Dazzling Stranger

by Colin Harper

  During the early summer of 1978 Bert and Martin had toured America with Ralph McTell: ‘You keep hearing that the singer-songwriter is dead,’ McTell told the Boston Globe, ‘yet more than eleven hundred people came to hear us play tonight. That’s tremendously rewarding.’ Socially, the tour was less successful. Bert was by now living in Coventry with Polly Bolton, a zoologist and one-time singer with Martin’s old group Dando Shaft. ‘I lived with her for about a year,’ says Bert, ‘I just don’t think we suited each other. There were so many incidents – she was so volatile and I couldn’t handle it after a while.’ Polly had also come on the tour: ‘Jesus Christ! That was terrible! Dreadful!’ says Ralph McTell. ‘Bert was getting pissed all the time and Polly was singing with him and one day she just said, “I’ve had enough,” and went out and got pissed herself to show him what it was like. It was at Princeton University and she came out on to the stage while Bert was playing, completely drunk, and started singing. Bert couldn’t go on or wouldn’t go on, so Polly continued singing and then Martin played a solo set. I don’t think Bert remembers a lot of these things. There’s great big blanks in his past.’

  However popular British acoustic legends like Ralph and Bert still were in America and Europe during the late seventies, the musical climate was changing. One incident speaks volumes about Bert’s ability to remain largely unaware of musical fashion and consequently, in his better moments, to transcend it. Ed Denson, an archetypal Californian hippy, was partner with Stefan Grossman in the Kicking Mule record label. In 1979 Bert became involved with the label and during a tour of the States wound up staying with Denson. As John Renbourn recalls, the story of how Bert influenced the course of punk on the West Coast is the stuff of legend. The connection was Denson’s son Bruce: ‘In front of poor old Denson’s eyes,’ says Renbourn, ‘the guy develops into this ferocious punk, the head of the Berkeley punk fraternity, and changes his name to “Bruce Loose”. These guys are coming into the house and not speaking to Ed and being very unpleasant, but everything changes when Bert arrives. It was the middle of Bert’s most horrendous drinking period – he was totally blitzed all the time. Bruce became fascinated, thinking Bert to have the most nihilistic approach to life that he’d ever seen. He’d get the rest of the punk crowd in just to see, following Bert down the streets and into the bars – and Bert never even noticed they were there! I did a radio interview in Berkeley years later and they still speak of him as this Von Daniken type of character: “The Bert”!’

  The deal with Kicking Mule was for one album, recorded in London in 1979 and released the following year as Thirteen Down. Typical of the label’s policy, Stefan Grossman had wanted a solo guitar album with tablature inserts but Bert wanted nothing of the sort. Together with Martin Jenkins, bass and keyboards player Nigel Portman Smith (another of the ‘Putney mafia’) and drummer Luce Langridge, with Jacqui McShee guesting on one track, Bert delivered an album of songs with a classy, easy-listening sheen. One highlight was ‘Sweet Mother Earth’, a translation of a song by the Brazilian performer Milton Nascimento (as recommended by Tony Stratton Smith) and a jagged, punchy complement to the smoothness of the other tracks. But while the presentation was polished, not all the sentiments were as comfortable: ‘Where Did My Life Go?’, written shortly after her death in April 1978, was a beautiful but desperately poignant song informed by the booze and drugs lifestyle of Sandy Denny, although typically there was no direct reference to its subject. No doubt many listeners, particularly those with an insight into Bert’s own lifestyle, believed it to be autobiographical.

  A particularly bland track, ‘Time And Time’, was released in Britain as a single while the album was released with a variety of sleeve designs in Britain, America and Australia.39 Bert, Martin, Nigel and Luce performed a Danish tour and a few dates in Britain including a BBC Radio 1 In Concert, after which Bert, Martin and Nigel toured America. During the tour, as Martin recalls, ‘Something happened with the partnership between Stefan Grossman and Ed Densen which I never quite understood. I never got any accounting, never heard anything from them. The deal just vanished.’ Later in the year Bert and Martin went to Japan, resulting in an uninspired Japan-only album Live At La Foret, recorded by Nippon Columbia with general agreement but without the duo’s prior knowledge of where and when.

