by Colin Harper
In the middle of the year the Reprise deal fell apart. ‘Warner Brothers’ policy shake-up,’ says Bert. ‘Anything that was dubious or not selling would be scrapped – and that included me and John.’ An immediate consequence was the shelving of John’s completed solo album. The talked-about solo projects from Jacqui and Danny were also discarded. Bert had offered the label his Paris recordings but no interest had been shown. Rumours of his retirement from live performance began to circulate; in the spring of 1974 a handful of English folk club gigs and European concerts were perceived as a farewell tour in all but name.
Heather, brought up in the country, was used to animals and enjoyed the solitude. During the Pentangle years she had been left to her own devices ‘for at least six months a year’. But for Bert, transplanting to an isolated hill farm near Aberystwyth was a change he had not fully thought through. ‘The reality of living deep in the country was a shock to him,’ says Heather. ‘He loathed it, poor sod. Couldn’t take it at all. He didn’t like milking cows, for sure. He didn’t like the Welsh as people. It would have been better if we’d gone to Scotland or even Ireland. And he was bored out of his skull, he’d always be drinking. So he only stayed in Wales for about six months of the first year that we lived there, if that, and then he began to spend more time in London and started playing again. It was quite evident that his music wasn’t finished, that he’d got a new lease of life.’
‘Believe it or not,’ said Bert, referring to that period of his life a couple of years later, ‘I can’t stand not having a contract. Regardless of whether I’m signed for twenty million years, I still like the security of knowing I have a record contract and that whatever I create I have an ability to present it to the public.’10 He was still being ‘managed’ by Roger Myers. Word got back to Tony Stratton Smith, owner of the maverick Charisma label, that the great Bert Jansch was without a recording contract. A fan from the early days, whose own tastes informed his company’s A&R policy, ‘Strat’ became involved immediately and a deal with Myers was duly signed. ‘I didn’t know quite what was going on at the time,’ says Bert. It is unclear precisely what occured next, but either Stratton Smith or Bert or both realised that Myers had to go. The new name in the frame was Ralph McTell’s younger brother, Bruce May: ‘Ralph wanted me to manage him, but I took on Bert reluctantly,’ says Bruce. ‘I didn’t really feel that I understood him.’
Stratton Smith, experienced in music management himself, very possibly realised that Myers was out of his depth. He would have been aware that Ralph McTell had recently ended his own relationship with Jo Lustig and was now being handled by Bruce and that Bruce, an Economics graduate who had represented Ralph on the club scene prior to Lustig’s involvement, was clearly doing a good job. Tony negotiated an exit deal for Myers. Bert now had a new label, a new manager and a new opportunity to make, if he so wished, the comeback that had so abjectly failed to materialise with Moonshine. He also had a marriage that was pulling in precisely the opposite direction.
Tony Stratton Smith was one of the great characters in the music business – generous, caring and passionate about his interests within a business he had been bumbling around in with equal quantities of luck and naivete since 1965. Slipping from a very successful career in sports journalism into the murkier waters of song publishing and artist management, most of Strat’s frustrations in the music game had revolved around the workings of record companies.11 He had made a few calculations, had the necessary contacts and felt that operating as an independent record label – at a time when there were very few at a genuinely national level – was a gamble worth taking. ‘This is a gambler’s business,’ he said, ‘this is not a business for bankers or investment people.’ His label, Charisma, would be bankrolled entirely by himself and two partners: there would be no banks involved. Setting up shop in the first of several offices all within the bounds of Soho, the first record was released on 10 December 1969.
Strat had estimated that at least ten album releases and around £100,000 in outlay would be needed during the first year to make the venture credible to retailers: in the event, with good fortune on his side, that same period would see fourteen releases and a healthy wholesale return of £117,000. Rarely again would Van Der Graaf Generator enjoy such a welcoming response as they did with their first album for Charisma; never again, after the timely million-plus triumph of their first Charisma single ‘Sympathy’, would Rare Bird trouble the chroniclers of pop. ‘Anything good of its kind, dear boy’: that was Strat’s maxim, and for a good innings both the public and the pundits would give his musical tastes more benefit than doubt.
