The Fascist & the Folk Singer
How a fanatical Nazi a-changed with the times and became Bob Dylan’s first British promoter.
Late on the afternoon of Sunday 17 May 1964, a surge of clapping greeted Bob Dylan, twenty-two-year-old star of the voguish American folk music scene. He had just walked onstage at the 2,500-seat Royal Festival Hall on London’s South Bank. Many of the audience must have been lured there by the song that he had played during the previous Monday evening’s live transmission of Tonight, BBC Television’s hit magazine programme.
To boost sales of his second album, which would enter the upper reaches of the British charts less than a week later, Dylan was about to perform what the promoter of the Royal Festival Hall gig advertised as “his first public concert in London.” Yet this tag-line was an outright lie. The fact is, Dylan had already played at the Troubadour and several equally small London venues in the run-up to Christmas 1962.
For his latest, much larger-scale London concert, which would be his only British gig in 1964, he was appearing under the “John Coast Presents” banner. In the course of a little over a decade, Coast had established an international reputation as a theatre producer, music agent, memoirist, and concert promoter, who ran his London-based business in collaboration with his attractive Javanese wife, Supianti, known to most people as Luce.
Slim and always elegantly dressed, usually sporting a pencil moustache of the type his newest client would later adopt, he was a handsome, suave, and erudite forty-six-year-old Englishman with a public school education and abundant charm. Like Dylan, who had grown up as Robert Allen Zimmerman, child of a Russian-Jewish immigrant family living in Minnesota, he had arrived at his current persona through a process of self-reinvention. In his case, the process was so radical that I have trouble reconciling his much younger self with the urbane figure presiding over Dylan’s Royal Festival Hall concert.
The truth about Coast’s earlier incarnation wasn’t exposed until almost two decades after his death. It emerged as an unexpected by-product of Rendezvous at the Russian Tea Rooms, a nonfiction book I was researching on the eccentric MI5 spymaster Maxwell Knight’s brilliant Phoney War-era infiltration of a group of would-be Nazi collaborators. Within a stack of declassified Security Service files, dating from 1939-41, I spotted multiple references to the self-styled Johnny Coast, who turns out to have been employed as an assistant to the prominent eugenicist and fascist, George Lane-Fox Pitt-Rivers. Dylan’s future promoter was described as a “Nazi fanatic”, “evidently unbalanced”, and a believer in a worldwide Jewish conspiracy that even involved Sir Oswald Mosley, leader of the militantly anti-Semitic British Union of Fascists.
By the late 1930s, Coast’s politics had alienated him from his family and encouraged MI5 to monitor his mail. Besides being in correspondence with the fascist ideologue, H.H. Beamish, who proposed that the Jewish population should be deported to the island of Madagascar, he was revealed as a vocal supporter of a British Nazi organisation called the Nordic League. He was also an acolyte of the renegade Member of Parliament, Captain Archibald Ramsay, leader of the Right Club, a secret society that sought to collaborate with Hitler’s regime. Among its most energetic members was Coast’s friend, the Russian émigré fashion designer and Nazi spy, Anna Wolkoff, with whom he shared a passion for ballet. The two of them often travelled around London putting up printed stickers emblazoned with venomous anti-Semitic slogans, which would no doubt have appalled Bob Dylan.
Coast wasn’t just a young man of violent opinions. He was a young man who revelled in the threat of physical violence. Reportedly, he told one woman with whom he disagreed “that before very long she and all her type would have their throats cut, and that he looked forward to that day.”
Despite being accused of being “anti-British” almost “to the point of being treasonable”, he was—in common with many other British fascists—prepared to fight for his country when the Second World War broke out. His conscription into the army during 1940 marks the beginning of a strange and circuitous career-trajectory that would bring him together with Bob Dylan.
Soon he was posted to Singapore where, by a delicious irony, he was captured by the Japanese, who had launched their war against the western democracies with the crucial assistance of the Scottish peer William Forbes-Sempill, another of Captain Ramsay’s Right Club circle. Via Forbes-Sempill, the Japanese had earlier obtained details of the British military technology that enabled them to land planes on aircraft carriers, without which the attack on Pearl Harbor would have been impractical.
After the fall of Singapore, Coast had the misfortune to be taken prisoner by the Japanese and used as a slave labourer. During his three-and-a-half-years of brutal captivity, spent building a railway through hundreds of miles of Thai jungle, he learnt Malay and befriended a young Javanese, who introduced him to that country’s traditional style of dance.
When the war ended, he wrote a popular book about his experiences as a prisoner of war. He then settled in south-east Asia, where he found a job working as a press attaché for the Foreign Ministry of the new Indonesian nationalist government, which had just declared independence from its Dutch former colonial masters.
In 1950, he left his job and moved to Bali and wrote a memoir of his foray into Indonesian politics. With the help of the Javanese woman he had married, his next step was to recruit a troupe of local dancers and musicians. The couple ended up taking them on a triumphant tour of theatres across Europe and the United States, promoted by a combination of the Indonesian government and the big-time Jewish-American impresario, Sol Hurock.
As well as providing Coast with material for his third memoir, the tour brought him into contact with the cream of Anglo-American showbusiness and landed him a job as the European representative for Columbia Artists’ Management. His experience of working for this powerful talent agency, which specialised in representing classical musicians, singers, composers, and conductors, gave him a perfect apprenticeship. During the mid-1950s, he set up his own agency, numbering Luciano Pavarotti, José Carreras, Monserrat Caballé, and Ravi Shankar among his clients. In parallel to his activities as an agent and promoter, he collaborated with David Attenborough on several BBC documentaries about Bali. Attenborough even supplied a foreword to the posthumous republication of Dancing Out of Bali, his 1954 book about the first theatre tour he organised.
But Coast’s involvement with Dylan wasn’t sustained beyond the Royal Festival Hall gig. When Dylan returned to Britain the following year, a different promoter handled the tour, which was chronicled by D.A. Pennebaker’s famous documentary, Don’t Look Back. We can only speculate why Coast and Dylan parted company, yet politics is unlikely to have been the reason. After all, none of Coast’s clients commented on him voicing anti-Semitic and pro-fascist opinions. Maybe he just kept them well hidden. He certainly did an excellent job of concealing his earlier commitment to British Nazism. Then again, maybe his youthful extremism had been quashed by the wartime experiences that brought him face-to face with the consequences of fascism, albeit of the Japanese rather than German variety. I like to think that he emerged politically as well as physically and psychologically transformed by his ordeal.