by Colin Harper
The group had done two or three town hall-type concerts before but this was their first serious venture into the provinces, mostly to university venues. At the Queen’s University Festival in Belfast they represented the world of pop with, incredibly, Les Bridger, Jimi Hendrix and the Watersons. For the Watersons, after two years of Roy Guest’s management, it was the final straw: ‘We’d been on the road solidly for about a month,’ says Norma Waterson, ‘and we were asked to host an evening in some sort of cellar in Belfast, and the place was absolutely packed out. The format was we sang for about half an hour and then it was an open mic. We sat there until everybody had finished and walked back to our hotel, absolutely shattered, at nine o’clock in the morning. We all just looked at each other and said, “What on earth are we doing?” We decided that night to stop singing.’
The Watersons had first heard of Bert at Bill Leader’s flat in 1965: ‘We were round there recording something,’ says Norma, ‘and Bill said, “I’ve just recorded this young guitarist. Do you want a listen?” He played the tape and we all just thought it was brilliant, and that’s when we started booking him for our club in Hull. Bert played the club loads of times. After a while we handed it over to a committee, because we were touring so much. Bert said to me only recently, “From the day you left that club, I never got another booking!”’
In February 1968 Bert was featured as a guest artist on two of the Watersons’ farewell concerts: at Manchester Free Trade Hall and Newcastle City Hall.30 That same month, his own group acquired a manager of formidable reputation, had its first of many sessions broadcast on BBC Radio 1 and began recording its first single and album for real. The manager’s name was Jo Lustig, and from now on the ramshackle, happy-go-lucky progress of the Pentangle was going to be a streamlined machine of purpose and efficiency.
Jo Lustig was a New Yorker who had first come to Britain in 1960 as Nat ‘King’ Cole’s publicist, settling there and transforming Julie Felix, a vocalist of questionable quality, into a national television celebrity. Danny Thompson and John Renbourn had both worked with Felix and knew Lustig. At some point Bert invited him down to the Horseshoe: ‘I went to see the band and I liked them very much,’ said Jo. ‘My philosophy is simple: if you can apply commercial techniques to crap, it can happen. Why can’t you apply it to fine music? I have a strange way of managing: I like to get a group of musicians who know their way. I let them handle their own way artistically, I handle their business. I’m not out to make friends with my bands. Bert once said to me, “Jo, you never hang out.” I don’t like hanging out – that’s not my scene.’
Lustig’s manner was abrasive and his fee substantial but his instinct was sound, his energy fearsome and his contacts seemingly inexhaustible. One obituary in 1999 characterised him thus: ‘Mention almost any name of significance in the arts, music or post-war Anglo-American culture in general and his response would be the same: “He’s a friend of mine.” He had the stocky build of a sawn-off shotgun (and sometimes the temperament to match), his steel grey curls and Roman nose lending him a magnificently leonine appearance. His Brooklyn accent, gravelly laugh and habit of punctuating his conversations with a jabbing finger could sometimes lead people to mistake him for a rough diamond. But he was an immensely cultured man, a canny operator who delighted in being an American at large in the world of British culture.’31
At the time Jo was introduced to the Pentangle the only act he was managing was Roy Harper. In later years, Jo would manage a stream of successful acts but the Pentangle were the making of his reputation and he, in turn, the making of theirs. Almost overnight, they were transformed from a cult folk-club act to a bona fide concert act with an extraordinary appeal across the social spectrum and massive, sustained media coverage. ‘Most of the band had fairly rough things to say about Jo,’ says Bert. ‘But I quite liked him. He very, very rarely made mistakes.’ Where everyone agrees is that Jo Lustig was the best PR man there was. To build a campaign around his new charges he would need something to sell: exclusivity. The club demand for Bert, John and the band would have to be starved to create the possibility of a concert relaunch. By the end of March 1968, the Pentangle and Bert and John as solo performers were withdrawn from circulation. Although they would continue to record albums, Bert and John’s solo careers were effectively stopped and would remain so for the next five years. The group’s relaunch as a concert act was scheduled for 29 June 1968 at the Festival Hall. The first album and single would be out by then, and the concert would be recorded for the second.
