Les Cousins: In Celebration of a Legendary Music Club

Les Cousins – 49 Greek Street, London – ought to be spoken about in the same breath as The Cavern. It’s rare that such a bolthole should hold such an important place in the development of a particular musical style, and just as Merseybeat was cooked up in an airless chamber beneath Mathew Street, the sound of British folk in the late 60s was seasoned in similar conditions beneath Soho. Once home to Nick Drake, Sandy Denny, Bert Jansch and so many more, its legendary all-nighters and the music they inspired continue to fascinate folk and blues fans decades later. As a new box set documenting the fabled venue arrives this January, Jon Wilks explains why a club that closed five years before his birth holds such a fixation, and why he’s helping Broadside Hacks put on a concert to celebrate those who are still around to tell the tales.

In 1996, I moved to Bangor in North Wales. I’d spent my previous year attempting to turn up to lectures at Thames Valley University in Ealing, usually missing the classroom entirely and taking the Picadilly Line to the Good Mixer in Camden, home of the burgeoning Britpop scene. I spent all of my student loan drinking with Menswe@r and quickly found myself despondent and in debt. It was decided by all concerned that somewhere very different to Camden would do wonders for my studies and my bank balance, and so I was packed off along the North Wales Main Line, my suitcase and guitar in hand.

They often say that Bangor is in a lovely part of the world; they rarely say that it is a lovely part of the world – and for good reason. In the mid-90s, it was a deprived rock on the edge of nowhere. “Culture shock” doesn’t quite cover it. I went from a hectic nightlife in which you’d regularly see Graham Coxon and pals stumbling around in the Camden streets, to a quiet halls of residence at the top of a punishing hill that hadn’t seen any real action since the Beatles were housed there during their visit to the Maharishi back in August, 1967. Bangor was home to a high street full of pubs (that still closed on Sunday afternoons) and a virulent meat market called the Octagon, where Scouse nurses would feed on the university rugby team every Friday and Saturday night, leaving debris and bodily fluids smeared across the dawn streets. Not being much of a clubber or a rugby player, I felt a long way from… well, anywhere, really.

Silver linings. At the bottom of that long hill there was an Our Price – a tiny record shop that seemed to have a permanent sale going on, especially if you were into folk music. In London, I had played in bands. In Bangor, there were no bands so I had no use for an electric guitar or amplifier. My trusty Yamaha acoustic became my permanent friend and my record player spun whatever sounds I’d managed to snaffle in the sale. Martin Carthy’s debut album was a big one, as was Way to Blue: An Introduction to Nick Drake. The one that really blew me away was Bert Jansch‘s first album, which seemed to me as electrifying and exciting as anything I’d heard come through an amplifier. I became obsessed with the romance of the troubadour – a singer, an acoustic guitar and the world (or at least a series of pokey coffee shops and pub back-rooms) at their feet. Above all else, I wanted that sound, and I spent hours in front of that record player trying to discern what made it so.

I’m not sure where I first came across the name, Les Cousins. It may have been from my uncle Pete, a dyed-in-the-wool folkie who, perhaps recognising my sudden interest in fumbled fingerpickery, engaged me in awkward conversation (is there any other kind with a teenager?) and mentioned that he’d been there. He also said that he’d had guitar lessons from Davey Graham, a chap whose signature tune I was struggling to bend my fingers around. These being pre-internet times, I must’ve found more nourishment in the library; perhaps there was an article in one of those retro music magazines that were finding their way onto the shelves at WH Smiths. I honestly don’t recall, but I gleaned enough info to know that I longed to have been a part of it. I wanted to find a Les Cousins of my own – a tall order in mid-90s Bangor. I might as well have been scouring the moon.

It’s only in recent years that the Greek origins of Les Cousins have become known to me. So it is with some pleasure that I can say I did indeed find a suitable equivalent, and that it happened to be the Greek Taverna in Upper Bangor. It wasn’t an airless basement club, as the original was – this venue had a small courtyard, its fair share of windows, a decent lick of paint and an alcohol license. Neither was it a hotbed of fingerpicking folk guitarists – I think I was the only one who even (very) vaguely matched that description – but it was a place that welcomed acoustic music. Nobody ever really got gigs there; it was more of an open-mic scenario, albeit one where people seemed to listen to what was going on onstage rather than chat through it. Best of all, they would occasionally give me a pint and a plate of boiled potatoes if I looked particularly hungry. As we’ll see later on, this, too, shared similarities with the original – the only – Les Cousins.

