Steve Shark Mansplains Heroin Horror To Kreemé! Dept.

Kreemé [left - Ed.] relaxes surfside with Davey Graham [right - Ed.], yestiddy. ©Foam-O-Graph

Steve Shark parachuted in to th' Isle O' Foam© with some swell screed, but his pictorial attachments were - what's the opposite of clickbait? That. So I axed Kreemé [18 my ass - Ed.] to help out with a celebrity appearance! It's a win-win situation! Th' gals get a platform for their gal-type "issues" - such as like, uh, swimwear - what th' fuck I know what's on their minds? - and us musicologists get a feast o' folk-blues history!

Back in 1971 [scribes Steve - Ed.], when I had hair and a waistline, I was a student at Milton Keynes College of Education – a teacher training college in Bletchley [Kreemé is gone like a train - Ed.]. It was actually in Bletchley Park, which was the home of the WWII codebreaking centre and where they cracked the Enigma machine. The town was also, and still is, where Marshall made their amps, but that's another story...

Some friends and I had decided to form a college FOLK CLUB and for a few months it was just acts drawn from the college students. It all went well, up to a point, mainly courtesy of the cheap bar.

One day, we were sitting thinking about what we could do to give it a bit of a boost and it was obvious we needed a famous folk artist appearing at our fortnightly folk night. In the end, we settled on the idea of having Davey Graham come to play. I can’t remember how we managed to contact his agent, but somehow we did. A cheque was sent off and so DG was booked to play a few weeks later.

The idea was to meet DG at the station – only a five minute walk from the college – and this seemed to be going to plan until Davey stepped off the train with a guitar case seeming a little confused, to say the least.

It was immediately very clear that he was either drunk or stoned, or both.

We were students, so we knew drunk.

We were students, so we knew stoned.

We were students, so we knew drunk and stoned.

However, this was clearly not just booze or marijuana, but something else entirely. By all accounts, I later discovered, he was a heroin addict then, so it was probably smack – something right out of our experience then, but very feasible to me now. Whatever it was, it didn't seem to inspire us with much confidence in the forthcoming evening.

It took about fifteen minutes (not the usual five!) to reach the college and we put him in the Green Room – someone’s bedroom in the student hall of residence.

As showtime grew closer, it became apparent that he was in no fit state to play, so we plied him with water and black coffee, and he seemed to perk up a little and started to tune his guitar. He still didn’t seem right, though. Looking back, perhaps it was cold turkey as we didn't see him take anything pharmaceutical.

The glitz! The glamor! Steve rips it up on stage!

The opening act went on – myself and Paul (the guy who’d eventually be one of the ushers at my wedding and later die from alcoholism) [left - Ed.] – and we played our set of mostly Lindisfarne, Neil Young and Donovan numbers [WHIPPING POST! - Ed.].

Then it was time for the HEADLINE ACT!

DG stumbled onto the stage, spent about 10 minutes retuning his guitar and then started to play.

It wasn’t good.

Through the fluffs, and despite the clams [???? - Ed.], you could hear that he was one hell of a guitarist, but it wasn’t a pleasant experience.

Did I say it wasn’t good?

It was absolutely bloody terrible.

He went on for about four numbers and then we indicated that he should stop, which he did.

We put Davey’s guitar back in its case, got him his coat, walked him back to the station, put him on the next train back to London Euston and returned to the college.

So, it was all one very strange folk night. On one hand, it was a big let down but, on the other, we’d had a genuine folk guitar hero at our own little college! In spite of Davy’s poor performance, we all felt really buzzed about it for days afterwards.

Davey was a master of acoustic guitar – jazz, folk, classical, blues, world...he could play it all. He wrote the standard Anji and was the first in a long line of British folk guitarists who went on to bring instrumental acoustic guitar music to world prominence, and influence players from Bert Jansch to Jimmy Page and beyond. Davey died of lung cancer in 2008.

A couple of albums to accompany this screed. In a handcrafted zip file you'll find Folk, Blues & Beyond, widely considered to be his finest solo album, and After Hours, which was recorded by a student at a college gig in 1967 – fortunately when he was totally compos mentis.