The first casualty of the Lustig regime was to be the Horseshoe. The club had, in truth, already served its purpose. The supposedly resident group had built up its repertoire and confidence and were itching to move on, increasingly accepting outside bookings. Although it ran on till March 10 1968, the club’s apogee coincided on Christmas Eve 1967 with the ending of Bert’s relationship with Nicola. Wizz Jones, Alexis Korner and Sandy Denny were all guests. It was Jacqui’s birthday the next day and she and Sandy, the worse for wear, sang ‘Make Me A Pallet On Your Floor’ – and fell over. Nicola had come with two college friends, Maggie and Chris. ‘Everybody was buying Bert drinks,’ she says, ‘beers with whisky chasers. And on the bar was this enormous line of drinks. We all went back to my parents’ house where Bert and Chris finished off another bottle of whisky. That night was a disaster and on Christmas Day Bert was ill. Even he couldn’t take that many whiskies. I don’t think Chris got out of bed all day. The next day Bert caught a train and left and that was it. We didn’t fall out as such: he just left and it broke my heart.’
‘The departure from the Horseshoe in early ‘68 was rapid and final,’ recalls Kieran Bracken. ‘The announcement went along the lines of “due to overexposure this has been the last evening”. The next time I saw the band was at the Festival Hall relaunch, after which they departed on a seemingly endless tour. Watching and listening to the Pentangle through that year at the Horseshoe was very, very exciting and one was aware of being part of something the like of which had not been seen before. Many saw their first album as a “beginning”, but in reality it was the end of a long process. Folk, jazz and blues all rolled into one! And we had been around to see it come together.’
8
Rosemary Lane
‘Pentangle is at a standstill at the moment,’ said Bert, surveying his career at the end of 1970. The interview, conducted during the course of a marathon drinking session around the pubs of Soho with Sounds writer Jerry Gilbert, was the most comprehensive Bert had given to date. Aside from exploring the detail of his long ascendancy, Bert was open in acknowledging that the Pentangle were at last experiencing artistic differences: ‘I think the problem is that the group has been working for such a long time that it finds it hard to get together to produce something that’s of value to everyone in the group,’ he offered. ‘I don’t want Pentangle to split up but it must be a lot free-er in what it does; I’d like the original concept of the band to remain there. In doing the Horseshoe I think we all got the satisfaction we wanted and I think we’re missing that at the moment. We ran the club and we had the freedom of playing together or not at all. I mean, if we just wanted to get drunk and fall about then we could do so. After that came the serious thought that we could maybe take the whole thing a stage further.’
The ‘whole thing’ had in fact been taken almost as far as any pop, jazz, folk or rock group could ever expect to get. With the release of their long-fêted first album and single in May 1968 the Pentangle’s profile had mushroomed virtually overnight. ‘I did like that first album,’ says Pete Townshend. ‘There was something fresh and innovative about it, although the Pentangle never really engaged me as such. But I was amazed with their success, which as far as I could see was instant. They seemed to be playing the Royal Albert Hall almost immediately.’ Certainly, the Pentangle were doing something new and exciting, but equally in Jo Lustig they had a manager who was the best PR operator in the business.
In 1968
alone Lustig secured for his group at least eleven BBC Radio 1 sessions and at least eight television appearances. The potential appeal of an act that was pigeon-holeable nowhere but could squeeze in pretty much anywhere made them at once more saleable and simultaneously more exotic as a ‘product’. They could move seamlessly from college gigs and Edinburgh Fringe residencies to folk festivals, jazz festivals, the biggest and most unforgiving rock festivals of the day, stylised set-ups in country churches, cathedrals and casinos, and major auditoriums such as Carnegie Hall or the Paris Olympia. If coverage on the airwaves was impressive, in print it was relentless: this was a group, like the Beatles, whose members were all distinct individuals and all capable of providing good copy.
