by Colin Harper
Rod went home, returning later to collect Charlotte. They visited Bert daily for the next week. ‘My pancreas had just given in,’ says Bert. ‘There was this lady doctor at Ashington who really counselled me through the whole thing. She had nothing to do with me as a patient but she was a fan. I never did find out her name.’
In Portman Smith’s view, Bert was ‘as seriously ill as you can be without dying’. He was faced with the ultimatum of giving up alcohol or simply giving up: there and then, he chose the former. ‘It was a conscious decision on his part, and a very courageous and miraculous one,’ says Charlotte. ‘He just did it overnight. But then you have something to replace in your life, and maybe he got a drive back or managed to focus his energies in a way which started to bring things back to him.’
There can be no doubt that Bert’s creativity, reliability, energy, commitment and quality of performance were all rescued dramatically by the decision to quit boozing, but the road to maximum recovery of health, artistry and professional credibility was to be no less tortuous than beating the addiction. It is to Rod Clements’s credit that he stood by Bert over the next few months and (re)organised the touring and recording opportunities to enable Bert to keep busy. A photo session for the sleeve of Bert & Rod’s projected album took place in November, Bert appearing visibly under the weather, and between 11 and 16 January 1988, the pair finally threw themselves into the actual recording. The resulting Leather Launderette was released in March 1988, promoted with sessions for Radio 2’s Folk On Two and Nightride and an ambitious thirty-one-date UK tour, mostly of folk club venues, during March and April.
‘Dave Smith had a lot of difficulty putting that tour together,’ says Rod, ‘and it was largely booked on the strength that I would be chaperoning Bert. But it was a good tour in terms of the audiences we pulled in, because he had been out of the limelight for a long while. A lot of old fans were curious – people came out of the woodwork, and the audiences were generally large and very attentive. But I don’t think Bert enjoyed it particularly. It was the first time he’d done a serious amount of work without drinking and he was still convalescent. You could count on him getting to the end of a number, which you couldn’t count on before, but he was very quiet. We drove for hundreds of miles on that tour and he didn’t say very much.’
Leather Launderette itself is difficult to assess: jointly credited on the sleeve, it is best approached as an upbeat, enjoyable but essentially unambitious Rod Clements record with Bert Jansch guesting prominently. That is not to denigrate Rod Clements, but to recognise the context in which the album was made. Bert had little or no new material ready, so Rod contributed and fronted several rousing country blues covers and pastiches and joined Bert on a couple of jointly credited instrumentals. For his part, Bert revamped the now iconic ‘Strolling Down The Highway’ plus two songs first heard on From The Outside, an album so pitifully neglected that he was still trying to salvage something from the wreckage. It was all enthusiastically presented and arranged-for-duo stuff with Rod on bass and slide guitar. But, for those concerned with the recovery of Bert’s muse, the fragile shoots were to be found in a wistful arrangement of the traditional ‘Bogie’s Bonny Belle’ and a beautifully poised, timely revisitation of Alex Campbell’s ‘Been On The Road So Long’.
Campbell had died in January 1987, and Bert’s re-recording of the song a year later had resonance with regard to both men: Alex had been beaten by the road and the lifestyle; Bert had only just made it back from the brink.14 His relationship with Charlotte would not be so fortunate: ‘We came back home and things were already difficult between us,’ she says. ‘We discussed separation and, in fact, when I brought it up with him a year later he said yes, he’d already found somewhere else to live. He was the one who went. It was nearly ten years and really it was no longer going forward. I guess we didn’t love each other any more. He left our flat on Boxing Day 1988 and moved into a flat in Hammersmith.’
Bert went into Charing Cross Hospital for major arterial surgery in January 1989, after which he relinquished tobacco. Charlotte looked after him for a couple of weeks and then moved on. Bert maintains a different recollection of the split: ‘She quit while I was still in hospital. I’ve no idea why. I think she’d just had enough of it.’ Things could only get better.
