Famous folk

BOB Dylan played Newcastle last week, saying nowt, his music talking. The consensus is that Newcastle won. The Telegraph supposed that the gig reaffirmed the old boy's status as a "dynamic, questing performer", the Guardian thought - approvingly, it's believed - that his voice was Macy Gray meets Donald Duck.

For Mike Callaghan - Crook lad, now in Jeddah - it simply stirred memories of the spring of 1965 when Dylan, still blowing in the wind, appeared at the City Hall as part of a three-week British tour.

Goodness knows how much they charged at the Telewest Arena last week, but at the City Hall, a balcony seat cost twelve and a tanner.

Mike also remembers Don't Look Back, a documentary film made of the tour, and particularly the sequence in which Dylan and his entourage head south from Newcastle by train.

It must have been a Sunday, one of those frequent occasions in the 1960s when engineering work meant that services were diverted from the main line onto the Durham to Bishop Auckland branch and, subsequently, through Shildon.

At one point the camera's peering out of the window and there, immortalised forever on celluloid, are Brancepeth colliery and Willington railway station, both long exhausted.

The times may be a' changing, but the memory's immutable.

DYLAN'S Newcastle appearance on May 6, 1965, warranted not so much as a line in the next day's Echo. Among the things which did make the paper that Friday morning were the continuing campaign to win a posthumous pardon for Timothy Evans, Witton Gilbert residents' complaints at faults in their new, £3,500 houses, "shotgun thugs" terrorising Crimdon Dene and an appeal for a name for Stanley's planned zoo. "Plain Stanley Zoo sounds uninspired," they said. That's what they called it, though, and it didn't last ten minutes.

MUCH cyberspace is devoted to Don't Look Back, said by Time Out magazine to be "one of the most influential rock films ever made".

It also featured Joan Baez - "at the height of her charms" - and, more briefly, Donovan, Marianne Faithfull and Jarrow lad Alan Price.

There's talk of Allan Ginsberg and of Hank Williams, of Dylan's tantra and Baez's mantra, of Albert Hall and Greenwich Village.

Sadly, however, we are unable to find so much as a passing reference to Willington railway station.

AN unexpected gesture to the natives, Dylan's second number at the Arena was House of the Rising Sun, most famously sung by Tyneside band The Animals and reckoned to be only the second time in 20 years that he'd performed it at a gig. Mr Tim Stahl in Darlington reckons that Rising Sun - no connection to the coal-black Wallsend colliery, no matter what they say up there - was the first record lasting for more than four minutes to make number one in the charts. Others may be able further to spin it out.

LIKE a rolling stone, Dylan was back in Newcastle in November 1969, this time at the Odeon. Between the two, the infamous "Judas" incident had occurred at Manchester Free Trade Hall - an angry punter's reaction to the former folk singer's electronic accompaniment.

More people claim to have been the original Iscariot than to know who pinched Jimmy Hendrix's guitar in Darlington, and there are strings attached to that one, too.

The Newcastle gigs are recalled on a BBC Music website. There were catcalls in 1966, too, a plugged-in Dylan seemingly high on the boos.

"It was obvious that this man was different from anything that had ever gone before," writes Keith Duncan of the 1965 show.

Julian Lloyd writes of the "sharp, hollow-cheeked, amphetamine glory of his stage presence".

Eighteen months later, Jo Parlar knew all about the mains team. It wasn't that which upset here. Dylan, the great grammar school iconoclast, came on stage in a suit.

WE'RE in a cafe in Saltburn, me and Vin Garbutt. Pie, peas and mash are on one side of the table, tuna salad on the other. No guesses. It's a good thing his is a cold lunch, anyway, because so many people want to talk to him. Popular lad, Vin.

One's a Scouser. Vin, a lifelong non-driver, recalls a recent visit to Liverpool. "They pinched me train," he says.

He's a folk singer, on the protest road almost as long as Bob Dylan and, if not as globally famous, then internationally acclaimed, nonetheless. "I seem to do well in the little places, I've even an 'exotic gigs' folder on my computer. "Folk music has never really been recognised in England, but I'm very big in Borneo."

A song called John North, no relation, is reckoned particularly big in Kuala Lumpur.

Dylan influenced him early on. He loved Blowing in the Wind, sang Masters of War, enjoyed The Times They Are a' Changing and knew that it was true.

"Probably my first LPs were Freewheeling by Bob Dylan and something by the Clancy Brothers, those and some obscure stuff on fiddles and whistles.

"I just loved folk songs the first time I heard them. It was stuff I'd never encountered before, it was incredible. I thought all music came out of a speaker."

The first song he wrote was called Me Dirty Purple Working Shirt - to the tune of McNamara's Band - the second about a strike at ICI Wilton. "I'm not a prolific songwriter," he insists. "I collect other people's, they're better."

