by Colin Harper
Best of all was ‘The Saturday Movie’, a beautifully crafted reflection on childhood aspirations, which appeared on In The Round (1986). So happy was Bert with the song that he went to see his old friend John Challis, now working in TV animation, believing that it might work well as a cartoon, although sadly nothing ever came of this. The escapist sentiments in ‘The Saturday Movie’ – playing cowboys and indians, climbing trees, getting away from real life – were harmless in the context of childhood, but hinted at the desolation in Bert’s own mind at the time. ‘Let Me Be’, his other notable contribution to In The Round, was a raging, fearful piece of work denoting a soul in some torment from a God who ‘ain’t gonna let me get much older’. The band, now featuring Mike Piggott and Nigel Portman Smith8 alongside Bert, Jacqui and Terry, were on the soundest footing they would achieve in re-formed guise, with a very good record under their belts and enthusiastic management from Chris Coates, a former road manager for Ralph McTell. Bert was giving the Pentangle his best shot, but he was doing so encumbered by a spirit of depression.
‘There’s an otherness about Bert, like he’s not of this earth, like he’s detached,’ says Charlotte. ‘I always felt very much that he wasn’t meant to deal with the realities of life and the hardnesses. Being from where he comes from he is very aware of the hardnesses but those were not things that were in him: he’s an artist. He can be quite funny sometimes, when he gets going. We did have a laugh, it wasn’t all dank and depressing. We had some good times together and I care about him very much, but Bert has always seemed to me a very blue kind of character.’
Lean times and alcoholism are too easy a summary of Bert Jansch in the 1980s. While those factors were ever-present, even in his darkest hours Bert was not one to remain idle or to give up creating music or trying to move forward. Moments of fun peppered the drudge. On one occasion, a Japanese businessman asked Bert to play the tour guide and take himself and half a dozen fellow Jansch enthusiasts around Britain: ‘He was a millionaire and a Hawaiian guitar player in some country and western band,’ says Bert, ‘used to fly into Nashville and play guitar with all these famous people. So he made me an offer I couldn’t refuse, and it was great fun. They went to Coventry and met Martin Jenkins, played in Edinburgh folk clubs, met my sister, my mum …’
‘I remember arriving home one night, about one in the morning,’ says Maggie Cruickshank, ‘to find the lights on and Bert here with all these Japanese people. My brother had met him in some bar looking for Liz.9 Why my brother brought him to my house I don’t know, because Liz was married and living down the road. So we took a pile of drink with us and went down to Liz’s house and there was this succession of bowing. They were only up in Edinburgh for twenty-four hours but it was such a laugh. In fact, Bert left his bag at Liz’s so she had to run up to Waverley Station the next morning.’
Bert went back to his home town for a week-long residency at the Edinburgh Festival during August 1985. Accompanied by Nigel Portman Smith and sharing the billing with piano balladeer Paul Millns, all three decided to work together on each other’s material. A very effective piano-led arrangement of ‘Is It Real?’, broadcast on Radio 4’s Round Midnight, is the solitary, tantalising glimpse of an experience that the Evening News’s Alistair Clark concluded ‘was all over too quickly’.
Towards the end of 1985 a solo album called From The Outside appeared, but only just. Cobbled together from sessions in Denmark and London, with unsympathetic engineers and featuring only guitar and voice, it was Bert’s rawest and most cathartic work since Bert Jansch twenty years earlier. It slipped out on the tiny Belgian label Konnexion in a pressing of only five hundred copies, and a greater contrast to Heartbreak would be hard to imagine. But this time it really was heartbreak. Remixing the album for CD some years later, with a few losses and additions in tracks, Bert added revealing notes on the material. A ‘new’ track from the original sessions, ‘Blackbird In The Morning’, a serene love song redolent of James Taylor, was restored to the album and lends a degree of balance. For this was an album adrift on a sea of melancholy, clearly the work of an artist weighed down by the woes of the world. Songs about the nuclear threat, a friend who had died of anorexia, the observed loneliness of old age, the rose-tinted marketing of ‘the sixties’, and the loss of a loved one all shared space with heart-on-sleeve material that gave vent to his own frustrations.
