Dazzling Stranger

by Colin Harper

  One of the most penetrating critiques of Bert’s character and status, which still holds currency today, dates from this period. Melody Maker writer Michael Watts identified the unique artist behind the shambling domestic circumstances and momentary mediocrity of his music: ‘He is among the world’s better players of acoustic guitar, and master of a style that perhaps will not survive him. Surprisingly, for one of his contrary reputation, he has a seemingly inexhaustible patience. He is also careful and articulate of speech which, when he’s sure of the company he’s in, he punctuates with short, sharp laughter. Yet he admits that he’s wary of people and that it takes him a long time to accept someone. He barely ever listens to albums, he doesn’t go around the clubs and very rarely will he attend a concert, partly because it makes him too nervous he says. He professes himself indifferent to great fame. “It’s not necessarily what you’re looking for in life, to convince the whole world that you’re a genius. Maybe all you’re trying to do is earn a living. If I go in a pub I don’t want everyone to know I’m Bert Jansch. I want to have a quiet game of darts.” He has an integrity that seems almost flinty and old-fashioned in these musical times and towards the end of last year his life had devolved into a pleasurable routine of Putney alehouses.’33

  One interruption of the cosy routine was an Australian tour as a soloist, double headlining with John Martyn and memorable for all the wrong reasons: ‘I was waiting for them in Perth,’ says Bruce May. ‘There was some kind of hurricane and they ended up in Melbourne, four or five hours away. I got a call at 9 a.m. and it was John: “What do you want, the bad news or the good news?” he said. There was no good news. “I’ve got a busted lip, Bert’s got a dislocated finger and the road manager’s in prison.” They’d had a fight on the plane. Bert had hit John Martyn. I said to Bert the next day, “Whatever possessed you?” He said, “Well, I knew before the tour was over John was going to hit me so I thought I’d get mine in first.” He’s a man not without courage. Chris, the tour manager, had bought a bottle of Scotch in an effort to calm things down but it just got worse. Chris took John’s bag off the plane and John for some reason had stuffed a life-jacket into his bag. So they were stopped as they left and Chris was thrown into prison. By the time they made it back, having postponed the gig by a day, only John could play. Later in the tour they were at the Sydney Opera House and it was packed, principally John’s audience. John was reaching the end of his set, going down a storm, when Bert decided to sweep the stage behind him. He’d found the janitor’s broom. He’d already had a fight with John – what was he thinking? I bundled him off the stage, got him by the throat – and he was giving me every kind of grief – but I don’t think anybody in the audience realised it was Bert, and I don’t think John ever knew. If it had been allowed to continue, if John had seen him … I was glad to get home in one piece after that tour. I eventually escaped from John Martyn. Bert and I just drifted apart.’

  Towards the end of 1976, with more than enough tracks for an album in the can and a Scandinavian tour booked as the first real outing for Bert’s infinite rehearsal band, fiddle player Mike Piggott revealed his dislike of travel. A replacement was required. Martin Jenkins had been in a band called Dando Shaft, notable for having worn a Pentangle influence on its sleeve, and subsequently in Hedgehog Pie. He knew Bert casually from the occasional shared bill and specifically through a shared roadie, Dave Cooper, and at the end of 1976 had time on his hands.

  ‘Dave phoned me up and said, “Would you be interested in having a rehearsal with Bert for a possible tour of Scandinavia?” Of course I was interested. The rehearsal was at Rod Clements’ house in North London and I came away from it elated. I could fit in fine and it was a tasty little band: guitar, bass, drums and the instruments I play – flute, fiddle, mandocello. We did the Scandinavian tour, three or four weeks, and it was a knock-out trip, really fine concerts and club dates, all in thick snow with a tour bus and seventeen-hour drives between some of the gigs.’

