by Colin Harper
Heather felt very strongly that she did not want her private life aired in public, and given that a child was involved any official split would have made court proceedings inevitable: ‘I didn’t need any of that,’ she says. ‘All our financial arrangements were resolved happily between us.’ Bert, effectively, left her everything. Heather continued to breed horses and to paint, and she and Bert would not see each other for nearly ten years. Sometime in the early eighties Bert invited Heather to a gig in Somerset: ‘I went along full of trepidation,’ she says, ‘not knowing how I would feel emotionally, and torn between a fear that if he was brilliant I would fall in love all over again, and if the drink had got the better of him and he was awful that would also be incredibly painful. But it was absolutely wonderful and in his true tradition he played a song that he knew only I would recognise for what it was and what it meant and when it was written, and that’s typical of the man. It was fantastic that he could still be so good and that I could still feel so good for him. We resumed contact after that.’ Heather by then was living in a small village in Devon, fearsomely self-sufficient as a person and herself now acclaimed as an artist in her own field. Although it was by then no more than a formality, Bert and Heather were divorced in 1988.
‘There’s definitely one small failing that Bert has,’ says Bruce May. ‘He’s the most indelibly heterosexual bloke I’ve ever known, but he sometimes misses when the woman is in charge. Heather was a very intelligent girl and he’s come to acknowledge that. So was Gail Colson. Women like Gail Colson, who could have eaten him for dinner, he regarded as “chicks”. She went on to manage Peter Gabriel, had a hugely successful management career. But at that time she was second in command to Tony Stratton Smith.’
‘I think Tony had a problem promoting me,’ says Bert. ‘Personally, I liked him. He was a real character. Lunch was always four hours and you had everything, champagne, whatever. I liked him because he’d sign out-of-the-way people like John Betjeman and I suppose I was just part of that out-of-the-way-ness. I don’t think the rest of the company knew what was going on. They were all in Genesis mode, particularly Gail Colson. I was a mystery to her.’
‘Bert would come into the office,’ remembers Pete Frame, ‘and because Strat had put it around that Bert was this great genius everyone would be very deferential to him. But Gail Colson would say, “Well, I’ve never heard of him. He doesn’t mean anything to me.” She was very down to earth with him, sent him back into the studio to re-record things, stuff like that. But she liked him.’
Strat’s relationship with Gail was a case of ‘I sign them, you sell them’. Making Bert a saleable commodity was an unreasonable challenge for anyone at the time: ‘We never really got a vibe going together,’ she admits. ‘But it wasn’t the case that I was too busy with Genesis: we gave every artist equal attention. Bert just wasn’t commercial. Then again, Genesis weren’t exactly commercial and Van Der Graaf Generator certainly weren’t commercial! But Bert really divided the company: there were some who raved about him and others who just didn’t see it at all. I remember having lunch with him a couple of times and found it really heavy going. I was never Tony’s secretary, but the way Bert got on with me he probably thought I was!’
For the first six months of 1975, Bruce May’s attention was understandably focused on Ralph McTell. Ralph had reached No. 2 in the UK singles chart in February with ‘Streets Of London’ and Bruce was frantically trying to build on the breakthrough. As a result of this, Bert spent the first third of the year doing not a great deal beyond drifting between places to stay.23 One of those he stayed with for a while was singer-songwriter Steve Ashley. Back in 1973, Steve’s band Ragged Robin were enjoying a six-week residency at Roy Guest’s new venue in Chalk Farm, his third and final club to go by the name of the Howff. As a folk-club organiser in Maidstone during his student days in 1967, Steve had booked Bert and had remained in awe. It was a thrill then to see from the stage of the Howff the great Bert Jansch and Sandy Denny sharing a table and enjoying his performance.
‘They came up after and said hello and were very encouraging to us,’ says Steve. ‘Early in 1975 I met Bert again by chance, at the Half Moon in Putney. It was about two weeks before he went to America to record Santa Barbara Honeymoon. I always found him a very friendly, positive sort of character. After the pub we went back to my basement flat in Battersea and Bert said he didn’t really have anywhere to stay so I said, “Well, you can stay here,” and he did. Next day he went out and bought a big broom and swept out the hall! He never said anything about it, I just came back and it was done.
