Who Knows Where the Time Goes?

At 49 Greek Street, a musical revolution took hold, driven by voices like Sandy Denny's that defined the singer-songwriter era.

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Oct 30, 2024

49 Greek Street - Photograph: Jackie Hopfinger

She stood just off the edge of the small stage, smoothing her long, flowered skirt with slightly trembling hands. Her flaxen hair, loose and wispy, caught the dim light as she tucked a strand behind her ear—a nervous gesture that revealed more than she wanted. Her eyes swept across the dark, smoke-filled room, though she wasn’t truly seeing the crowd, not yet.

The cellar hummed with conversation and the scratchy shuffle of bodies finding space in the pews around the walls and on the floor in front of the stage. When Sandy Denny saw her name on the folded sign by the narrow doorway up on the street, it made her nerves even worse. Performing was always an ordeal, especially the minutes leading up to stepping on stage. The tension, the preparation, the fear—it all churned inside her. But once she began, something always took over. A deep current of melancholy would rise up, carrying her away, and in that moment, she'd lose herself to the music. At least tonight it would be over early, as the American who was a regular at the Greek Street folk club was headlining. Her father had met him, later describing Paul Simon as “an insignificant little chap who wore his cap to one side. He looked a bit scruffy.”

Sandy felt her own appearance was nothing like a folk singing eighteen year old was supposed to look, which added further to her nerves. Unlike Julie Felix or Joan Baez, she wasn’t slim with long, sleek, straight hair. She had tried everything—taking slimming pills, even asking a friend to iron her frizzy hair between sheets of brown paper before shows. No matter what she did, the nerves remained, gnawing at her. She could drink away her insecurities, though—drink until her edges blurred and her hands steadied. In later years, she showed herself fully capable of drinking Led Zeppelin under the table, but all that was yet to come.

Her gaze drifted toward the doorway on the other side of the stage, where the steep flight of stairs led down from the street above. A stout young man with a round face and short black hair was at the bottom, collecting money from the incoming crowd. He smiled and nodded in her direction, offering silent encouragement.

With a deep breath, Sandy took her first hesitant steps onto the stage. She glanced down at her guitar, her fingers brushing over the strings, familiar yet tentative. The murmurs from the crowd faded as they shifted in their seats, a few offering gentle applause. She adjusted the microphone, her fingers still trembling slightly, then closed her eyes and began.

Across the evening sky, all the birds are leaving,

But how can they know, it's time for them to go?

The narrow doorway still remains, but the club that ushered in the age of the singer-songwriter is long gone. Les Cousins, a folk and blues club in the basement of a Greek restaurant, once thrived on Greek Street. The folk revival had begun in the 1950s, led by figures like Ewan MacColl (father of Kirsty MacColl), and by the mid-1960s, London alone boasted over 300 folk clubs. These venues offered a space for folk enthusiasts to pass the mic and share songs—both discovered and written—tapping into a sense of authenticity that many felt was missing from mainstream music.

Yet, within the folk revival, a schism was emerging. As folk writer Karl Dallas explains: “It was a time of polarisation when the young Turks were about to wrest the folk revival from the hands of the Old Left pioneers… a reaction against the puritanical neo-Calvinism of Marxists like Bruce Dunnet and Ewan MacColl, for which the new band of what we were later to call singer-songwriters were to substitute something a great deal more hedonistic, instinctual, less rational.” It was a Greek Cypriot family who created the unique space for these young turks.

The Greeks in London

Greek was spoken on the streets of London centuries before English, predating the arrival of the Anglo-Saxons. While Greeks certainly accompanied the Romans, there’s evidence that Greek traders visited these shores as early as 1300 BC. With the rise of the Ottoman Empire, more Greeks migrated to London, leading to the establishment of the city’s first Greek Orthodox church in Soho in 1677. The Greek community was granted land on what became known as Greek Street, originally Crown Street.

Greek Street’s fortunes rose and fell with those of Soho itself. By the nineteenth century, the area had descended into poverty and disrepair. In 1906, the Metropolitan Police labelled it “the worst street in London” for crime, vice, and disorder. The Illustrated London News went further, calling it a “haunt of choice for rascaldom,” and published lurid illustrations to match.

