Dazzling Stranger

by Colin Harper

  ‘He liked to keep a very clear division between his private life and his public life,’ says Heather. ‘I can remember one time we had somebody come to do an interview at home, which was very unusual. The guy started to ask me questions about how it was for me when Bert went away, at which point Bert started to get extremely angry, cut the interview short and threw the guy out. He felt very keenly that that wasn’t any of his business. The curious thing about Bert is that as a man he has very little to say, as a poet he has a great deal to say, and that’s how it should be, I suppose.’

  Hughes’s article for Disc explored the poverty of Bert’s childhood alongside his current status as something approaching a pop star, and certainly now as a man of comfortable means. Bert’s responses had been prickly concerning his early years and most particularly on the topic of stardom and normality. He was nonetheless proud of what the Pentangle had achieved and delighted to have the best of both worlds: popular success and, as a group member, relative anonymity. During the first six months of 1970 the group was commercially at its peak. Basket Of Light had charted at No.5 in November 1969 – largely on the back of ‘Light Flight’, a song that was concurrently featuring as theme music for the BBC’s first-ever colour drama series, the hugely popular Take Three Girls. Invariably whistled by visitors to the gents at Bert’s local, it was the key that had opened the Pentangle’s door to mainstream consumers.

  The year opened with soundtrack recording sessions for an ultimately unsuccessful film, The Devil’s Widow, based on the traditional ballad ‘Tam Lin’. At the same time the BBC were broadcasting a series of four half-hour radio programmes dedicated to the group. In terms of television, from January to June there were at least twelve appearances, spanning Britain, France, Belgium, Holland and America and ranging from Top Of The Pops6 and tea-time variety shows to half-hour concert broadcasts. Printwise, the Pentangle were everywhere from solemn analyses in broadsheets to the centrefold in teenage girls’ magazine Jackie. In terms of live work, from February to April there was a seven-week British tour followed immediately by another seven-week tour of America – their third and longest there, opening at Carnegie Hall and routinely playing college campus venues to audiences of eight thousand or more. One Melody Maker headline from May, ‘Hysteria and exhaustion for Pentangle in the States’, said it all. ‘We’ve been on the road since Christmas and we absolutely need a break,’ said Danny. ‘We come back in a couple of weeks’ time then we go into the studio to start recording our next album, then we take a couple of months off.’7

  That June – July rest period became sprinkled with odd concerts and TV dates and then it was into August with four festivals, climaxing with the mammoth Isle of Wight Festival, an event chiefly memorable to Bert for the privilege of lying under the stage listening to Jimi Hendrix perform in Britain for what was to be the last time. There were a handful of further shows in September, more recording sessions for the new group album, and then another full-scale tour of Britain in October – November. Bert’s family would delight in seeing him during such tours, when the group would generally play Edinburgh’s Usher Hall. The family had collected Bert’s records from day one, but going to Pentangle concerts was the first time any of them had seen him performing: ‘I’m sure our mum was very proud of him,’ says Mary, Bert’s sister. On Boxing Day, the Pentangle members and their extended families could all relax and watch themselves on prime-time BBC2, pre-recorded at the ancient Trumpington church in Cambridgeshire, for a broadcast entitled Songs From A Country Church: this was what success was all about. And Bert was rapidly losing heart with the whole business.

  Discontent, disillusionment and frustration, on both business and musical levels, would eventually come to consume the Pentangle, but at the very height of their commercial celebrity it was Bert who first experienced the malaise. Danny and Terry were pro musicians revelling in the trappings of success. John was basking in the limelight as a studious adventurer in medieval music and all things esoteric. Jacqui, without any children at this stage and with her husband Jock in conventional employment and occasionally travelling with the band, was free to enjoy the trip without getting quite so detached from real life as the rest. Bert, also married, was finding it more difficult to adapt to the responsibilities and to living away from London: ‘I think it was okay for a while,’ says Jacqui, ‘but he still had to have the pub across the road. I won’t say his life revolved around the pub, but he spent an awful lot of time in pubs. He’s an observer.’

