Dazzling Stranger

by Colin Harper

  Nevertheless, as the 2006 edition of this book was being prepared, it was clear yet another generation of musicians has discovered Bert’s music. Current acoustic music icon Beth Orton has been loudly proclaiming her admiration of Bert and his influence on her (she guests on Bert’s new album, scheduled for release coincidental with the second coming of this book). Across the water Devendra Banhart, leader of the current resurgence of interest in folk and acoustic music, and the musicians around him – Vetiver, Espers, Joanna Newsom et al – are all dedicated fans and claim Bert amongst their principal inspirations. Indeed, with the advent of the BBC4 session and sixtieth birthday concert in 2003, each involving an array of musical peers and celebrity admirers, one could say that Bert has now accepted his somewhat rarefied position as an icon to many other musicians – while not in any way changing his view that it’s all about the music. If those admirers can help him with that, then that, and not the press cuttings, is where it matters.

  It is my sincere hope that this book, Folk Britannia, the various documentaries, tribute albums and other projects mentioned above will go some way towards encouraging a fuller appreciation of the man and his music, loyally beloved of many and surely now secure in an era in which he may be discovered and cherished by many more.

  Afterword

  Bert Jansch never took a great interest in the prevailing trends of the music world. So when an emerging vanguard of young folk pickers, singer-songwriters and modally-minded expeditionaries around the world rediscovered his music, it was perhaps no surprise that it took others to alert him to the fact. To the likes of Devendra Banhart, Joanna Newsom, Espers and, later, Laura Marling, mentioning Bert Jansch or Pentangle was something akin to uttering a secret password. Over in Crickhowell, Wales, obsessive Pentangle fans Jo Bartlett and Danny Hagan had overseen the exponential growth of Green Man – a festival especially created for all the bearded boys and lank-haired girls who revered Bert as intensely as, forty years previously, the likes of Jimmy Page and Nick Drake had done. But, typically, it was Bert’s wife Loren who was quickest to nurture the cross-generational bond between Bert and his new acolytes. For his 2006 album, Loren helped secure Bert a deal with esteemed US indie label Drag City – home to hip left-field mavericks like Pavement and Smog. On hand to co-produce the new songs was Devendra Banhart’s right-hand man Noah Georgeson. With guest appearances from the likes of Banhart and Beth Orton, Bert’s twenty-third album The Black Swan foregrounded the autumnal folk colours in his playing. ‘Katie Cruel’, the album’s eponymous opener and a re-recorded ‘A Woman Like You’ numbered among the many highlights of what amounted to an inspired contemporary companion piece to Bert’s final Transatlantic album Rosemary Lane. Within weeks of The Black Swan’s release, Bert was summoned to the Mojo Awards. At the ceremony, at which Bert received the Merit gong from Roy Harper and Beth Orton, Elton John paid tribute to him, recalling how he and Bernie Taupin used to listen to Bert’s albums in their musical infancy.

  Elsewhere, the measure of Bert’s influence was further underscored by the release of Family Tree – a compilation of early Nick Drake songs which featured a version of Bert’s own ‘Strolling Down the Highway’. As was his wont, Bert seemed to derive a measure of bewildered gratification in this renewed interest in his work. In 2007, at a Pete Doherty-curated night of entertainment in Hackney, Bert was asked to do a turn. Amid Peter’s friends – a rag-tag assortment of would-be poets, drug buddies and hangers-on – Bert outshone everyone who played before and after him. What must he have been thinking as Pete took the vocal on ‘Needle Of Death’, puffing up his own myth with a song that was surely written to puncture the notion of heroin as a glamorous drug? We may never know – Bert’s only words to the audience that night came when he wryly introduced himself as ‘an old man from the 60s.’ Just as Bert’s cachet rose, so did that of Pentangle. The heavens seemed to be perfectly aligned for a reunion of the folk supergroup whose music – after all these years – still sounded as daringly progressive as it had on those very first improvisations at the Horseshoe on Tottenham Court Road. For all of that, getting the original five members in the same room presented a series of seemingly insurmountable obstacles. Bert and John Renbourn hadn’t crossed paths for several years. Danny Thompson was the most in-demand double-bass player in Britain. Jacqui McShee was touring regularly with her husband Gerry Conway in Jacqui McShee’s Pentangle. And then, of course, there was Terry Cox. Since opening a restaurant in Minorca, Pentangle’s drummer had reportedly not touched his kit for decades.