The Greek community continued to grow, especially after Cyprus became a British colony in 1925. An influx of Greek Cypriots arrived after World War II, answering Britain’s call for help in rebuilding. Many found work in catering, the rag trade, and manual labour, settling in areas with established Greek communities like Soho, Islington, and Hackney. In 1949, around the time London’s first Orthodox Cathedral, St. Sophia, was consecrated, Loukas and Margaret Matheou arrived from Cyprus with their two-year-old son, Andy.

The family settled in a second-floor flat at 55 Frith Street, with Andy attending Soho Parish School on Great Windmill Street. Loukas initially ran a café in Fulham but eventually saved enough to lease the ground and basement floors of 49 Greek Street in 1960, opening the Soho Grill. The restaurant began as a French establishment, and the basement—Les Cousins—was originally modelled as a French discotheque.

A basement community

The basement club struggled to find its identity at first, but in 1965, the Matheous handed over its management to their son Andy, fresh out of school. Andy had a sharper sense of the changing tides in Soho and beyond. A fan of Bob Dylan and the American folk revival, he had his finger on the pulse of a counterculture that was just beginning to stir. Just across the street, Peter Cook’s Establishment Club had already tapped into this emerging scene in terms of satire, and Andy saw the potential for music at Les Cousins. Under his stewardship, the club blossomed. As his widow, Diana, later reflected: “Cousins became a melting pot where artists gathered to exchange, share skills, and play together.”

Jackie’s friend Tony, a regular at the club, echoed this sense of community: “I went to Cousins about a dozen times in the late 1960s. I must have been 16 or 17 at the time. The all-night sessions were especially memorable… The main performer would do about three sets, and between those, other musicians would take the stage. There was a sense of people sharing their music and learning from each other.”

In his brilliant survey of British folk music, Rob Young describes the club as a “poky palace…where the folk monarchy held court, (and) audiences of no more than 150 were routinely treated to mythically revelatory performances.” With no alcohol licence, Les Cousins offered tea, sandwiches and a discreet place to smoke joints all night. Few other clubs could claim to foster such an open exchange of ideas and creativity. Les Cousins was more than a folk club—it became a crucible for musical experimentation, building upon while pushing beyond the boundaries of traditional folk.

Take the case of just one song: Scarborough Fair. Ewan MacColl had first heard it in 1947 from Mark Anderson, a retired lead miner in County Durham, while collecting and documenting folk songs. MacColl published the song in a book of Teesdale folk songs, where Martin Carthy discovered it. In 1965, Carthy performed it one evening at Les Cousins. In the audience that night was Paul Simon, a club regular. Simon recorded the song the following year, and when the Simon & Garfunkel version reached #11 on the US charts, it became the start of their rise to stardom.

Paul Simon also took inspiration from another Cousins regular, Davey Graham, covering his instrumental Anji. As music writer Robin Denselow noted, Graham was “not just a key figure in the British folk-blues movement, but one of the earliest exponents of world music.” With a Guyanese mother and a Scottish father, Graham had a natural affinity for musical fusion. His travels across North Africa in the early 1960s led him to develop the now-famous DADGAD tuning, which allowed him to play along with Moroccan musicians. This tuning soon became a hallmark of the British folk revival, later adopted by musicians like Jimmy Page, whose use of it can be heard in Led Zeppelin’s Kashmir.

Les Cousins’ influence extended far beyond the folk scene. Its regulars included not only Cat Stevens, Al Stewart, and Roy Harper, but also musicians like John Renbourn and Bert Jansch, whose innovative guitar work blurred the lines between folk, jazz, and blues. Jansch, who had honed his skills in Edinburgh’s folk clubs before moving to London, became a central figure at Les Cousins. His style left an indelible mark on generations of musicians. Johnny Marr of The Smiths described hearing Jansch for the first time: “I couldn’t believe what I heard, especially from the guitar: it was jazzy, it was bluesy, and kind of funky—it went off all over the place. It runs all the way through what I was doing in The Smiths. All roads lead back to Bert Jansch.”

