by Colin Harper
‘The name evoked something,’ remembers John Wilson, a young drummer in Belfast who would shortly rise to prominence with the blues-rock trio Taste. ‘We read the Melody Maker religiously, from the price on the front to the printing information on the back. You’d read his name in the Melody Maker so you assumed he must actually be somebody, and that when he walked around London everybody would be nodding and saying, “Wow, there’s the great Bert Jansch!” The same with Alexis Korner. It made you feel that if you were in London these were the sort of people you would meet, which was all total rubbish but for a young kid sitting there day-dreaming that’s what it was all about. Bert was an inspiration to a lot of musicians in Belfast because he was a lone wolf, the good player out on his own. I must admit, in those days the man’s music helped me through all that period of getting away and doing it in the real world. He represented to people like me all that was good about the music business.’
Wilson’s testimony is not unique. All over Britain individuals were discovering Bert Jansch. Rab Noakes, a young Scot, later a successful songwriter and producer himself, vividly recalls the moment he made the connection: ‘It was the summer of 1965. I was on holiday in London and came across the first album in a shop window display. I remember being entranced by the photograph and intrigued by the name. I went into the store and played the record in a little booth and I can honestly say I’d never heard anything like it. I bought the LP and brought it back to Alloa and spent much time trying to play it all. I had limited success but much of it remained, and remains still, out of reach. Bert became something of a hero, and the first album was played endlessly until the second one appeared. I had no idea then that he came from Scotland and had been part of the Edinburgh scene. That scene was already a bit mythological to people of my age anyway, and we would travel far to catch performers from that era, particularly Owen Hand and Archie Fisher.’
Like so many others, Rab Noakes made his way, in 1966, to London: ‘I spent many evenings at folk clubs to listen, learn and get up for floor spots,’ he recalls. ‘By this time I could play a few Bert numbers. I saw Bert play a couple of times and won’t ever forget one night at the Scot’s Hoose. I was asked to do a floor spot and had opted for an unaccompanied song from Scotland, “The Merchant’s Son”, a narrative about the guile of the poor pitted against the naivete of the wealthy. As I was singing I recognised Bert standing over at the bar beside Bruce Dunnet, who ran the club. When I finished the song he wove across the room towards me with a pint in his hand which he gave to me with a compliment. I was dumbstruck and delighted, and really quite surprised to see someone I admired acting in such a down-to-earth manner. It was, though, as I found out later, very typical of his generosity.’
Bert had brought an end to his residencies at Les Cousins and the Scot’s Hoose in December 1965, although he would still perform at both venues periodically throughout 1966 – 67. Established as he now was, if Bert did not feel, in a given month, like playing at the Cousins, the Scot’s Hoose or even in London at all, he would simply not do so.1 The new year would see other significant changes for Bert. He would release two more albums, one in full collaboration with John Renbourn, both very different from his previous work. He would only rarely now allow himself to be booked for all-nighters, at any venue. As the year wore on he would become increasingly viable as a concert artist. And at some point in the spring he decided that the scene at Somali Road had become intolerable. Along with John Renbourn, and without Les Bridger, Bert moved into a flat at 23 St Edmund’s Terrace, in St John’s Wood. There would, at least, be no more interruptions from Donovan’s people looking for songs. Indeed, things were beginning to go momentarily awry for Donovan, who spent most of 1966 in litigation with his management and/or in America, preventing the release of any new product for the best part of a year.2
Bert had been wise to have remained semi-detached from Stephens and Eden and the ‘ducking and diving’ side of the music business they represented. Aside from anything else, his personality was not equipped to deal with public recognition on a par with Donovan’s. ‘Bert was never somebody who was going to be marketed,’ says Martin Carthy. ‘He was unacceptable. Nobody could get their heads round the way he played guitar and sang, not in a commercial sense. That’s not an insult to Bert, that’s just a fact.’
