Dazzling Stranger

by Colin Harper

  Bert, now being managed by Jeff Beck’s guitar technician Andy Roberts, and courtesy of agent Chas Cole, was on the verge of his biggest ever solo tour. Forty-three dates around the UK and Ireland and spanning September – November 1993 were flagged as the ‘Thirtieth Anniversary Tour’ – thirty years since he had become a professional member of the music business. Andy Roberts’s immediate contribution, aimed at profiting from the interest generated by the documentary and the reissues, was the production of some Bert Jansch merchandise for the tour: a souvenir programme and T-shirts.

  ‘It’s like everybody else who’s had a go at it,’ says Bert, ‘it’s coming in thinking they can do something and that there’s a lot of money there. But there never has been a lot of money there: they realise that, they panic and they don’t know quite what to do. Andy’s a road manager basically, which he’s very good at. Mind you, during that time I ended up with one of the weirdest roadies I’ve ever met – this guy who didn’t know anything at all about me or, apparently, music. He was just a weirdo. I remember before the tour coming back to my flat to find two horrible kitchen chairs and three empty beer crates – all things this guy thought we needed on the road and which he’d gone out and pinched from some pub.’

  The first half of 1994 saw Bert and the Pentangle alternating short tours or scattered dates around the UK, Denmark and Spain (that season’s winner in the ‘who’s next for a folk revival?’ stakes). Chas Cole had organised a series of joint gigs during May for Bert, John Renbourn, Davy Graham and Miller Anderson. Bert, John and Davy would also be among those booked for that year’s Cambridge Folk Festival, in July.

  Around this time Bert was often bumping into blues/rock guitar hero Rory Gallagher down at the Troubadour which, along with Bunjies, was one of the few original folk venues in London still functioning. Rory, though ill, had been an admirer of Bert’s music for years and was keen to involve both Bert and Martin Carthy in a planned acoustic album. He had got as far as sending demos to Bert, hoping to arrange a still more extraordinary collaboration: ‘He actually wanted to work with Anne Briggs,’ says Bert.11 ‘But she thought he was a pop star and rejected the idea out of hand. I then suggested Maggie Boyle. Maggie lived in Yorkshire and came down to London especially to meet Rory and record the stuff that we’d arranged but he didn’t show up. He just drew a blank, couldn’t remember having arranged it. I grew disheartened at that point.’ Rory died a few months later, in June 1995.

  With Demon continuing their CD transfers from Bert and the Pentangle’s Transatlantic catalogue, it seemed that the label would be a natural home for his next album proper. Andy Roberts, talking up Bert’s potential selling power, was counting on it and a lengthy UK/Irish tour was arranged for Bert spanning October – December 1994 on the assumption that a new album would be ready to accompany it. Through a combination of Andy Roberts’s business stance and Demon’s caricature perception of Bert’s lifestyle, the whole thing went pear-shaped: ‘Whatever figure Andy had demanded,’ says Bert, ‘they’d said, “No way: the deal is ten grand, that’s it.” And they actually sent round a guy to my house to say, “You’re not getting thousands of pounds out of this company to spend on cocaine like you did in the seventies.” I was very angry about that. I threw the guy out and obviously the deal fell through.’

  Andy Roberts was knocked for six. Bert, however, had been recently introduced to one Richard Jakubowski, who was running a dance label called Prima Vera. ‘At the time I was well into MIDI recording technology and there was talk of dance mixes and so on,’ says Bert. ‘We actually started work on the album and it was about a quarter of the way through that when Alan King became involved and Cooking Vinyl took over.’

  Alan King is best described as a lovable rogue. Through a combination of his own personality and the time simply being right for Bert, King’s entry into the picture ushered in, facilitated or perhaps just happily coincided with a period of time that can be seen as Bert’s coming of age as an icon. During the course of 1995—96, Bert Jansch, finally freeing himself from the Pentangle, would be hailed repeatedly by the press as a unique figure in British contemporary music and would be acknowledged amongst a new generation of prominent musicians for his influence, ideas and not least for the spell-binding quality of his current performances. Alan King, for all the flannel and dodgy deals, was to provide the platform for Bert to move out of the folk clubs and into the sun.