‘I was very focussed about our son Adam when we split up,’ says Charlotte, ‘because I knew Bert had two sons before from previous relationships whom he’d not kept in touch with very well.15 Partly it’s difficult for musicians because of the lifestyle, but he’s not very outgoing that way anyway. So for me it was very important that he saw Adam regularly, and I made sure that happened. He’s great with Adam.’
The Pentangle, with Rod Clements on board and Bert hardly firing on all cylinders, toured Italy, Britain and America during the latter half of 1988 and recorded So Early In The Spring, an album of largely traditional material, for the German label Plane. Produced by Nigel Portman Smith, with that boomy eighties sound one either loves or loathes, it was unsatisfying as folk, rock, jazz or music of any description bearing the input of Bert Jansch. There were one or two highlights – ‘Lassie Gathering Nuts’ was fresh and imaginative, ‘Lucky Black Cat’ had a certain swagger – but mostly the material had already been trampled to death in the folk-rock boom of the early seventies. ‘The Blacksmith’ was an old Steeleye Span chestnut and it was difficult to see ‘Bramble Briar’, a re-titling of the original Pentangle’s ‘Bruton Town’, as anything other than a crass ploy to avoid giving up royalties to the owners of the Transatlantic/Heathside copyrights. What, indeed, had been the point in re-recording it at all? If the band had been truly fantastic the lack of exciting material might not have seemed so crucial, but with Bert convalescing, Clements undertaking the role of lead instrumentalist for his first time in any band and Gerry Conway yet to amalgamate his nail-it-to-the-floor style with the delicate swing of his new employers this incarnation of the Pentangle could only walk, not fly.
‘I wasn’t sure of the validity of Pentangle at that time at all,’ admits Rod. ‘In Germany they seemed to accept the group for what it was, but when we went to the States it was a different story. People were palpably disappointed it wasn’t the John Renbourn/Danny Thompson line-up. I’m certainly no John Renbourn and I couldn’t play the fiddle like Mike Piggott did, which I realised as soon as they sent me the rehearsal tapes. So I tried to figure out Mike’s parts on slide guitar, which I okayed with Bert. It was great experience for me, we felt it was a pretty good band and we liked the album we did – but it was just struggling against the earlier identity.’
Bert and Rod, as a duo, had simply fizzled out: ‘To be honest, I ran out of patience with Bert there,’ says Rod, ‘because he basically wasn’t interested. He was interested in Pentangle. The last thing I did with Pentangle was a short tour of Italy. Some work was mooted for the summer of 1990 which I wasn’t able to do. I’d already sensed Bert had Peter Kirtley waiting in the wings and said, “Why don’t you get Pete?” and that was that. I’d been a fan of Bert’s from the sixties, so it just meant so much to be working with him. I feel privileged to have been able to have done so.’
Clements returned to Lindisfarne and Peter Kirtley, who had already been working with Bert on odd dates in 1989 as a duo partner, became the Pentangle’s lead guitarist. It was an injection of fresh energy sorely required. A soulful, spiky player from the North East, Kirtley had been a Jansch fan since Birthday Blues. He had seen Bert at the Festival Hall concert in 1971 and at Ronnie Scott’s in 1975, following his career from afar and more recently socialising with him through mutual friend Ian Vincentini: ‘Working with Bert never crossed my mind,’ says Kirtley. ‘We used to play darts, have a few pints and talk, basically. But I was thrown into it pretty quick. He just said one day, “I’m going to Ireland next week, do you fancy coming?”’
An accomplished, dynamic player capable of great sensitivity and wild bursts of energy, often in the same song, Kirtley had long rea
lised that the key to enhancing Bert’s music was first understanding fully how it was constructed and performed: bass lines, melody lines, ornamentation, rhythm and whatever else was going on on that one guitar. ‘The thing about Bert’s music is that it’s already complete,’ says Kirtley. ‘He can play it by himself or with a band or whatever but other musicians can only orchestrate what’s already there. People can copy Bert but they can’t write what Bert writes, that’s the difference.’