There was nevertheless a clamour of expectation surrounding Bert, manifest from his earliest interviews: ‘Everybody asks me what my message is. The answer is that I’m not trying to do anything in particular,’ he had told the MM in August 1965.3 At the beginning of 1966 his views appeared in print again, in an Oxford University magazine: ‘When I record I’m not recording for anyone, just myself,’ he told his questioner, Robin Denselow. ‘I’m not in the record business for money. I don’t sell much but I’m quite happy: I mean, I sold about 1,500 in two or three months, then Donovan brings out an LP and within a week he sells 8,000.’ Of more interest to Bert was his new direction: ‘I do a lot of work with John now and we dig doing it,’ he said. ‘Words mean a lot but you’ve got to have a reason for writing them. You receive more from hearing a sound than you do from working out words, that’s why I’m now mainly interested in instrumentals. You should leave words alone until you’ve something to say.’4 For the moment, Bert Jansch had nothing more to say.
There You Go, the debut LP from Dorris Henderson and John Renbourn, jointly credited, appeared on Columbia in February 1966. John’s solo debut John Renbourn appeared on Transatlantic the following month and suffered greatly by comparison. Some of the material was similar, but less polished (the recordings were year-old demo sessions), lacking the character brought by a vocal stylist of Henderson’s stature. The two instrumentals with Bert Jansch, ‘Noah And Rabbit’ and ‘Blue Bones’, were quite beyond some people: ‘They seem to have no hatstand upon which to hang themselves,’ declared Folk Scene’s reviewer, Dave Moran, adding that ‘if John Renbourn is to progress artistically then he must stop being delighted with his own ability’. This was a harsh view but one that perhaps needed to be expressed, not only of Renbourn but of Davy Graham (especially) and Bert Jansch (potentially). All three were now perceived as a quite distinctive by-product of the folk revival and their technical accomplishments were now taken as read. ‘They’ve proved that they can exist as an independent “third stream”, influenced by both folk and jazz,’ wrote Karl Dallas in MM. ‘They’ve now got to produce some really memorable music that stands up on its own account.’
While no folk venue, barring the Scot’s Hoose, managed to establish a lasting presence in a Soho dominated by the Cousins, the latter’s success influenced existing clubs nearby. The Marquee, the premier R&B venue in London and at that stage owned by Chris Barber, was just around the corner in Wardour Street. Ken Colyer’s Studio 51 was another R&B spot, in nearby Great Newport Street. Within a few months of the Cousins opening, both would be running at least one folk/blues night a week – at Colyer’s club a Saturday all-nighter. Bert rarely played the Marquee but was regularly featured, as a soloist, at Studio 51.
Bert was also now performing sporadically with John Renbourn. Their London platform was always the Cousins, with John joining Bert almost every week in the last three months of Bert’s Thursday residency. The collaboration continued well into 1966 although opportunities were less regular, partly because each artist now commanded, individually, the highest club fees available. As a duo they were in theory unaffordable, but in practice the partnership was too engrossing to let finance get in the way.
The strange fusions of styles and influences that marked Bert And John, their inevitable joint recording, paved the way for a more fully realised exploration of ideas in a full group context, though at the time the record did little to assuage those who felt this was all just virtuous noodling by the technically impressive. ‘On the whole this is a pleasant, unmemorable record,’ concluded Karl Dallas, ‘which will be required listening for everyone interested in well-played guitar. But very little of it sticks very
long in the mind.’
‘It was one of those albums me and John did virtually in an afternoon,’ says Bert. ‘We did actually put some thought into it but a lot of it was a jam. The album itself is only fourteen minutes long – seven minutes a side – but there’s probably twenty-four tracks on it!’ Bert’s memory is a caricature, but only just: the album is twenty-six minutes long with twelve tracks. Some of the material and arrangements delivered on the promise of ‘Lucky Thirteen’ (the pair’s sharply focused duet on It Don’t Bother Me), while others fooled around with arpeggios and produced nothing of consequence.
Barring two vocal tracks, a dishevelled crack at Anne Briggs’s ‘The Time Has Come’ and ‘Soho’, a brooding Jansch original destined to be covered on demos by both Sandy Denny and Nick Drake, the album was instrumental and very much of a style. It brought the modern jazz influence to the fore and displayed on its cover a couple of cool young hipsters smoking thin cigarettes in a darkened room and playing some inscrutable and doubtless eminintly fashionable board game (its name was Go). The iconography of sleeve design was desperately important in those days, a broken vase from which entire civilisations could be built in the minds of the followers of such cult celebrities.