‘I went to one gig he had during that time, somewhere in South London. Gordon Giltrap was doing support. We went on beforehand to one of the London pubs with Bruce May. I was quite anxious because the time was getting on, and we were pottering about having a game of darts. That made me feel uneasy. I was the sort of guy who’d arrive at a gig two hours early, because I couldn’t stand the tension of not being there! Bert’s got a nice laid-back attitude to what he does but the point was we were drinking a lot, the pub was very attractive, the darts were going on … Then he showed me this little game he used to do involving lifting a matchbox up on a packet of cigarettes. I think it was a guitarist’s finger exercise – or that’s how I rationalised it! Needless to say, we arrived at the gig quite late.
‘At the time he was working on a couple of songs, “Build Another Band” and “Lost And Gone”. Lovely songs. I had a feeling it was one of those times your life’s changing. We sat up late talking one night and the next day he was off to LA. I’d taken his banjo, to be repaired for him, to a guitar maker down in Kent. It’s probably still ready for collection. Actually, he left some of his washing behind too and I would occasionally have a few drinks thereafter on the fact that I was wearing Bert Jansch’s underpants!’
In April 1975 Bert went back to California for two months to cut his second album for Charisma. It was to be supervised by a man who now called himself Danny Royce Lane and who had only recently been kicked out of Ralph McTell’s road band mid-tour. Somehow, Bruce May had thought this was the right man to put some commercial zing into Bert’s music: ‘Bert needed a follow-up to LA Turnaround,’ says Pete Frame, by then bemused to find himself employed as Charisma’s A&R man, ‘and no one could think of a producer. I wrote to Neil Young, he didn’t reply; I wrote to Eric Jacobson, who’d produced the Loving Spoonful and Norman Greenbaum, but he didn’t want to do it; I approached Jim Rooney, who later worked with Nanci Griffith, but he didn’t want to do it. So almost by default, Bruce got this drummer who’d run off with Nesmith’s wife. I couldn’t see it.’ On reflection, neither can Bert: ‘We had this mad drummer as a producer and he was living with Mike Nesmith’s ex-wife and kid. He was a nutter. All of them were Christian Scientists and there was a bad case of shingles going through them and no one could do anything to alleviate it. This was all going on at the same time as the album. It was chaos.’
At the time, however, Bert was quite happy to go along with the idea of another record produced by an American, with largely anonymous session players, sugary backing vocalists, whizzing synthesiser, Dixieland jazz ensemble and Jamaican steel drums adding to and occasionally pulverising his delicate songs. ‘I’ve been through a period where I’m not fully convinced about what I’ve been doing,’ he admitted, choosing his words carefully eighteen months later.24 But the seemingly maverick attitude at work here in Bert’s thinking was fuelled more profoundly by his continuing rebound from the Pentangle. ‘Towards the end of Pentangle,’ he explained to Sounds’ Joe Robinson, on his return to Britain, ‘it got to the point where you were really terrified of playing. The standards were so high and some of the music was so difficult to perform that you were in a real nervous state of shock by the time you actually got onstage. Now I just get on and enjoy myself. I just don’t care.’25
Bert took the opportunity of being in California to play some low-key gigs, get romantically involved with a strident TV
producer called Tisha Fine, to whom the eventual album, Santa Barbara Honeymoon, was dedicated, and generally hang out. Cocaine was still a near-mythical substance in Britain but in California’s music scene of the mid-seventies it was de rigueur. ‘One of my last duties at Charisma,’ says Frame, elbowed out in July 1975, ‘was to peruse and pass for payment the expenses sheet for the album. It reminded me of the food and drink bill that Prince Hal found in the sleeping Falstaff’s pocket.’ Lane and his cronies had managed to get through more cocaine than food, drink, tobacco, entertainment and sundries put together.