  Once again, Loren’s tireless work opened up the channels of communication. Also instrumental in hastening that process was this book’s author Colin Harper who was commissioned by Sanctuary Records to curate 2008’s ‘The Time Has Come 1967—73’, a four CD Pentangle box set. With all five members of Pentangle in regular communication once again, all they needed was a suitable incentive to reconvene in the same room. In the end, it was an award – a lifetime achievement prize at the 2008 Radio 2 Folk Awards – that threw the original lineup back into a rehearsal room for the first time in thirty-five years. Other musicians who played that night had yet to be born when Pentangle last played together, but none of them sounded as fearlessly innovative as Pentangle did as they refamiliarised themselves with ‘Light Flight’ and ‘Bruton Town’. Eighteen months later and clearly delighting in each other’s company, a properly reformed Pentangle embarked on a tour that met with a flurry of critical superlatives. Two months later, a headlining slot at Green Man ratified something that had been in the air for a while. Amid a bill full of young bands who all counted Bert and Pentangle as a key influence, the stars shone benignly as Bert leant forward to sing a mesmerising version of Basket Of Light’s centrepiece ‘Hunting Song’.

  By the time, Neil Young asked Bert to join him on a string of American shows, Bert’s stock was raised higher still by a long-overdue CD reissue programme of his 70s output. Having long been out of print, L.A. Turnaround had assumed an almost mythical status among collectors. Far from disappointing, original vinyl copies of the album – which featured ‘Fresh as a Sweet Sunday Morning’, the song he sang to Loren on their wedding day – rose even higher as the quality of the songs became apparent to Bert’s new fans. Having spent over four decades singing Bert’s praises, Neil Young deemed it time to demonstrate his gratitude to the singer whose first album he would listen to over and over again in his Toronto bedroom. ‘He’s a great guitar player and that’s what everybody talks about,’ Young told Mojo, ‘but they really can’t put their finger on the other thing which is his songs and his voice.’ Bert’s return to the live stage suggested that he was getting the better of the lung cancer that had already forced him to cancel some shows with the Canadian singer. A handful of further Pentangle shows in 2011 also suggested that, albeit with half a lung removed, Bert was on the mend. And yet, at that year’s Glastonbury it was still startling to see the Bert who gingerly shuffled on stage to pick up his guitar. His clothes seemed way too big for him, such was his dramatic weight loss. Loren had been seriously ill at the same time as Bert, but she too had been given the all-clear. That day she mentioned something to me about Bert facing further complications. Her tone was upbeat and emphatic. It was going to be alright. If the firmness of his handshake after the show was anything to go by, perhaps she was right.

  In fact, both Loren and Bert were seriously ill – though it’s unclear the degree to which either was aware of the fact. Pentangle had some further commitments and Bert had every intention of honouring them. They had even made time to record some new songs together – though quite how many is still unclear. Back in 1967, it was entirely apt that the Royal Festival Hall – built in the spirit of post-war optimism and synonymous with the promise of tomorrow – should have introduced Pentangle to the wider world. Forty-four years later, on a beautiful August evening, it seemed no less fitting that this was where they would perform for the final time, and where Bert would effectively say his final goodbyes.
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  In the hours after his death on October 5th 2011, Bert’s music filled the airwaves. On her BBC 6 Music show, Lauren Laverne broke down when she announced Bert’s passing. Other DJs gave over their entire shows to his music. Two days later, the Guardian devoted the cover of its Film & Music section to him. Among the luminaries to pay their respects in those days, Neil Young (on behalf of himself and his wife Pegi) wrote, ‘he was a hero of mine, and one of my greatest influences. Bert was one of the all time great acoustic guitarists and singer-songwriters.’ Johnny Marr also paid fulsome tribute. ‘He completely reinvented guitar playing and set a standard that is still unequalled today. Without Bert Jansch, rock music as it developed in the 60s and 70s would have been very different.’

