by Colin Harper
I see your face in every place I’ll be going
I read your words like black, hungry birds read every sowing
Rise and fall, spin and call
My name is Carnival
Sad music in the night seems a string of light out of chorus
Voices you might hear appear and disappear in the forest
Short and tall, come throw the ball
My name is Carnival
Here there is no law but the arcade’s penny claw, hanging empty
The painted, laughing smile and the turning of the stile – do not envy
And the small can steal the ball
To touch the face
Of Carnival
There comes a point for every artist where the balance changes: a point where the public no longer want or expect any further development, but rather an endless re-presenting of what is already fondly familiar to them. Some artists accept the situation and become unashamedly purveyors of nostalgia, doing so with either dignity or caricature; others wrestle with the tide, refusing to acknowledge that people move on, and often within a cruelly short passage of time.
By the time he reached 1995 and delivered his first wholly new album of the decade, Bert Jansch had been determinedly following and honouring his muse for thirty-five years. His style of writing, playing and performing, even his lyrical vocabulary, had changed essentially not one iota from the time his first album had dazzled and astounded in 1965. Whether through dogged determination or inherent inability to stray too far from what came naturally, Bert Jansch had been doing the same thing for years and the wheels of the music world had revolved to face him once again. He may never have been a household name but he had outlasted, creatively and professionally, many who were and had done so with credibility intact through long years of critical and public indifference and personal upheaval. He had traversed the sixties all but unaware of the Beatles and by the same token had survived, in blissful ignorance, any number of subsequent trends in music, emerging in the mid-nineties into the glare of a whole new generation of commentators, musicians and music-literate public. People were now at the very least deferential towards his unique status in British music history: an influence, an innovator, an enigma, perhaps even a genius, a man of few words, deep principles and unassailable integrity – a stylist as singular and as instantly recognisable as icons like Johnny Cash, Jimi Hendrix and John Coltrane.
He will continue, no doubt, to write songs which are occasionally brilliant and occasionally so-so; to make records which, at best, dazzle and surprise even hardened admirers or, at worst, do nothing to diminish his status; to confuse Neil Young with Neil Diamond, and to fail to see how he could possibly be an influence on either; to view Clive Palmer as a genius; to gravitate tantalisingly close to, and yet perennially miss, those periodic opportunities truly to ascend the ladder of popular success. He will continually play down ‘the legendary Bert Jansch’ and yet he will continue to be, without doubt, the legendary Bert Jansch.
Postscript
‘I thought it was a great scene,’ says Donovan, ‘to be able to go there to Les Cousins, stay up all night and then have breakfast in the Greek Café down in Soho. So I’m sitting there talking at six in the morning and all the deadbeats are there, all the bums, and then running into the street singers who you might call the real folk singers singing to the cinema lines: “’Allo Bert, ’ow’s it going? Bit cold, innit?” So the busking, the strippers, the students, the poets, the painters, the folk singers, the blues singers – it was a golden age. It couldn’t last forever but what does last forever is the music, and I can’t say enough about Bert’s new music. I’d heard all these horror stories where he’d got ill and nearly died and then when I heard the music, the resilience … It just blew me away.
‘But the power of all this is extraordinary. There was a young man at a gallery opening in Dublin, he comes up to me and says, “Hey, Donovan, I’m just beginning to play guitar, have you got any advice?” And the first thing that comes into my head is, “Have you heard of Bert Jansch?” Now, I knew that I would start him down a road. He didn’t know who Bert Jansch was but I said, “He’s a guy that we all learned from. If you play a little bit you’ll play more just listening to it.” And his eyes lit up as if he’d heard Bert. He got this “high” off me and I thought, “My God, it doesn’t matter that we’re in our fifties, if we’re remembered as teachers as well as guitar pickers …” He took out a pencil and said, “How’d you spell it?” And off he went. Maybe he didn’t get it or maybe he got it and his life changed. It’s not just your guitar life changes, I think your life changes if you’re exposed to a certain book, a certain artist, a certain film – and to be exposed to Bert Jansch can change your life. There should be a warning on the label!’