Earlier in 1969 Pete Frame, besotted with the romance of Bert’s music and lifestyle in the mid-sixties, had followed his own dream and started a magazine. Called Zigzag, it was arguably the first publication in Britain to take rock music seriously and was certainly the direct antecedent of the glossy music monthlies of the 1990s. ‘An ambitious but ridiculously shoestring operation, it was never out of financial chaos,’ wrote Frame. ‘It was one of the great dance-around-the-house-in-wild-abandoned-joy days when Tony Stratton Smith bought us out, assuring us that he was going to sort out all our problems and put us on a sound footing. Strat, bless his heart, was one of the great philanthropic idealists of our age and it soon became plainly obvious that he was no more of a businessman than I was. He ran his record company, Charisma, on a purely whimsical basis and it was only by the grace of God that he ever made a penny. A dreamer, he flew entirely by the seat of his pants, and that part of his body contained therein.’12
Strat took over Zigzag in 1972 and in April 1974 he bankrolled a lavish fifth birthday party for the magazine at the Roundhouse, featuring one-time Monkee turned country-rock icon Mike Nesmith and his sidekick Red Rhodes. ‘Strat got on famously with Nesmith,’ says Frame, ‘and whisked him down to Crowborough in Sussex, where he had a country retreat. By this time, Bert had been signed to Charisma. Give Strat his due: he was a total shambles by any conventional yardstick, but he had an instinctive and intuitive feel for what was worthy and noble and artistically valuable. For instance, the listening room at Charisma had a great big John Bratby painting on the wall and a desk which had once belonged to Tolkien. There was a framed, handwritten letter from him in the top drawer, confirming that he had written The Lord Of The Rings on it. He had a good heart, did Strat, and that’s why everyone who worked for him loved the guy. However, having signed Bert, he wasn’t at all sure what to do with him. It was all down to finding a sympathetic producer, and the two of them could never come within two miles of agreement. This had been going on for months.’
‘In the end things happened really fast,’ said Bert. ‘All the material that went on the album I had for over a year – Jimmy Page wanted to produce it but couldn’t find the time, Bob Johnson turned it down and in fact when I was with Warners I started doing the album with Danny Thompson in Paris. We did eight tracks there. But Warners weren’t happy with what we’d done and when I joined Charisma neither were they. Strat didn’t want solo stuff so we wrote off £3500 worth of tapes just like that. Strat simply wanted everything connected with Pentangle out, and that included Danny, and I suppose it’s true that you can’t live in the past.’13
A few days after the Zigzag event, Strat phoned Bert at Ralph McTell’s house in Putney, where he was staying at the time, and invited him down to Crowborough for the weekend. Quality material, in Strat’s eyes, was a necessity for success and giving his artists the time and space to come up with the goods was thus paramount. He would often give his acts a few weeks’ solitude to get it together in the country at either his own place in Sussex or a farmhouse in Hertfordshire which the label kept for the purpose. ‘Having never seen Strat’s country residence,’ says Frame, ‘Bert says, “Yeah, that’ll be cool – I’ll pop down on Friday evening.” From what I recall of conversations with Bert a few weeks later, he got a lift south with John Martyn, who was living in Hastings. They set off from the pub some time in the
afternoon, consuming a few drugs to sparkle up the journey, and felt so genial on arrival at John’s that they decided to pop round to his local and knock back a few jars over a game of snooker. With about fifteen pence left in his pocket, Bert phoned for a cab to take him to Strat’s place – only about thirty-five miles away! After searching all the highways and by-ways of East Sussex for about two hours, they eventually located Strat’s gaff, Luxford House, only to find a note pinned to the door, saying, “Bert, we’ve gone to the pub – please walk in and help yourself to anything you want.”
