CASTING THE RUNES
In 1970, Dave and Toni Arthur recorded Hearken to the Witches Rune, an occult-themed LP of folk songs. Fifty years on, the album has gained cult status, but its gestation and legacy are just as extraordinary as the music itself, stretching from the rituals of “King of the Witches” Alex Sanders to children’s TV favourites Play School and Play Away. Dave and Toni reminisce with BOB FISCHER.
In 1970, Dave and Toni Arthur recorded Hearken to the Witches Rune, an occult-themed LP of folk songs. Fifty years on, the album has gained cult status, but its gestation and legacy are just as extraordinary as the music itself, stretching from the rituals of “King of the Witches” Alex Sanders to children’s TV favourites Play School and Play Away. Dave and Toni reminisce with BOB FISCHER.
Iwas interested in magic and witchcraft and things like that from an early age,” says Dave Arthur. “Twelve or so. Dennis Wheatley’s novels… I read those. The Devil Rides Out, To the Devil a Daughter, The Ka of Gifford Hillary. Occult novels fascinated me when I was a kid. And then I discovered the Atlantis Bookshop, just by the British Museum, which was the occult bookshop in London at the time. All the magicians and occultists of the time used to hang out there, and I was part of that scene. It was one of those old-fashioned bookshops, with piles of books all over the floor, all dusty and dark.”
We’re discussing the background to Hearken to the Witches Rune, an album of starkly beautiful folk music recorded by Dave and his then-wife Toni in 1970. Fifty years on, it’s an LP that maintains a devoted cult following among enthusiasts of folklore, occultism and esoteric music alike. Its eight tracks are riddled with tales of fairies, shapeshifting, spells and Elfin Queens, all recorded on a Revox A77 reel-to-reel tape recorder in a first-floor Camden Town flat. Its subsequent scarcity has only compounded the record’s mystique: it has been resolutely unavailable since the 1970s. There is no pristine digital remaster, no CD box set or deluxe 21st century vinyl, and abandon hope all ye seeking iTunes downloads or Spotify streams. The vintage crackles of increasingly elusive eBay copies and DIY Youtube rips have themselves become part of the album’s own extraordinary story.
“I had totally forgotten his absolute predilection for Dennis Wheatley!” exclaims Toni. I speak with them both, one after the other on the same afternoon, via crackling Skype connections at the height of Covid-19 lockdown. Both are fast-talking, funny and fascinating conversationalists. I’m keen to discover where this mutual interest in the supernatural arose, and what part – if any – the genuinely uncanny played in their
its subsequent scarcity has only compounded the record’s mystique
respective upbringings.
“I’ve had a lot of strange experiences,” continues Toni. “A lot of stuff that could be construed as magic. When Dave and I got together, I’d had a very ordinary background, but I’d had some very extraordinary things happen. I’ll give you one instance: I had my first piano lesson when I was nine. Mum took me round to see Miss Adams… she was my schoolteacher, but she also taught music. I went there, and had my first lesson.
“And I got to school the next day, and in those days every classroom had a piano in it. Miss Adams said ‘Now, Antoinette had her first lesson yesterday. And what did you learn? Come to the piano, and you can play it.’ And it was a tiny, five-note little thing. I said ‘That’s what we did… and I’m going to do another thing later, and another thing later, and at the end I’m going to play this…’
“And then I played the last piece in the book, reading from the music.”
MAGICAL BALLADS
Dave Arthur was born in Cheshire and Antoinette Wilson (“We’ll gloss over that,” she laughs) in Oxford, but both moved to London at an early age. At the turn of the 1960s, the pair met as teenagers at The Twelve Stringer, a late-night coffee bar run by Dave. Toni, then a nurse at University College Hospital, was brought along one night by her flatmate, the promising blues guitarist Buddy Watson.
They married in 1963, moving to Oxford to run a university bookshop while simultaneously building a reputation on the folk club circuit. Their 7” version of traditional folk song ‘The Cuckoo’, recorded as The Strollers, was released on the Fontana label in 1965. Its crossover folk-pop stylings, however, were absent from the minimalist albums that followed: Morning Stands on Tiptoe (1967) and The Lark in the Morning (1969). Both are beautiful essays in unaccompanied traditional song with a distinct leaning towards the pastoral. As the decade wore on, the Arthurs’ interests progressed from interpreting established folk club favourites to actively seeking out hitherto uncelebrated stories and songs – with an increasing leaning towards the uncanny.
