by Colin Harper
Jo Lustig had promoted Lindisfarne, a hot new folk-rock act from Tyneside, at London’s Festival Hall in March; he had booked the same venue for 30 June, for the similarly up-coming Belfast singer-songwriter Van Morrison. In May Morrison’s manager cancelled the arrangement and Jo was left threatening writs, with a large room to fill at a month’s notice. John Renbourn had already established the precedent, having played the more compact Queen Elizabeth Hall in February in support of his Early Music album The Lady and The Unicorn. Now it was Bert’s turn: ‘I let John do his first, because I’m a coward,’ said Bert, three weeks after the event. ‘It took about a year to talk me into doing one. To start with, I didn’t have a repertoire. I couldn’t sing songs I’ve done on my albums because they were done so long ago I’d forgotten them. And I prefer to use new material for a concert. [But] I think it’s a good thing for us to do musical things on our own. It brings in fresh ideas. The group needs new life.’13
‘Bert Jansch has a gift for the understatement,’ wrote Andrew Means, reviewing the great event for Melody Maker. ‘He strolls on stage, head bent towards an introspective world of jeans and plimsolls. Just as casually he exits. It was hard to believe that last week’s Festival Hall concert was his first solo since Pentangle was formed. In retrospect it was equally surprising that he should concentrate on the contents of his recent album Rosemary Lane. But if his choice of material could have been more representative of his past, Bert’s performance was an undeniable success. Sure there were bum notes and cracked vocals, but the result was merely to intensify expectations. The legend fled in the face of something more positive – live music.’
Also on the bill, at Bert’s insistence, were COB – Clive’s Original Band, the latest in a series of esoteric ensembles fronted by Bert’s old pal Clive Palmer – plus a heavily pregnant Anne Briggs. Both Clive and Anne had been key influences on at least the content, if not also the style, of Rosemary Lane and a little earlier in the year they had also been part of a package of one-off album deals arranged between CBS and Jo Lustig.14 Anne had already released an album that year, for Topic: her self-titled LP debut and her first appearance on record at all in five years. Mostly traditional and unaccompanied, it did feature the Jansch/Briggs composition ‘Go Your Way’ and, somewhat after the event, her first recording of the troublesome ‘Blackwater Side’. The Time Has Come, appearing later in the year on CBS, would mop up the remaining songs from that collaborative period in 1965: ‘Wishing Well’ and ‘The Time Has Come’, adding many other new, self-written and instrumentally accompanied songs. It would prove to be the public swansong of a singular career.15
The return of Anne, as a now legendary, mysterious figure from the early years of the revival captured the reviewers’ imagination, all but overshadowing Bert’s performance. Words like ‘beautiful’, ‘uncompromising’ and ‘compelling’ were lavished on the typically nervous goddess of trad, though to Andrew Means ‘more so than Bert, her music taxed the patience of the uninitiated, balanced between monotony and fascination’.
‘I was stone cold sober when I did that gig,’ says Anne. ‘I was pregnant and I didn’t have anything I could actually wear and Jo Lustig’s wife Dee gave me this bloody awful pink maternity thing. I think Jo was so gob-smacked he sent somebody out to give me a bunch of flowers. He didn’t know what else to do and I didn’t know what to do with the flowers. I was so embarrassed.’ As Jo remarked after the show, having comically botched the job of compere: ‘I fired myself on the spot. But it really was the best concert I have put on since the first Pentangle concert three and a half years ago.’
Bert’s set, after the novelty and revelation of Briggs and Palmer, was short and understated – seemingly no more than forty-five minutes. Most of the material performed had been relearned from Rosemary Lane, for this sole event, with only ‘Oh, My Babe’ to remind people of who he was before the Pentangle. ‘There was a great sense of occasion at that concert,’ remembers one fan, Mike Fox. ‘When Bert finally came onstage he seemed nervous and ill at ease, although still able to joke with the audience – “As long as it’s not one of mine,” he said, when a baby started crying! As a fifteen-year-old I was staggered at the intensity of the performer and his level of involvement with the music. He finally left the stage half-way through “Veronica”, which was going badly wrong, only to return resignedly for an encore – “They wouldn’t let me out!”’