  ‘I never quite understood why we finished really,’ says Martin. ‘Bert didn’t say anything about it, but that’s Bert’s way – he finds it difficult to talk about so he just does it. The time we worked together we worked a lot: hundreds and hundreds of gigs. Some of them were fantastic, most of them were fine, and Bert always tried to give the best he could. He had a better audience in Europe than in Britain by that time. But I suppose the work had started to tail off. The last gig we did together was in 1982, but during the summer of 1981 he went to California to make another album, on his own, and we didn’t work so much together that year. Maybe by then it had reached its logical conclusion.’40

  10

  Heartbreak

  ‘I don’t think any of us can be left behind and classified as an old folkie,’ said Bert in January 1981. ‘Does a young punk in the street have any idea what a folkie is? I don’t think anyone’s a folk singer these days.’1 As if to prove the point, Bert, once again without a record deal, accepted an offer from John and Richard Chelew, guitar retailers in Santa Monica, to fly over in June 1981 and cut a solo album in determinedly modern FM radio style. As Santa Barbara Honeymoon had done before, the new album was to marry Bert’s jagged Celtic artistry with the latest US gloss in the hope of creating something commercially viable. Its name would be Heartbreak.

  A quartet of session men, including Albert Lee on lead guitar and mandolin, were hired to flesh out a set of songs that were as close as Bert was likely to get to mainstream singer-songwriter territory. A polished revamp of ‘Blackwater Side’ and the spiky, spacious instrumental ‘And Not A Word Was Said’ hinted at Bert’s unique musical character while cracks at three standards – ‘If I Were A Carpenter’, ‘Heartbreak Hotel’ and ‘Wild Mountain Thyme’ (with Jennifer Warnes on guest vocals) – were punchy and valid. Of the new material, ‘Is It Real?’ and ‘Up To The Stars’ had a profundity and restless vigour at odds with the affable langour of Thirteen Down and its immediate predecessors. It was a strong album: well performed, well presented (a black and white portrait shot of a resolute, confident looking Bert against an airbrushed backdrop graced the cover) and surely the basis for a career boost.

  The album was released in Britain on Logo in February 1982. In April, Bert toured the UK with Albert Lee, Nigel Portman Smith and Luce Langridge, recording a fine BBC Radio 1 In Concert and playing Edinburgh’s Queen’s Hall along the way: ‘If the mop-haired maestro looks a bit frayed round the edges, it isn’t reflected in his music,’ wrote Lindsay Reid in Edinburgh’s Evening News. ‘Looking a bit beefier over the years, this was Bert Jansch on home ground: relaxed, smoking and drinking his way through a set of well over an hour. The magic was still there. He even took time to wish his mum, in the audience, a happy birthday. She’s seventy. It’s some considerable time since the man was packing the Usher Hall as part of Pentangle but the turnout showed he’s not forgotten. The boy did his mum proud.’2

  This was the last time Bert would tour with a band under his own name. It was nearly ten years since the Pentangle had split and the trajectory of Bert’s career, broadly comparable to the careers of its other members, had been essentially downwards ever since. The Heartbreak album and tour had been a magnificent effort to say something fresh and bring new listeners on board, but it was simply not happening on any significant scale. By way of both diversion and necessity, Bert had recently acquired a new residence in Putney: Bert Jansch’s Guitar Shop, 220 New King’s Road.

  Bert had stumbled his way into retailing as a pragmatic solution to finding somewhere to live with his partner of recent months, Charlotte Crofton-Sleigh. She had met Bert at a gig shortly after leaving school in 1978, when he was still
involved, musically and otherwise, with Polly Bolton. ‘Polly used to bring this huge Alsatian to gigs,’ says Charlotte, ‘and when she wasn’t sitting near Bert she’d leave the dog there – like it was a guard dog! It was very funny.’ By the time Charlotte and Bert became involved, during 1980, Bert had left Polly and had been staying with first Martin Jenkins in Coventry and then Nigel Portman Smith in Twickenham. The priority for the new couple had not only been to find a good place to live but a solid means of doing so.

