Bruce Dunnet

John Bryce McGregor Dunnet, club owner: born Edinburgh 23 September 1923; married 1965 Jacqui Higgins (one son); died London 19 March 2002.

John Bryce McGregor Dunnet, club owner: born Edinburgh 23 September 1923; married 1965 Jacqui Higgins (one son); died London 19 March 2002.

Bruce Dunnet was one of the giants who wrested the folk revival out of the effete middle-class hands of those who thought to make it over into a never-never land of milkmaids and pewter tankards – and turned it into something which changed the way we look at the world. He was a Rabelaisian, lantern-jawed, foul-mouthed, stooping, commanding presence at the folk clubs and concerts he ran.

He was born John Bryce McGregor Dunnet in 1923 in Edinburgh. His father was a plumber, who committed suicide shortly after going to seek his fortune in the United States. Dunnet was brought up by his mother, Jean, mainly in Inverkeithing, where he set up a Communist Party branch meeting in a disused shed on the golf-course, and was elected branch secretary, either at age 12 or 14 (his accounts differed). He joined the Royal Navy at the outbreak of the Second World War, but was invalided out with TB, moving at the end of the war to London, where he undertook various jobs. It was as a spin-off from his tough, working-class politics that Dunnet got into folk music.

As well as launching clubs all over London from the Fifties onwards, Dunnet also for a long time ran MacColl's Singers' Club, which was funny, seeing that the singer Ewan MacColl had set it up in 1961 to be free of the scroungers and conmen who were even then buzzing round the nascent folk scene like bees round a honeypot, but then Dunnet wasn't your standard entrepreneur, regardless of the high-finance shenanigans he dabbled in towards the end of his life.

Tales of Dunnet abound, and were part of the folklore of the folk revival. The time he put on Dominic Behan in cabaret at the Edinburgh Festival, and was chastised by his star for missing the press launch. Dunnet explained it was a little matter of a torn foreskin during over-enthusiastic sexual foreplay, and, when Behan doubted this far-fetched story, Dunnet unzipped his trews and displayed the bandaged member for all to see.

I was there on the occasion in 1958 when Dunnet turned down Paul Simon [see 11 April]. I was singing my last professional singing engagement for some 30 years at his club in Soho and Simon turned up at the door, seeking a £10 engagement. "You couldn't draw the door-money," opined Dunnet. Simon offered to do it for a fiver – same reply.

Many years later, Dunnet was attempting to find a headliner for a festival he was putting on at a racecourse outside London, and he persuaded the London busker Meg Aikman, a friend of Simon's who had often been invited to join him on stage at concerts at the Royal Albert Hall or suchlike plush venues, to ring him with the offer to name his own price to headline. "Tell him I wouldn't draw the door-money," said Simon.

Then there was the time a group of lads came to one of the folk clubs he ran in Middlesex, asking if they could do a tune or two. Asked what sort of songs they did, they replied, "Blues." Whereupon he gave them a lecture on people singing from their own cultural traditions, and refused to let them perform. They became a band called the Rolling Stones.

This antipathy to white Britons' singing the blues didn't prevent him from recognising the genius of the guitarist Bert Jansch, when he and John Renbourn and the bassist Danny Thompson and drummer Terry Cox and singer Jacqui McShee formed themselves up as the seminal folk-rock group Pentangle. Of course, it wasn't called folk-rock in those days, but undoubtedly the club Dunnet ran for them at the Horseshoes in Tottenham Court Road saw the birth of a hybrid that was to inspire Fairport Convention and Steeleye Span and is still packing them in at Cropredy, in Oxfordshire, every August.

The hippest a capella folk group ever, the Young Tradition not only were residents at a club he ran in what was then the Scots Hoose in Cambridge Circus – the same venue where Simon couldn't get a booking, incidentally – but they also nicked the name of the club and made it their own. Dunnet managed them for a while, but parted when bigger bucks, and a Transatlantic Records contract, beckoned. Much the same thing happened with Pentangle. And with Julie Felix, before Dunnet took her to meet David Frost, who introduced her to Jo Lustig, who became her "proper" manager, signed contract in the filing cabinet and all (Lustig also managed Pentangle for a while).

Dunnet had been sick for many years with a weakness of the bones in his spine – which probably began in the war – and suffered a great deal of pain, for which he found the only treatment was regular imbibing of warm light ale. When the brewers put up the price of his tipple, he wrote a letter of complaint, and the licensee was instructed forthwith never to charge him the full amount.

Karl Dallas