Never a subscriber to organised religion himself, Bert was baffled by the catch-all nature of Christian Science: ‘The basic philosophy is that God will cure everything,’ he mused a few months later. ‘But I don’t understand why they can shove twenty ton of coke down their nostrils at the same time. I’ve had endless discussions with Nesmith about it but he could always get round it.’26
Bert was also surprised, during the California trip, to meet one of his oldest friends, recently retired from the Incredible String Band and another subscriber to esoteric religion: Robin Williamson. ‘He showed up at this gig with an entourage,’ Bert recounted to MM writer Michael Watts, ‘and he’s very quiet and mystic with this big fixed smile. All these religions seem to have this thing that you must smile to everyone the first thing you do. So he’s got this permanent smile on his face, and eyes which don’t actually see anything, and he’s trying to speak and he was smiling and floating at the same time. I said, “Why don’t you come round to the studio and see what we’re doing?” So he came round with his fiddle, his mandolin, his guitar. He got up with his fiddle and tried to do one track, and he played for three hours, but it didn’t come together. It cost me about four hundred quid.’27
Remarkably, given the decadence of Lane’s regime, Santa Barbara Honeymoon came in under budget, at $22,000: cheaper than LA Turnaround and cheaper than some of the Pentangle albums. It would be released in October. In the meantime, Bruce May had formulated some plans to shift Bert’s profile up a gear: on 30 June he was to perform a financially-motivated ‘reunion’ concert with John Renbourn at the Festival Hall, followed immediately (and starting later that night) with a week’s residency at Ronnie Scott’s jazz club as a solo performer and festival appearances at Cambridge and Montreux a few weeks later. Bert and John’s relationship had distinctly cooled of late. They had only seen each other periodically and always in the context of trying to sort out the Pentangle’s business affairs. The ex-members would remain in debt to Reprise for years.
Publicity-wise, both the reunion and the twice-nightly Ronnie Scott’s performances were successful. All three British weekly music papers gave coverage and Charisma filmed two of the Ronnie Scott’s nights for a promo aimed at the BBC’s Old Grey Whistle Test, although nothing was ever screened.28 Performance-wise, however, all was not well. While the brief Bert and John finale to the Festival Hall concert, climaxing in a specially written duet setting of Renbourn’s ‘Lady Nothing’, was judged successful, Renbourn’s solo set had been a triumph and Bert’s a disaster.
‘The contrast with John, at the top of his game, was stark,’ remembers one fan, Mike Fox. ‘It was a strange gig and I remember the feel of it more than the actual details. It was very clear how far their styles had digressed and there was a sense of partially reconciled antipathy between them. John later confided that he had felt rather snubbed by Bert, that Bert was “doing him a favour” by playing with him. Bert’s performance at the Cambridge Folk Festival felt the same – it seemed as if he didn’t want to be there.’
While Bert’s writing was exploring new avenues at this time, his playing was at its weakest. Some of the new songs abandoned his trademark fingerstyle for simple strumming: perversely, not a playing style Bert was much good at. Again, it was an extreme reaction to his past: ‘My guitar might be unusual but in no way am I an out-and-out guitarist,’ he told Sounds just prior to the Renbourn reunion. ‘I have always considered myself primarily a songwriter. It was just my association with people like John Renbourn that put me in that virtuoso bag. He’s much more a guitarist than I am.’29
When Santa Barbara Honeymoon was released in October 1975 it elicited almost palpable gasps of astonishment from the commentators. Judgements ranged from stunned admiration at how Bert was forging ahead to the more exasperated tones of those who felt that, for all its daring, this was simply not Bert Jansch. Angie Errigo, for NME, perhaps expressed most clearly what Bert’s loyal fans must surely have thought: ‘Had it been by someone new I would have dismissed it out of hand as a bore. Because it is Bert Jansch I’ve played it continuously, trying to find some of the spark that has always made Jansch so special. I cannot believe he was on this album.’
‘Some of the songs are among the best I’ve written. I still stand by them,’ says Bert now. Certainly ‘Lost And Gone’, on oil exploration and the Shetland Isles’ ecology, remains a work of rare power, Bert’s sombre artistry alone creating the withering emotional force to compel beyond the rants of conventional protest. By way of contrast, an unlikely but sincere cover of ‘You Are My Sunshine’ and his own ‘Baby Blue’, lyrically slight, had a freshness and simplicity about them with which Bert was trying to imbue all his songs of the period. Unfortunately, Lane’s production overwhelmed anything else that may otherwise have impressed in this way. ‘Dance Lady Dance’, grafting Dixieland flourishes on to Bert’s best efforts at something uptempo, was released as a single and went nowhere. Bert, meanwhile, had gone to live in Putney.