  Martin’s arrival had the added impact of revitalising the stage material. ‘Everywhere on that tour people wanted him to play “Angi”,’ says Martin, ‘but he didn’t want to play it. He’d been playing it for years. We did work up another old song, “Running From Home”, which I’d sung myself years before in the folk clubs round Coventry. We worked it up as a canon, with me singing first and Bert following a couple of bars after, because he couldn’t remember the words.’34

  With his dextrous style, love of time signature trickery and a distinctive, burbling mandocello sound based on phaser pedals Martin quickly made his mark on the presentation of Bert’s music: ‘It used to astonish me how many new songs he would come up with,’ he says. ‘In terms of the arrangement, with Bert’s guitar playing it’s almost complete in the first place so we didn’t really arrange, we just learned the songs. For my part I played to his guitar, catching every little tag that he puts in and trying to remember it all.’

  After the Scandinavian tour Rod Clements accepted the offer, too good to turn down, of reunion concerts with his old band Lindisfarne. Then Pick dropped a bombshell. He had been asked to join ‘this funny little punk band called Dire Straits’: ‘We all laughed,’ says Martin, ‘and then six months later he was recording in the Bahamas, with platinum albums all round the cosmos. So Bert said, “Shall we just carry on as a duo?”’ Bert’s period of working with Martin spanned seven years, 1976 – 82. For much of that time they worked as a duo, towards the end of the partnership drafting in other musicians to create a three- or four-piece band known as the Bert Jansch Conundrum.

  A Rare Conundrum, having lain on Charisma’s shelf for the better part of a year and having inspired the group name in the interim, finally appeared in May 1977 at the height of punk.35 For all the rehearsing that had gone on with the Rod Clements grouping, Bert had only played a handful of British dates in 1976 – a flurry of solo shows in April, a few band shows in July and a trio of dates at London’s Marquee Club in December. Rod, Pick, Martin and even Danny Thompson made their contributions to the shows. ‘They were wonderful gigs and had the feel of a comeback,’ remembers Mike Fox. The first of the Marquee dates provided an opportunity for Hugh Fielder at Sounds to interview his hero – an opportunity offered by a publicist working with Bruce May at the time. The fact that Bert, an artist with a now legendary if over-played antipathy to the press, actually had a publicist at all was an irony not lost on the writer. Bert was clearly happy with the forthcoming album. He was currently more prolific than he had been for a long time, he felt – certainly evidenced by the number of known outtakes from various sessions the previous year – and expressed a liking for the recently split 10CC, a liking for Ralph McTell’s song-writing and a disliking for the production on Ralph McTell’s records. He was also concerned about the growing abundance of equipment in live and studio situations: ‘The more it becomes technology the less it becomes music. There has to be progress but there also has to be a limit. I mean, am I a folk musician or not? There has to be a point where I’m not any more.’

  Martin Jenkins would often be surprised, during their time together, at how little Bert seemed to know or want to know about the recording process: he was only concerned with creating the songs. During the early nineties Bert would throw himself at technology, investing in digital multi-track recording gear, computer software, MIDI equipment and suchlike. But until that time, technology was simply a necessary evil and somebody else could deal with it: he was still pursuing the path of an artist. ‘I’m still progressing,’ he told Fielder. ‘There’s a lot more to be played and said and heard yet, and there are a lot of new horizons for me.’

  A Rare Conundrum was a step removed from the West Coast stodge of Santa Barbara Honeymoon, but it was hardly a great leap forward. Featuring some very beautiful if painfully delicate songs that referred to Bert’s childhood and early days as a musician, the aura was relaxed to the point of being lightweight and inconsequential. Yet reviews were generous. There was a general se
nse of relief that Bert was at least making records that sounded ‘English’ again. Ironically, the one item universally singled out for praise was Bert’s handling of the Irish song ‘The Curragh Of Kildare’, ‘discovered’ by Christy Moore some years earlier and learned by Bert from the singing of Luke Kelly. Other than that, as Hugh Fielder noted in Sounds, ‘the themes cover familiar Jansch territory – love songs, reminiscences and tales of homelessness. At times you feel that some of the ground has been covered once too often.’