Now, however, a film's being made about Vin's life and times, too. A sort of folk museum, it'll be called Teesside Troubadour. He's a South Bank lad, started singing in the mid-60s, completed an apprenticeship as a turner at ICI Wilton but in 1969 started singing full-time.

"He's not just your typical folk singer. He's a passionate and serious protest singer who gets you thinking and in the next breath is a comic genius who'll have you in stitches," says Craig Hornby, the Saltburn-based film maker who accompanied Vin and his wife Pat on a recent 12,000 mile tour which took in Belgium, Holland, Malaysia and Australia.

They live on a cliff top near Loftus, grow organic produce - "veggie carrots," said the Scouser - most weekends essay a sort of Travelodge tour of Britain.

Two years ago he had a last-gasp heart operation, had another queer turn last September but seems fine again. So when's he slowing down? "Theoretically now, but the work keeps coming in.

"If it doesn't, there may still be someone who wants a good turner."

WE'VE moved on to the pub. Pint of bitter on one side of the table, orange juice on the other. No guesses.

An oriental female glides up, hands over a card which says that she's deaf and is asking for money in exchange for a copy of the deaf alphabet.

We scrape together a few bob, a gesture acknowledged in sign language. "She says she's got all my albums," says Vin, who'll be 60 in November.

A lovely, twinkling sort of bloke, he enjoyed the Beatles - "all the Liverpool crowd, really" - didn't much care for the Stones, shared the unease when Dylan plugged into the national grid. "Most of the people I knew backheeled him after that."

They almost met a few years ago, at Hong Kong airport, after both had been playing gigs on the island.

"I was doing a little folk club, 120 or so, but at least I'd sold out. A few weeks beforehand they told me that Dylan had added a Hong Kong date to his tour, that it was the same night as mine, and asked if I'd put mine back a night if they give me a ticket for Dylan. I loved it."

Dylan's gig was half-empty - "admittedly a bit bigger than where I was" - the faithful 120 back for the Vin extraordinaire the following night. He still has the cutting from the South China Morning Post: "Watch out Bob: Vin's in town."

Teesside troubadour, wandering minstrel, he's never entertained thoughts - as a turner might - of doing a Dick Whittington. "It's been fantastic, but the beauty and the bane of the folk scene is its amateurism. Most of my employers are hobbyists, they love music and they've seen me through, but sometimes they're lacking in professionalism."

He's off until the weekend: Saturday Oldham, Sunday Harrogate, September Canada, 60th birthday special at The Sage on November 1. He'd not change a minute, he says: don't think twice, it's all right.

Mourning Johnnie 'Maffen'

OUR old friend John Maughan, cheerful embodiment of one of the English language's many peculiarities, has died, aged 89.

The problem was acknowledged, in brackets, in the death notice. (Johnnie Maffen.)

Johnnie, Tow Law lad and denizen of the workmen's club, would often tell the story of his early Army days, wondering why he never seemed to get any letters from home.

After another empty handed morning - or maughaning, as the case may be - he had a word with the sergeant, who asked his name.

"Maffen," said Johnnie.

"Spell it," said the sergeant.

"M-a-u-g-h-a-n."

Great character, Johnnie. His funeral's tomorrow at 10.40 at Tow Law parish church.

LAST week's column on the remarkable Jim Slater, still writing for the South Shields papers at 96, supposed that his biggest scoop was probably the birth of Marian Chapman, weighing just ten ounces, in 1938.

"Nee bigger than half a pund o' butter," as the Sand Dancers were given, slightly inaccurately, to observing. Marian spent many years in the Guinness Book, Britain's smallest surviving birth. Several readers have asked what happened to her.

She worked for many years as a typist at Reyrolles, in Hebburn, weighed eight and a half stones on her 21st birthday and later married Bob Taggart at Harton Methodist church.

They moved to Bristol where Marian died, aged 44, in 1983.

THE column a couple of weeks back recalled how the Queen travelled from Durham to Teesside Airport following the 1967 Maundy ceremony - inadvertently huffing Sedgefield en route.

Wendy Acres in Darlington, was better informed. "We knew she'd have to go over the then level crossing at Middleton St George, where there was a dip. The car would have to slow down and we'd get a better view.

"Rather a lot of people had the same idea, but it was worth it. She gave us a gracious wave."

and finally, my attention is drawn to Salut!, a much acclaimed blog website run by Shildon lad and former Daily Telegraph man Colin Randall, now exiled to the south of France.

He's examining the French presidential candidates, including the wondrously named Marie-George Buffet, the fearsomely right-wing Jean-Marie Le Pen and Francois Bayrou, an Independent.

"Ever since my old friend Mike Amos, a lifelong Tory, stood (and won) as an independent in my home town, I have tended to think of self-proclaimed centrists and independents as conservatives in disguise," he writes.

It was a long time ago but, if not by email, the writ is on its way, par avion.