New post on Don Partridge and Company...

A busy summer - there is a new post with some extracts from the book on the Don Partridge and Company blog here...

News from The Lows and the Highs later...

Don Partridge and Company - the book...

The main reason (apart from my natural sloth!) that this blog has gone very quiet the last months has been because much of my time and energy has been involved in writing, editing and putting together the collaboration we are going to call 'Don Partridge and Company...' Patrick and I decided that I would publish it myself, via my internet outlet, if we could not find a publisher before the spring. Many polite refusals, some compliments - but no action, so forwards we will go on our own. The book is almost ready, just needing some fine-tuning and the photographs selected and added - Pat has a large amount of material which we still need to whittle down. But we plan to publish another book later on via the same outlet focusing on his photographs in more glossy form, which would obviously cost more but would allow the material to be displayed in sharper definition.
Watch this space, as they say... we are aiming at early June...

Onwards anyway... 'Don Partridge and Company'...

Probably the main reason why my blog posts have been very sporadic this year is because I have been working on a book – provisional title: 'Don Partridge and Company' – with two friends, Patrick Keene and – Don Partridge, 'King of the Streetsingers.' Who, of course, sadly died a few weeks back. (I have also been busy on another project, a novel). Don and I started the book a couple of years back and very soon afterwards brought in Patrick, but our progress was understandably delayed when Don's partner Pam died about eighteen months ago. A lot of grief has been carried. The premise of the book: three interlinking stories, two fairly obscure characters, one who became very famous for a while, then left orthodox show business to go back to his original occupation, which we all shared. Busking – the art of being a street musician. Don, especially after he launched his one man band, inspired originally by Jesse Fuller (whom he had encountered in London when he booked him for a gig at Ealing Town Hall in the early Sixties) but with a more flexible mobile apparatus, had already made a lot of waves in London and beyond before he was discovered by Don Paul and subsequently became a pop star. He was earning a very good living on the streets and lived high, wild and well. Patrick Keene, who was playing with Don when I first met them, sometime in 1966, had started busking in Paris in 1960, mixing with the likes of Alex Campbell, the young Davey Graham, Derroll Adams, Richard Farina, Ralph Rumney and the Guggenheims (I kid you not). (Pat also recorded an lp with Don just before the one man band days). I started playing in London (having dipped my toe in the water here and there) in the summer of 1966. Pat was also a photographer and increasingly focused on his talent in that area to make a living. He did some freelancing for the Daily Mirror, the Sunday Telegraph and other mainstream newspapers – plus some work for the underground publication International Times. The idea of the book was to use our stories to bounce off the more famous one of Don, illustrated by the stunning black and white photos that Patrick took in the late Sixties on the streets and beyond – culminating on the night of the Buskers Concert at the Albert Hall in 1969. Which have never been published. Inspired apparently by Alan Young, Don's oldest friend and fellow busker, Don booked the Albert Hall and brought all the London street musicians, young and old, together for a unique event. Helped by his agent, Don Paul and his publicist Max Clifford, the show was a sell-out. An amazing night – yet one that now has been almost forgotten. The three of us were involved – myself playing with my then street sidekick Aidan Agnew and with The Earl of Mustard, a tap-dancer and street legend whom I had often worked with, when his accompanist refused to go on with him because he was in drag(!). Don, top of the bill of course – and Patrick, who did not perform but was there as a photographer and who also appeared obliquely. Pulled out of the audience by the escapologist who coaxed him to reluctantly stand on his throat! Pat, who was and is a tall, powerfully built man and who was wearing cowboy boots, was naturally a little reluctant. But this guy knew his trade (although there is a story that a couple of years later, another busker, whose name escapes me, obliged his prompt to the crowd for someone to tie him up at the Derby in front of a large crowd – and trussed him up too tight for him to escape!). But on this occasion, the show went to plan! (And Patrick was not arrested for involuntary manslaughter).
All of this was - and will be – the meat of the book. There are many stories and characters in the world of street music: ours just illustrate a particular time period, from the beginning of the decade to the next – by the seventies, London was becoming over-crowded with buskers and many of us had created other circuits in Europe where the pickings were better. Perhaps the Albert Hall concert stands as a unique event, the culmination of something wonderful and weird...
So Don is gone – but the book was almost complete and will be finished perhaps differently, relying on some other testimonies. The special flavour he brought to it I hope I have captured. We are doing the rounds of publishers at the moment, some more work needs to be done. But hopefully...