On 28 September 1966, a young Jimi Hendrix, fresh to London and eager to play, arrived at Les Cousins for an open jam session hosted by blues guitarist Alexis Korner. Hendrix paid his fee at the door, quietly observed from the back, and then blew everyone’s minds when he was invited to play. “He plugs in his white Fender,” Andy Matheou later recalled, “and does all this stuff with his teeth. Just blows everybody away.” David Bowie once showed up, eager to perform, but no slot was available for him that night.

By 1967, Loukas Matheou felt it was time to revamp the family’s restaurant upstairs, renaming it Dionysus to reflect the growing popularity of Greek cuisine among British holiday-goers. With the restaurant’s success, the basement was expanded to accommodate the increasing crowds at Les Cousins. That same year, Pentangle—formed by Jansch and Renbourn—began to gain wider recognition, selling out the Royal Festival Hall and bringing even more attention to the club. New talents like John Martyn, Nick Drake, and Sandy Denny began to emerge from this vibrant scene.

Mike Cooper, another performer at Les Cousins, recalled the weight of playing there: “When you played Les Cousins, you had joined ‘the scene’; been acknowledged, made it—whatever that meant at the time. It was the Vatican, Mecca, and Jerusalem of the folk scene.” And among its brightest stars was Sandy Denny, who would soon go on to shape the future of British folk-rock.

Sandy Denny

Sandy Denny’s musical roots ran deep. Raised in Wimbledon, her Scottish grandmother from Dundee, a singer of traditional Gaelic songs, encouraged Sandy’s budding talent. While learning classical piano at school, she also picked up guitar and began singing, blending the formal training with the folk traditions passed down to her. By the time she attended Kingston School of Art, Sandy was a regular on London’s folk circuit, performing a mix of American folk covers and Scottish ballads. What set her apart, however, wasn’t just her interpretation of others' songs, but her own gift for songwriting, which quickly revealed itself as something extraordinary.

Green Gartside of Scritti Politti admires how Sandy "wrote some beautiful tunes, really inventively harmonised." He noted songs like ‘The North Star Grassman and the Ravens,’ ‘The Sea Captain,’ and ‘The Lady,’ all of which showcase her deep talent for blending melody with intricate emotion. Gartside also highlights the pioneering nature of her work: at a time when there were very few female songwriters, in either Britain or the U.S., Sandy was blazing a trail. "Her full recognition," he adds, "is only now being established."

One of her most celebrated compositions, ‘Who Knows Where The Time Goes,’ was written when she was nineteen. Rufus Wainwright has described it as "one of the saddest songs ever written". Its timeless quality caught the attention of legends like Judy Collins and Nina Simone, both of whom covered the song. But while Sandy’s songwriting drew admiration, it was her voice that left the deepest impression.

Singer Linda Thompson described how Sandy’s ability to hold an audience was unparalleled, even when performing long, traditional ballads with no hooks, bridges, or choruses. “Sandy could sing a 43-verse ballad, and you would never, ever, ever once be bored,” Thompson recalled, marvelling at how Sandy made such songs captivating. Her secret lay in the way she delivered each line as though telling a story, almost speaking the lyrics while still holding onto the melody. “You believed every word, every syllable, every heartbeat,” Thompson explained, a testament to Sandy’s rare ability to make each performance feel emotionally truthful.

Island Records boss Chris Blackwell described her as “one of the great voices of the times”, and so it was inevitable that she would outgrow the ‘poky’ Soho club. A brief time with Strawbs was followed by her auditioning to join Fairport Convention, a band that, up to that point, had mostly emulated American acts like The Byrds. But before auditioning for them, she insisted that they audition for her: “You first. I want to hear something.” As Linda Thompson later said “For a girl in those days it was absolutely unheard of.”