  During their time at Ticehurst, Heather recalls that Bert ‘rarely thought of anything except escaping the pressures’. During the odd free moment, they might visit Anne Briggs, living relatively nearby with Johnny Moynihan and subsequently with her new partner Pat. ‘When I saw Bert,’ says Anne, ‘he would often say, “Oh shit, I wish I was you, just travelling around singing what you really want to sing and doing what you want to do.” He often said that, and I can see why now.’

  Arguably the most creative but also the least vociferous member of the Pentangle, Bert was finding his role increasingly marginalised. While much of the group’s music was still challenging to play, Bert’s delicate, magical touch was often lost in the overall sound, especially in concert, and he yearned, as Anne observed, to relive the freedom of earlier days. If he could not have it in actuality, he could still have it in music. The clearest evocation of that yearning would also prove to be the finest single work of his career: Rosemary Lane.

  The making of Rosemary Lane was a throwback to happier times in itself. It was recorded simply, on portable equipment, by Bert’s very first producer and engineer, Bill Leader, over the course of periodic visits to Ticehurst. ‘It took a year to make,’ says Bert. ‘Bill used to come down to the cottage and spend the weekend, and sometimes he’d just spend it with me and Heather, not actually recording. We’d set the gear up and then we’d go for a pint, discuss it, and if I felt like recording we did it. The songs were just whatever I had at the time, wherever my head was. I was losing interest in the band at that point, wishing for other things to do.’

  Fuelled by a sense of longing for times past – his own not too distant past and an Olde England more of the imagination than of history – Rosemary Lane was romantic in aura, serene and reflective in tone and breathtaking in its starkness and simplicity of presentation. The dearth of tangible, discernible contemporary references, save for the dark observations on America – a place he now loathed – in ‘Nobody’s Bar’, and the undatable nature of Bert’s instrumental techniques produced a work of timeless quality. Everything one needs to know about Bert Jansch, in support of the notion that he is an artist unique in his art and whose art is of great worth, is demonstrated on this record. It reveals an unmistakable personality yet at the same time a transcendent quality to the work implying that, at its heart, the work itself is the foreground and its creator a barely visible presence facilitating the construction of something magical. Enigmatic, as a judgement of the whole, is too short a word.

  In the context of Bert’s circumstances and state of mind at the time of its execution, Rosemary Lane can be seen to reflect each with piercing clarity. But the listener is offered more than one man and his troubles. ‘Wayward Child’ is observation becoming parable; ‘Nobody’s Bar’ takes the idea of metaphor on to the doorstep of the metaphysical; ‘Bird Song’ rings the bell and goes right in. And who could fail to hear an echo of John Donne in ‘A Dream, A Dream, A Dream’? Like that of the metaphysical writers of a previous age, Bert’s writing – in general, but particularly on his three solo albums of the Pentangle era – displays a marked preoccupation with ‘the soul’, and with the nature of true love. On his previous album, Birthday Blues, it had been clumsily expressed; on his next album, Moonshine, it would be almost too clever by half. Rosemary Lane was where less became more and everything was in balance.

  ‘A lot of my writing is just throwing up questions that I might think about myself but not come up with the answers,’ says Bert. ‘You
get a lot of the same thing in each song. I write from personal experience. I do bring in, in all my songs, God, and I often bring in instances that happen to me in everyday life. This applies to all my songs. I cannot distinguish between one song and another. To me, they’re all just one big song, almost like a diary. I don’t write because I think, “Ah, I’ve got an idea for a song.” I’m not that kind of writer.’