I was born out of time. My only connection with “The Cousins” is through stories told to me by people who were there (I’ll happily travel great distances to hear Cousins veterans impart tales of yore), through the ridiculously small amount of photos that seem to have survived, and through the music that came out of that tiny melting pot at 49 Greek Street. I may not have been there, but I do feel somehow imbued with the spirit of the place – the desire to share in that subterranean hubbub of creativity; to meet and be inspired by other people who are as electrified by the twang of an acoustic guitar string as it splits the smoke-laden air and demands unwavering attention. And I know others of my generation feel it, too. Just before I began writing this article, I was chatting with Angeline Morrison, whose Les Cousins obsession also dates back to her mid-teenage years. Without knowing it, the two of us – both from the surrounds of Birmingham – longed for a place we could never visit; dreaming across the decades, along the train lines, up Tottenham Court Road, down the stairs into a cellar where we’d heard magic took place.

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Meet the Matheous

“People seem to remember that place as being somehow magic,” recalled guitarist, John Renbourn. “It was a basement in Greek Street, that’s all it was… it was just a sort of dosshouse.”¹ And he wasn’t entirely wrong. As Ian A. Anderson, musician, journalist and compiler of a new Les Cousins Cherry Red Records box set explained to Tradfolk in an interview back in 2017, “Once you’d finished a gig in London, if you didn’t want to go back home you could go down to the Cousin’s legendary all-nighters on Friday and Saturday nights. For people outside London – like when I started hitchhiking up from Bristol – it was the cheapest hotel in town. You could pay your five bob and you could stay all night.”

He used to feed any folkies that wandered in, which put all his ordinary customers off.

Bert Jansch

Dosshouse or otherwise, a sense of welcome and belonging seems to have fuelled the eventual success of the club, stemming from the hospitality of its owners. “[Loukas and Margaret Matheou] ran the restaurant upstairs,” Bert Jansch told ZigZag magazine in 1974, “They were beautiful people. Every wayfaring folk singer would always get fed. That’s why [their] business went down. It looked like a very classy restaurant – the food was superb – but he used to feed any folkies that wandered in, which put all his ordinary customers off. He saved a few people’s lives, did Mr Matthews.” Diana Matheou, who met the owner’s son, Andy – her future husband – at Les Cousins when she was just 17 years old, remembered, “Many turned up at the family flat in Frith Street, were fed and sometimes housed there too. Jackson C Frank truly became part of the family while he was in London, referring to Loukas and Margaret as ‘like his parents’. Anyone coming into the restaurant kitchen hungry didn’t stay that way for long. Loukas would listen to the hard luck stories, responding with wisdom, dry wit and food.”²

49 Greek Street

Oddly enough, 49 Greek Street – Les Cousins’ address – already had a musical history by the time Loukas Matheou took on the lease in 1959. Billy Bragg takes up the story in his book, Roots, Radicals & Rockers: How Skiffle Changed the World: “[Russell Quay] opened the Skiffle Cellar at 49 Greek Street on April 13th, 1957, offering skiffle seven nights a week. Within a couple of months, membership had topped a thousand. Because the club had no alcohol license, it became a magnet for teenage skiffle groups wanting a taste of the Soho scene… Over two hundred turned up in the first two weeks.”