Epilogue
In April 1998, Bert Jansch came to Ireland. Half a dozen dates North and South were by now an annual fixture. This time around he was including two dates in the North: a Saturday night at Downpatrick Folk Club and the following night upstairs at Morrison’s Bar in the centre of Belfast. His driver and promoter for the Northern gigs, as usual, was the long-suffering Nigel Martyn, a man of both supreme musical taste and extraordinary bad luck. A few weeks earlier Nigel had promoted an Ulster Hall concert by an international rap ensemble, then currently No.1 in the UK charts, and still managed to lose his shirt. Promoting Bert, it had always been a case of love before money. Upwards of a hundred punters on the door allowed all concerned to cover the costs, make a healthy profit and enjoy a great night of music from one of the masters. These days, with Bert’s legendary status assured, even Nigel could always count on those goals being met.
After the Downpatrick gig, with Nigel still having a good time drowning his sorrows in pleasant company, I offered to drive Bert up to Belfast. ‘By the way,’ said Bert, at one point along the dark and winding highway, ‘would you consider finishing the book?’ I was shocked and stunned. If there had, at that juncture, been a road sign announcing ‘Wrong Way: Next Left’, I would quite possibly have taken it. This was a man who seemingly never even reads his own reviews, and though never standing in the way of my earlier efforts at writing a book he had certainly never displayed any active interest in it. For myself, the passing of several years and the consequent replacement of naive enthusiasm with greater knowledge and insight had not made the subject of a Bert Jansch biography less daunting: quite the opposite. I could not imagine what had suddenly made it seem like a good idea to Bert. I still don’t know the answer to that one.
I reviewed his show the following night, leavened by the thrill of hearing no fewer than five new songs, and promised to give the matter some thought. It would be a major undertaking, not only professionally but personally. We agreed to meet in August during the Edinburgh Festival, conduct some interviews and review any progress with publishers. Where previously, in the early nineties, no one had been interested, several publishing houses were now responding positively. In November, a deal was signed with David Reynolds of Bloomsbury Publishing, over lunch in an agreeable restaurant two doors down from the old Cousins premises in Greek Street. Reynolds had been a Cousins regular himself in those days. It felt right.
Bert continued to go about his business: he was available and willing to do whatever was necessary to assist with the project. My own conviction was that the best way to proceed was to work on in seclusion with an already towering collection of researched and accumulated material relating to both Bert and his peers. It had taken the middle months of 1998 just to catalogue the stuff in preparation. Local vendors of box files and envelope folders had had a field day.
Back in May 1998, Bert had negotiated himself out of his contractual association with Cooking Vinyl, unhappy with aspects of their operation and with the company’s attitude towards him as an artist over the past year. The lingering management association with Kresanna Aigner had been amicably concluded and a new manager by the name of Brian Hallin – a ‘safe pair of hands’, unlikel
y to push Bert into any visionary schemes, wide-boy transactions or relentlessly ambitious touring strategies – was welcomed to the fold. In December 1998 another new name on the scene, Matthew Quinn, asked for a meeting with Brian and myself in London. He wanted to make a documentary on Bert, and to someone already experiencing the malaise and terror of standing upon the foothills of such an Everest, in print form, Matt’s enthusiasm was most refreshing. He had, he explained, recently been the best man at a friend’s wedding. That friend was a Bert Jansch fan and Matt, blissfully unaware of the awe factor, had simply tracked Bert down and asked if he’d play at the wedding. He had said yes.
Three months later, in March 1999, it was my turn to get married. My fiancée Heather, who had first met and indeed first heard Bert that night in Downpatrick, had suggested I ask Bert to play. It was a preposterous idea: the wedding was set to take place in a particularly inaccessible corner of Donegal, Bert was a living legend with surely better things to do, we could at best cover his expenses but – well, he could only say no. He didn’t: he said yes. The fact that Bert Jansch would willingly make such a gesture says a great deal about his character and at least partly explains why both Matt and I have invested time, money and effort on documenting the life and work of this extraordinary individual.