“When I got more into folk and traditional music, all these magical ballads appeared, and it was exactly what I’d been interested in all along… a fascination with the supernatural,” explains Dave. “Wherever we went in the country, we would always spend our
time between gigs in libraries and archives: the Mitchell Library in Glasgow; the broadside ballad collection in Preston Library, among others.
“And everywhere we went, we would be tracking people down and interviewing them. Going out to the countryside, to Travellers and canal barge people, fairground people, and – particularly – farmers. Talking to them and recording them.”
One folk tale collected in such a manner is alluded to on ‘Magic in Ballads’, a handtyped four-page pamphlet included with the first pressing of Hearken to the Witches Rune. “In Norfolk a while ago,” it begins, “an old farmer told us about a horseman who sold his soul to the Devil…”
“He sold his soul and underwent the Toad Ritual,” says Dave, continuing the story 50 years on. “Finding a walking toad and burying it until the ants have eaten all the flesh, then throwing the bones into running water. This has to be renewed every seven years, but he didn’t manage it – he didn’t find a toad in time. And he went into the barn one morning to get his horse’s harness, and the whole thing just burst into flames. He died in the inferno.
“That was told to us by an old farmer in Norfolk as a true story. He said he knew the people it had happened to.”
“It’s like any form of mythology,” adds Toni. “People are frightened of their surroundings, so you get supernatural things coming out.”
This hands-on collection of oral tradition followed in the footsteps of singer and folklorist AL “Bert” Lloyd, whose 1950s crusade to document – and, indeed, perform – the vanishing folk tales and songs of the British Isles was clearly an inspiration to the youthful duo.
“We did an awful lot of research,” says Toni, now a Norfolk resident herself. “It was a passion, a complete passion. And there was no time when we went around the countryside that we didn’t stop at places and look at things. Markets used to be a big thing. I wore a beautiful horse brass that represented the three stages of the Moon… I’ve still got it on the beam of an Inglenook, near where I sit. It’s absolutely gorgeous, and supposedly the Queen of the Witches wore it. So I used to wear it round my neck… it’s actually pretty heavy!”
And, as detailed in ‘Magic in Ballads’, the duo’s interest in the secret rituals of the Norfolk horsemen led to conversations with Scottish folklorist Hamish Henderson, who had collected similar tales of the Horseman’s Word – “an anti-Calvinist farm workers guild, with smatterings of the occult”.
“When we sang in Scotland, we’d spend time in Edinburgh with Hamish,” says Dave. “Drinking, most of the time – in his favourite malt whisky bar. But talking about folklore and ballads, obviously. And we mentioned to him at some point about the Toad Men in Norfolk and the Horseman’s Word, and he sent us some information that he had.
“And then someone wrote to me out of the blue. Their grandfather had been in the Horseman’s Word, and they sent me pages and pages of transcripts… what he remembered of some of the songs he’d learnt at these convivial meetings. They used to get together, get hammered in the markets, and sing these songs about shagging Queen Victoria!
“So that was all going on at the time. We took bits from Hamish, bits from Bert Lloyd, bits that we’d come across, and we’d put versions of songs together that we felt told these stories to our satisfaction. That’s what we were doing at the time we met Alex Sanders.”
KING OF THE WITCHES
By the mid-1960s, Alex Sanders was already a high-profile figure. The so-called ‘King of the Witches’ was on the verge of transplanting his Wiccan coven from Manchester to fashionable west London, and was attracting national tabloid attention. “HORROR ‘WEDDING’ IN A WITCHES TEMPLE” was the headline of a full-page “exposé” by Peter Forbes in The People, dated Sunday 5 December 1965. “Maxine Morris is blonde, slim and just 18,” wrote an outraged Forbes. “And on Wednesday, she will give herself to a man old enough to be her father.”
“She will become the bride of 39-year-old Alex Sanders in the name of witchcraft… black candles will burn on the witches’ altar. The air will be heavy with incense… and into this vile mockery of a wedding ceremony will step little Maxine, naked