“What I remember is that there was a list on the door, and I knew some of the names on the list,” says Martin Carthy, stretching his memory back to the late 1950s. “One of them was Ewan MacColl and another was A. L. Lloyd – Bert Lloyd. The resident band was Russell Quay’s City Ramblers – they called themselves a “folk music and spasm band!” What I really associate with that place and time was an occasion when I was leaving and going home. I remember the bus stop was outside St Martins Art School, the back of which was Greek Street. I was walking up to the bus stop and I spotted one of those signs that the evening papers would put out. It was an announcement saying that the 1959 call-up had been drastically reduced and the 1960 call-up – that is, to go and do your national service – had been scrapped. I leapt on the next number 24 bus and I got back home, I walked in the door and my mum was standing there and I said, ‘The call-up’s been scrapped!’ She looked at me with a big smile on her face – I hadn’t seen her smile in ages – and she was very, very happy.”³

What Carthy is referring to is often seen (in Britain, at least) as the germination of the teenager. The end of national service in 1960 freed up a generation that had expected to spend their final years, before grim and grey adulthood, in the army. For the countless thousands that had been turned on to skiffle only a few years before (Carthy, the Beatles, the Stones – the whole lot of them), the future was suddenly theirs to experiment with. The sixties were on their way.

Unswinging discotheque

Perhaps Loukas Matheou sensed the coming changes early. Taking up the lease in 1959, he turned 49 Greek Street into the Soho Bar and Grill, spanning two floors. “It proved larger than was necessary,” writes Anderson in his wonderful portrait of Les Cousins, “so after a few years he decided to use the other part of the basement for another purpose. French discotheques were taking off – La Poubelle, Le Kilt, and Le Disco­theque had all opened in Soho – so Loukas agreed with a public school customer called Phil to turn the unused part of the basement into Les Cousins, presumably named after the Claude Chabrol film.”⁴ The doors to the newly christened discotheque were thrown open on October 4th, 1964… and nothing much happened.

Phil didn’t last long, either. In Noel Murphy‘s recollection, “One night I was in the Scots Hoose in Cambridge Circus with Derroll Adams, who was my lodger from time to time. Derroll was a legend, a philosopher. I owe an awful lot to him. We were in there and a young public-school gentleman called Phil Phillips approached us and said, ‘Mr Adams, I’m opening a new all-night folk club in a basement that was a French club called Les Cousins, under a Greek restaurant. I was wondering if you’d like to compère the first all-night session?’ And Derroll said, ‘You don’t want me for that. They’d never stay awake and I wouldn’t either. You want young Murphy here.'”⁵

It was about the size of the inside of a single-decker bus. Its reputation is so big but the place itself was small.

Noel Murphy

While the caleidoscope of time has stretched and rearranged facts slightly in Murphy’s recollection (the Soho Grill wouldn’t become Dionysus restaurant until 1967), his description of the venue seems definitive. “It was about the size of the inside of a single-decker bus. Its reputation is so big but the place itself was small. You went down some narrow stairs. It was run by an Anglo-Greek called Andy Matthews [Matheou].”⁶

In the absence of Night-Flit Phil, Andy had been roped into running the underground club by his father. Different accounts exist of Andy’s role in the Cousins’ subsequent success, but Diana Matheou recalls his importance. “The young man who Andy was had an honest, fearless nature, a capable, curious mind, a generous heart – like his parents – and loved music. The Matheou family were the right people in the right place.”⁷ Bert Jansch remembered him as someone with a keen ear for the new: “Andy was the first person I knew who took notice of the Beatles. He’d say, ‘You gotta listen to this’ and he’d play whatever it was. ‘Er, right, so who is it then?’ To me, it was just another pop band. I couldn’t tell any difference. I much preferred the Rolling Stones anyway.”⁸

In come the Cousins

Similarly, differing accounts exist of the moment that Les Cousins went from being a failing wannabe discotheque to becoming the cradle of the British folk and blues revival. John Renbourn’s take is probably the stuff of pot-laced fairytales. “Les Bridger was responsible for opening the Cousins,” he recalled in 2014. “Me and Bert stayed at his place. Les had a Martin guitar he’d bought on the never-never and never paid for it, so Bert used to play it the whole time. Les would go out at night and nobody knew what he was doing. He told us he was doing very important gigs, which was impossible because he was a terrible player… He was pissed one night, he fell down an alleyway and knocked himself against a door, and it turned out this place was called Les Cousins. It was a girls’ club for the girls who were up in the home for foreign students. When Les opened his eyes, so he said, he played the guitar for them and got in there. Eventually, me and Bert found out, but when we went down they’d taken all the girls away and they kept it going as a club.”⁹