Matt began filming in May 1999, and in August we all convened at Bert’s now annual concert at the Edinburgh Book Festival. Matt and Darren, his partner in the documentary project, would spend their trip dashing around Scotland interviewing various ‘Chapter Three’ people – Dolina MacLennan, Owen Hand, Len Partridge – and filming Bert’s gig. Heather and I were simply enjoying a holiday that just happened to coincide, as most of our holidays seem to do, with a Bert Jansch concert nearby. On this occasion, Bert debuted in public ‘Caledonia Forever Free’, a song he had demoed long before and was then considering as the title track of his next album. It was, he confided to the four or five hundred present, still a psychological hurdle to perform a song in public for the first time.
Between May and October that year, Matt filmed several gigs around the country, interviewed on camera many of those whose tributes and recollections appear in this book, and others besides, and enjoyed Bert’s cooperation in a number of specially staged sequences. Bert had agreed to perform three of his most archetypal songs – ‘Morning Brings Peace Of Mind’, ‘Fresh As A Sweet Sunday Morning’ and the immortal if rarely aired ‘Reynardine’ – several times over in the controlled environment of an empty Cecil Sharp House. He had also participated in genuinely spontaneous duets with two celebrity admirers he had never previously met, Bernard Butler and Kelly Joe Phelps.
If Bernard and Kelly Joe were nervous of playing with Bert, they were not alone in that feeling: ‘I’m actually terrified of those kind of situations,’ says Bert, on reflection, ‘but I’m proud that I played with Bernard and Kelly Joe. If I met Jimmy Page now and tried to play something with him there’d be nothing worthwhile happening. Here, something came out that was new, that hadn’t been there before – and this was us meeting for the first time.’
In April 1999, in partnership with Loren, Bert finally acquired a new and more home-like flat, down a leafy lane in Kilburn in North London. In June they were engaged. While Bert continued the business of writing and recording songs for his next album, and Loren continued to juggle various writing and teaching obligations of her own, the complex wheels of organisation began turning for what was to to be a lavish long-weekend wedding celebration on the Isle of Arran, culminating with the ceremony itself on 1 November.
Many of Loren’s extended family had flown in from South Africa, yet it was probably Bert’s family who were more surprised at being in the same place at the same time. Along with sister Mary and her family, and his own son Adam, Bert’s elusive brother Charlie had also accepted the invitation. It was only the second time he’d seen Bert in thirty years and thus politely he concluded that he would be of little use to a biographer. From the music world, Gordon Giltrap, Maggie Boyle, Johnny ‘Guitar’ Hodge and Bert’s agent John Stoneyport were there (Ralph McTell, Jacqui McShee and Dick Gaughan all had prior commitments, while Anne Briggs was remaining elusive); from the Howff days, there was only his thus-far mysterious friend ‘Wee Jimmy’. Matthew Quinn and I had both been invited, somewhat unnerved by Bert’s prior suggestion that this time it would be us who would have to play. Was he serious? It transpired that he was.
‘Sometimes it irritates me,’ Bert told an interviewer from the Evening Standard in 1995, ‘people saying, ‘If you hadn’t done that then this would have happened. It’s a strange thing: it doesn’t bother me personally [thinking of what might have been], but it does seem to bother a lot of other people on my behalf.’
There are a fair number of people ‘around’ Bert in a semi-detached sort of way – old friends, admirers, other musicians and people in the media – who are all united by a strange sense of aspiration on his behalf. It is perhaps there not only because he is such a hero to all of us, but because he seems entirely disinterested in playing the music business game and remains thus desperately exposed to being torn apart at regular intervals by the sharks in that treacherous sea. From my own perspective as one of those vaguely orbiting Bert over the past few years, I could recount several examples of where I believe wrong career decisions were made, business and musical associations made with dubious individuals, and opportunities missed. To those of us in this virtual Bert Jansch solar system, the shrugging of shoulders is a regular occurance. He has done it his way, and he shall continue to do so.
