Dazzling Stranger

by Colin Harper

  Nicola’s relationship with Bert was to last until Christmas 1967: ‘The first six months of our relationship I was in heaven,’ she says. ‘The second six months it wasn’t so good. I seem to remember we broke up in the middle and then got back together. I pursued him and that was probably my mistake.’ The union was finite, but Nicola and Bert were close during a significant period in his career. Nicola gave up her commitments as an art teacher at two girls’ schools outside London and took a job in the capital, moving in at St Edmund’s Terrace. On occasion she would travel with Bert to his gigs in the regions. The surviving documentation from a show at Bedworth in the Midlands in February 1967 indicates Bert’s relative worth at the time: he received £40, the once indomitable Alex Campbell £25 and everyone else between £5 and £15.

  From Nicola’s recollections, this was a period when Bert was working continuously on his music. He was very much open to widening his horizons, gleaning anything of value from the pop charts and taking Nicola along to see Pink Floyd at one of their earliest gigs. The tools of Bert’s trade were expanding too: having owned a John Bailey acoustic for a few months (his first personally owned guitar since 1960), Bert had recently acquired an experimental Bailey electric, for use with the band, and a twelve-string acoustic. He was also the co-owner, with John Renbourn, of a sitar. ‘Alexis Korner phoned up one day,’ says Renbourn, ‘and said, “Would you boys like to buy a sitar?” And we said yes, we would. “Well, the man’s probably outside the door now,” he says. This guy knocks on the door with peroxide hair and black sunglasses, with a sitar not even in a case: “There you are. Lovely, isn’t it? Ten quid.” And suddenly we had a sitar!’ Bert, incidentally, recalls the price being somewhat higher at £30.

  Photographs taken by Val Wilmer of Bert ‘playing’ the new toy appeared in the music papers during 1967, but only John would have the courage to use it on recordings. Bert was having enough to do with his battery of guitars: ‘If he was in the flat, he was playing the guitar,’ says Nicola. ‘I remember some girl at a gig saying to me, “Oh, you’re so lucky to be able to listen to him playing all the time.” And I said, “Well, he doesn’t sit around playing ‘Needle Of Death’ all day, you know!” He always played beautifully, but it was always just something in the background. I never heard him say, “Listen, I’ve just written a song”, although he did sit with paper and pen and write songs. Anne Briggs would come around occasionally. They both tried to teach me how to play guitar and got very frustrated when I couldn’t!’

  Bert, Nicola and the newly wed Renbourns spent some time as a quartet at 23 St Edmund’s Terrace ‘until Bert got John and Judy to move out because Judy was pregnant’, says Nicola. The Renbourns moved to Camden. By April 1967 Bert was recording his next album. Released in July, its name was Nicola: ‘I should have felt terribly honoured,’ says Nicola, ‘but it’s different when you’re in the middle of these things. I was a bit blasé. I suppose it felt like a natural progression.’19

  The album was recorded over several studio sessions with Nat Joseph as producer and David Palmer as musical arranger, and its concept – folk singer meets orchestra – was of the moment: both Judy Collins and Al Stewart had just released similar works and to great acclaim. ‘I think it was his least successful album,’ says Nat, ‘but you have to try. You can’t just go on making the same album. It got a lot of knocking at the time, but it was an interesting experiment. We had a comparatively limited number of artists in the earlier days, and I always felt that they shouldn’t stand still. I always tried to push them to do something different and tried to introduce them to new talents coming up in other areas, like David Palmer.’

  David Palmer, a recent graduate of the Royal Academy of Music, would go on to become a member of Jethro Tull in the seventies. Nicola was his first commission and he took the bull by the horns. Ultimately, five of the album’s tracks saw Bert fronting a fifteen-piece orchestra and coming out of the experience with something at least tolerably accomplished: ‘These were live sessions,’ says Bert. ‘It wasn’t as if they put the orchestra on later. But it was wrong of them to do it with me, because I’d do anything at the time, just out of interest.’