  After the album’s release the opportunity arose for Bert and Martin to tour as a trio with Danny Thompson. Danny’s period of working with John Martyn had come to an end with the blistering Live At Leeds (1975). Martyn’s career had reached a momentary impasse and Danny was at a loose end. Bert had written ‘Build Another Band’, featured on Santa Barbara Honeymoon, as an oblique encouragement to Danny. Why not put his money where his mouth was? The new trio toured England and Scotland and had a fine old time, played fantastically well and drank on a monumental scale.

  ‘It can be quite hard,’ says Martin, ‘so much travelling, so much music. Drinking becomes just a way of getting through the day. You’re in the hands of new people every day, and they all want you to boogie with them. People wanted a lot from Bert but it was hard for him to deal with it. Some people are basically outgoing, like Danny Thompson: when Danny stopped drinking it didn’t make any difference – he’s just as outrageous with or without. For Bert, the drinking helped him deal with everything. It was also quite important just because it was fun. Most of the time when Bert had a few drops with me he could open up enough to just have fun, it seemed to take away some of the troubles which plagued him which I never knew. He was quite private, wouldn’t say a lot about his life, never complained, but you knew there were always things that were troubling him. There’s so much burning within him. When it comes out, it comes out in his songs.’

  By the end of the seventies what remained of the folk scene in Britain was in hock, on the one hand, to guitar-toting comedians like Jasper Carrott and Fred Wedlock, and on the other to hard-line, ear-fingering traditionalists. The folk clubs of Britain had by and large become ale-swilling, chorus-singing, beard-wearing, beer-bellied by-ways of awfulness and irrelevance. With Bert having failed to maintain a solo career as a concert hall artist it was back to the folk clubs if he wanted regular work in Britain. No longer the dazzling stranger of the sixties, or a cultural commentator with any mass constituency like Dylan, Bert was a faded icon who was less than prominent on the current British scene and who could hardly be said to be an ‘entertainer’: ‘People had come to expect performers, particularly folk performers, to entertain them with more than music,’ says Martin, ‘but that was never a priority with Bert. He’s not one for making jokes and gags. Bert’s priority was to make music.’

  For what would prove to be the final review of a Bert Jansch concert in the British weekly music press, Karl Dallas, nearing the end of his own term as the man from the Melody Maker, went along to see Jansch, Jenkins and Thompson at the Queen Elizabeth Hall in September 1977. ‘It was a bit like a throwback to the days when we used to sit in the Horseshoe,’ he wrote, ‘amazed and bemused at the magic being made by the five disparate individuals who fused and became Pentangle, and saw history being made. Except that there was no sense at all of déjà-vu: this was quite obviously 1977, and the music being made was as different from the music of Pentangle as their music was from everything that had gone before.’

  Touring Scandinavia as a duo shortly after that performance, Bert and Martin were recorded for Swedish television performing a work in progress that would evolve into one of the greatest works of Bert’s career: ‘Avocet’, then still known by the name of its melodic inspiration, the traditional song ‘The Cuckoo’. Bert had been developing the piece onstage from at least the time of the Marquee gigs in December 1976 and musing on it to journalists ever since, often coinciding with an expressed admiration for the classical guitarist Julian Bream: ‘I’m still trying to work out what to do with this piece,’ he told one writer. ‘I’m writing it down more for my own pleasure than anything [but] I don’t know yet whether to try and play all the instruments myself or whether I should get other people in.’36

  ‘We toured Scandinavia at least twice a year,’ says Martin, ‘and often went in between for festivals. During one of these tours we were sitting in a restaurant in Copenhagen with Bert’s Danish manager Peter Abramson and he said, “Why haven’t you recorded this?”, to which Bert said, “Because nobody’s asked me to.” Actually, I think he’d already put it to Charisma and they didn’t want it. Peter went off and came back half an hour later and said, “Okay, I’ve got a fine studio booked for February next year, you can have it for two weeks, you can make the album. I’ll give you this much money as an advance, this much in royalties, this much for publishing …” Bert said, “Yeah, fine,” and we had the whole deal worked out there and then.’