  Bert had met Alan, running some ‘shady gigs’ in the East End of London, through a friend of a friend. ‘I was brassic at the time and so I accepted these gigs,’ says Bert. ‘Alan himself was actually doing the support. He knew I didn’t have a manager, told me he could do all sorts of wonderful things and at the time I thought, “Well, why not? Everybody else has had a go at it!”’

  Andy Roberts had played all his cards with the Demon deal and gracefully withdrew to spend more time with Jeff Beck’s guitars. With Prima Vera, Bert at least had an outlet for his new material. Alan King saw it as his task to up the ante and bring a more appropriate label on board. Bert was less concerned about securing a new record deal. He had seen it all before: money was a necessary part of the equation, but huge advances had never been his prerequisite for creativity. He could once, perhaps, have been a gardener, imbuing that vocation with the same levels of commitment he had shown throughout his career as a musician. By this stage in the game there was no alternative: the creation of music was simply who he was and what he did.

  ‘The trouble is, with life,’ he explained during the Roberts era, ‘the more you settle on one particular thing, then the other things fade on the way, so that all you are left with is the one. Now I’ve no other means of actually earning a living at all other than picking up the guitar. But what I’m happy with is that whatever I create, a lot of people want to hear it. That makes me happy. I create, and it just happens to be a guitar I create on. If I’m at home I’m playing the guitar. It’s a continual process. In fact, it’s dreadful to go away and do gigs because I don’t play guitar! I don’t like to stand on a pedestal or a stage saying, “Here I am, the greatest player in the world.” That’s nonsense. To me life doesn’t work like that. The record industry works like that.’12

  During March and April 1995 the Pentangle story staggered to a close on what all involved recognised privately, before a gig had been played, as probably their final tour. Promoting an underwhelming new concert album, Live 1994 (recorded on a German tour during the autumn of that year), this was a group of people just going through the motions. The brinkmanship and fire apparent onstage during the spring tour of only a year before, and the more adventurous material – ‘Light Flight’ and ‘Train Song’ resurrected for the first time – had all dissipated by the time any concerts were taped for the live album.

  Peter Kirtley was developing a solo career with his own band and, having moved out to Suffolk, geography alone was a factor in the Jansch and Kirtley duo (neither being drivers) becoming less and less frequent. Gerry Conway was splitting his time between the Pentangle and John Martyn’s band and towards the end of 1994 had introduced Jacqui to Martyn’s keyboard player Spencer Cozens. The three of them determined to make an album together, which they did the following year. Jointly credited and titled About Thyme, it was essentially the solo album Jacqui had long craved. For Bert, the deciding factor in his decision to leave the group – for he wished only to leave it, not destroy it – was the recent development of Jacqui and Gerry’s relationship.

  ‘Gerry had virtually taken over the band,’ he says. ‘With him and Jacqui I was facing up to two people instead of one. But also musically it was going the wrong way for me. I couldn’t deal with the metronomic beat any more. Terry Cox always followed what was going on: Gerry can’t do that. Sometimes I couldn’t physically keep up with him. Also Jacqui, once she’s learned something that’s it, it never changes. If you want to play something different you can’t because it screws up the band. You’re playing the same thing every night.’

 
; A handful of German festival dates following the March/April tour were fulfilled by Jacqui fronting the usual group with Alun Davies, former guitarist for Cat Stevens, replacing Bert. It was hardly going out with a bang but at the time those involved were not entirely convinced that Bert was confirmed in his decision: perhaps he just needed a rest? ‘Bert has a way of changing his mind,’ said Jacqui, later in the year. ‘It feels like the end to me at the moment, but it wouldn’t surprise me if Bert said that he fancied doing some more gigs. Your guess is as good as mine.’13 Jacqui, Gerry and Spencer evolved to record and perform together, with Bert’s blessing, as Jacqui McShee’s Pentangle. The name still lingered, but at last everyone was free.