  Bert’s romantic streak is to the fore on Nicola and while it remains unsatisfying as a unified album, it has its moments. The instrumental title track was a stylish pseudo-baroque marriage of woodwind, cello and guitar, wearing the influence of John Renbourn boldly on its sleeve: ‘I haven’t got the ability to quite comprehend what John is on about,’ said Bert, a few years later, ‘because I’ve always been so far behind him musically. But I think he’s learned a lot about actually living from me whereas I’ve learned a lot of interesting things from John which I hadn’t been interested in before.’20

  At one stage Bert had felt that the eventual Nicola should be a blues-oriented album. ‘Come Back Baby’ and ‘Weeping Willow’, powerful solo performances originally learned from Len Partridge, were the survivors of this notion and were the first ‘traditional’ blues songs Bert had committed to vinyl. The brooding ‘Go Your Way My Love’, retrieved from the Jansch/Briggs collaborations, was similarly arresting. On the other end of the scale ‘Rabbit Run’ was a delightfully impressionistic piece, inspired by The Wind In The Willows,21 which cleverly utilised, for pace and atmosphere, the double-tracking of Bert’s vocals. Alongside the use of electric and twelve-string guitars, double-tracked voice was another Bert Jansch first and last on Nicola.

  The Palmer/Jansch collaboration yielded one real triumph: ‘Woe Is Love, My Dear’. A masterpiece of pathos and execution, Palmer’s arrangement of Bert’s paean to unrequited love was lavish but wholly sympathetic to the tenderness of Bert’s sentiments. Recorded a month after the release of the Beatles’ ‘Penny Lane’, the piccolo trumpet solo can hardly be coincidental. Prompted on the question of singles by Beat Instrumental in December 1966, Bert had revealed himself to be sympathetic to the principle but, given Transatlantic’s promotional ability in this area, believed it to be a waste of time.

  ‘I have to say we were pretty bloody useless at promoting singles,’ says Nat Joseph. ‘But I always thought “Woe Is Love” was a potentially major song. I remember saying to everybody, “That’s a hit single.” The principal problem was the title.’ Hardly an opportune flagship for the ‘Summer of Love’, ‘Woe Is Love, My Dear’ had nevertheless the same inscrutable poignancy as Procul Harem’s ‘A Whiter Shade Of Pale’ (a UK chart-topper in May 1967) and was announced in some music papers as a forthcoming single. Inexplicably, the single that finally appeared coupled ‘Life Depends On Love’ with ‘A Little Sweet Sunshine’, two further Palmer/Jansch concoctions that diluted the essence of Jansch while lacking, as compensation, the full-on swagger of a successful pop singer. The record did become DJ ‘Baby’ Bob Stewart’s ‘single of the week’ on the influential Radio Luxembourg, but the public stayed home in droves. ‘Rather than jumping direct from solo folk artist to pop star with lush backing,’ concluded Karl Dallas in his MM review, ‘it might have been more advisable to have stopped at the transitory stage of the Pentangle.’ In retrospect, he was right.

  The group’s name had come from John, inspired by the Arthurian tale of Sir Gawain And The Green Knight. The ‘pentangle’ was the sign on the inside of King Arthur’s shield: ‘So we decided that that would be a good name,’ says John, ‘because it was valuable to protect us from evil as much as anything else! Of course, when we went to play in America later on we hit up against the California culture which was very much into tarot cards and the occult and all things esoteric, and almost by coincidence our stuff slotted right in with that.’

  The first concert appearance of the Pentangle, and the first appearance of the name, had been at the Festival Hall on 27 May 1967. The rest of the bill had featured Ottilie Patterson, with Chris Barber’s band, and ‘Spider’ John Koerner. But it was essentially the Pentangle’s show, and it was sold out. A surviving set list from a concert at Birmingham Town Hall three weeks later – comprising an eight
-song John & Jacqui set, a five-song Bert set and an eight-song group set – indicates that the group were still in the process of defining their repertoire. Material from the solo sets would eventually settle into the group’s repertoire while, conversely, the group were still dabbling in arrangements of material from Bert and John’s solo repertoires, with a bluesy emphasis. The instrumentals ‘Waltz’ and ‘Bells’ were the only group originals at this stage.

  As the Pentangle were becoming a formalised unit, so the Horseshoe club, a 400-seater venue many times plusher than the average folk cellar, was gaining the ring of permanency. From June the Pentangle would invite their friends each week as guest performers: the likes of Wizz Jones, Anne Briggs, Ralph McTell, Alexis Korner, Davy Graham and Clive Palmer.