A more level-headed account comes from Diana Matheou, who remembers, “Andy was already listening to Dylan and was totally disinterested in running a discotheque. I’m sure these and many other factors all came together – the time, place and people were right and Les Cousins the iconic folk and blues club was born.”¹⁰

The club was reopened on April 16th, 1965. Anderson recalls that “early memories and pictures have it with sports car photos on the wall, plus a wagon wheel and fishing nets to make the disco a bit folkier.”¹¹ This time, however, the new venture worked. A combination of its dosshouse affability, a lack of alcohol license, and its all-night open policy made it – by accident or design – the right place to be at the right time, initially attracting the waifs, the strays and the weekend beatniks. “You’d arrive at 10 o’clock and leave at seven in the morning,” recalled Dave Deighton in 2014. People would come in late on. They’d missed the last bus home and were willing to play because they’d got nothing better to do.”¹²

Word spread, however, and it quickly became a beacon for a flurry of young guitarists and singer-songwriters. The musical policy was fairly open, much to the relief of folk fans who felt restricted and frowned upon by the folk police that ran places like the Singers Club. This meant that acoustic players with styles as disparate as Martin Carthy, Bridget St. John and the Incredible String Band could share space on the tiny stage. Much of this had to do with Andy’s “adventurous booking policy”. He’d give most people a go, and if he liked them, they’d be back on – sometimes with very little warning. Anderson writes, “I remember when I was living in London over the blues boom winter of 68-69, I’d get the tube in from Notting Hill every Wednesday lunch­time to get a Melody Maker at the news stand at Tottenham Court Road tube station, hot off the press. That was how you found out if you’d got a gig at the Cousins that coming weekend! But you didn’t mind because not only was it a great gig, those listings were pored over by folk fans and organisers all over the country and if you were listed there, you’d – as Mike Cooper said – made it. It was a guaranteed career boost.”¹³

There were people that were quite certain that it was owned by a bloke called Les. ‘Have you met Les yet?’ ‘Never seen him!’

Martin Carthy

“We called it ‘The Cousins’,” remembers Carthy fondly. “It had been known as Les Cousins [pronounced in the French way, ‘lay coo-zan’], and then Les Cousins [in a more brittle, English manner] and there were people that were quite certain that it was owned by a bloke called Les. ‘Have you met Les yet?’ ‘Never seen him!’ It was a guitar school. What skiffle had done was sold millions of guitars, and some people had taken it very seriously. There were some amazing blues players – sensational. They started off with 12-bar stuff and then some of them let their imaginations run riot. There were some quite breathtaking players. John Martyn… he was one of the blazing talents down there. He was fond of his chemicals, he really was, but there was a brilliance to what he did sometimes.”¹⁴

At other times you might stumble across a young Paul Simon trying out a new song in the wee hours, and Andy Matheou’s contemporaneous diaries show a continuous stream of soon-to-be legends, from Davey Graham to Ralph McTell, from the Young Tradition to Anne Briggs. The list goes on: Alexis Korner, Champion Jacke Dupree, Stefan Grossman, Sandy Denny, Steve Tilston, Wizz Jones… even Van Morrison turned up for a fee of £3.

The all-nighters were a trial by fire of stamina and patience both for audience and performers.

See also

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Mike Cooper

One potential downside of the all-nighter format was the graveyard shift. While some used their 3am appearances to try out new material, it could be a dispiriting affair for a new performer – in the words of Mike Cooper, “a trial by fire of stamina and patience both for audience and performers”.¹⁵ John Altman remembered: “The audience gathered along one side, with benches right in front of where you played. As it got later, people started going to sleep on them, so it would feel as if you were playing to a bunch of corpses. People would loom out of the darkness and appear onstage, and I never knew who would be on next.”¹⁶

