Les Cousins (music club)

Les Cousins was a folk and blues club in the basement of a restaurant in Greek Street, in the Soho district of London, England. It had its heyday during the British folk music revival of the mid-1960s and was notable as a venue in which musicians of that period met and learnt from each other. As such, it was influential in the careers of, for example, Jackson C. Frank, Al Stewart, Marc Brierley, Davey Graham, Bert Jansch, John Renbourn, Sandy Denny, John Martyn, Alexis Korner, The Strawbs, Roy Harper and Paul Simon. Several albums were recorded there.

Origins

Les Cousins was opened on Friday 16 April 1965 in a basement venue at 49, Greek Street, Soho (some sources give the address as 48 Greek Street) which had earlier served as a 1950s skiffle club. Upstairs was the Dionysus restaurant owned by a family called Matheou, whose son, Andy Matheou ran the basement club. The club was reputed to have taken its name from Claude Chabrol's 1959 film Les Cousins, the story of a young man from the country who comes to the city to study law, but is distracted by the rowdy cousin with whom he shares lodgings. However, the name was usually pronounced with English pronunciation, rather than French. The decor included a huge wagon wheel and fishing nets. The club was noted for its all-night sessions and was favoured by the innovative musicians who were less welcome in more purist traditional folk clubs.

Les Cousins

Les Cousins may refer to:

See also

Les Cousins (film)

Les Cousins is a 1959 French New Wave drama film directed by Claude Chabrol. It tells the story of two cousins, the decadent Paul and the naive Charles. Charles falls in love with Florence, one of Paul's friends. It won the Golden Bear at the 9th Berlin International Film Festival.

Plot

Paul, a dissolute, profligate and jaded Parisian, takes in his naive, innocent and idealistic cousin Charles from the provinces who is something of a mama's boy while they both attend law school. Paul takes Charles to a club at which he meets the beautiful Florence, who has the reputation of being a slut because she has slept around with every man in Paul's circle of friends. She takes an interest in Charles, who knows nothing of her past, and he kisses and falls desperately in love with her.

Paul refuses to study for their law-school exam, cavalierly boasting that he is smart enough to pass it without opening a book, while Charles studies frantically for it in order to make sure that he will not disappoint his mother, to whom he writes daily. But one day, through a misunderstanding, two hours before Charles had told Florence to meet him outside the law school after his class, she comes to meet him at Paul's flat. The only ones there are Paul and Clovis, a thoroughly corrupt friend of Paul's who operates as a kind of hustler, pimp and purveyor of bizarre entertainments for Paul and his friends; Clovis has previously expressed to Florence his disapproval and resentment of her trying to break away from her past by pretending to Charles to be the virtuous maid she isn't. Clovis then lewdly proposes with insidiously lascivious suggestiveness to Florence that she have sex with Paul, to which she succumbs, and they adjourn to the bedroom, so that, by the time Charles comes home he discovers that the Florence he loves has given herself to Paul.