  Imagining is the key to understanding on Rosemary Lane. When Bert sings, on the traditional English title track, ‘When I was in service in Rosemary Lane …’ one does not hear Bert Jansch singing a song from the early seventies: one hears the story as if straight from a fireside story-teller in some indeterminate place and time. It is of no relevance that Bert is singing from the point of view of a woman, the subject. The same is true of ‘Reynardine’: the accompaniment alone is a masterpiece, a distillation of all that is definable as the contribution of Bert Jansch to guitar playing. After years of being more concerned with the guitar than the voice when recording, Bert had now reached a point where he was viewing both with equal care. There would come a time, in the mid-seventies, where the balance would swing momentarily towards the presentation of voice and songs alone, with Bert in virtual denial of his status as an instrumentalist. But on this album, with that unmistakably rough-hewn vocal displaying a new poise and clarity and with that inimitable, highly individual guitar work honed to perfection, the songs and tunes were accompanied by an open invitation to the mind’s eye. And the view was breathtaking.

  As Bert was proving with words and music, and as Anne Briggs had already proved with words alone, in the late twentieth century the very best of the English and Irish traditional canon could still enthral and communicate without contrivance. The style of accompaniment Bert used was not synonymous with ‘the sixties’ or ‘the seventies’, but had been honed to the demands of the song. If troubadours of the eighteenth century had played guitars, it would only be a stretch of academic credulity, and not of the listener’s imagination, that this might be how they would have sounded.

  ‘I always felt that it was very sad that somebody who should reach a position of fame so young should feel so at odds with it,’ says Heather, ‘because he did. Although the whole flavour of the sixties had allowed him to come to prominence it was so far away from who he is and what he was. He was an enigma, and still is. He stood outside of the sixties because he was part of something much older. There was much more of the bard in him than anything else. He actually lives the myths and legends inside himself and makes them real. What he writes is of legendary quality but concerned with contemporary society, or so it appeared to me.’ Drawing upon old and new, in the form of traditional songs, baroque interpretations and masterful pastiches, and his own contemporary writing, Rosemary Lane encapsulates the view that great art comes out of a refusal to accept existing boundaries, but not through a refusal to acknowledge the past.

  Very little of the material on Rosemary Lane would happily have survived a transition into the Pentangle’s repertoire, and as a consequence very little of it was ever revealed onstage at the time.8 One or two pieces, perhaps more, were only ever performed for the recording and then forgotten. ‘I’ll probably have to re-learn this one back from the record,’ read Bert’s brief sleeve note on his delicate instrumental ‘M’Lady Nancy’. It is likely that he never did.

  Given 1970’s workload, the following year must have felt like a holiday to the Pentangle. There were a handful of gigs and recording dates in the first quarter, with an American tour scheduled for April – May. Ostensibly, the tour was cancelled at the last minute because Heather was having a baby. Prior to the group’s previous US tour in April – June 1970, Bert had gone into print labelling the place ‘the most violent country in the world’;9 after it, his view was even more dogmatic: ‘Under no circumstances will I return. All that madness and insanity, no thanks!’10 With the tour cancelled and with few summer festival dates – a consequence of certain open-air disasters the previous year – the group members were left with a swathe of free time until the autumn. Bert and Heather used a little of it to move house: ‘We were very happy in that place,’ says Heather. ‘But it was too small. Kieron was born while we were still living there. Bert’s mother wanted to come down from Scotland, so we gave her the house and we bought another one nearby. Bert’s like that – an incredibly generous man.’

  Discontent was now endemic in the group. Their fourth album, Cruel Sister, released and promoted with a full British tour at the end of 1970, had been a commercial disaster. The relative freedom of 1971 must have given everyone time to reflect. They had come together in a spirit of adventure that was sufficient to fuel the first three albums, but the energy had almost tangibly expired by the time album number four came around. Musically low-key, it was based largely on John and Jacqui’s vision and contained only traditional material. True, it showed aspects of musical development, particularly with John’s use of low-volume electric guitar, but it was not the right way to maintain the momentum of critical and popular success. Bert’s contribution was limited to co-vocalling with Jacqui a side-long and less than gripping revamp of ‘Jack Orion’ and adding a little concertina to John’s atmospheric ‘Lord Franklin’.11 On the group’s subsequent albums the balance would be redressed, and previous heights reconquered, but with the definite science of hindsight their moment had passed.