One such newcomer was the rarely-seen and subsequently much-feted Nick Drake, a man that Altman describes as having “got rather lost in the throng”. Drake’s inability to communicate with his audience is the stuff of sad legend, but at the time it was seen as simply not being able to cut it. Ian A. Anderson remembers him as, “a really nervous, undistinguished singer-songwriter who sent the audience to sleep.”¹⁷ While this assessment may sound particularly harsh in light of what we now know about Drake’s mental condition, it goes some way toward explaining how his contemporaries overlooked him. Anderson continues: “It didn’t help that he was the world’s worst live performer. He had no confidence at all. They’d stick him on at four o’clock in the morning when everybody was asleep. Back then you had to be a really good songwriter, a really good guitar player and be able to do the chat. And if you couldn’t do the chat, unless you were fantastically good at the other things, you weren’t going to make it. These days you’ll go to open mic and it amazes me. They strum their guitars and their introduction is, ‘Here’s a song off my new album.’ And I wonder, how does that work?”¹⁸

Stuff of legend

As the reputation of the club grew, so too did that of the clientele. According to a Medium article by Mike Press, “On 28 September 1966 Jimi Hendrix, who had been in London for three weeks, finally received a work permit, allowing him to perform professionally. That evening, to celebrate, he went along to an open jam session being run by blues guitarist Alexis Korner at Les Cousins. Hendrix walked down the stairway, paid his money and quietly watched. According to Andy: ‘Later they asked him to play and he plugs in his white Fender and does all this stuff with his teeth and just blows everybody’s mind.’ But not everyone could play when they wanted to. David Bowie turned up one evening, asking to perform, but no slot was available.”¹⁹ In Donovan’s memory, “Cousins was always packed when I was there. We sat on the floor if there were no seats. I had no experience playing in the folk clubs. They didn’t like my stuff. I played on the beaches of St Ives and around people’s pads. I was never allowed to play in the clubs. I was considered too American in my tastes at the time, it seemed.”²⁰

That anyone should be considered too American seems anathema to the Cousins booking policy. We’ve already established that Andy Matheou was a Dylan nut, and that both Champion Jack Dupree and Paul Simon stumbled down the Greek Street stairwell. Indeed, a glance at the tracklisting of the new box set, Les Cousins: The Soundtrack of Soho’s Legendary Folk & Blues Club [Cherry Red Records, January 2024] shows a wealth of American talent. Dorris Henderson, Spider John Koerner, Tom Rush and Dave Van Ronk all made it to the Cousins, inevitably leaving their mark on audience and musicians alike. It’s most likely why so much of the late 60s/early 70s British folk sound shares a certain bluesy aesthetic. Whoever ventured down those Greek Street stairs found themselves tossed about in a salad bowl of styles and ideas, whether they were performing, stoned or taking it in through sleepy osmosis. Blues, original songwriting and traditional British folk music were all mashed together as one. “There was a sense of people sharing their music and learning from each other.”²¹ Imagine being a young musician taking in the early songs of Paul Simon, Nick Drake or Jackson C Frank; hearing guitar innovators like Bert Jansch, Martin Carthy, Dave Evans and John Martyn; singular singers such as Sandy Denny, Bridget St. John, Long John Baldry, and Anne Briggs; walls of harmonic sound from the likes of The Watersons and The Young Tradition; radical visionaries, teamed up as the Incredible String Band, Third Ear Band and the nascent Pentangle. How could you not be altered by that?

It’s the stuff of musical legend, and no mistake. For every contemporaneous recollection of the club as a dosshouse, an unpleasant place to place, or just another gig, you’ll find a whole heap of halycon. And the myth-making has continued. Apocryphal Cousins sightings of Clapton, Dylan, McCartney, Joni Mitchell and Pink Floyd have rolled in over the years, each one adding grist to the rumour mill. “People would see the ads in the Melody Maker,” recalled Anderson. “You already knew that people like Bert Jansch and John Renbourn were the going thing, and after you looked enough weeks and had seen their name in big print at the Cousins you’d want to go there. You would immediately believe that the Cousins was the place to go in London, so it became it.”²²

Les Cousins, in its folk and blues format, lasted seven years, eventually petering out in April 1972. No scene lasts forever – people move on, tastes evolve, bigger stages beckon. Andy Matheou died in 2005 but not before becoming the subject of at least two songs by Les Cousins alumni; it is said that John Martyn’s much-admired song, ‘May You Never’, was written for Andy, as was ‘Matthew and Son’ by Cat Stevens. Diana Matheou became the keeper of the flickering Cousins flame, remaining in Soho until 2019 when gentrification took “the home I thought I’d always have”.²³