‘He was never without a girlfriend,’ remembers Bruce May. ‘In the period we were working together Bert must have had twelve or fourteen serious, more-than-two-month relationships.30 He had this strange way of just wobbling from one lady to another. He would always move in with them and it would always fly apart – and you never knew why! Sometimes he’d have a black eye; I’m quite sure they never did. But it would be anybody. There was Tisha Fine in LA, there was Ralph’s sister-in-law Astrid, there was a production assistant from the Old Grey Whistle Test, then he played a show in Belgium and announced he wasn’t coming back, that he’d taken up living with a girl who ran three boutiques – and he must have stayed there for at least three months. He lived with a Danish girl for a while as well. Another was Polly Bolton: a tough girl. So the idea that there was a career or a strategy – how could there be? We were just young men, it was all new to me – bank borrowings, people getting nicked for a having a bit of dope on them, turning up at gigs to find no sound system … I mean, Jesus, we were just chasing our tails.’
During the latter half of 1975, Bert locked into a most agreeable way of life based in and around the pubs of Putney, socialising with the ‘Putney mafia’, a motley crew of folkish musicians who orbited the Half Moon pub, moved in and out of each other’s bands and who all seemed to be managed by Bruce May. Bruce’s offices were nearby and so too, in a large house by the common, was Bert’s new residence. The house itself had featured prominently in a TV ad for Unigate Milk, courtesy of Bert’s landlady Caroline whose partner was in advertising, while TV current affairs personality David Dimbleby lived next door and novelist Jilly Cooper up the road. Caroline would host cocktail parties where Bert would be introduced as ‘the artist who lives upstairs’, while Caroline’s bloke grumbled about the hours Bert was keeping. After five months, Bert was asked to find alternative accommodation but not before a Danish TV crew had comprehensively documented the time and place in the documentary A Man And His Songs.
A leisurely but compelling English-language film, broadcast only in Denmark, it demonstrates unwittingly both the brilliance and the under-achieving tendencies of its subject: stunning as a solo performer, frustrating as an apparently unambitious man content to plough time and effort into something uncomfortably close to a pub rock band. We see Bert performing a solo concert in Edinburgh, playing darts in the Bricklayer’s Arms with Ralph McTell, pottering about in the garden of Caroline’s house, and discu
ssing the Pentangle, the Campaign for Real Ale and his lifestyle in general: ‘I sit here and play the guitar during the day usually or go out and meet a few friends,’ said Bert. ‘Putney’s like a little village in the middle of London. If I cross the bridge to the other side it’s very rare – it’s about once a month, unless I’m actually working.’31
More than ever, with only odd dates in Europe to concern him, Bert’s life was essentially a social drinking scene: ‘It was extraordinary,’ says Bruce. ‘Bert would show up at the Half Moon and toddle off home, leaning sideways to avoid falling off Putney Bridge. I remember once on tour when he was utterly out of his head, walking through this really lovely reception that had been laid on for us – the glass was perpendicular, he was diagonal, but he didn’t spill anything, didn’t bump into anyone. Other guys, they’re crashing into people, throwing up, being obnoxious … Bert was never like that. People say “shambolic”, and I know the chaotic randomness that he seems to evoke, but to me he’s not a shambles. He’s a very sinuous, careful, controlled kind of man. And he never, ever complained about anything.’
Bert’s soft-spoken, unassuming and easily likeable personality shines through on the documentary, onstage and off. The most affecting performance is ‘Blackwater Side’ filmed in concert at Edinburgh University. Entertainingly fluffing the intro and later struggling to recall the lyrics, somehow Bert’s essence, fallibility and genius are captured in that one piece of single-camera footage. In contrast, three songs from the new band in rehearsal are depressingly mediocre.
‘I think he needed a group,’ says Bruce, ‘I think he wanted to recreate the success he’d had with Pentangle. I thought at the time, “Yeah, fine, if that’s what you want to do – but who’s gonna pay for it?” They must have played “Curragh Of Kildare” for weeks on end!’ The core of the group were Rod Clements on bass, Pick Withers on drums and Mike Piggott on violin. Others would come and go. There would be periodic recording sessions and very few gigs but the rehearsals went on forever: ‘I was trying to put a band together and everybody in the whole world seemed to be in it,’ Bert recalls, ‘all sorts of characters that clashed.’ He tried to justify the situation at the time by characterising the personnel flexibility as a conscious alternative to the solidity of the Pentangle era. In truth, 1975 – 76 was a period of aimless floundering. In May 1976, a party of journalists were invited to Croydon’s Fairfield Halls to witness the Bert Jansch group, only to find that something had gone pear-shaped and Bert was doing the show solo – a perfunctory set lasting barely an hour – all of which ‘caused considerable shrugging of Charisma shoulders’.32