But by the summer of 1970 Bert’s life of being endlessly whisked around the world with a bunch of colourful characters had lost its novelty. The boredom of travelling, the arguments, the pressure and the intake of alcohol that had become daily routine were no longer being adequately compensated for by the music. The social contact, invariably in pubs, that had hallmarked the group’s beginnings was becoming rarer. For a start they were all living much further apart: Bert had moved to the little village of Ticehurst in Sussex, John was still relatively nearby in Surrey, Jacqui was in Reigate suburbia, Danny had a manor house in Suffolk and Terry was in the process of moving to Minorca.1 Pete Frame interviewed his old hero for his pioneering new rock magazine Zigzag in October 1969, during a tour in support of the group’s third and most commercially successful album, Basket Of Light. Bert was now, to all intents and purposes, the rhythm guitar player in a pop group. Frame put it to Bert that the Pentangle were unusual among their peers in not living together:
‘We live totally different lives,’ said Bert. ‘The group gets together when it has to, when it’s forced to. Like when we have to do a record we get together and create some numbers, but apart from that we do no rehearsals at all. We just get onstage and play.’ Frame also noted that Bert was not getting much opportunity to sing his own songs these days: ‘I’m given a section in the programme, as everyone is, to do whatever I want,’ he replied. ‘But yes, it’s so long ago since I did solo performances. I was just about the first folk singer to successfully do a solo concert in this country, and that was doing a two-hour show, just as we’re doing now [with the group]. But that too was a far cry from those folk club days, when I never had a programme but just went in and sung whatever was in my head. Nowadays there has to be a bit of organisation because there are so many of us involved.’2
For Bert, the desire to create and be a part of a genuinely cooperative, democratic unit of five creative individuals had to be balanced against the inevitable compromises. In theory it was the same for each member, but in practice Bert was always the least vocal in making his presence felt. The live half of the group’s second LP, Sweet Child (a double), was recorded at London’s Festival Hall on 29 June 1968 – the first of the concert and festival dates that summer that effectively relaunched them as a concert act. At this period the five members of the group were at their live peak, complementing and collaborating with each other in various combinations and giving space for purely individual contributions. The balance between the constituent parts, onstage at least, would never again be so perfect.
Among all the many concert reviews and surviving set lists from the summer of 1968 to the summer of 1971, there is not one reference to Bert performing a solo spot. His only solo outings in that period were two BBC radio sessions around the January 1969 release of his first truly Pentangle-era solo LP, Birthday Blues.3 Bert dismissed claims at the time that he was short of material but it was a ragged affair, a handful of well-honed songs and instrumental ideas fleshed out with bluesy jams and wordy vamps on matters spiritual and metaphysical. ‘Some numbers have taken me years to write, others have taken me two minutes,’ said Bert, hardly countering the criticism. ‘But I’m not out to become the greatest solo artist in the world.’4
Recording the album around the time of his twenty-fifth birthday in November 1968, Bert had been joined on half the Birthday Blues tracks by fellow Pentanglers Danny Thompson and Terry Cox and by Ray Warleigh on saxophone and flute plus Duffy Power, an inspired choice, on harmonica. The highlight of the ensemble tracks was ‘Poison’, a powerful if oblique reflection on pollution, but these were little more than spikier extensions of the Pentangle sound. Bert’s future direction as a solo recording artist was to be glimpsed more clearly in the baroque fascinations of ‘The Bright New Year’, a song for his mother, and the instrumentals ‘Birthday Blues’ and ‘Miss Heather Rosemary Sewell’. The latter indicated the current woman in Bert’s life. In this case they had married.
Heather Sewell was an art student from London, strikingly different in background and personality from her new husband. Previously the girlfriend of Roy Harper, Heather had actually met Bert through Roy, probably early in 1968: ‘I was familiar with his music on record,’ says Heather, ‘although I didn’t know of the existence of Pentangle at that time. The first time I heard him perform was when I went with him and Roy down to a gig in Bristol. They were playing on the same bill. It was a classic case of love at first sight.’ Heather’s inevitable ‘defection’ to Bert resulted in what she recalls uncomfortably as ‘a duel of songs’ and an understandable degree of angst from Roy.