True to form, however, Bert had debuted some ‘new’ material at the concert: a new vocal interpretation of Ewan MacColl’s ‘The First Time Ever’ and ‘Twa Corbies’, a Scottish traditional song long in the repertoire of Archie Fisher. Bert would make the latter his first solo spot in years during the next Pentangle tour, at the end of the year. It would also be the featured item in his only solo TV outing of the entire Pentangle era, on BBC 2’s Once More With Felix.16
Rosemary Lane was a minority interest album, even at the time of release. Bert Jansch, the solo artist, was no longer at the heart of the British folk scene. Besides which, the scene itself had changed markedly from its heyday in the mid-sixties. The Melody Maker’s Folk LP of the Year award for 1971 would go to Steeleye Span’s Please To See The King. A triumph of electric ‘folk-rock’, it was indicative of the direction British folk music was now expected to embrace. The best of the Cousins-era singer-songwriters – Al Stewart, Ralph McTell, Roy Harper and so on – had all graduated to the thriving college circuit, on an equal footing with the middle-to-top division rock bands of the era. Others, like Sandy Denny and Dorris Henderson, had joined bands with a folk-rock sound. Duffy Power would that year make an entire album with progressive rock luminaries Argent, while Alexis Korner of all people had jumped whole-heartedly on the bandwagon with a series of bands including the Mickie Most-produced pop-rock ‘big band’ CCS and, with various refugees from King Crimson, the stadium-filling Snape. The Cousins itself, ultimately overrun with would-be guitar heroes to the exclusion of any audience, had simply run out of steam. Steve Benbow had become a taxi driver.17 Ewan MacColl, having inadvertently destroyed his own Critics Group from the inside, was about to enjoy a more positive new celebrity as author of Roberta Flack’s worldwide hit with ‘The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face’. Alex Campbell, the godfather of all troubadours, just continued to do what he did.
While Bert Jansch, Jack Orion and the rest, for all their rough edges, had challenged and captivated fans and contemporaries alike, they had been recorded and released during a time of musical development and discovery in popular music as a whole. 1971 was no longer that time. In any case, who was Bert now but a vaguely anonymous member of the Pentangle – a modestly successful pop group whose members indulged in periodic solo projects of little interest to the uncommitted? There was, of course, a contractual obligation for both Bert and John to carry on delivering solo albums alongside the group work. John was happy enough in having the best of both worlds; Bert was growing weary of one. Nat Joseph observed that once Bert had been caught up in the machinery of the band he was ‘somehow never a free soul again’. It would appear, from the weary interiors of ‘Nobody’s Bar’, that Bert had begun to agree with him.
‘The success of the band meant that we were all able to buy places in the country,’ he explained some years later, ‘and to some extent my bohemian existence stopped. But John was living in Surrey and I was in Sussex, and we’d often end up after a Pentangle concert at Waterloo Station waiting for our trains at a dossers’ pub called the Hole in the Wall which sold ale at a shilling a pint. We’d invariably end up talking to these amazing tramps, missing our trains and staying all night.’18
One memorable insight into Bert’s lifestyle during the mid-Pentangle era is provided by David Cartwright, a singer-songwriter who joined Transatlantic in 1970. ‘After recording and mixing my first album in a day and a half,’ says Cartwright, ‘I went down to see Nat Joseph with a view to getting him to spend a bit more money and doing the job properly. Needless to say, Nat’s smile and guile talked me round, a
nd I was never to recover. Anyway, that very afternoon I was introduced to Bert who was wandering around Nat’s Marylebone offices cadging ciggies. In the sixties I’d booked him four or five times at Stourport Folk Club, overlooking the River Severn: a beautiful, intimate little club hosted by genuine, though somewhat elderly, Woody Guthrie devotees. Bert’s impact on all the Harmony Sovereign “learners” in the audience was spellbinding. He didn’t remember me. Why should he? But he shook my hand and we had a little chat. As I made to go, he sprang after me and we left the building together. It was a warm summer’s afternoon. We went for a drink, as you do, then another, then another. By ten o’clock we were bosom pals and very, very drunk. I was new to London but I loved it. In those days you did. Bert knew a club in Soho where they served really late.