Over in Ireland, a developing circuit of pubs and club venues with an active interest in promoting singer-songwriters and roots music generally would serve Bert well over the coming years of his ‘rehabilitation’. Given his status and unblemished reputation there, Bert would enjoy generous TV, radio and press exposure both North and South over the next few years.16 Similar respect for Bert’s status and longevity would begin to develop too among the regional and national media in Britain.
Leather Launderette and So Early In The Spring represented the beginning and end of Bert’s creative nadir on record. His creative recovery would be a slow process, entirely down to his own resolution. Any critical or commercial reappraisal was down to external forces: the changing nature of the media; a new generation of music-minded public willing to salute any worthy survivors of the punk-era purges; and the advent of the compact disc, allowing the reissue and rediscovery of now ‘classic’ recordings. Having beaten the booze, Bert Jansch had only to re-learn the intangible greatness of his art. In the meantime, he was single-mindedly pushing forward on the lonely path between the world of the has-been and that of the icon. In retrospect, 1989 – 95 were seven years of a career being rescued by stealth from oblivion.
11
Renaissance
For Bert Jansch, on the road to post-alcoholic recovery, the last years of the 1980s were a creative trough. Towards the end of 1989 one new song, ‘The Parting’, did appear, on Mastercraftsmen, a various artists’ tribute to luthier Rob Armstrong. The song, a bittersweet reflection on the collapse of his relationship with Charlotte, was Bert’s first recording with Peter Kirtley. Signs of a more substantial artistic recovery emerged in November 1990 with two virtually simultaneous releases: The Ornament Tree, on the tiny British label Run River; and Sketches, on the German label Hypertension.
Sketches, recorded in Hamburg in a single week, was produced by Danny Thompson who also accompanied Bert and Peter alongside a trio of local players. The retrospective focus of the album was not necessarily testament to any lack of ideas on Bert’s part – Hypertension had specifically requested oldies revisited. Precisely which oldies was more or less down to Peter, who was amused to find himself ‘teaching Bert a few of his tunes’. Given a low-key release in Britain on Temple, even the sleeve was a benign throwback to old times: its designer was Heather Jansch. While the production values reflected something of the budget involved – a thin sound cruelly unfavourable to the re-creation of powerful songs like ‘Poison’ and ‘Oh My Father’ – the more delicate material was beautifully executed. ‘The Old Routine’ (a remake of From The Outside’s ‘Blues All Around’) was a masterpiece, with Peter’s moody instrumental ‘Afterwards’ and Bert’s one wholly new offering, ‘A Windy Day’, more than promising.
In contrast to the cheap and cheerful ambience of Sketches, The Ornament Tree was a revelation: a fully rounded, beautifully and powerfully realised ‘concept’ in the manner of Jack Orion or Avocet. Bert had set out with a very clear idea and had delivered consummately. Reviewing the work in Q, one of a new breed of monthly music magazines that would prove significant to Bert’s perception in the 1990s, Ken Hunt put the case for the artist to be regarded no longer as a purely historical figure but as one of contemporary value: ‘The Ornament Tree recaptures the old spirit while the chemistry between Jansch and his accompanists rekindles memories of his finest hours with Jansch sounding in better voice than he has for a long time. The Ornament Tree is the stuff we expect of him.’ In Vox, Martin Townsend was ecstatic: ‘The finest folk album of the year? Forget it. This stands as one of the most impressive LPs in any category.’
Bert’s fellow musicians included Kirtley, Portman Smith, Steve Tilston and Tilston’s partner Maggie Boyle. But more so than any of the previous ‘Bert plus group’ albums, this one felt determinedly the work of the artist whose name was on the cover. Although Bert has often acknowledged Maggie as a major influence on the album, and as a personal favourite singer next to Anne Briggs, Maggie attributes the vision and execution of the project to Bert alone: ‘What was on there was what Bert wanted,’ she says. ‘There was definitely no chance of duelling whistles on it! Anything too sugary was out the window. Really, all I did was lend him the book where he found most of the songs: Sean O’Boyle’s The Irish Song Tradition.’