‘Having no money to pay the cabbie, Bert invited him in and the two of them were confronted by this enormous banqueting table covered with the debris of a gargantuan meal. They got stuck into a bottle of brandy and were feeling pretty good by the time Strat, Mike Nesmith and sundry chums returned from the pub. Everyone assumed the cabbie was Bert’s roadie and kept his glass topped up – until Bert suddenly remembered him and got Strat to stump up the fare, whereupon the guy floated out into the night. Bert was introduced to Nesmith but had absolutely no idea who he was. They chatted, and after more bacchanalia, all straggled off to bed.14
‘Next morning Bert stumbles down to join Strat, who is halfway through his customary six-course breakfast, when a mobile recording studio suddenly appears outside the window. Strat leaves the table, and before you know it there are microphones and cables all over the place. Not only that, but a film crew arrives and begins to set up. Bert wonders what the fuck’s going on and it suddenly dawns on him that the whole shebang has been organised for his benefit! Before he knows what’s happening, he’s sitting out in the garden cutting a few songs, with ambience mikes strategically positioned to pick up the chirping of the birds. Bert goes along with it for a while. Finally, he erupts: “Look, Tony, I really would prefer to make my album in a real studio!”’
Rarefied as the situation was, six tracks were nonetheless recorded that day,15 and some of the pastoral ambience exquisitely captured on the opening moments of ‘Fresh As A Sweet Sunday Morning’. The song had precisely the aura that Strat had wanted: it was definitively Bert Jansch, enigmatic and angular, and at the same time displayed a very marked break with the sound and style of the Pentangle. It felt like Bert was opening a new chapter but simultaneously reconnecting with his work as a soloist in the sixties – a period and a body of work that had itself been set aside during his time with the Pentangle. Sensual and mysterious, cool and unusual as it was, the placing of ‘Fresh As A Sweet Sunday Morning’ as track one, side one of the eventual comeback album LA Turnaround was a masterstroke: an immediate statement of intent that Bert Jansch was still relevant, valid and artistically unique.16
Nesmith and Rhodes had to return to Los Angeles and, fearing a loss of momentum, Bert felt the sessions should continue there as soon as possible. Stratton Smith was all for it and added an inspired touch of his own by enlisting Beatles acolyte Klaus Voorman, whose group Paddy, Klaus & Gibson he had once managed. The richness and smoothness of Voorman’s bass playing on the resulting tracks was to prove a wonderful complement to Bert’s taut, snapping guitar work, and very possibly the glue that held together the cream of LA’s session scene and this most English and unorthodox of guitar players. ‘What really amazed me was that all these people knew who I was,’ said Bert, ‘and I think it frightened them a bit.’17 Pete Frame later heard that one hired hand ‘was so overawed by Bert’s virtuosity that he threw up out of sheer panic’.
The method of recording, entirely live with no overdubs as opposed to the piece-by-piece assembly of tracks that had characterised Pentangle sessions, was refreshing. One track per day would be accomplished, all bar two tradititional songs and a Renbourn instrumental being Jansch originals: ‘Travelling Man’ was a clever amalgam of titles and phrases from well-known folk songs; ‘Stone Monkey’ was based on a Chinese children’s story, later the surreal TV series Monkey; ‘One For Jo’ was a gentle ode of encouragement to Jo Cadman, Bruce May’s assistant and wife of Pentangle roadie Bobby Cadman, couched playfully in the language of day-dream and adventure. A sense of poise and maturity was pervasive, spiced by the interplay between the musicians and the acidity of Bert’s guitar work. The inclusion of the two exceptional Paris guitar solos, ‘Chambertin’ and ‘Lady Nothing’, added balance and provided a subtle link to the style of playing which had given Rosemary Lane its brilliance. ‘Chambertin’ in particular, a taut, dark and almost visibly dextrous baroque-with-swing construction, is possibly the ultimate encapsulation of how Bert Jansch redefined the vernacular of the steel-strung guitar.18
Most surprising of all was a re-recording of ‘Needle Of Death’. ‘I never did like the original recording at the time,’ said Bert, not long after his return from California. What had horrified him most when listening to his early albums, for the first time in years, in order to re-learn material for live performance, had been the sound of his voice. His prime concern when recording in the sixties had been the guitar; his work in the mid-seventies would be characterised by a swing to the other extreme, with the presentation of voice and songwriting to the fore. ‘I think my songwriting’s getting a bit better,’ he told the Melody Maker. ‘It’s not so sterile as it was before, not so clean cut. A lot free-er, but then that’s only my opinion. A lot of the songs no one’s going to understand. But the imagery is there and people can make up their own minds. They just become paintings.’19
LA Turnaround was released to a flurry of acclaim in September 1974 and it remains one of Bert’s strongest and most accessible. For Colin Irwin at MM it was ‘not far off being the perfect album’; for Charles Shaar Murray, over at the NME, it was ‘almost as good as Orson Welles’ War Of The Worlds’. Bill Henderson at Sounds was uneasy at the prominence of steel guitar. Bert, on reflection, would share those feelings. Each of the British weeklies took the opportunity of what was widely perceived as a comeback to run interviews with Bert. It would provide Bert with a platform to draw a line under the Pentangle and to explain his subsequent drift and reappearance, and it would enable the writers to explain to a new generation of readers just who Bert Jansch was. This was virtually ten years after his first album and the world was a different place.
