Reading this site certainly brings the memories flooding back .... let me see, it was 1962 and I was 15 nearly 16 when an older family friend suggested I go with him one Friday or Saturday night to a coffee bar named the Monde Marie near Courtenay Place, where he assured me the atmosphere and live music was great.  My mother was firmly of the opinion that she had heard that this place was likely a den of iniquity and that marijuana was freely available!

 

Arranging to meet at the Monde around 10pm, a time teenagers of those times were usually coming home from movies, I had a vision of dark walls, fishing nets, wine bottles covered in candle wax, and a bevy of waitresses wearing black skivvies & skirts for all the world as if they were about to dance the Tarantella or sidle along Paris's Left Bank. One, slightly older with curly red hair, a Cheshire cat grin and beady eyes, seemed to be holding sway over where people sat or when they got their coffees served .... I was later to be advised that this was the owner, one Mary Seddon.

 

That night I was introduced to Max Winnie and Val Murphy, and by the time the crowd thinned around 3am I was, as they say, hooked. The Monde became my home away from home for some 3 or 4 years after that first night, and pleased to say that many of the 'in crowd' became very good friends, subsequently flatting with a number of them.  I managed to ingratiate myself with the musicians who played and sang there, joined in a few choruses, and learned to play the guitar … as well as developing an interest in the then re-emerging ‘folk music’. Having been raised on classical music at home, and choosing jazz for my own, the advent of folk music was then another avenue for my ethnomusicology leanings.

 

As often happens, being at the coffee shop for prolonged periods meant greater familiarity with both the staff and Mary, and I was often called upon during busy nights to assist in the kitchen or ensure the Cona coffee pots were always fresh and full.  This expanded to also ‘booking’ the musicians and paying them at the end of their session, and eventually becoming for nearly a year what Mary called her day Manager …. remember that during the day the Monde Marie was more of a restaurant serving plain-but-wholesome meals at lunchtime, and only in the late evening did the music scene expose another side of the place.  Mary’s old van (Austin A40 or Devon?) would be used to go collect the pre-prepared meals from a house in Hataitai, and then I’d lug the full stainless-steel buckets into the shop, ladle the ubiquitous Bolognaise or curry or Stroganoff into the bain marie before putting the coffee on and ensuring the tables were wiped clean.

 

Mary rarely visited during the day, but try as I may to change the music, she wouldn’t have a bar of it and that damned Spanish-Greek-Mediterranean  pap is still etched in my memory.  Mary was a hard lady to accept change, and even her little cadre of performers were soundly warned to not entertain elsewhere unless she gave approval … and even new-comers wanting to do a spot had to be literally introduced and vouched for by a regular singer.  A competing coffee bar opened across the road in the Embassy picture theatre building, the Chez Paree, and Mary would often send a trusted spy across there to ensure none of her “stable” had defected.  Mary also had certain ideas of what constituted appropriate music for the Monde, and whilst entertainers were pretty much free to set their own play lists, we were always given a little frown, nod, or shove if something was deemed not to her liking.

 

As has been reported in others’ memories, any overseas musical entertainer was inveigled to come to the Monde after their evening performance, and just by chance an Evening Post photographer would happen to be there too.  No one came into the Monde for free, including these professional performers, and I remember sitting in the gutter outside on Roxburgh Street chatting (drinking wine, actually) with Judy Collins about some esoteric nonsense comparing Martin, Gibson and Epiphone guitars when Mary stormed out to us, glared at me, and dragged the poor singer back into the throng.

 

However, Mary was also generous in other ways and allowed us to use the premises when not trading to gather for either a jam session or to hold guitar lessons. I recall one such Sunday afternoon when a bunch of maybe 9 or 10 folk singers and fans alike thought a formally organised group might better serve the folk music enterprise, and from that the germ of the Wellington Folk Club arose.

Shortly afterwards, Mary and Frank Fyfe came to NZ from Australia, and opened another music-based coffee bar in upper Willis Street, named the Balladeer. Whereas the Monde had lots of booths and the singers jammed into a spare corner, the Balladeer was set up with a performance stage area at the front, with chairs, tables and benches looking towards the stage and performers.  Also different was that the singers at the Balladeer were booked and billed a week beforehand, as opposed to the Monde’s ad hoc approach, and generously allowed those more dedicated to the music genre to meet for lessons, jam sessions and open-stage evenings.  This also coincided with the flourishing individual folk clubs in regional centres, Universities, etc, as well as an influx of folk-related musical ideas from both Britain and America … hell, even Dylan had gone electric!

 

I gradually lost contact with the Monde, as one does, and on one return visit there found it sparsely occupied, with a seemingly school-aged kid listlessly singing “Black Velvet Band”.  The sun was setting on the hootenanny, the age of the hippy was dawning, and the Monde no longer had ‘atmosphere’.

 

There are far too many people I have met through the Monde for me to attempt to name them all, but it was a great bunch that imposed no bounds in terms of age or musical preferences, for which I will always be grateful to Mary Seddon and the Monde Marie.

 

Ricky Berg.