‘She was a lovely girl, very good-looking,’ says Roy. ‘Bert was more well known than me at the time and I think that Heather was rather more conscious of that than she should have been, although Bert did have this boyish charm. Every woman who ever met him wanted to take care of him and so it was with Heather. The presentation in Bert’s stage performances was always awful, same as it is now, but it did somehow pull women in. But he never took advantage of that because it wasn’t an act – he was like that off the stage too. I think Bert was careful about the way he treated the whole subject with me. He took good care of me that way, in his own silent way. He didn’t ever do anything maliciously. I would have loved Heather to the end of the world, but she chose against me. What can I say? I was a bit mad at the time. Then again, in her own way she’s a screwball too – and her match in life was not Bert Jansch.’
When Heather met Bert it was on the eve of the Pentangle’s most rigorous two years of touring, and they were consequently prompt in marrying, at Lewes, in Sussex, on 19 October 1968. The touring lifestyle caused problems for some of the other marriages within the band and it must surely have contributed in some way to the eventual failure of Bert and Heather’s. ‘I’ve always been happy in my own company anyway,’ says Heather, ‘but I think the first time that it was difficult was when they first went to America [January – March 1969]. I was still adjusting to life away from London. But life was very good for me because there was plenty of money. I had a lovely house, a few acres of land, I could paint. But it left me time to myself, without the compromises that are inevitable when you live with someone. What I did object to was things like him not letting me go to the Isle of Wight Festival that year, because I wanted to see Bob Dylan. He was worried I might get molested in the crowd. He was a very jealous man. I’m sure he thought he was being protective. What he said about that particular incident was that it was a big gig – the Pentangle were playing too – there was a lot going on and he didn’t need the tension and anxiety of wondering if I was all right. I felt perfectly able to take care of myself. After all, I’d been a student in London, and I hadn’t exactly led a sheltered life. But he was a very conservative man in many respects.’
Aside from painting, Heather had decided to occupy herself in other ways during one of those early tours: ‘I renovated the house,’ she says. ‘That was how I expressed my creativity at the time! I just knocked the guts out of this beautiful seventeenth-century cottage that we’d bought. All the original features had been obscured, so I did the classic thing, wiping it all off and exposing the beams. Bert was horrified actually. He was away in America when I started that project, and when he came home there was only the bed
room that wasn’t affected. The roof was off, the floors were up, the builders were in … He went absolutely spare. I hadn’t thought that he’d be tired when he came home and wouldn’t want to live on a building site! But I certainly feel about him that he was a very great teacher to me, just in life. He’s incredibly perceptive and he’s also very gentle and caring, and he doesn’t mince words – and I needed a bit of a shaking up, I think. I was a bit of a spoilt brat. I couldn’t allow myself to indulge in generalities, and platitudes were not acceptable. And I hadn’t realised that until I met Bert.’
‘If you passed Bert Jansch in the street it is doubtful whether you would give him a second look,’ observed David Hughes, an interviewer for Disc who met with Bert in April 1970, typically, at the Capricorn Bar in Soho. ‘Jansch is a humble soul who seems unaware that musicians and audience alike hold his playing in great respect. He is a self-contained unit. He knows what kind of person he is – and wants to stay that way. His life is simple. If he had pursued his solo career he could, he says reluctantly, have become a latter-day Donovan. But he didn’t want that. “I’d rather prop up a bar somewhere with nobody knowing who the hell I was. I like my beer and I don’t like people staring and pointing their finger at me when I just want to enjoy myself and be an ordinary human being. I’m just an ordinary, average guy like you. I watch Tomorrow’s World and Doctor Who.” He has an obvious affection for humanity. He cares about people; he cares about peace but, superficially anyway, he doesn’t seem to care about himself. “I’m not very stable – if I wasn’t married it wouldn’t really worry me where I slept. I thought I should buy the house as some security for my wife. I suppose I am a country person but I do like the city. I need the country to off-set the pressures of work. But I don’t want to tell you about the house; I want to keep it a secret.”’5