Don Partridge 1941-2010: In Memoriam

So: where to start? After the initial shock of the phone call from our mutual friend Patrick – to relay the news of Don struck down by a massive heart attack – the re-grouping, the business: people to be informed across networks which might not be immediately available to the family, so you distract yourself by being busy. With words: which are useless, but you go through the rituals and realise as you do so – yet again – that rituals – the informal rituals of bereavement - have a purpose. To distract... Then a fitful night and more phone calls and the process of the human placing of death into something that can be manageable. Which of course it never is – which is the awesome power of death. Hence the rituals. But the force of it all finally drops down enough for you to decide that something should be written, especially as you have spent so much time over the last couple of years digging back into the past with Don and Pat as we slowly created the manuscript we called 'Don Partridge and Company,' our on-going project, a three-way chronicle (Don, Pat, me) of the sixties busking years culminating with the famous Buskers Concert at the Albert Hall in 1969. With suddenly a final chapter...

So you place yourself in the futile position of trying to apply measure.

So: how do you measure a person? Specifically: Don Partridge, such a unique character in the myriad groupings of your friends which comprise so many characters possessed of strength, talent, creativity, belief in themselves, humour, love and that blissfully undefinable sense of – FUN. Because Don was FUN to be with. So many people who knew him - read the testimonials already and at the funeral there will be a legion more prepared to step up and say: here was someone whom we enjoyed the company of greatly, who made an impression on our lives - maybe the the link between them all will be that sense of FUN as a counterbalance to the loss. A deep FUN, manifesting in a joy in life, despite the recent tragedy that he had to bear and the resultant dark hours, the loss of Pam from the ravages of cancer last year. When I was with Don a few weeks ago, the sadness and grieving were still there but he made me welcome as usual in his house as we worked on the book and took a drink or two and laughed over our reminiscences, the triumphs and absurdities all recounted with his good humour - and his wry, hard-won wisdom. That welcome he had always provided – from the crowded flat in Archway he shared with Alan Young, Jester and Joker, his oldest perhaps sidekick, where I slept on the floor with Barbara in 1966 before we found our first apartment off the Fulham Road where we reciprocated in equally cramped conditions. The house in Hastings where he wrote 'Rosie' and drove us all mad with the first drafts of the song that would propel him to fame – to the extent that when he came into the old 'Earl of Sandwich' bar, back of Leicester Square and said he had recorded it, the general consensus was: 'Bollocks, Partridge!' So we were wrong... in spades... that song we mocked, recorded in E.M.I.'s Studio Regent B for six quid, at the instigation of the man who found him in Brewer Street market and became his manager, Don Paul, that took him to the hit parade, a certain measure of fame and money which provided a bigger house in West London we dubbed the 'Mansion' where more welcomes were offered amid mucho craziness – the first time I went he somehow drove us back from central London (both of us and Paris Nat having been thrown out of the 'Troubadour' for alcoholic crimes against folk music), despite the onrush of the acid we had both taken as a chaser. Which freaked Nat out when he realised, somewhere down the Uxbridge Road... Those were the days, as they say... That house where I heard some of the nascent formations of 'Accolade,' the folk/jazz/rock band he formed with Gordon Giltrap that should have taken him beyond the One Man Band/novelty/variety act that the Biz saw him as and which he was rapidly wearying of. And not to blame the Biz too much for that, because that was the game then and they did not have the measure of many a musician who stepped across boundaries, let alone one as idiosyncratic and wilful as Don. A band who never got the launch, maybe, they deserved, for whatever reasons, but who stand up pretty well now against much of the crap and the twee of the time, something more than hey-nonny with a clumpy rock backbeat. Pentangle aside - English folk-rock: jeez. But he eventually turned his back on the Biz to follow his own footsteps that led back to the streets. Scandinavia and back, criss-crossing Europe, Canada, hitch-hiking down the 'Trans-Canadian Highway.' One of his better songs and it should also be put down here that he was a musician of talent way beyond the sometimes stifling if necessary repetitions/confines of the busking arts, beyond the confines of the Biz as stated above. A very good songwriter when he felt the muse, a brilliant arranger of others' songs and traditional material into different formulations – because Don was incapable of copying after he had acquired his mature style early on. For a recent example of skilful adaption: dig 'The Highwayman' if you can find it, his long riff on the old Alfred Noyes poem which works so well because he gets inside it so well. Maybe he was never truly captured on record – and for all that, you could say his art was that of the busker, which is transience, a song on the wind that produces enough temporary pleasure for the bung to the bottler or the open guitar case – and the larger the better, please. We have thirsts... Don said that ultimately he preferred the natural lighting of the streets, daylight and sunshine, streetlights and shop illuminations at night, the backdrop of arenas filled with people and bustle, to the artificial sets and lighting of the Biz and the compromises that go with it. That was his true stage, his realm. Remember this: he was The King of the Buskers. Others were buskers before him and others will no doubt aspire to the crown he has sadly vacated – but he was the first to get there, by the sheer chutzpah of self-coronation and he held his kingdom down the years, against all comers.