Over the course of three albums, all released in 1969, Fairport Convention set the foundation for British folk-rock, creating a direction followed by Steeleye Span, Lindisfarne, and influencing bands such as Led Zeppelin. It was a year of creative transformation and tragedy for the band, as the van driving them back from Birmingham overturned on the M1, killing drummer Martin Lamble and guitarist Richard Thompson’s girlfriend Jeannie Franklyn. This loss profoundly influenced their music, leading them toward a distinctly British sound rooted in traditional folk elements. Released in December 1969, Liege & Lief is considered the pinnacle of Fairport Convention’s legacy and a defining record of the British folk-rock movement. It abandoned American influences in favour of reinterpreting traditional British and Celtic folk songs.

Writing decades after its release, Michael Hann focuses on the unique brilliance of Liege & Lief: “Sandy Denny’s voice is justly hailed – so clear and true and forthright – and the contrast between her performance style, derived from folk, and the band’s, derived from rock, generates the tension that drives the music. She sang with minimal vibrato, and took nothing from the blues traditions that had given birth to rock music, while Richard Thompson would add colouration of modernity. Dave Swarbrick, meanwhile, was to Fairport as John Cale was to the early Velvet Underground, his fiddle playing making the whole sound otherworldly.”

Sandy Denny had been instrumental in equipping the band with its pioneering spirit, blending British folk with rock and through her own genius for songwriting, creating a new approach to folk storytelling. And with that, she was gone. Sandy Denny left Fairport just days before Liege & Lief was released in December 1969, playing Les Cousins for the last time as the decade drew to a close.

A family affair

Andy and his wife Diana were the heart and soul behind Les Cousins, providing musicians with opportunities and encouragement to perfect their craft and pursue their ambitions. Diana, a regular at the club, moved into Andy's family flat on Frith Street as their relationship grew. “We were running the club from here,” she recalls. “I’d push Em, our baby, in the pram, leave her in the restaurant corridor upstairs, go down to run the club, and did the door for two or three years.” Les Cousins was a true family affair.

Most nights, Andy sat on a stool at the foot of the stairs, collecting the five-shilling entrance fee. This vantage point let him enjoy the performances, manage the takings, and dash across to the Pillars of Hercules pub to fetch guest performers when it was their turn to play. He wasn’t just a manager, he also inspired some of the songs. As Diana recalls about his friendship with musician John Martyn: “He and Andy shared a bond beyond the ordinary. That’s what John wrote about in ‘May You Never’. One summer day, he burst into the Frith Street flat with DJ Jeff Dexter and announced, ‘I’ve written a song for you.’ He and Andy spent countless hours together.”

Andy also sparked creative inspiration in other ways. Opher Goodwin recounts how Roy Harper’s song “She’s the One” stemmed from a conversation with Andy: “Roy was talking about splitting up with Mocy, and Andy told him he was a fool; she was a wonderful woman. Roy turned that conversation into one of his most passionate songs, a live favourite.”

Ian Anderson describes Andy’s laid-back booking style: “Once Andy trusted a performer, they’d be booked every few weeks. I remember in the winter of ’68/’69, I’d head to Tottenham Court Road every Wednesday to get a Melody Maker, hot off the press, to see if I had a gig at Les Cousins that weekend!”

Kevin Dempsey, who performed many times at Les Cousins with Dando Shaft, believes the club’s success was due to Andy’s unique character. “Andy was special—warm, insightful, and deeply respected. He made you feel welcome and valued. He was, in a way, the voice of truth, always speaking from the heart.”

Running the club was a family effort. As Diana explains, “The Matheou family were the right people in the right place. Andy had a keen sense for authenticity and wasn’t materially driven; he became part of the musicians’ family and the spirit of the time. Musicians would show up at our flat, and if they were hungry, they wouldn’t stay that way for long. Loukas would listen to their stories and respond with wisdom, dry wit, and food.”

Kevin Dempsey fondly remembers the warmth of the Matheou family: “Diana brought a calm, welcoming vibe, and Andy’s father ran the restaurant upstairs—the Dionysus, named for the Greek god of wine and revelry. After the gig, you’d go upstairs for a meal. It felt like being part of the family.”