The Ornament Tree reflected Bert’s ongoing interest in the London-Irish scene. Aside from his own ‘Three Dreamers’ (based on a traditional tune) and two ‘honorary traditional songs’, Hamish Henderson’s ‘Banks O’ Sicily’ and Dave Goulder’s ‘The January Man’, the album comprised Scottish and Irish material, faithfully interpreted yet brimming with the understated power and invention of a Jansch performance. The quietly stunning end product belied the problematic process of its creation. ‘I did that album track by track and it took over a year,’ says Bert. ‘I didn’t like that approach. It felt like if you’d got a couple of hours free you’d come over and record a track and then go away for a while and completely forget the album. I lost the feel for it, and a lot of things had to be re-recorded because they didn’t go well. The studio was on the other side of town. It sometimes took me two hours to get there. But at the same time Sketches was done in a week, and it worked. Two different approaches.’
The Run River label had debuted in 1987 with Steve Tilston’s Life By Misadventure and Maggie’s Reaching Out (with Bert on guitar). It had been founded by Richard Newman and studio owner Michael Klein but, with the albums in the can awaiting release, Newman disappeared. Fred Underhill, a friend of Steve’s with private means and time on his hands, was brought in to rescue the venture. Subsequent releases included The Grapes Of Life, the first new album in years from Wizz Jones, featuring a cover of Bert’s ‘Fresh As A Sweet Sunday Morning’, and an eponymous album from John Renbourn’s new group Ship Of Fools, an ensemble that included Steve Tilston and Maggie Boyle. Fred Underhill was not especially a Bert Jansch fan, and while the option was there for Bert to have made further recordings for Run River Bert pursued instead the association with Hypertension in Germany.
During the early nineties the Pentangle as a brand name was much in demand from Germany and America, and increasingly from Spain, Belgium, Denmark, Ireland and even the backwaters of Britain. Over the next few years interest in the group as a live act lurched progressively forward, though it was still frustrating for most of those concerned. For Nigel and Gerry, the sidemen, it was clear that the Pentangle was never going to be a genuinely full-time band again (not least because of Bert’s increasing solo commitments); as for Peter, he was happier both musically and personally as a duo with Bert. Jacqui was still yearning to record a solo album while Bert was pragmatic enough to express his hopes for the band to become a full-time unit while perhaps realising even then, and certainly with hindsight, that it was holding everyone back from more fulfilling pursuits – himself included.
From a fan’s point of view, however, this was another golden era: the Jansch / McShee / Portman Smith / Kirtley / Conway line-up would last almost as long as the original band and was, on a good night, an exhilarating live experience with an identity very much its own. Three albums were recorded before Bert finally called it quits in 1995: the admirable studio albums Think Of Tomorrow (1991) and One More Road (1993), and the disappointing Live 1994 (1995). These were the products of a band which had come to terms with its history, its current audience and its creative potential. Mixing styles, from the soft rock of Nigel and Jacqui through Peter’s ‘heavy soul’ to Bert’s distinctly individual songwriting and
a doff of the cap to the rhythms of world music, these were genuine band albums with everyone bringing something valid to the table. With Think Of Tomorrow, recorded for Hypertension over two weeks in Hamburg, it had been remarkable that anything of value had appeared at all.
‘It all happened so fast,’ says Portman Smith. ‘Within two or three weeks of us signing the deal we were in a studio. Bert just brought along a tape of his songs, gave it to us on the aeroplane and said, “Listen to this. Anybody else got anything?” I had a couple of ideas, Jacqui had a couple of ideas – it was a melting pot. Then Bert had a phone call on the Tuesday of the second week saying, “Your tickets are on their way. See you in Milan, Thursday morning.” Bert said, “What are you talking about?” It was his Italian agent: he had a tour of Italy. It was a complete shambles. We had to put everything Bert was going to do down on tape there and then. The rest of us tried to change our plane tickets to stay a few days longer, but it was the start of the Gulf War and there was no chance. It was difficult enough to even get into the airport. Gerry was the only one of us who could stay on to do any mixing, which he’d never done before. Gerry still maintains his mix was great. It wasn’t!’