  ‘Gigs were sporadic,’ says Charlotte. ‘There were royalties as well, but not enough to live on. He was earning more from his publishing than from record sales – they were still paying off the advances for one of the Pentangle albums, Solomon’s Seal. I suppose we were thinking of ways to diversify, really. We found a flat that had an empty shop underneath.3 My sister made jewellery and we knew somebody else who made pottery or something, so we thought we’d put some of this stuff in the window. We also knew some guitar makers at the time and it grew from there. Bert had a deal with Yamaha and he could maybe give lessons and it all seemed to make sense. We moved into the guitar shop straight after our son Adam was born: November 1981.’

  The endorsement deal with Yamaha had been generously arranged for Bert through the influence of Gordon Giltrap, a long-time fan who had recently scaled the UK singles chart with ‘Heartsong’, an acoustic guitar-led instrumental that displayed traces of the Jansch influence. The deal was more than convenient: aside from a free £2000 guitar (later given to a friend), Yamaha’s retainer had provided Bert with the financial credibility necessary to acquire a bank loan and establish his shop, which was to specialise in hand-built instruments. Giltrap had known Bert casually for years but had only recently developed a friendship with his old hero: ‘On a personal level, things were pretty grim for me at that time,’ says Giltrap, ‘and I think Bert and Charlotte took pity on me. I would occasionally stay over and I can even remember taking my father to a pub in the area to meet up with them for a drink. My dad was quite thrilled to meet his son’s boyhood hero and, of course, Bert handled it very well in his off-hand, jokey sort of way. I sold a number of surplus instruments via the shop, including the famous John Bailey double-neck which I’d used on my mid-seventies albums. I remember going in one day and Bert was bemoaning the fact that it needed restringing. There were eighteen strings: he said it had taken ages. On checking it out, I wasn’t quite sure whether he’d restrung it before or after visiting the pub.’

  When Bert’s version of ‘Heartbreak Hotel’ was released as a single in February 1982, he appeared on Capital Radio’s London Tonight to promote (in typically understated fashion) both that and the shop. Asked why he was not so visible around Britain as he once was and whether he would be on hand at the shop to offer advice to young musicians, Bert’s wry response was telling: ‘The best advice is, ‘Don’t do it!” he said. ‘But yeah, I’m there on tap to help out with people’s problems.’

  ‘The shop was a struggle,’ says Charlotte. ‘It was meant to bring in some extra money but in fact what it ended up doing, because we weren’t making any money at it and paying commercial rent and rates, was draining the very few resources we had already.’ The guitar shop survived just over two years before the bailiffs had their way. But it did achieve something for Bert: after years of playing largely in Europe and America to the neglect of Britain, it put his name quite literally back on the British map. A number of his old friends sought him out there and were happy to give him their business. ‘I was sorry it went wrong for him,’ says Steve Benbow, by this stage back to playing part-time around the pubs. ‘It was a good shop, he had some lovely guitars and I thought he’d be very happy with that situation. Charlotte was very efficient.’

  John Harrison, formerly of the Watersons, was another visitor: ‘I remember speaking to his lady. “How’s business?” I asked. “Oh, we sold a guitar string,” she said. “What gauge was it?” I asked, for no particular reason. This guy had come in and said he had to have a 23-gauge string. By pure fluke she didn’t have one but said she’d get one in. He came back later on and got his string and she’d asked him what it was for: it was for cutting cheese. So that’s how good business was.’

  At the same time as Bert had been pottering around as a retailer, a reunion of the Pentangle was under way. Claudio Trotta, an Italian promoter who had regularly booked the John Renbourn Group (featuring both Renbourn and Jacqui McShee), had asked John to canvass the original members on the basis that he would bankroll an album and tour. Rehearsals were now taking place at Jacqui’s house in Reigate and at Bert’s guitar shop.

  ‘I think everybody was being a bit more enthusiastic about it outwardly than they really were,’ says Charlotte. ‘Everybody needed the boost at the time, and the money for the Italian tour was quite good, although I think Bert did want to do it for its own sake, not just for the money. But they were a bunch of volatile characters, and ten years down the line they were if anything even more set in their ways: Jacqui had a family by then, Terry was living in Minorca running a restaurant, Danny was as mad as ever, John was thinking about taking a degree in music, and Bert was Bert. Musically, Bert and John had gone in very different directions and that was obvious by then. They didn’t not get on, but they didn’t go out of their way to be with each other, and when they were they were quite formal.’