The legacy of Les Cousins

By 1972, the singer-songwriter era that Les Cousins had helped pioneer was in full swing. That "insignificant little chap" who once played at the club had gone on to release Bridge Over Troubled Water, one of the best-selling albums of all time. Following his lead, artists like Cat Stevens and Elton John were now chart-toppers too. 1972 also marked David Bowie’s transformation from introspective singer-songwriter with Hunky Dory to flamboyant glam rock icon with Ziggy Stardust.

Former club regulars like John Martyn, Al Stewart, Bridget St John, and Roy Harper had moved on to the college circuit, returning to Les Cousins only occasionally as their careers took flight. New favourites, like the band Dando Shaft, brought fresh energy, blending English and Irish folk with Eastern European influences. But the times were changing, and in April of that year, Les Cousins closed its doors. Loukas and Margaret returned to Cyprus, only to lose their home in the Turkish invasion. Margaret later died of cancer, and Loukas moved with his brother to Barking, where they ran a fishmongers. Andy and Diana joined them in the business, though they continued to live on Frith Street.

And what of the stars of Les Cousins?

Nick Drake, the quiet musical genius, released three albums, but to his label’s frustration, he refused to promote them and eventually stopped performing altogether. His records barely sold, and by the time he took his own life in 1974, Nick Drake was almost forgotten. Half a century later, those three albums are recognized as masterpieces of the British folk-rock scene and the singer-songwriter genre.

John Martyn had an extraordinary run of albums in the 1970s, showcasing his unique style. As we can personally attest, he was a mesmerising performer who sustained his audience even as musical tastes changed. Yet his addictions and troubled life contributed to his early death at sixty.

Pentangle disbanded shortly after Les Cousins closed. Bert Jansch continued to record and perform, moving to the United States for a time. His struggles with alcohol culminated in recovery in the late 1980s, and he went on to influence a new generation of musicians, performing and recording with artists like Eric Clapton, Bernard Butler and Neil Young. He died of cancer in 2011.

After leaving Fairport Convention, Sandy Denny won the Melody Maker Female Singer of the Year award two years running and reached a broader audience through her duet with Robert Plant on Led Zeppelin’s The Battle of Evermore. Her songwriting and singing continued to soar, but her career was hindered by conflicts with managers and her refusal to conform to the typical female rock-star image. She never had a hit single, and her one album with the band Fotheringay, along with her four solo records, barely registered on the charts. When Island Records dropped her, Denny was already struggling with postnatal depression, alcoholism, drug use, and chronic self-doubt—challenges that ultimately led to her early death in 1978, at just 31.

Sandy Denny was one of the first—and certainly the most notable—British female songwriters to weave raw, honest storytelling into her work, exploring themes of love and longing set against the land and seascapes of England. Her songs, often mislabeled as ‘folk,’ possess a vivid, timeless sense of place. Her remarkable voice, capable of both strength and vulnerability, shifted effortlessly from powerful ballads alongside John Bonham’s drumming to delicate, spiraling melodies intertwined with Dave Swarbrick’s fiddle.

By showing that a female voice in popular music could be both intensely personal and universally resonant, Sandy Denny opened doors for artists like PJ Harvey, Adele, Tracey Thorn, Amy Winehouse, Florence Welch, Arlo Parks, and Emeli Sandé. Her legacy paved the way for generations of women to use their own songwriting as a means of self-expression, storytelling, and emotional connection.

That legacy was born, nervously and tentatively, in a smoky Greek Street cellar in the 1960s, watched over by Andy Matheou. He passed away in 2005, leaving Diana as one of Soho’s last ties to that era. But her time there was also ending. “In May 2015, my landlords told me I’d have to leave—53–55 Frith Street was to be redeveloped. Four years later, I’m finally moving from the home I thought I’d always have. Andy and his parents are gone, and our daughter is in Bath with her children, so I’ll join her. The new landlord will earn far more than my rent-controlled tenancy ever did. As I say goodbye to Frith Street, I take comfort in the words of Teresa of Avila: ‘Let nothing disturb you or harm you; everything changes, God changes never.’ Soho is a blessed place, and it will always be home to those who truly find their way here.”