IN MEMORY OF DAVE COUSINS

Strawbs co-founder Dave Cousins died in July following a long illness. The singer, songwriter and guitarist enjoyed an active musical career spanning more than six decades and has been name- checked by many musicians as a key influence and inspiration. We reflect on his rich legacy and reveal plans for a number of posthumous releases, including the long-awaited new Strawbs album.

- Sid Smith

The announcement of Dave Cousins' death on Sunday, July 13, marked the end of a long and fruitful career in music that began with the formation of the bluegrass-picking band The Strawberry Hill Boys in 1964, but he truly found his original voice once the outfit morphed into Strawbs in 1967. With his roots deep in folk music, like many of his contemporaries, he was galvanised into writing original material after seeing Bob Dylan and Donovan, but equally open to the giddy pop of The Beatles. Amassing a personal songbook that had already accumulated over 50 songs by the mid-1960s, Cousins eagerly embraced the stylistic freedoms of the times, seizing the opportunity to write about the issues of the moment — war, peace, sectarianism and sexuality, all of which were often freighted with a cynical eye and a poetic turn of phrase.

In that last respect, he never really changed. To the last, Cousins maintained his prolific songwriting, scribbling ideas, poems and lyrics down on scraps of paper which later would be retrieved from pockets, bags, flight cases and other repositories to be crafted into memorable songs. The starting point of such notes could be prompted by chance encounters, the random juxtaposition of attitudes or ideas. Cousins' work often carried a confessional aspect to it, chronicling the emotional topography of his own relationships or others he observed from a distance. His best writing had an intensity that frequently connected the landscape, or the implacable effects of the seasons, to the psyche, creating a vivid sense of place and marshalling tiny details to paint the bigger picture.

Keyboardist Blue Weaver, who joined the Strawbs on 1972's Grave New World, says that Cousins was primarily a poet.