  In June 1995, Bert began a summer residency at a tiny but characterful new London club called the 12 Bar. Located down an alley off Denmark Street, it was one of a number of clubs in that area trying to recapture the spirit of Soho in the sixties. Indeed, the 12 Bar had been started by Phil Phillips: the very man responsible for the Cousins thirty years earlier. Alan King had had a personality clash with Bert’s agent Chas Cole, leaving Bert with a Wednesday residency at the 12 Bar, another on Fridays at the Cabbage Patch in Twickenham, and not a great deal else. ‘There was nobody booking tours,’ says Bert, ‘which was why I was doing the 12 Bar every week! It was meant to last one summer but it went on for a year. But it was around this time that I was realising that the gigs were better because I didn’t have to be involved with a band or a duo partner. I was in control of it. And because of that I put more effort and concentration into it and my performance improved.’

  Not only were Bert’s solo gigs of the mid-nineties an exciting experience for long-time fans and for younger followers whose fascination was based on the sixties’ recordings, but from the summer of 1993 he had been featuring onstage a quartet of intensely powerful songs that were to form the backbone of his first new collection of original material in ten years: an album that finally appeared, on 28 August 1995, as When The Circus Comes To Town.

  The new material was quite stunningly equal to, and stylistically reminiscent of, his greatest work of the Transatlantic era. It was as if the intervening quarter century had simply not happened. In another sense, though, it was clearly the work of a individual with a penetrating insight and stoic perspective gained only by years at the coal-face of life: ‘Walk Quietly By’ observed the breakdown of welfare for the mentally ill; ‘Morning Brings Peace Of Mind’ praised daybreak itself, with pathos and serene dignity, for release from the nightly troubles of unconscious memory; ‘Stealing The Night Away’ was less easily penetrable in content but swaggered and teased like a libidinous Delta blues; ‘The Lady Doctor From Ashington’, a fragile baroque homage to the woman who had counselled Bert through his recovery from alcoholism, was spiritually a lost gem from Rosemary Lane. Musically, Bert Jansch was drawing from the well of his past, but he had allowed his muse to gaze at last upon the 1990s. The 1990s were poised to respond in kind.

  While Cooking Vinyl was by no means a major label, it had more clout than any company Bert had been associated with in recent years and was enjoying something of a golden era. Bert joined an eclectic roster of artists with cult credibility, including Jackie Leven, Pere Ubu, Ani DiFranco and the Wedding Present. Many of these people were being independently represented by publicist Mick Houghton, whose reputation was founded on working with people broadly ‘alternative’ in outlook. Happily for Bert, Houghton was not only Cooking Vinyl’s PR of choice but an old fan, a regular at the Horseshoe who had remained an admirer ever since. Houghton’s job now was to take the ‘was’ out of sentences beginning ‘Bert Jansch’ and to build mainstream awareness. And he knew how to do it.

  ‘I’d say his profile by then was largely non-existent,’ says Houghton.14 ‘I thought it was quite strange that there hadn’t been any major reappraisal of Bert’s career up to that point. He’d basically been neglected. The thing with anyone who could be described as folk or country or anything generic is that unless there’s someone actively there to point out to people that you’re really an “alternative” act, you’re going to get stuck in that ghetto, playing and selling records to the same people. The way the media works, if you’ve got a long career like Bert has, to some extent it’s a career there to be reappraised every third record. And because I was such a huge fan anyway I knew almost without thinking about it which journalists were fans or would be likely to be interested. It wasn’t exactly difficult to draw people in.’

  Houghton ensured coverage for When The Circus Comes To Town in virtually all the national daily and Sunday broadsheets, in addition to the monthly music titles. Over the next four months he used the 12 Bar residency to entice a stream of concert reviews and interview features from publications such as Q, London’s Evening Standard, Time Out, The Guitar Magazine, Rock’n’Reel, The Scotsman and Scotland On Sunday. Almost overnight, a generation previously oblivious to Bert Jansch became aware that a bona fide ‘lost legend’ of the sixties – reputedly on a par with Jimi Hendrix, vaguely associated with Bob Dylan, influential on a host of subsequent ‘name’ players – had a terrific new record out and could be seen playing every Wednesday just round the corner from the Tottenham Court Road tube station. More to the point, he was, by all accounts, one of those rare legends still capable of living up to his reputation.