  ‘During late Sunday afternoons,’ says Kieran Bracken, a club regular, ‘the band would set up, and could later be found partaking of their Sunday tea across the road in the Wimpy Bar until about 6.45. In those days pubs were strictly closed between two and seven on Sundays. They would then make their way back to the Horseshoe and ring the doorbell for admission. Bruce Dunnet had membership cards printed, and memberships were sold for ten shillings. At one point he even took to selling photos of Bert! He also kept the evening running to schedule which gave it all a very professional feel. The audience covered a broad spectrum – students like myself, bohemians, young couples and a few older “professional” types. Entry was five shillings [25p] for members, seven and sixpence [38p] for others. Usually this left me nothing for beer. Indeed, many sat through the evening without consuming much at all, band members excepted!

  ‘The music started at 7.30 prompt. The hotel closed sharp at 10.30, so there was no time to waste. After some rapid infusion of refreshment in the bar John would always start off the night, usually joined by Jacqui. John’s cigarette-smoking ability was so fascinating as to be of almost equal interest to the music. This is the only man I have ever seen who could light up before the start of a piece and play it from beginning to end while smoking a cigarette down to the butt without removing it from his mouth. Bert would take the floor at eight and play a solo half-hour. The audiences of the day were very tolerant of the effects of alcohol on performers. Frequently Bert would appear to be well gone, unable to focus on the proceedings, and yet his charisma alone seemed to carry him through. In retrospect, I suspect the guy was nervous as hell. Looking back now, I can recall a sort of determination on Bert’s part to make the whole thing work.

  ‘After Bert there would be a short break, a long queue at the bar and then the floor-spot, maybe Sandy Denny, Clive Palmer or Les Bridger. But time was short and Pentangle really had to be on by 9.30 to give the audience full measure. My last train home was 11 p.m. If the band was on form and overshot the 10.30 closing time there was a real possibility of an uncomfortable night on a station bench. This did happen to me a few times. To this day I still feel it was worth it.’

  One Sunday in July, Tony Wilson went along to investigate the phenomenon for MM: ‘It’s some months now since the Pentangle made their debut at the Horseshoe Hotel,’ he wrote. ‘Then they were ragged, uninspired and generally lacking in confidence – now that has all changed. They have become a much tighter unit. Musically the group has widened its horizons and is performing folk songs like “She Moved Through The Fair”22 and “Let No Man Steal Your Thyme”. They appear to be cutting down on the blues stuff, which is an improvement as in the past they were top heavy with blues songs and this created monotony. The real test, however, will be when the group moves out of the sympathetic environment of the Horseshoe and they have to face a cold, un-blues un-folk oriented audience.’

  On 13 August the group had to do just that, appearing as ‘The Pentangle with BERT JANSCH’ alongside Jeff Beck, P. P. Arnold, John Mayall, Fleetwood Mac and Cream at the seventh National Jazz & Blues Festival at Windsor. ‘There was a guy in the audience who had the biggest teeth I’ve ever seen,’ says Jacqui, ‘and he just stood up and pointed at us and laughed and laughed and laughed! It was very disconcerting. He’d obviously never heard anything like us and thought it was funny. We shouldn’t have been sandwiched between all those people. We were definitely on the wrong bill.’

  ‘It was nearly the end of the band,’ says John. ‘A guy that Bert was very close to, Simon Bouchant, had just been killed in a car accident, and his girlfriend was there. Bert was trying to look after her plus think about playing, and I’m afraid it was just a disaster. Nat Joseph had been against the idea of the band doing it, but Bert told Nat that the band must definitely do it, for the publicity. But the publicity was terrible! The review simply said, “Bert Jansch was dire”.’23

  Nat Joseph had not been enthusiastic about the group: ‘I had long felt that Bert and John could become the nub of a folk-rock band,’ he says, ‘but the kind of music the Pentangle turned out was just the kind of music I didn’t think they would. It was far too bland.24 I’m not denying that it wasn’t successful or good, but I always felt they could have done something much more exciting.’