  Aside from the epic he had crafted from ‘The Cuckoo’, Bert had accumulated a number of other instrumentals and Martin had one himself. Danny Thompson was drafted in on bass and production. It was decided to put five short pieces on side two with the magnum opus consuming side one. Every piece would be named after a sea bird or wading bird: ‘The Cuckoo’ finally emerged on record as ‘Avocet’:

  ‘Each night we’d take a cassette from the studio back to the hotel and just listen to the day’s work,’ says Martin. ‘It was all written by Bert, all the guitar parts were his and all the melodies that I played on fiddle were basically his suggestions too. When we’d first played it he’d recorded his guitar parts on a little tape machine and then demonstrated over that, on guitar, what he wanted me to play, not for me to copy strictly, but how I wanted within that framework. He also wanted Danny to contribute in his own way. Most of it was mapped out but we had to record it in sections. Bert really had it clear in his head how each piece could flow together with a sense of continuity, in terms of key rather than tempo. I was highly impressed. When I listen to it now I think Bert should have had a better violin player than me because it’s really quite a special piece of music. But I’m proud to be on that record.’

  Avocet first appeared on Peter Abramson’s Ex-Libris label in Denmark in 1978, and was subsequently licensed to Charisma for UK release in February 1979. A charitable interpretation of Charisma’s delay would have the label waiting for a gap in the ebb and flow of ‘vintage’ Jansch from Transatlantic, sold on by Nat Joseph and trading under Geoff Hannington’s ownership as Logo. Three volumes entitled Early Bert, recycling old albums in distinctly budget-looking guise, had appeared on Transatlantic’s XTRA label in August 1976. The legendary Bert Jansch would remain on catalogue at full price. A still more tawdry-looking release entitled Anthology – a fair selection of material, but lacking any gravitas, information or even the dignity of a sleeve design – appeared in May 1978. It was the shape of things to come.37

  ‘I’m not complaining,’ said Bert, a couple of years later and with admirable restraint, ‘but the Musicians’ Union or somebody ought to do something about it. Contracts are contracts, but there ought to be a limit on how many times they can put out the same old tracks under new titles. I’m proud that my first album has continued to be in the catalogue and sell year after year. But to delete an album and then reissue it under a new title, it devalues the new product. In the end, the public begins to think you’re not doing anything new.’38

  Avocet would be the last Bert Jansch album for many years to receive anything like respectable coverage in the music papers. But if Bert was now perceived to be going out of fashion, he was doing so in style. In Britain the new record was hailed as something of a gentle triumph, with reviewers perhaps pleasantly surprised that the once great, more recently meandering, Bert Jansch had once again come up with the goods.

  Not least, the album represented a return to almost wholly acoustic music. It was a return all the more striking in being starkly against the gra
in of the times. Mark Ellen for NME felt that, musically, the album was a fulfilment of the promise hinted at in the instrumental work on LA Turnaround five years earlier. He was literally correct, for ‘Bittern’ – complex, edgy, and featuring the trio trading solos in 3/4 time in the exhilarating tradition of the Pentangle at their best – began and ended with a guitar figure straight from ‘Chambertin’. Hugh Fielder, in Sounds, observed that Bert’s guitar style was ‘too distinctive to hold many surprises any more but when placed in this setting it blossoms until it becomes positively cosy’. That in itself was something new: this was no easy-listening album but it was eminently listenable – something that, to the uncommitted, could not easily be said of every one of its predecessors. For Karl Dallas, in Folk News, it was ‘quite simply the most splendidly flawless recording Bert has made since Bert & John and possibly the finest he has ever produced’. For the unashamedly partisan Dick Gaughan (one of Bert’s drinking buddies at the time), writing in Folk Review, every track was a winner. Moreover, he felt, readers should listen to the record ‘with pleasure, delight, wonder and pride, yes pride, because the folk world can say that Bert Jansch started with us, has always stayed close, and will always be part of the folk world’. It was an observation that reflected a strange truth. Bert Jansch had always regarded himself as a folk singer, and yet he had never been a part of the mainstream of the world that was represented now by the folk clubs. He would always remain, to some extent, an outsider. There would be no chance of a sing-along chorus.