Having found the ‘real studio’ work for It Don’t Bother Me a pressurised experience, Bert And John had been recorded by Bill Leader in the front room at St Edmunds Terrace. It was one of three albums involving its namesakes which Leader recorded in the summer of 1966. Among the others was Renbourn’s second album, Another Monday, recorded in Leader’s Camden flat – infinitely better than his debut and, as with Bert And John, tentatively pushing forward with new ideas. The rudimentary blues covers were still in evidence, with vocal colouring from Jacqui McShee, but Renbourn’s interest in Early Music had now risen to the surface with the beautifully crafted Elizabethan pastiche ‘Ladye Nothing’s Toye Puff’ and the inspired combination of guitar and oboe in ‘One For William’, a remarkably original trek along the borders of jazz and baroque.
The third album in this restlessly inventive trilogy was the most astonishing of all. Credited to Bert Jansch, though featuring Renbourn prominently on four of its eight tracks, it too had been recorded at Leader’s place and its title was Jack Orion. The ideas had been brewing in Bert’s mind and fermenting in his playing style for the previous year or more, and this was consequently the most focused, taut and energized product of the trilogy. Its impact was immense. Bert had at last committed to record the first fruits of his explorations with traditional music, relying exclusively on DADGAD or ‘dropped D’ tunings, that had begun with Anne Briggs before even his first album had been released.
‘Jack Orion really turned people upside down,’ says Martin Carthy. ‘Bert And John not so much. At the time, Jack Orion was the one where people just sat back and thought, “What is he trying to do?” It was just so outrageous and different, so unlike anything else that anybody else had ever played – and the title track was nine minutes long! For us twenty- to twenty-five year-olds ballads were still boring things which you had to get down to as few verses as possible. We didn’t actually understand this idea that it’s not a question of how long a ballad is, it’s the fact that it does so much in such a short space of time: so it’s thirty verses and ten minutes long – that’s two and a half hours in a film. And if you give it just as much concentration as you give a film you’re going to be just as excited.’
‘Jack Orion’ itself was the vestige of a traditional melody, reconstructed by Bert Lloyd as a narrative on the sexually charged adventures of a demonic fiddler. Bert Jansch’s version succeeded more through the intensity of performance than through any great accuracy in execution: this was a relentlessly dark, dense assault upon the hallowed tradition. Other tracks, however ‘Trad Arr.’ in their credits, were vehicles for the scattergun imagination behind Bert’s instrumental work. His interpretation of ‘The Gardener’, a song learned from Owen Hand, was wildly impressionistic – a wordless vocal scatting some rumour of the song’s melody atop a cyclical, string-snapping riff which reappearred in the arrangements of Ewan MacColl’s ‘The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face’ (sensitively performed, and a moment of light in the modal darkness) and the immortal ‘Blackwater Side’.
That song at least, by far the most crafted piece on the record, had already been played around the clubs. Al Stewart had been following Bert around, keenly observing this revolutionary new playing style and determined to master it. A few weeks before Jack Orion appeared, Al had booked a studio and session players to make his own record debut. Jimmy Page, an established sessioneer, turned up to play guitar and during a tea-break Al played him what he believed to be Bert’s accompaniment for ‘Blackwater Side’. It was possibly Page’s first acquaintance with the DADGAD tuning, and the seeds were sown of what would later become a distinctively folky, eastern-influenced but very British element in mainstream seventies rock that would have wide-ranging reverberations in that world.
In his subsequent capacity as a member of Led Zeppelin, the biggest rock group of the seventies, Page would be enthusing wildly on the topic of Jansch for years to come: ‘A real dream-weaver,’ he said. ‘At one period I was absolutely obsessed by Bert Jansch. His first album had a great effect on me. It was so far ahead of what anyone else was doing. That was what got me into playing acoustic. I watched him playing once at a folk club and it was like seeing a classical guitarist. All the inversions he was playing were unrecognisable. He was the innovator of the time.’5
‘I don’t recall being shocked,’ says Nat Joseph, on checking out Bert’s new sound. ‘I was never shocked when I heard anything other than when it was very bad. Bringing in the traditional material was something that seemed to me extremely interesting because everybody had thought of Bert as a kind of Dylan-esque character. He was going back to the roots and I couldn’t see why not.’