  Bert’s funeral took place in Highgate Cemetery almost exactly a month after his death, on November 4th. Friends, relations, colleagues and admirers gathered together in the golden autumn sunshine to help send him off – among them many of Bert’s most esteemed folk guitar peers. Anyone visiting the cemetery to pay their respects won’t have any trouble finding Bert. The prominent location of his headstone – almost the first you see as you walk into the cemetery – is commensurate to his incalculable, continuing influence.

  Pete Paphides, November 2011

  Author’s Note

  It’s been six years since the first edition of this book and, as you might expect, a number of things have happened. For a start, I actually interviewed Davy Graham, the man who Bert and all acoustic guitar players of note from that generation regard as the wellspring from which their very careers and much of their musical ideas flowed. It might seem to have been editorially amiss not to have cornered this king of the jungle during the book’s research but, rightly or not, I judged that to bother a man with both health problems and an infamous antipathy to Bert Jansch, a musician whose career could be paraphrased as picking up the baton from Davy and running with it to glory while the master faded from view, would be insensitive. Besides, there was – in addition to the first-hand testimonials and recollections of his peers – a fair amount of previously published interview material from Graham from which to draw.

  Thus it was that it was only during the promotion of Dazzling Stranger first time around, when commissioned to write a compare-and-contrast piece on Bert and Davy for Mojo magazine, that I decided to grasp the nettle. Davy was charming and erudite, if not a little eccentric, and his views on Bert were interesting.

  ‘He’s just as bloody-minded as I was,’ he declared. ‘He sat in the corner and played all day. But I didn’t have the same formation as Bert. I was southern, where Tennyson observed people to be capricious and fickle, while the northerner is the true romantic. Bert’s a romantic, undoubtedly, and this James Dean image he had with women is something that was alien to me. I thought that a bit juvenile. I read On the Road and formed the impression that Jack Kerouac might be the same sort of person!’

  As to that old rivalry: ‘I wasn’t dealing in mystique, I was trying to be a good guitar player. I’ll have a drink with Bert but what will the conversation be? I don’t think we’ll have anything in common – gardening, maybe that.’

  Well, whether they compared notes on the finer points of chrysanthemums I can’t say, but it has certainly been one of the great delights of the past few years to have seen, in Britain, a revival of interest in Davy Graham’s outstanding contribution to music – manifested not only in documentaries, in print and in the remastering of his remarkable back catalogue, but in a series of concerts during 2005 as a double-bill with Bert Jansch. His health may never permit a full-scale concert renaissance, but there is at least a sense that Davy Graham, the master, is no longer a forgotten man.

  Sadly, the past six years have also seen the passing of a number of Bert’s fellow travellers: Owen Hand, Nathan Joseph and Gill Cook among them. I remain grateful to all three for their generous help in the process of writing this book and fondly remember a phone call from Nat, shortly after receiving an advance copy of the finished book, to tell me with some delight that he wouldn’t be suing me after all. I like to think he was joking.

  As for Bert, his standing has, in the intervening period, continued to rise. In 2000 Matthew Quinn’s fine documentary Dreamweaver, featuring many of those interviewed in this book, aired on Channel 4 – a year in which not one but two Bert Jansch tribute albums also appeared. In 2001 he was given a Lifetime Achievement gong at the BBC Radio 2 Folk Awards, presented by rock legend Johnny Marr and received with characteristic humility. Bert being Bert, of course, he declined a request to perform something nice and folky from his new album, Crimson Moon, with Marr and fellow rock icon Bernard Butler, and opted instead for the visceral ecological dark of ‘Poison’.

  In November 2003, on the back of Edge of a Dream – a body of work I regard as among his very best – he celebrated his sixtieth birthday with a memorable concert at London’s Queen Elizabeth Hall featuring numerous guests and elaborately worked-out arrangements of songs old and new. Many of the guests had, only the week before, enjoyed a dry run at St Luke’s Church for the benefit of BBC4, the hour-long broadcast of which added another undulation to the ever-increasing hillock of celluloid Jansch crying out for some kind of release on DVD.