So: you come to the measure and find, as with all great people – and I choose my words carefully – that the idea of measure, however human and hot-wired into our heads, is a paltry thing, when we consider such a man. Yes he was fickle, infuriating at times, faithful to something beyond conventions of faithfulness, yes and that is romantic and could be seen as a cop-out but Don did not, in my experience at least, ever cop-out. Wherever the road led him, he was true to its directions and imperatives. Not an easy life, as all who have travelled it know well enough. Not an easy life perhaps, for family and friends at times. The King was no saint. But when he looked down that road he saw it clearly and followed it with no small measure of courage. And love. In the end, he overflows any measure you can make and that is the plain damn truth. He was too damn big to be defined easily. He leaves a large hole in our hearts and memories as we here extend our condolences to the family - and all who knew him. He was a true friend and I loved him and I will miss him.

'If you don't see me next spring, I'll be in Berlin.'

Don Partridge R.I.P.

With a heavy heart to write this - my good friend Don Partridge died yesterday from a heart attack. The King of the Buskers has moved on... All our condolences to the family. I'll probably write more about this unique guy - but not tonight...

Saturday: down the market...

And here's Don in his street environment the day after - looking remarkably fresh considering the festivities the night before... (I'm surprised there wasn't more camera shake)...

Review: Don Partridge at the Pack Horse, Friday, 13th June, 2008

Onwards to belated review number two...

... the mighty Don 'Snakehips' Partridge, King of the Buskers, complete with one-man band and two guitars – the big twelve string and a six for more elaborate stuff returned to the Pack Horse after a five-year hiatus. Another national treasure like Jack Hudson, Don has a good few old friends up here from his tenure in God's Little Acre and environs a few years ago – some of whom were here tonight. If you have seen him playing on the streets, the indoor performance is somewhat different. For one thing, he can rein back a bit, not competing with traffic and outdoor urban noise. And this gives another side to his music – Don has always been a clever and sensitive writer of songs and those who know him just from the pop hits of yesteryear ('Rosie,' 'Blue Eyes' and the recently resurrected 'Breakfast on Pluto') may be surprised at his depth and reach. Don is also a natural raconteur with a fast wit, interspersing the music with tales of the roads travelled. Coming from folk music, yet broadening out to include songs like 'Black-eyed Susie,' originally an old bluegrass number that mutated into a big hit for Guy Mitchell. (I remember a long time ago he used to do 'Hey Baby,' the old Bruce Chanel track, in a similar move – he probably still plays it).















Others - a loping 'Streets of Laredo' (joined effectively on squeezebox by the other half of the resident musicians duo, Dave Morton), the old Bessie Smith tune 'Nobody knows you when you're down and out,' a soulful 'I've got you under my skin' which featured some nifty harmonica. Of his own songs, 'Trans-Canadian Highway' is a favourite, recollecting a journey long ago and his seven minute version of his setting of Alfred Noyes narrative poem 'The Highwayman' displays abundantly his musical ear – both sensitive and rousing as befits the story being told. The one-man band sound of bass drum, cymbals and harmonica fleshes out his guitar work to give a full and solid support throughout, translating well from the streets to the club. A fascinating night, with odd fluffs here and there but they did not marr the overall performance and are almost obligatory for a folk club anyway. Only criticism, the vocals may have benefited from a touch of amplification – I was straining a bit at the back occasionally. Having said that, most of those in front of me probably heard everything more clearly... So: Hail the King! (Also, mention should be made of Mr Marmion's new instrument, seen in one of the photos, forged from the body of a six-string banjo and chopped into – something else... nominations for a name are being taken. 'The banjo from the Black Lagoon' was one...