‘At about midnight he suggested moving on, to “somewhere with a bit more life”. So we found a night club, where we sat huddled in a corner, looking at the ladies. I put my arm around a pretty waist, who immediately went and told her boyfriend. He came over and told me to stand up, so he could hit me. Bert suddenly adopted the warmest, friendliest American accent and intervened on my behalf. We were just tourists, “a little drunk but meanin’ no harm, buddy”. And that was that. At about two in the morning it really was time to go. Bert assumed I’d got a pad somewhere; I thought that he had. We realised then that we had nowhere to sleep. But Bert had friends, and at three o’clock I found myself giggling into a rhododendron bush as he knocked, rather loudly, at a door somewhere in Fulham. Eventually a man wrapped in a large multi-coloured blanket answered the door. No questions, no aggro. We were invited in, shown a couple of dog-eared sofas, and slept log-like till mid-morning. Ralph McTell made us a hearty breakfast, talked to me about “good old Transatlantic” – he was just joining Warner Brothers – and we left about midday. I’ve not met Bert since.’
I don’t know what my baby’s gonna say when I get home —
I really should have gone but the booze keeps flowing on.
But right now, feel like staying on here,
Let the booze flow out of my ears —
But I really, really, really should go,
‘Cos I know that my baby’s back home
‘When I Get Home’, one of the stand-out tracks on Reflection, the Pentangle album recorded in March 1971, is Bert’s most transparently confessional song of the Pentangle era and clearly explores the dilemmas of his life at this point. A married man with ‘clipped wings’, he was torn between the responsibilities of home life and a partner he loved and the relentless pressure to escape it all through nihilism and drink. Bert is no complainer by nature, but this song was as close to a ‘cry for help’ as he ever came. Perhaps most tellingly, a verse is devoted to his Uncle Adam who, to paraphrase, worked hard all his life, never married and came home drunk every Saturday night – ‘and I wish that I could be like him’.
For all its problems, Bert’s marriage would outlast the Pentangle, but John Renbourn’s would not be so fortunate. Bert and John, still friends as well as colleagues, would go off adventuring around Ireland together at least twice during the Pentangle era. In the summer of 1971 they went with Sue Draheim, a recently arrived American fiddler with whom John would return and set up home in Devon. For Bert, the Irish trips were remarkable in that Luke Kelly from the Dubliners seemed to appear in every pub they ventured into. Bert’s hope for the summer ’71 trip was to seek out the celebrated uilleann piper Willie Clancy. The first step was to make for his home village, Milltown Malbay19 in County Clare:
‘We went to the pub that we knew he always played in,’ says Bert, ‘a pubcum-post office-cum-grocer’s shop, and they said, “Oh, he doesn’t come in till eleven o’clock.” So I think we just wandered about until half past ten and went back to the pub. Quite a few people were gathering – Americans, people with tape recorders and all that – and come eleven o’clock they shut the pub. Willie arrived with his mate and that was it: we were there till dawn. He sang and he played and then somebody else played and then Sue played, and they were all knocked out because she knew all the tunes. It was a great night. In fact, we became Willie’s roadies for about a week after that, went to about three or four gigs with him. And the funny thing is, money didn’t seem to be involved. Food, drink and general hospitality seemed to be the system.’20 Later in that holiday, the three adventurers made it to the Cliffs of Moher, on the western shore, among the highest sea-cliffs in Europe. Taken by the experience, Bert came back with a song for the next Pentangle record: ‘Jump Baby Jump’.
Jo Lustig’s ‘stable’ of artists had expanded significantly during 1971, and as Jacqui McShee notes: ‘Everybody was more or less in the same musical vein, and we were all playing more or less the same venues. We began to feel that he was getting bored with us. It just seemed that he would book us out to places and we would be on the road all the time, and occasionally we’d meet up with Steeleye Span and find that they were complaining of the same thing. We’d been saying, “Don’t sign with Jo!” But of course they did. They saw our success and they wanted the same.’
