Dazzling Stranger

by Colin Harper

  Solomon’s Seal, named after the oldest known rite of magic, was the Pentangle’s final album. With the advent of full-scale electric folk-rock, let alone their own troubles, individually and collectively, the group’s increasingly fragile music was on borrowed time and everyone knew it. ‘Pentangle beat the boredom barrier,’ had been the damnably faint praise lavished by Melody Maker on Reflection. That album had failed to chart, but the seeds of an artistic renaissance were definitely there, and the signing of a new three-album group contract, plus Jansch and Renbourn as solo artists, with Reprise in the early weeks of 1972 resurrected a sense of hope.

  Recording began promptly and, after a low-key 1971, the new year also saw a touring schedule to rival that of their glory days, with tours of mainland Europe, Scandinavia, Australasia, Britain and possibly also America. Bringing along pals like Ralph McTell, Wizz Jones and COB as support acts wherever possible was a conscious attempt to bring some camaraderie back into the picture, but by this stage it was all papering over cracks: ‘Various members had personal troubles at the time and there was a lot of drinking going on,’ says Jacqui. ‘It was hard to cope. It just wasn’t enjoyable any more.’

  In hindsight Solomon’s Seal is a record of people’s weariness, but also the product of a unit whose members were still among the best players, writers and musical interpreters of their day. Everyone wanted it to work, and said as much to interviewers at the time: ‘It’s probably my favourite of our albums,’ says Jacqui, ‘but we worked on it in the studio as much as anything. There wasn’t much rehearsing – there wasn’t time.’

  Musically less adventurous and sonically drier than Reflection, the new album was released in September. Of its content, the group had been playing Cyril Tawney’s ‘Sally Free And Easy’ (sung by Bert) in concert for years; ‘No Love Is Sorrow’ was a rare and striking song contribution from Danny; while Bert offered two compositions, ‘Jump Baby Jump’ and ‘People On The Highway’. The latter, sung in unison with Jacqui, was a beautiful melody and guitar figure softening a desperate strength-in-adversity lyric that reflected Bert’s current creative viewpoint: ‘It’s better to be moving, better to be going, than clinging to your past’. The rest of the album was traditional: ‘Willy O’Winsbury’, a song inadvertently ‘created’ by Andy Irvine cross-referring a set of lyrics to the wrong tune in a folksong manuscript, had previously appeared on Faro Annie, but the most powerful and delicate of the trad arrangements was ‘The Snows’, a chilling song of loss recorded previously by both Anne Briggs and Archie Fisher. ‘You get the feeling they’ll go on for decades like this,’ concluded one reviewer, ‘making pretty, well-played, unstartling albums, enjoying themselves in their own mild way and not causing any commotion.’23 He was wrong – on both counts.

  The British tour of October – November 1972 became the Pentangle’s valedictory parade. A number of live reviews from odd shows around Britain during the summer had been surprisingly positive, deferential even, with commentators now realising that here was a real rarity, a group of five individuals in their seventh year as a creative unit. But there were still those who marvelled at how strangely soporific the Pentangle concert experience could be. Even Bert, the group’s staunchest apologist at the time, will not on reflection deny it: ‘Oh, the Pentangle could be dull, absolutely boring,’ he says. ‘I wouldn’t go to one of their concerts! The tuning up was horrendous. People used to fall asleep on stage, quite regularly – me and John, because we had the guitars to lean on. If we didn’t have anything to do we’d be hunched over them with our arms folded and before you knew it you were asleep, getting a gentle nudge from Danny or somebody letting you know your part was coming up soon. It got too into its own self, that was the problem.’

  ‘We knew things were getting tired,’ says Jacqui. ‘We knew it was beginning to fall apart. We’d signed the deal at Warners’ offices and it was like a big champagne party. There was a lot of positive talk, but there were internal politics that we weren’t aware of at the time and not long after we signed the guy who signed us was moved sideways or something and I think then the interest waned. We actually did have thoughts about folding, to get rid of Jo, and then reforming as something else.’24 As it was, prior to the October – November tour they came to an arrangement with Jo that their relationship would conclude on New Year’s Eve. Holding things together till then was the problem.