The abiding message of ‘Blues All Around’ (lost in the CD transfer) and ‘Change The Song’ was Bert’s desperate search for a way out of what he readily acknowledged in the retrospective notes as ‘my depressed and heavy drinking days (gladly no more)’. Yet the songs themselves are classic Jansch, with universal beauty and power. Less potent artistically, but yet more specifically addressing alcoholism, ‘Get Out Of My Life’ demonstrated at least that Bert was no longer denying his problem. ‘Unless you’re a really excessive, falling-down drunk it’s hard for people to notice,’ says Charlotte. ‘Bert’s drinking was much more a case of get up in the morning, go to the pub, go home and then back to the pub until it closes. He wasn’t one for sitting at home all day drinking. It wasn’t mad, bingeing drinking as it had been with the Pentangle: it was a lifestyle, so people weren’t having conversations with him about it. Also, he had this amazing thing he could do of keeping people away from him. He could be in a crowded room and still sitting on his own, not because he was being nasty to people but because he exuded this thing of “this is my space”. But when it came to the crunch, giving up alcohol was a decision he had to make himself.’
Although Charlotte never agreed to marry Bert, she was there for the long haul: in the event, almost to the end of the decade. ‘I think one of the things that contributed to our relationship changing,’ she says, ‘was that when the guitar shop folded and there wasn’t much work coming in I had to go out and get a job. I got a job in the film industry and I was becoming quite successful at it, and that was a difficult thing for Bert to deal with. I was maybe more powerful within the relationship than he was comfortable with, because he’s very traditional in that way. I was bringing in money, I was quite successful in a career, I was travelling a lot because of that and I don’t know how secure he felt. There came a point where I had some decisions to make and he wasn’t behind me, and yet I’d always felt that I’d been really strongly behind him in everything. And that changed things for me, to find him being like that.’
Around the end of 1984 Bert had become involved with one Richard Newman, a man with fingers in a number of pies on the London music scene. Known to some of his younger followers as ‘the wizard’, the character of Newman as described by Loren Auerbach, who worked with him on various schemes and dreams at the time, is typical of the colourful and unlikely personalities who continue to carve themselves niches in the music business. ‘Richard was somebody I met when I was eighteen, in 1982,’ says Loren. ‘I’d just left school and was doing Oxbridge exams – but what I really wanted to do was be a singer and save the world!’ Newman was friendly with a number of veteran musicians – among them Cliff Aungier, himself a friend of Bert’s at the time – and had booked Michael Klein’s Heartbeat Studios for the first of many sessions based on his songs and Loren’s singing. Along with Nat Joseph, Richard Newman remains one of the very few people whom Bert actively dislikes, but he was nonetheless a good song-writer and in Loren he had a singer of some character. Bert’s role, on what would transpire to be two albums, was ultimately to lend his talent and his name. ‘Peter Green was coming to that first recording session,’ says Loren. ‘Cliff had mentioned this to Bert and Bert had asked if he could come along. He wasn’t expecting to do any playing, he just wanted to meet Peter.’
Bert nevertheless did become comprehensively involved in that record, a short but very atmospheric album entitled After The Long Night, released in March 1985 on Loren’s own label-for-the-purpose Christabel. Bert’s name was prominently billed on the front cover. Newman was keen to do a second album. This time, an array of minor legends
would be involved: Bert once again, Cliff Aungier, Geoff Bradford and Brian Knight. A handful of other players would fill out the sound, and with Bert’s name again flagged on the cover he would also have the opportunity to contribute material: ‘Is It Real?’, his distinctive arrangements of ‘Weeping Willow’ and ‘Yarrow’ and two completely new, if undistinguished, songs, ‘Carousel’ and ‘Give Me Love’. Entitled Playing The Game, and released in October 1985, it was a record of very good moments but an occasionally over-egged pudding, lacking the naive charm of its predecessor.