‘The treatments may not be trad but they’re fantastic,’ agreed the reviewer for Sing. ‘At first sight the idea is horrifying,’ cautioned Karl Dallas in MM, ‘a bluesy guitarist who has hitherto concentrated on contemporary subjects singing the big old ballads of the true traditionalist. In fact, Jansch’s interpretations illuminate the songs from a completely new angle. As sung by him, the brutal world that created the old ballads doesn’t seem so very far off from the world of the “Needle Of Death”.’ And if anyone needed reminding, Transatlantic were repromoting that one as lead track on an EP. Jack Orion, Bert and John and the Needle Of Death EP were released simultaneously in early August 1966, the last comprising five tracks distilled from Bert’s first two albums for the delectation of impecunious students, the unwaged and the casual buyer.
From mid-1965 the opportunities for folk music on television had exploded, and a little earlier in the year Bert had sneaked on for the first time to perform ‘Needle Of Death’ on a topical religious show called Hallelujah!6 A twenty-minute Sunday night broadcast for the Birmingham-based ABC, the show was screened in all ITV regions except London. Its presenter was Gill Cook’s neighbour Sydney Carter, with Martin Carthy and Nadia Cattouse as resident performers: ‘It was the weekly God slot,’ says Carthy, ‘and basically we would take a subject and do songs on that subject. Mainly it was confined to British traditional stuff, but we also did American stuff and bits of Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht. The week Bert was on the subject was drugs. It was close on being controversial.’ Being nervous, Bert recalls nothing of the experience: ‘I don’t know how it went down,’ he says, ‘but they seemed to think it was in keeping.’
Around the same time as Bert and John’s flurry of recordings were being made, in June 1966, Indian sitar virtuoso Ravi Shankar was in Britain for a Festival Hall concert, a groove-in on BBC Television’s A Whole Scene Going and a series of recitals at provincial folk clubs, pubs and public libraries. On 12 June his entourage arrived at Bardswell Social Club, a tin hut in Brentwood, Essex, where the support act was Bert & John.
‘We weren’t allowed to smoke,’ says Bert, ‘wh
ich I found a bit weird because they were burning all this incense. I’m not quite sure how we got through the night without a cigarette. Probably disappeared outside every now and again. But it was great fun. After the gig they had to get back to London so we all travelled together in the train. There was a whole load of them, all with long black coats and sitars and the like. We were on the platform of this station and for some reason they were fascinated with this speaking weighing machine and kept jumping on and off it. When we got to Liverpool Street at the other end they ordered this taxi, all seven of them, and started to get in one side and out the other. The taxi driver didn’t know what to make of it. They were all just a big bunch of kids!’
From the summer of 1966 onwards, plans were afoot in the camps of Bruce Dunnet and Nat Joseph to establish Bert as a concert hall artist. The two men had little in common, but Bruce admired Nat’s integrity: ‘He was only interested in commercialisation,’ says Bruce, ‘making money out of the records, and to that extent he was honest. He never pretended to be a folksong enthusiast although he enjoyed some of it and he certainly came to the clubs on occasions.’ There was no great strategy at work, rather two individuals who realised that Bert’s audience was growing and that in terms of the club scene, one could only play more venues, not bigger and better venues. The obvious answer was concerts and festivals.
The folk festival in Britain had become a serious proposition in 1965 with the first Keele and Cambridge events, although it was still a fragile concept – potentially large, organisationally complex events run by amateurs. The first Beaulieu World Folk Festival on August 6 1966 aspired to be Britain’s Newport: Phil Ochs, Tom Paxton, Bert Jansch, John Renbourn and Julie Felix were to share an open-air platform with the Spinners, the Dubliners, the Watersons, Ian Campbell’s group and others. Poor organisation, torrential rain and a number of cancellations, including Bert, in hospital with what was reported as ‘suspected rheumatic fever’, did not assist the potentially momentous occasion. It was nevertheless enjoyed by the 3500 who turned up, and highlights were broadcast on BBC television and radio.