  ‘It had really gone sour for them,’ says Wizz Jones. This was the Pentangle’s only British tour to include support, and though it was never planned as a farewell, they were going out in style. ‘The management chose to send me and Clive Palmer’s COB along on the same bill, to give us both a leg up,’ says Wizz. ‘But it really was an incredibly shambolic affair. Danny Thompson had this sport that he insisted on every night of persuading, bribing, the night porter to open the wine cellar – and he cleaned out every hotel wine cellar on that tour. I mean, God, the kind of stamina you needed to do that! But everyone was involved really, it was the classic “rock tour syndrome”. Jacqui was wonderful, she was just so used to working with these people. I don’t think any other woman would have put up with it. I remember on one occasion saying to someone at a hotel at about one in the morning, “Have you seen Bert?” and they said, “Well, the last time I saw Bert he’d just gone into the lift with a tray of drinks.” The last thing the guy saw was the doors closing, the lift starting and Bert toppling over with this tray of twenty or thirty drinks, crashing in a heap. I’d love to have been there at the other end when the doors opened. A wonderful vision, and it really sums up what that tour was like.’

  Solomon’s Seal had been strongly exposed, with two BBC radio sessions and TV concerts for Granada and BRT in Belgium – appearances that, though barely months apart, show a group with new life and a group with its life visibly extinguishing. The Belgian show, a half-hour live in a dismally bare studio, was broadcast in January 1973, though recorded before the British tour. It was notable for the Pentangle becoming a rhombus: Renbourn had been too drunk to make it to the end of the show. The British tour was of a lower key than before, but nonetheless well received. Bert had regained sufficient confidence or interest to take regular solo spots, and both ‘Reynardine’ and ‘The January Man’, a Dave Goulder song learned from Martin Carthy, were featured. The tour was scheduled to finish up in Barry, Glamorgan on 8 December, but Danny became ill with heart trouble and the final three dates were cancelled. The Pentangle, launched in a blaze of publicity at the Festival Hall back in 1968, would appear to have played their last note in public at a civic hall in Barnsley on a cold Wednesday night in November 1972.

  ‘I think it was the evening of New Year’s Day,’ says Jacqui. ‘I got a phone call from Bert. It was really late at night and he was pretty drunk. “I can’t take any more,” he said, “I really can’t take any more. The band has split.” I phoned John the next day and he said, “Bert can’t split the band. It’s not his to split, it’s a five-way decision.” So he came to see me the day after that and said, “What shall we do about it?” And then there were phone calls all round. And just somehow nothing happened.’

  9

  After the Goldrush

  ‘Pentangle Split’ was the front-page headline in the first Melody Maker of the new year. ‘It’s been on the cards for six weeks, but we haven’t got round to sorting out the details,’ said Jo Lustig, the only person quoted. MM writer Andrew Means commented that the only surprise was the five members managing to hang together so long. Rumours and denials of splits had been around for two years. The straw that broke the camel’s back, Means speculated, had been Danny Thompson’s illness. News of the Pentangle’s dissolution, he concluded, was ‘an anti-climax’.

  The following week the NME could judge the reported split as ‘the biggest non-story of 1973’. Lustig was denying that he had put the story about, while acknowledging that the group had been due to leave his management ‘amicably’ on 31 December – an arrangement that had been agreed before the autumn tour.
The group’s new manager Roger Myers, an accountant for the Rolling Stones with little experience at the front line, led the damage limitation exercise but conceded that Danny’s illness had put any group plans on hold: ‘You can say that the others will be pursuing their individual careers for the moment,’ he stated. Renbourn was writing material for what would prove to be his first and only album of original songs – part of the group/solo deal with Warners/Reprise: ‘We’re all pottering about doing bits of music here and there,’ he said, ‘getting it together until it works.’1 A group tour of America was being pencilled in for the autumn, while it was hoped that Danny might be well enough to allow the group to record a new album within a couple of months. Terry Cox was in Minorca, Bert Jansch was ‘in bed with the flu’. His new album Moonshine would be released at the end of the month.