‘It was all such a nightmare by then that I find it hard to listen to,’ says Loren. ‘Richard had been saying, “If Bert’s producing it I’m not doing it”, and vice-versa from Bert. Richard and Bert always hated each other. But from the moment Bert and I met there was always a bond between us. Bert used to ask me all the time, “What are you doing hanging around with him?” He’d promise a lot and never deliver. That was the problem with Richard in a nutshell. In the end I couldn’t bear it any more, but at the time I was young and headstrong and I wouldn’t listen to anyone. We put out a thousand albums, they sold, that was the end of that. Richard would never follow things through – he’d jump from project to project, generally revolving around the same group of ageing guitarists.’ Bert, for the moment, removed himself from that category and situation. Loren, who had put off university long enough, decided to put some semblance of order into her life with a degree course in English literature.
Open The Door, the first record of the resurrected Pentangle, had done little more than that. By 1986 the group had acquired in Chris Coates a manager with a game plan, and over the next two years everyone would give the all-new Pentangle project their best shot: ‘Chris thought he’d got a better chance of getting us played on Radio 2 and doing concerts in arts centres,’ says Nigel Portman Smith, ‘which was in fact a complete red herring. It wasted a couple years of our careers, really. We were played every morning on The Jimmy Young Show and things like that, but it didn’t mean we actually sold anything. The people who listen to Radio 2 aren’t big buyers of records,10 and we were playing to half-empty theatres. Chris did his best and it was great to go out on the road and do it, but it just wasn’t right.’
Two major tours of Britain were undertaken in February and October 1986. In between, the group went to Europe and America and were well received. ‘Surprisingly, the new Pentangle is better than the old,’ concluded one reviewer. ‘The original band could be inconsistent, reaching elegant beauty one minute and getting too laid-back the next. The new band hits the heights more often, thanks mainly to Piggott [who] gives the band a fire it’s seldom had before.’11 For another commentator, it was Portman Smith who ‘has done most to kick Pentangle’s sound out of the laid-back lethargy that plagued it before the band split’.12 Either way, things were moving forward. A number of studio sessions were recorded for late-night BBC Radio 2 programmes,13 some of them evidence of how good the new lineup of Jansch, McShee, Cox, Piggott and Portman Smith could be on both new and old. Coates’s strategy was brave and positive, but ultimately wrong. To compound matters, Making Waves, with whom the new Pentangle had signed a multi-album deal, went bust shortly after In The Round’s release. In March 1987 Terry Cox decided to call it quits. ‘He’d come to expect his life as a musician would be well looked after,’ says Portman Smith. ‘Being back on the road with Pentangle, staying in grotty hotels and with Bert boozing so much, it wasn’t good enough. Bert was difficult at the best of times. I found it a lot easier because I could get drunk with him, and get closer to him, but Terry didn’t drink and Jacqui didn’t drink much and I’m sure Bert’s condition used to worry them something shocking. His professional reputation was suffering. We were very lucky in finding a couple of agents who’d deal with us. I don’t think Bert even today realises how bad his reputation was.’
Given that the Pentangle had positive management and that the other players had a cushioning effect which bolstered his stage performance and got him where he needed to be, the mid-eighties were by no means as bad for Bert professionally as they could have been. A lot of work was put into the group by all involved, Bert included, for very modest financial returns – but at least it was work. As a solo artist, Bert was running out of options: ‘Honestly, he would be drunk on stage,’ remembers Ralph McTell, ‘and you can’t do that and continue to get bookings. I’ve spoken to a lot of agents since then and he’s burned a lot of bridges. I think Bert could have been bigger, no doubt about that, and I think he was probably instrumental in preventing that.’
Shortly after Terry Cox left, Mike Piggott did likewise. Gerry Conway, veteran of various British folk-rock groups, had been drafted in as the new drummer; the question of a new lead guitarist was thornier. Bert suggested Peter Kirtley: a friend of a friend, a recent drinking buddy and most conveniently a terrific lead guitar player. Nigel felt that, given their existing repertoire, in the short term a guitarist who could double on fiddle, as Mike Piggott had, was essential. He suggested Rod Clements.
From the time of Rod’s original association with Bert in the mid-seventies, some people had felt that Rod’s limitations as a musician were outweighed by his attributes as a companion to Bert on the road, a role that should not be dismissed lightly: ‘Rod was a strong character,’ says Charlotte. ‘He cared about Bert and he wasn’t somebody who was relying on Bert in the same way that other musicians he knew often were. Rod had his own thing going on with Lindisfarne, and it’s more like they were friends. In fact, it was almost as if Rod was not exactly more famous than Bert was, but more successful.’