Towards the end of the writing process, in late November 1999, Matthew Quinn secured a broadcast slot with Channel 4, for June 2000, timed to coincide with the original publication of this book and the release of Crimson Moon, Bert’s first album for Castle Communications (which subsequently became Sanctuary) current owners of the Transatlantic catalogue. For Bert the decision to sign with them was a pragmatic one – at least now the flood of reissues may conceivably be contained. He is arguably now producing his best work since those Transatlantic recordings which first brought him to prominence in the sixties, and he will hopefully continue to do so for a long time to come.
Following the release of Crimson Moon, Castle released a double CD Jansch anthology, reining in material from several labels, much of it not previously or only obscurely available on CD. Also entitled Dazzling Stranger, this was the first Jansch compilation to cover his whole career and is the ideal introduction for newcomers. A systematic series of individual album reissues of Bert’s catalogue also began in late 2000, superbly remastered and beautifully repackaged using the original artwork together with extensive new sleevenotes and other new material. A box set of the Pentangle era, featuring much rare and previously unreleased material, is scheduled for release in 2006, while one focused on Bert’s solo career is also likely at some point.
Two tribute projects appeared around the time of this book’s publication: Gordon Giltrap’s Janschology, in May 2000; and, in September, a various artists set on Market Square Records entitled People on the Highway – a fascinating collection of Bert’s peers, associates and more recent admirers ending in style the age-long dearth of Jansch covers on record. In February 2001 Bert’s contribution to music was acknowledged more formally, again for the first time, with the honour of a Lifetime Achievement award from BBC Radio 2 at their Folk Awards – the sole prevoius recipient being Martin Carthy.
In November 2003 Bert celebrated his sixtieth birthday with a concert at London’s Queen Elizabeth Hall, where he was joined on stage by Johnny Marr, Bernard Butler, Ralph McTell, Hope Sandoval and David Roback (both from Mazzy Star) and Colm O’Ciosoig (from My Bloody Valentine). Bernard, Ralph, Hope and Colm, along with Dave Swarbrick, had all guested on Bert’s 2002 album Edge of a Dream. Shortly before the birthday concert BBC4 organised a special concert for television at St Luke’s Church, including guest appearances from Jacqui McShee, Ralph McTell, Johnny Marr and Bernard Butler. Taken alongside t
he documentaries Acoustic Routes (1992) and Dreamweaver (2000), the BBC4 concert provides all the evidence needed for the case that Bert Jansch’s music and artistry has survived intact many years beyond the sixties in which it first dazzled and inspired. In February 2006 the same station broadcast director Mike Connolly’s Folk Britannia, a remarkable three-part series chronicling the British folk revival from the time of Ewan MacColl and Lonnie Donegan to the present, including interviews with, and vintage film of, many of those featured in this book. I was honoured and delighted to have been involved with the series, in a small way, and commend it as a kind of visual companion piece to this book.
As for Bert himself, he has an inclination to do less touring; has an idea to construct a guitar course, for sale over the internet; and has a plan to document his music in a book, in printed notation form. Asked to choose a favourite from his own recordings he says this: ‘Avocet and possibly one or two tracks on Rosemary Lane. But there’s always one track on every album. People don’t realise that I’ve a set idea of each album and if it hasn’t worked out that way I’ll reject that album. Toy Balloon started off great, fantastic. But the finished album, I couldn’t listen to it.’ Far from wallowing in it, he has always been slightly uncomfortable about the increasing quantity of celebrity musicians who cite his influence: ‘I don’t pay much attention to it. It does bug me a little in that with interviewers the first questions will be Jimmy Page, Neil Young – and the list goes on from there! But it’s all part of being in the music business. It’s like being a bricklayer. If it’s the only thing you know how to do, you have to be in the building trade to do it.’