  ‘With Circus, the line we took promotionally was “This is Bert’s best album in a decade”,’ says Houghton. ‘It may or may not have been, but most people out there hadn’t heard a Bert Jansch album in ten years, so it was. The other thing we did was to major on the influence Bert had had on other people, namechecking the obvious examples. Younger, more contemporary musicians were discovering Bert. Certainly, any of the other acts that we were working with at the time and took along to the 12 Bar were all captivated. Performance wise, he was still completely on top of his game.’ A mischievous news item planted by Houghton in the Daily Star informed pop-pickers that Jarvis Cocker and Noel Gallagher had been among the ‘all-star audiences’ checking out ‘sixties guitar god’ Jansch at the club. It may or may not have been true, but the curious came in droves and Bert Jansch was emphatically back in business.

  ‘Sometimes with artists like Bert,’ says Houghton, ‘you have to make it possible for young people to admit they like him. It has to be cool, and once it is they can acknowledge it. I don’t think Circus was a truly great Bert Jansch record – I think it was half a truly great Bert Jansch record.’ Houghton’s view, shared by others who had been attending Bert’s shows and keenly awaiting the new record, was that many of the songs had an attack and an immediacy onstage that was less apparent on the record. With retrospect, however, the taut, subdued mood of the album – described in Mojo at the time as ‘a late-night, candle-lit intoxication’ – feels absolutely right. Rather than opting whole-heartedly for the ensemble bluster of Birthday Blues, Bert had re-created the dark poise and smouldering energy that had characterised his most enduring work of that era as a purely guitar/vocal performer. While accompanying musicians were selectively featured – a beautiful string arrangement for ‘Morning Brings Peace Of Mind’, a soprano sax weaving dreamily through ‘Summer Heat’, a backing chorus on ‘Back Home’ – this was very much an album in the stark tradition of Bert’s sixties’ classics.

  Oblique commentaries on modern issues and, of course, on the demons of his own psyche, dominated Circus: the title track was, almost impenetrably, a reflection on the crack cocaine epidemic (not to be read as autobiographical); ‘Living In The Shadows’, a withering metaphor on the UN’s role in the Bosnian war, seemingly conducted through television; ‘Born With The Blues’ tried to explain the other side of fame’s coin to those who would covet Bert’s celebrity. It was only those songs that strayed away from the solemn ‘period’ mood, and which were incidentally also the most lyrically obvious – ‘Step Back’, ‘Just A Dream’, ‘Honey Don’t You Understand’ and the only cover on offer, Janie Romer’s ‘No one Around’15 – that ultimat
ely denied Circus the accolade of being a ‘truly great Bert Jansch record’. But, at the time, this was a minor detail.

  ‘For too many years, Bert Jansch has been a critical renaissance waiting to happen. In a nutshell, everything that was great and magical about Jansch’s work in the sixties is here, present and correct, updated with sparse but thoroughly modern touches,’ was my own judgement, in Mojo. Other commentators had similar views: ‘his best album since the sixties’ is an accurate summary of all the major reviews published in Britain. Over in the States, the pundits went further in exploring just how and why this was such a watershed release: ‘It may have taken a while,’ concluded Chris Nickson in the Seattle Times, ‘but this is the sound of a man who’s finally found peace with himself.’ The New York Press reviewer cannily observed that while there were no obvious standout tracks ‘Circus does what a Bert Jansch album is supposed to do: it gives you hauntingly romantic songs, played in a deceptively simple manner that grows more fascinating with each listen.’ Imperfect it may have been, but Circus compares with both Rosemary Lane and LA Turnaround in having an aura definably its own, and the content to justify its continuing reputation.

  ‘For all his disdain for the career ritual – amply reflected by the pokiness of the 12 Bar Club,’ explained David Cavanagh, to the hip and happening readership of Q, ‘Jansch was once a near superstar. Nobody at the 12 Bar would mistake Jansch for a superstar now. He is a forbidding-looking, unkempt man in his early fifties who, while playing, keeps his eyes either closed or fixed on the fretboard. The songs are introduced in a murmur. He sits on a wooden chair and sings in a rich, brambled voice. When the gig is over, he goes home to West London. And every Wednesday he returns to play at the 12 Bar. He admits he finds certain areas of life difficult and relies to an extent on sympathetic management. “Being a folk musician, my head’s not geared that way. We could all do with more money, but I’m quite happy musically. I’ve got the album almost right – almost, not quite – so I’m heading in the right direction. I suppose I’m a romantic. I like words to be properly put together. I often spend months on just one line of a song.’ ”16