  The one-time darlings of the media became a whipping boy, a byword for tedium and lethargy. The pressures of touring and each member’s changing social and personal circumstances were factors in the ‘magic’ waning; a diminishing of commitment from their manager, increasingly busy in developing new acts, may also be conjectured,12 as can a lack of financial will on the part of Transatlantic to see the project through. Relations with Jo Lustig, their manager, were definitely deteriorating. His contract would come up for renewal in February 1971, and begrudgingly everyone would agree, in the absence of any better ideas, to re-sign. In a way, this lack of any imagination in providing for their own best interests is illustrative of what Jo viewed as a tendency towards complacency in the group. But any group under the spotlight of critical interest can only bask in the glory for so long. The Pentangle had enjoyed more than three good years, and those who are built up by the media must surely be torn down by the same.

  Reflection, recorded over three weeks in March 1971 at a promising but technically problematic new studio called Command, in Piccadilly, was the Pentangle’s fifth album. Bill Leader, as producer, was especially well placed to observe their disarray: ‘If the Pentangle were the sort of people who could have hung together, realised groups have difficulties and that they’d got to somehow handle that, then they would have gone on to make more music. But at the same time, if they were the sort of people who would have appreciated that, they wouldn’t have been the sort of people they were – and they wouldn’t, in the first place, have been producing such interesting music. My memory is that the two pros, Danny and Terry, would be there on time; Bert and John would arrive at different times, depending on how much they’d had to drink and where they’d managed to lay their heads the night before. And it seems to me, in retrospect, that each day a different member of the group had decided that this was it: “Sod this for a game of soldiers, I’m leaving the group!” And we’d spend the rest of the day either trying to get him back or doing the best we could without that particular member. I don’t think Jacqui threw that sort of tantrum. She was just very disappointed that this was going on. But certainly with the rest of the group, it was as if they’d drawn straws before coming in to see which one today was going to throw a moody.’

  For all the angst of its creation, Reflection would prove to be not only the best recorded Pentangle album (the only one to use sixteen-track facilities, exploited to the full) but arguably their most satisfying. John brought ‘So Clear’, his only self-written vocal contribution to the group’s canon, and furthered his distinctive explorations of the electric guitar; Terry offered �
�Helping Hand’, a funky, intriguing little tune; Jacqui’s singing was better than ever, atmospherically double-tracked in places; the traditional selections, ‘Wedding Dress’ and ‘Rain & Snow’, were more sensual, less austere than before; Danny’s contribution was rarely more powerful than on his triple-tracked bowed and plucked intro to the album’s stunning title track, an eleven-minute epic based on Bert’s old ‘Joint Control’ riff; and, not least, Bert’s contribution was once again the equal of his colleagues. It was, in a sense, the follow-up that Basket Of Light had demanded. But by the time it came out in October 1971 it was too late to make a difference.

  Rosemary Lane was released in May 1971, the same month, by way of context, as Carole King’s Tapestry, Paul McCartney’s Ram and Mountain’s Nantucket Sleighride. It was a month later than scheduled. ‘Those who have waited patiently for this album have in it a reward deserving of their endurance,’ declared the MM. The most penetrating observations came from Jerry Gilbert at Sounds: ‘The thing with Jansch is that you cannot compare him with anyone else, you can only draw the comparison between the man as he was and the man as he is today,’ he wrote, establishing a truism that still stands. ‘The aesthetic pleasure derived from listening to Jansch these days is based on quite different merits from, say, the Jansch of five years ago, despite the fact that he has gone right back to the traditional songs which were his starting point. And although his own material is far more tranquil these days it is a sublime tranquillity which is totally uncompromising.’

  Gilbert believed that Bert ‘would have arrived at this stage with or without Pentangle’. Aspects of the Pentangle experience had certainly informed the content of the original songs on Rosemary Lane, but the overall mood and musical stylisms of the record were utterly independent of it: this was never a collection of pieces designed to be repeated on the concert stage. Which was unfortunate, as for the first time in over three years Bert had a solo engagement looming.