A high-profile tour of British concert venues aimed at promoting the new album and reintroducing Bert as an artist at that level was undertaken during November – December. Bert had hoped to tour with a band comprising album musicians Klaus Voorman and Danny Lane plus English fingerstylist Pete Berryman on lead guitar. It transpired to be a solo tour, with folk-rockers Decameron as support. Modestly attended throughout, it climaxed in a show at London’s Theatre Royal. Reviews were respectful rather than ecstatic. Bert, dwarfed on the large stage with only a couple of microphones and a bottle of beer for company, appeared nervous, and the looseness of his intros and endings and a recurring inability to keep his instrument in tune were, while typically Bert, simply inappropriate for a concert professional.
He was, at least, working to a largely prearranged set list for the tour. Starting each night with a newly written song, ‘Build Another Band’, and following that with the old Pentangle blues ‘I’ve Got A Feeling’, a sure favourite with audiences and reviewers, he would continue with half a dozen pieces from LA Turnaround. He would follow those with two or three old favourites including the now inevitable ‘Angi’, a recently-recorded arrangement of ‘In The Bleak Midwinter’ – an ill-fated stab at the Christmas pop charts20 – and encore with a blues medley based around ‘Key To The Highway’. It was a well-balanced set and Bert was clearly doing his best to adapt to the role of solo concert performer. But he lacked the popular touch of a Ralph McTell or the raging swagger of a Roy Harper. In the past he had succeeded by word-of-mouth, intimate venues, a youthful energy and the off-centre charisma of his personality and passion. Ten years on, and after the interval of being an increasingly anonymous member of a band, a way for Bert to be viewed in the 1970s was still in the process of discovery. ‘The commercial success of Pentangle may h
ave diminished some of the man’s mystery,’ wrote one reviewer, ‘but some of the old magic is still there. It emerges only spasmodically now, but when it does it’s as potent as ever.’21
‘The farm’s got nothing to do with me,’ said Bert, in August 1974. ‘It’s the wife’s farm, I just live there. I just go down to the pub and have a good time with the locals, that’s all I do. It’s all I’ve ever done.’22 Shortly after the comeback tour, around Christmas, Bert returned to the farm and told Heather he wanted to live in London.
‘We discussed selling up and moving back,’ she says. ‘He said that he didn’t really want to do that. I said, “What do you want to do, then?” “I don’t know,” he said, “sometimes I think I just want my freedom.” So we parted company, sadly but amicably. I don’t think either of us felt that it was an irrevocable step, just that something needed to change and we weren’t sure what. We’d arrived at a point where we both felt we would achieve more separately than if we stayed together. Neither of us had thought it would end. It’s difficult to pinpoint why, but his alcoholism was a part of it. It’s very distressing to watch someone destroying themselves when you know that you can’t help them, but the only person who could help him was himself. He wasn’t ready to stop drinking.’
Bert’s priorities were not those of his wife’s at the time. He was still unhappy at the situation that had forced his mother to move back to Scotland, with undignified haste, and rely on the hospitality of Bert’s sister Mary. As Mary recalls, their mother felt understandably hurt. Bert, having abdicated all responsibility for the move to Heather, was not without guilt. He wanted to make amends, but his wife was on another wavelength: ‘Everything was horses,’ he says. ‘She decided she wanted this extra sixteen acres of ground with this money we had, because she’d sold the house my mother was living in. I said, “Look, you know, the idea was when we’re in better shape we’ll put her into another house.” But no, she wanted this extra land so I split at that point.’