  To Bert’s mind Moonshine was ‘an album that never surfaced – I don’t think anyone knows it exists’.2 He could say that only two years later. For this was an album out of time: promotionally unsupported by the record company, by then undergoing an internal shake-up, and musically an artefact of the now moribund Pentangle era. Produced by Danny Thompson, arranged by Tony Visconti and clothed in the rich visual foil of Heather Jansch’s sleeve art, it remains a delightful curio in Bert’s canon. With an atypical wordiness, unwieldy in places and not retained on later work, a renewed vigour jostled for attention amidst an aura of serenity carried over from Rosemary Lane.

  An array of guest musicians were featured throughout: a flute consort adding Elizabethan poise to the dark tale of ‘Yarrow’, a traditional song salvaged from the last days of the Pentangle; guitar and harp weaving a delicate web around ‘The January Man’; Shetland fiddler Aly Bain scatting through the tumbling wordage of ‘Night Time Blues’; Ralph McTell blowing harmonica on ‘Brought With The Rain’; jazz guitarist Gary Boyle blistering and burbling his way through ‘Oh My Father’, doomed to oblivion as a single. Most striking of all, perhaps, was the reappearance of Ewan MacColl’s ‘The First Time Ever’, sung as a canon with Visconti’s wife Mary Hopkin, and featuring Charlie Mingus’s drummer Dannie Richmond.3 First covered by Bert as an instrumental on Jack Orion it had since been an international hit single for Roberta Flack and was destined for the repertoire of Elvis Presley. Bert later met the author of the song and was damned with faint praise: ‘He said, “Oh, Bert Jansch. My son’s got a lot of your records. He’s a big fan of yours.” “Thanks a lot, Ewan, that’s really great,” I thought.’4 Curiously, Roy Harper remembers Peggy Seeger saying exactly the same thing to him.

  Critical reaction was cool. Let It Rock, a new monthly, viewed the album as ‘precisely the way not to bring folk into rock or rock into folk’. Andrew Means, for Melody Maker, was philosophical: ‘One has to make allowances for his style. But he does what he does well and with sincerity.’ In Sounds, Jerry Gilbert was less equivocal. For a start, he felt, nobody did ‘The January Man’ as well as Archie Fisher. ‘Gone are the beautiful romantic ballads of Rosemary Lane,’ he concluded, ‘and in its place we have the old harsh Bert: but whereas his voice once went hand in hand with the music it now sounds a little incongruous.’

  Moonshine was a brave experiment with outside musicians, intricate arrangements and a mixed bag of material but it still felt like a product of the sixties. If Bert was to remain relevant as a creative force he needed to make a giant leap forward. How that would ever have happened in the context of remaining a part of the Pentangle, a group viewed widely as having been long since stuck in a rut of wispy inconsequence, is difficult to imagine. Within weeks of Moonshine’s release, that problem was resolved: the group finally imploded.

  ‘Pentangle dies with a whimper’ was the Melody Maker headline of 31 March 1973. Karl Dallas interviewed four of the five members and this time the facts were right. Studio time for a projected group album had been booked for April, but Terry had decided to leave. Danny, unhappy with the circumstances of Terry’s departure, followed suit. The other three had lost the will to deal with it. Ralph McTell’s brother Bruce May was following the situation with interest:

  ‘Roger Myers just couldn’t believe it,’ he says. ‘The Pentangle had walked out on Jo but they still had a binding contract with Warners, under the terms of which they only had to deliver an album to pick up, I think, £5000 – in those days a fortune. All they had to do was spend another few days together and pick up £1000 each. But they just flew apart.’

  For Dallas, the dissolution of the Pentangle marked ‘five years which had begun in the excitement of exploring new musical territories and ended in something close to tedium’. Jacqui was talking about a solo album; John, doing odd gigs with her as a duo, was recording his own solo album for Reprise and thinking about moving abroad; Danny too was talking about a solo album, feeling musically rejuvenated and ‘looking forward to the next gig, whatever it may be’.5 He had also just recently returned from Paris where a holiday with Mr and Mrs Ralph McTell and Mr and Mrs Bert Jansch had turned into a recording session with one George Chatelain.6