Lindisfarne were, like the Pentangle, operating during the 1980s as a reformed part-time concern with full-time aspirations. For the next three years Rod Clements would divide his time between both groups, with one proviso: ‘I used to argue with him vehemently about us always being the second choice,’ says Portman Smith. But that was how it was. There would be little activity on the Pentangle front until the summer of 1988, but Rod Clements’s availability would not be the only reason. Bert Jansch was not a well man.
‘I was spending quite a bit of time with Bert and Charlotte at their flat in Redcliffe Square,’ says Rod, ‘and Bert was spending quite a bit of time in the pub. Even back in the seventies drink used to be a problem for him in terms of gigging. I’d have to phone up promoters and apologise for him occasionally. So I wouldn’t say I was shocked, but I was a bit surprised that it had taken over to such an extent. We were rehearsing Pentangle material but I felt that Bert should be doing more than Pentangle. I think, like a lot of people, I’d always felt Bert was a bit diluted in the Pentangle, and at the time I joined they weren’t doing very much. Bert seemed to be kicking about at a loose end and spending most of his time in the pub, so I seized the opportunity and asked if we could get a little duo together.’
Rod approached Geoff Heslop, owner of Black Crow, a small record label based in Northumberland, and between them they hatched a scheme to bring Bert back to a level where they believed he would be better off. Geoff agreed to bankroll a Bert & Rod album and in the meantime enticed Bert into a Woody Guthrie tribute project. Also involving Dick Gaughan, Rab Noakes and Rory McLeod and recorded over a convivial three-day session in Newcastle-upon-Tyne during August, Woody Lives was released in February 1988. Bert’s only vocal, on ‘This Land Is Your Land’, managed to make Woody’s celebratory anthem a world-weary lament.
During that summer of 1987, Bert was also visiting Rod’s home in Rothbury, Northumberland, to rehearse material for the prospective duo album. Geoff Heslop had got an agent, Dave Smith, involved, and the unenviable task of assembling Bert’s first substantial tour of the UK in years was in progress. Rod was excited by the prospects; Bert was still, curiously, more interested in the Pentangle and was at best acquiescing to the duo project. On Monday, 5 October Bert arrived in Rothbury for the album’s final rehearsals: it was to be recorded at Heslop’s favoured studio in Newcastle the following week.. ‘He really was d
rinking quite heavily at this point,’ remembers Rod. ‘I live about a mile from the village, where the nearest pub is. Bert would set off at about eleven o’clock in the morning, I would go and get him at lunchtime, maybe have one with him, and bring him back to the house to do some playing. Then he’d go down again at six o’clock and I’d join him later. It was quite difficult to get him to eat very much.’
‘The drinking had got so bad I couldn’t lift a glass,’ says Bert on reflection. ‘I had to look at it for a long time first, and I couldn’t talk to anybody unless I’d had a drink first. And I must have been losing a lot of work. Virginia McKenna wanted me to play on a film and sent a guy round but the state I was in …’
Rod had organised Bert a gig for the Tuesday at a folk club he was running nearby. On the Wednesday and Thursday they rehearsed, and then for the Friday night Dave Smith had organised Bert & Rod a little ‘pocket money’ gig at a pub in South Shields: ‘Now that night Charlotte and Adam were coming up on the train,’ says Rod, ‘which meant Bert wasn’t drinking much. My partner, Marie, met them at the station while we were doing the gig and we all met up back at my house around midnight. Bert seemed okay, if a little tired, which I put down to him not having had a drink. We sat around and had a bottle of wine between us but by the morning of the tenth Bert wasn’t well. He looked like he was in some pain – an awful, pallid colour, wasn’t able to hold himself up right – so we took him down to the local doctor’s surgery. He and Charlotte were in for maybe twenty minutes then the doctor came out and said, “Can you take him to Ashington Hospital?” I said, “Yeah, okay, I’ll stop off at home and pick up his things.” She said, “No, straightaway.” So we drove the twenty miles from Rothbury to Ashington, all country roads and driving pretty slow because he was in some pain. I hung around to see if I could be of any use and the next thing I saw was Bert going past on a trolley with tubes coming out of him.’