  ‘When you have a wonderful holiday when you’re a child and think you must go back, it isn’t the same, is it?’ says Jacqui. ‘Danny knew this agent in London and Claudio Trotta was pushed aside, which I felt very bad about and so did John. I still squirm when I think I allowed that to happen. The reunion would never have happened if it hadn’t been for him, but both John and I are very quiet and if someone else is speaking louder I tend to let them get on with it. Needless to say this other guy put a tour of Italy together which was abysmal.’4 Emerging from a Pentangle rehearsal in a state of anxiety, Terry Cox had been involved in a road accident and was put in traction at Guildford Hospital. Bert had hoped Terry would play drums on his Heartbreak solo tour in April, but that was now out of the question. He would be lucky to fulfil any of the Pentangle dates.

  ‘I don’t think Terry’s wife wanted the band to re-form at all,’ says Bert, ‘because they had a nice little life and restaurant in Minorca and all he needed to do was the odd tour with Charles Aznavour. And he was quite happy. To suddenly come back to this chaos of the Pentangle … He was nervous all the time, fearing all the old problems would reappear.’ At some point Terry rang Jo Lustig of all people, broaching the question of management. Jo’s wife and business partner Dee answered the phone and made it clear that she at least would have nothing to do with it. In any case, Jo had tired of musicians and their foibles and was developing a successful new career as a producer of arts documentaries.

  The re-formed Pentangle, as an empty-sounding four piece, given Terry’s condition, made their debut at Cambridge Folk Festival in July 1982. Filming the whole festival, BBC2 broadcast ‘Bruton Town’ while BBC Radio 2 aired ‘People On The Highway’ and ‘If I Had A Lover’, the Thirteen Down track on which Jacqui had guested. ‘They weren’t the most dynamic act of the festival,’ wrote one commentator, ‘but Bert Jansch certainly seemed to be enjoying himself among his old mates after all those years in the spotlight on his own.’5 In December, all five – with Terry in a wheel-chair but somehow able to play – completed the tour of Italy. ‘Some of it was good, some of it was great,’ says Bert of the music, ‘but we weren’t enjoying the tour and we weren’t creative. That to me was the most important thing about Pentangle: absolute creation. This was just resurrecting old stuff and it was painful to have to relearn it. All the old things that would naturally come to the surface did. It would have been easier on everybody if we’d just done the one tour, and then we would have had the chance to have come back in another couple of years and done it again.’

  Instead, the group carried on into 1983 and through Danny’s agent found themselves touring Aust
ralia (a better experience than Italy) and playing some festivals in Germany.6 By that stage, John Renbourn had enrolled at Dartington College to study music. ‘He told me he was going to leave,’ says Jacqui. ‘I said I would as well, but he said, “No, don’t. I’m not going to be working that much, I’m going to be studying, so you should stay with it.” I wanted to change the name of the band, but the argument was that Fairport and Steeleye had had loads of personnel changes and had retained the same names, so I went along with it.’7 Mike Piggott was drafted in as the first replacement in the Pentangle’s history. As the band continued through the eighties and well into the nineties as a necessarily part-time concern, it was to prove the first of many departures and arrivals: Danny would be next (after one album), then Terry (after two), then even the replacements would start coming and going. Only Bert and Jacqui would remain constants.

  ‘It just escalated,’ says Bert. ‘As each member left a new one would appear and I was in the centre of it. I couldn’t get out of the situation. I was actually tied to a continually changing band, so that everybody else could get work, basically.’ On the one hand it could be argued that over the period of the Pentangle’s renewed existence (1982 – 95), and increasingly so towards the end, Bert’s obligations as the lynchpin in a band that was perceived to be nostalgic in nature was detrimental to his career. But Bert’s solo career had all but run aground and, certainly during the eighties, involvement in a group that was working semi-regularly around Europe and the UK was at least keeping him active. Creatively, there were also opportunities to make recordings under the group’s name that were simply not there for him as a soloist. Clearly, the group felt under obligation to record an amount of traditional material, and Jacqui was becoming something of a songwriter herself, but among the five studio albums the group made for Spindrift/Making Waves, Permanent and the German labels Plane and Hypertension between 1984 and 1993 lurk a small handful of Bert’s finest songs.