  Like John and Jacqui, Bert had been using the enforced lay-off since January to play some low-key club gigs but ‘I certainly don’t want to do it for the rest of my life,’ he told Melody Maker. ‘I always need some kind of challenge and though it has taken a bit of nerve to go out on my own after playing with the group for nearly six years it hasn’t been an artistic challenge. Another problem is that I’ve lost touch with the club scene. There are all these thousands of guitarists and singers floating around and it’s a new world to me.’7

  ‘He’d always said that when his playing days came to an end we’d retire to the country,’ says Heather Jansch. ‘He wanted to be a market gardener, that was his dream. Mine was always to breed horses. When we did go to Wales I found myself in this magical land, totally at home. He didn’t want to go to Cornwall because that was too busy in the summer and it was still in the folk scene, which he wanted to get away from. He really had had enough – he just didn’t want to play any more. He didn’t want to go back to Scotland, he didn’t fancy Suffolk and the other place where there was a lot of land to be had for a reasonable price was Wales. He was in Paris recording at the time when I was looking for property. He wasn’t interested to go and look for himself, which was curious. “Just go and choose a place and we’ll go and live there,” he said. So I went to the Brecon Beacons and it felt like going home. I bought a place and we moved there without him ever having seen it. He was utterly disinterested as long as it was away from the music business.’

  In April 1973, Bert was interviewed for Sounds by Jerry Gilbert. Far from hiding in Wales Bert was, it transpired, on the eve of a solo concert tour: ‘At present, however, he has very little to talk about,’ noted Gilbert. ‘Pentangle has gone, the present holds a tour to which he feels largely indifferent and the future is in the hands of the Almighty. He has no plans for anything, a fact that he stressed more than once during the interview. Ask him what John Renbourn is up to these days and he’ll mutter, predictably, “You’d better ask John”; ask him why he’s playing the London Palladium he gives an evasive “You tell me.” It’s all a bit of a game interviewing Bert.’8

  The tour was a half-hearted attempt to push the Moonshine album, requested by Reprise and doubtless organised by the inexperienced Myers: ‘It’s all very vague,’ said Bert. ‘The record company don’t really know what’s going on.’ Gilbert’s interview had taken place in Soho’s Capricorn Club and during a discussion on the incongruous possibility of an imminent Jansch concert at the London Palladium, Duffy Power had wandered in. ‘Bring all your harps and have a blow,’ said Bert. ‘I haven’t a clue what’s going to happen.’ That, as Gilbert duly concluded, was the story of Bert’s life at that point in time.

  The Palladium concert never happened but on 23 April 1973, Bert began his first solo tour in years, at the ‘sparsely filled’ Birmingham Town Hall. Dennis Detheridge reviewed the show generously for MM, although it was clear that Bert was nervous as a perf
ormer and far from promoting his new album was relying very largely on old material. He was, of course, ‘playing to the converted and his admirers were grateful for the chance to hear pure Jansch for sixty minutes’. Bert had told Gilbert that he had gone back to his earlier albums and relearned what he thought the audiences would like to hear – material that included ‘Running From Home’, ‘Blackwater Side’ and ‘Angi’. He had recorded three of these old faves, plus the new single, ‘Oh My Father’, for a BBC radio session a few days before the tour.9 On the opening date he was joined for three numbers by Danny Thompson on bass, most notably for an improvised crack at Brownie McGhee’s ‘Key To The Highway’. Bert was not only relearning his repertoire but relearning his trade.

  Although there continued to be club dates here and there, Bert became increasingly absent from the music scene and for a while – months rather than the ‘two years’ it has become in his own memory – did not even touch a guitar. ‘I joined the Farmers’ Union, the whole bit,’ he says. ‘Very strange. I think I just wanted a break.’ In July he went to the Cambridge Folk Festival simply as a punter, something he would do throughout the seventies. That year’s event provided a rare chance to see his old hero Davy Graham in action. Bert’s only other noteworthy activities of 1973 were equally nostalgic in nature: he guested on Wizz Jones’s When I Leave Berlin and on Ralph McTell’s Easy. Both invitations were perhaps more for old times’ sake than for any great want of a Jansch guitar part. There was a danger that he would simply drift away into farming and obscurity and that would be the last the music world would hear of a once great talent.