The Pentangle’s relationship with Jo soldiered on into 1972 but with the release of Renbourn’s solo album Faro Annie in January the association with Transatlantic had reached its conclusion. Aware that a change was coming, Renbourn had recorded the album – deliciously out of kilter with the solemnity of his recent instrumental work – shortly after the Irish trip as a kind of celebration, with old friends Dorris Henderson and Pete Dyer, Danny and Terry and Sue Draheim guesting. ‘I remember with quite a lot of fondness and gratitude the fact that I made any records at all,’ says Renbourn. ‘I saw Nat as being quite a benefactor and I developed a genuine respect for the type of music that came out of Transatlantic as a whole. Our contracts were all about to expire and the American company that had been leasing the group’s stuff from Transatlantic for American release, Warners/Reprise, wanted to take them up: Bert’s and mine as solo artists and the group’s. I had one more record to do for Transatlantic and in a moment of some wistfulness decided to make a record that was like the first one, just to make it a complete cycle.’
The Pentangle’s exit from Transatlantic was characterised by a sense of bitterness. Members of the group differ in their opinion of who was to blame. Bert has no doubts: ‘Nat’s the villain in the whole thing,’ he believes. ‘If you sign a contract with anybody you take it as read that you get paid. You don’t afterwards, having signed it, look through the thing to find any flaws in it, which is exactly what he did. What else was he doing with it – looking for some bedtime reading?’ An eavesdropping employee at Transatlantic told Jacqui that Nat was ‘jumping up and down, hugging himself with glee’ when he realised through examining the contract that he was by now, through whatever proviso or mechanism it was,21 within his rights to stop paying the Pentangle record royalties.
‘It’s perhaps worth explaining that we put up a lot of money,’ says Nat. ‘Nearly always we paid the recording costs and we never sought to recoup them. We did pay lower royalties than some companies, but instead of, say, paying £10,000 worth of recording costs, not paying the artist a penny until that £10,000 had been recouped in royalty earnings and then giving them a ten per cent royalty rate or whatever it was in those days, we paid for the recording and then gave the artists a royalty from record one – although that royalty may only have been five per cent.’
With nobody in the group understanding how or why their royalty tap could be legally switched off, they were looking for someone to blame. ‘Nat was saying, “Well, you signed the contract and your manager okayed it – why don’t you sue your manager?”’, says Jacqui, ‘while Jo was saying, “Look at my contract.” It said on the bottom, in very small print, “You cannot sue me for anything under any circumstances”!’
As a man who was taking twenty-five per cent ‘off the top’ as manager and an additional twenty per cent off mechanical royalties, Jo Lustig must undoubtedly accept some blame for the failure to ensure a
gainst a contractual situation that left his artists in a position where the flow of royalties could be simply curtailed after a given period. With no more mechanical royalties and a large part of their concert income going straight to their manager, before expenses, the group established their own publishing company, Swiggeroux, in 1971, as Jacqui recalls, ‘to try and actually make some money out of all the work we were doing’.
‘The amount of work and travel the Pentangle had to do was horrendous,’ says Ralph McTell. ‘Because there were five of them, and let’s say they didn’t skimp on anything, they often came back with absolutely nothing to show for their labours. They had the most terrible fights and rows on the road and an unbelievable amount of drink went down.’
If Nat was absolutely within his rights in the case of the Pentangle, still his major artists at the time, then the only criticism must be his judgement as a ‘man manager’. Transatlantic had blazed a trail in providing unique opportunities to talented artists at a time when there were few other outlets. But it is telling to consider that Transatlantic artists of the calibre of Billy Connolly, Gerry Rafferty, Mike Oldfield and the Dubliners, to name but a few, achieved significant commercial success only after they had left the label. Nat was scrupulous as a businessman and daring as a pioneer, but was he also wise and pragmatic enough as the builder of what could have been an empire as critically and commercially brilliant as those created by Chris Blackwell at Island or Richard Branson at Virgin?22
‘Everybody eventually fell out with Nat and left him,’ says Dave Arthur, of the duo Dave & Toni Arthur. ‘It’s a shame because I love Nat dearly. He’s a really sweet guy but a very, very hard businessman. Friendship doesn’t come into it with Nat. He would send you a bill for 25p. He was our agent for a while, and if some ancient TV thing we did is being repeated the fee goes to Nat: he takes his twenty-five per cent and sends on a cheque for £8.35! You’d think nobody would do that, but he does. He’s very good, but he’s utterly businesslike. The folk people, of course, weren’t.’