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Reuniting the Cousins

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The Les Cousins veterans that are still with us are on the cusp of their ninth decade. Wizz Jones and Martin Carthy are both comfortably into their 80s, and yet they’re still playing and more than happy to reminisce. At the time I heard about the release of the new box set, I was working occasionally with Campbell Baum (Broadside Hacks) who sometimes invites me to appear at the Moth Club in Hackney, currently a hotbed of folk music and ideas sharing in its own right. Knowing Campbell’s obsession with that late 60s blues/folk sound, I suggested to him that we find some of the Les Cousins musicians and invite them to the Moth Club for a celebration of their alma mater. Being a man of swift action, Campbell immediately started making inquiries and, before the week was out, messaged me to say he had Wizz Jones, Martin Carthy and Ian A. Anderson interested. This was a good start, so we began pencilling in potential dates. Shortly afterwards, he messaged again to say that, incredibly, he’d pulled off a couple of real coups and booked Diana Matheou and Bridget St. John, the latter back from the US this Spring. It felt like a pinch-yourself moment.

At the time of writing, the Les Cousins celebration at Moth Club is selling fast, confirming my suspicion that it’s not just me and Angeline Morrison that wish we’d been there all those years ago. What the Cousins generation did for the new crop of folk and psychfolk musicians cannot be overstated. For one night only, we’ll hear the tales from the lucky few, and maybe even experience a little of that dosshouse magic.

For more information on the Cherry Red Les Cousins box set, head to cherryred.co.uk. For tickets to the Celebration of Les Cousins at Moth Club, head to dice.fm.

This article could not have been written without the help of Ian A. Anderson. Huge thanks.

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1. Singing From the Floor, JP Bean [Faber & Faber, 2014] ↩︎
2. Allnight Fever, Ian A. Anderson [fRoots, edition 377, November 2014] ↩︎
3. Martin Carthy interviewed by Jon Wilks [Kings Place, December 2023] ↩︎
4. Allnight Fever, Ian A. Anderson [fRoots, edition 377, November 2014] ↩︎
5. Singing From the Floor, JP Bean [Faber & Faber, 2014] ↩︎
6. Singing From the Floor, JP Bean [Faber & Faber, 2014] ↩︎
7. Allnight Fever, Ian A. Anderson [fRoots, edition 377, November 2014] ↩︎
8. Dazzling Stranger: Bert Jansch and the British Folk and Blues Revival, Colin Harper [Bloomsbury, 2000] ↩︎
9. Singing From the Floor, JP Bean [Faber & Faber, 2014] ↩︎
10. Allnight Fever, Ian A. Anderson [fRoots, edition 377, November 2014] ↩︎
11. Allnight Fever, Ian A. Anderson [fRoots, edition 377, November 2014] ↩︎
12. Singing From the Floor, JP Bean [Faber & Faber, 2014] ↩︎
13. Allnight Fever, Ian A. Anderson [fRoots, edition 377, November 2014] ↩︎
14. Martin Carthy interviewed by Jon Wilks [Kings Place, December 2023] ↩︎
15. Allnight Fever, Ian A. Anderson [fRoots, edition 377, November 2014] ↩︎
16. Nick Drake: The Life, by Richard Morton Jack [John Murray, 2023] ↩︎
17. Nick Drake: The Life, by Richard Morton Jack [John Murray, 2023] ↩︎
18. The Ian A. Anderson Interview, Jon Wilks [Tradfolk, September 2017] ↩︎
19. 49 Greek Street – formerly Les Cousins, Mike Press [Medium, 2022] ↩︎
20. Singing From the Floor, JP Bean [Faber & Faber, 2014] ↩︎
21. 49 Greek Street – formerly Les Cousins, Mike Press [Medium, 2022] ↩︎
22. Dazzling Stranger: Bert Jansch and the British Folk and Blues Revival, Colin Harper [Bloomsbury, 2000] ↩︎
23. 49 Greek Street – formerly Les Cousins, Mike Press [Medium, 2022] ↩︎