  At the time of writing, the British media are awash with declarations of a new folk revival. BBC4 are screening a season of programmes around Folk Britannia, a new three-part documentary series which doesn’t rewrite history as such but rather restores it, after decades of the inconveniently massive, if brief, impact of the sixties folk revival and its artists being generally ignored by, airbrushed-out of, or shunted into a footnote in the Standard Text of British Pop History. Whether all the talk of a new folk revival amounts to anything more than a flash in the pan and a few neo-beardy blokes and elfin girls getting profiled in Sunday supplements remains to be seen. But once again a new generation are name-dropping Bert Jansch – amazed and delighted at discovering a home-grown icon of understated cool and singular artistry, accessible and approachable yet clearly with the mark of an outsider about him, a British Johnny Cash. To my mind, there’s no one else like him, and I remain both honoured and humbled to have, in retrospect, spent a rather hand-to-mouth writing career building towards the convergence of circumstance, enthusiasm and requisite ability that allowed me to tell his tale and to celebrate the people and places that long ago made it possible. I suppose we’re all outsiders these days.

  Colin Harper

  February 2006

  Acknowledgments

  This book would not have been possible without the generous cooperation of a great number of people. Firstly, I wish to thank David Reynolds for commissioning the work and for his and his editor Helena Drakakis’ encouragements and constructive criticisms of draft chapters. Also, with the departure of David from the company in 1999, my appreciation to Matthew Hamilton and his team for seeing it through.

  Having had, for some months, various people enquiring about its availability – and finding myself on the verge of a J. R. Hartley situation – it was a delight to find, in January 2006, after a phone call to Bloomsbury’s acting paperbacks supremo Holly Roberts, that there was pretty instant karma on the subject of an enhanced reprint. Some might say that where there’s a will there’s a way; well, luckily for me there was Will Webb, whose beautiful design work not only graces the cover of this edition but whose infectious enthusiasm for the book itself was, I’m told, significant in its resurrection. I’m grateful to Holly, to Will and to everyone else at Bloomsbury for such speedy decision making and for such palpable interest in the Stranger’s unexpected return – and grateful to Bert for his ongoing endorsement of the book and his willingness to hit the campaign trail again.

  Special thanks are due, this time around, to Johnny Marr for readily agreeing to provide a new foreword. ‘How soon would you like it?’ he said. ‘How soon is now?’ said I. Well, actually I didn’t – but let’s just say the deadline didn’t allow for too much wandering around the Lake Distr
ict in search of inspiration. Thanks Johnny!

  Further additions include a new Author’s Note, Epilogue and Appendix. The discography is substantially refined, expanded and updated – with Loren Jansch’s assistance – from one prepared for the original edition of the book, unused at that time for reasons of space and cost. The main body of the text, however, remains unaltered from the first paperback edition of 2001, which had seen a small number of factual errors present in the hardback edition corrected – mainly spellings of Scottish place names. I’m grateful to Trevor Hodgett, Larry Roddy and Rab Adams for pointing out such errors.

  While a wide variety of print sources have been consulted, and acknowledged in the bibliography and footnotes, the diligent reader may notice occasional (and mostly minor) differences in detail. Similarly, those familiar with my own previous writings on Bert Jansch and his peers in a variety of newspapers, magazines and sleevenotes may also spot the odd deviance. If at all possible, particularly with regard to chapters two to six, I have tried to verify conclusively every point of detail used. Where this has not been possible – for example, the dating of Brownie McGhee’s visit to The Howff which so influenced Bert in the early weeks of his guitar playing, or the precise relationship between Davy Graham and Bert Jansch’s versions of Mingus’ ‘Better Get It In Your Soul’ – I have provided footnote discussions on the matters in question. As a rule, however, if something is presented as fact, particularly in those early chapters which have benefitted from the most rigourous draft ‘referree-ing’ from both interviewees and independent experts on the period, it overrides anything to the contrary published previously by either myself or others. This is not to say that my work is infallible but rather to assert that everything reasonable and viable has been done to attain maximum accuracy.