  Immediately after the Windsor débâcle the group flew to Denmark for their first-ever tour, organised by Bert’s Danish agent Walter Claybell who had inexplicably billed the Pentangle as Britain’s newest rock sensation. It was another disaster: ‘The first night, it was a typical rock club,’ says Bert. ‘The stage was quite high and the audience were “down there”. It was full and they were all kids, fifteen- to sixteen-year-olds, all expecting rock‘n’roll. The Pentangle show at the time was that John would go on first and do a solo set, and then John and I would do one, and then I would do one, and then the whole band would come on. But that night John lasted two or three songs. They were throwing coins. It was really quite dangerous.’ ‘In the end,’ says Jacqui, ‘we all went on, turned everything up as loud as possible and played the normal set, just very loudly. They thought it was great.’25

  Shortly before the Danish tour, Bert had debuted his electric guitar onstage: ‘I could never handle it,’ he later admitted, ‘although John Renbourn was also starting to play electric guitar at that time. We always kept solo spots, partly to appease folk guitarists. We were greeted with shouts of “Sell-out!” because we had bass and drums, even though it was a double bass.’26 Bert’s brief use of an electric guitar had been simply a response to the amplification problem. If he had ever harboured any thoughts of exploring the instrument further, these were swiftly forgotten in the wake of a momentous concert on 25 September 1967: a ‘Guitar In’ at the Festival Hall with flamenco player Paco Peña, the classical duo Tim Walker & Seb Jorgensen, Bert Jansch and the Jimi Hendrix Experience.

  Bert was already aware of Hendrix by then. His version of ‘Hey Joe’, which Bert had himself performed years earlier, had been a hit at the start of the year and prior to that he had turned up at the Cousins.27 ‘I’d read some poetry he’d written,’ says Bert, ‘and also I’d heard a tape of him playing acoustic guitar and I’ve never heard that since. It was magic. We were onstage when I said hello, at Jimi’s soundcheck. I did meet him but he didn’t open his mouth once all evening. I enjoyed his soundcheck more than anything else. It was quite extraordinary: he walked on, plugged into one of his pedals, turned the whole volume up as loud as possible, smashed [a chord on] the guitar once, and that was it.28 Paco Peña that night was actually in the artists’ bar handing out leaflets for flamenco guitar lessons! But Jimi’s show itself that night was stunning. Unbelievable.’

  Only two papers had sent reporters along: Melody Maker and the Financial Times. Tony Wilson, for MM, marvelled at Hendrix’s full array of performance tricks, clearly redefining the possibilities of the instrument. Bert Jansch ‘ambling on stage with two guitars’, his six- and twelve-string acoustics, was in marked contrast. Bert was ‘well on form’ and new material was aired including ‘A Woman Like You’ and ‘Birthday Blues’. ‘I was standing in the wings,’ says Nicola. ‘It was fabulous. I know afterwards that Bert went out and bought different strings for his guitar – whate
ver Hendrix used. I remember John rang and I told him Bert was off buying new strings and John said, “Oh, he’s not is he? I’ve just done that!”’

  Bert would share two further bills with Hendrix and would remain in awe. Yet today other iconic players regard both men as being of equal stature: ‘As much of a great guitar player as Jimi was, Bert Jansch is the same thing for acoustic guitar,’ was Neil Young’s view; ‘He tied up the acoustic guitar in the same way that Hendrix did the electric,’ was the conclusion of Jimmy Page.29 Many more, Johnny Marr and Bernard Butler among them, have since agreed.

  The group was by now dominating Bert’s performing life. One of the very few solo engagements he managed before the end of the year was a Saturday night at the Cousins with Anne Briggs; he also appeared at an all-star concert at Manchester’s Free Trade Hall in a duo with Renbourn, alongside Dorris Henderson, Al Stewart and the Incredible String Band (by now psychedelic paragons on the Elektra label). In November the Pentangle, misbilled as ‘Bert Jansch & the Pentangles’, undertook their first British tour, arranged by Nat Joseph and jazz impresario Pete Burman: ‘I only remember bad things about it,’ says Renbourn. ‘Pete Burman would take a long time in the dressing room getting decked out in a dinner jacket, with throat spray and all the rest of it, and then he’d run on stage and give this incredible introduction. And then we came on. It was ridiculous.’