Among the many talented folk artists to emerge from London in the late ’60s, Bridget St. John was the only one to have an entire record label created around her. She counted such luminaries as Paul Simon, David Bowie and Nick Drake among her contemporaries. But after making just a handful of albums, the gifted singer-songwriter essentially disappeared from the public eye for almost two decades. So why did St. John step away from what seemed to be an incredibly promising career?
As St. John told Chickfactor in 1999, music was a part of her life ever since she learned to play piano as a child, but everything changed when her grandmother gave her £20 to buy a guitar.
“Then when I went to university, I was around all these people that could play,” St. John explained. “I would just watch them, try to figure out what they did. My second year at university I met John Martyn [British singer-songwriter], so then I started learning a lot.”
St. John was also inspired by her travels through the South of France with American folk singer Buffy Sainte-Marie, in addition to the recordings of English singer Helen Shapiro, whose voice was deep (like her own), the Beatles and Bob Dylan. Not long after she started playing gigs, the poet Pete Roche introduced St. John to the famous radio DJ John Peel, who was so impressed with her music that he invited her to appear on his BBC radio show. Eventually, Peel and record executive Clive Selwood formed Dandelion Records specifically to release St. John’s music.
“John Peel played a pivotal role, not just in my recording career but in my performing career and in my life,” St. John said in a a 2019 interview with Charles Donovan for RnR Magazine. “My relationship with John was hugely important and still is really. After meeting John, everything evolved very naturally, without a plan on my part at least. I consider myself totally fortunate that things unfolded for me the way they did, that John and Clive Selwood created Dandelion Records and that I was part of it.”
St. John’s debut album for Dandelion, 1969’s Ask Me No Questions, was reportedly recorded in just 9 to 10 hours. Though the record wasn’t a commercial success, St. John’s music won her plenty of respect and admiration on the scene. She played at Bowie’s iconic and pioneering Beckenham Arts Lab, which started as a folk club and evolved into an all-encompassing center for a variety of different artists.
According to St. John, Bowie was very hands-on and “actually ran” the club.
“He’d sit there with his acoustic guitar and play and then introduce whatever guests,” she recalled. “I also opened for him at an open-air festival when Space Oddity first came out, and I’ll never forget, we were all sitting around backstage listening to the single, and everybody was looking at him like this is so great and he’s got his long curly hair…very sweet.”
St. John was also a regular performer at the legendary London club Les Cousins, where Simon often played when he first arrived in England, and where she became close friends with Drake.
“It was this great little place where you could always go and hear so many people,” St. John said. “Nick and I played there a lot. We were very much alike — we tended, if somebody’s talking, to be kind of quiet. I didn’t need to say much with him. I can remember sitting outside on Greek Street — outside a pub opposite Les Cousins waiting to go in and play and not really saying very much, and it was very comfortable — I don’t have to fill up the silence if it’s not necessary.”
Though St. John released three more highly regarded albums over the next five years, none of them were commercially successful. In 1976, she moved to Greenwich Village after traveling there to visit a boyfriend (though the relationship didn’t work out).
“I had never been there before and knew very few people,” St. John told Michael Freerix in a 2019 interview. “I slowly got to know people — and Chrysalis Music, my publishing company at that time, allowed me to make song demos through which I met up with some New York musicians. I did my first gig opening for John Martyn at Kenny’s Castaways — and that was the beginning of a long relationship with that club — playing there and working there. I also played the Bitter End and the Bottom Line as well as some East Coast college gigs. And in 1978, I played Carnegie Hall and was on the bill at one of the Central Park concerts at The Wollman Rink.”
Before long, unfortunately, singer-songwriters were “less in vogue,” as St. John put it, and she had fewer opportunities to play live. By the time her daughter was born in 1983, she decided to focus on being a mother and “stepped back” from performing, though she still worked sometimes “behind the scenes” at the clubs.
“There were definitely times when I wished I was onstage, but I didn’t have a clear path to doing that at the time,” St. John said. “By the ‘90’s, I decided to do other work — and basically took on helping people, mostly elders, in the sense of organizing things that had become challenging for them. All the while I never felt I had stopped making music or being involved with it. My focus was necessarily elsewhere.”
St. John made a return to the actual music business in 1996 with the release of her album Take The 5ifth, a collection of unreleased songs from 1975 to 1982. Since then, she’s continued to perform and has released a number of live and compilation albums. In 2025, she released a mini-album called Covering My Brothers, a tribute to Drake, Martyn, Kevin Ayers and Michael Chapman.
“They were my brothers — never lovers!” she told Uncut at the time. “They were people that stayed in my life, other than Nick, who died so young. I saw John Martyn three months before he died, he came to New York. Even though I didn’t see them all the time, the connection was there, like it is with good friends.”
Related: Iconic Singer-Songwriter, Who Paved the Way for Bob Dylan and Joni Mitchell, Vanished Without a Trace 52 Years Ago