by Colin Harper
Back in London Nigel remixed the tapes, while Kieron Jansch (Bert and Heather’s son) designed the sleeve. The album appeared in October 1991, supported by a German tour. A remixed single of the disarmingly funky ‘Colour My Paintbook’ was also released, if only in Germany. For Bert watchers, there was an assuredness in his playing throughout. In terms of writing, the opening track, ‘O’er The Lonely Mountain’, was his most compelling piece in ages: a smouldering cry of outrage on environmental issues. Something of a slow-burning, rough-edged epic in concert at the time, particularly as performed on Bert and Peter’s duo gigs, the five-minute, air-brushed Pentangle recording was a fair compromise.
There had been US tours for the group during the summers of 1990, ’91 and ’92, with German tours in the autumns of 1991 and ’92. The latter visit was specifically to promote Anniversary, an imaginative but controversial compilation from Hypertension drawn from Bert’s Sketches, a forthcoming Peter Kirtley solo album, the four post-reunion Pentangle albums and seven tracks recorded in Belgium in 1990 at a benefit concert for Derroll Adams. Featuring Bert, Jacqui, John and Danny in a one-off reunion, it was these recordings, licensed in from the concert organisers, which caused the problems. Four of the seven had been previously authorised for release on a multi-artist album of the concert (issued only in Belgium); approval for the use of the other three and, indeed, for the reappearance of any on a Pentangle album, had not been sought from either John or Danny. They were, justifiably, incensed.
Relations between Bert and John were already at an all-time low. They had toured America in October 1990 as Bert & John, a reunited duo, and did so again, in trio format with Jacqui, in April 1992 as the ‘Pentangle founders’. Bert was pragmatic enough to accept the opportunity to tour however it was dressed up. But he was also conscious that such shamelessly retrospective ventures would undermine the current Pentangle, let alone his aspirations as a solo artist. In fairness, John Renbourn did have a place in Bert’s recording plans of the time: a Bert And John II had been mooted and by 1992 new material, instrumental and vocal, was being jointly rehearsed. Following the US tour in April the idea was dead in the water.
‘It was just one of those tours that didn’t happen,’ said Bert barely a month later. ‘Personally, we don’t get on well; musically, it left a lot to be desired. The agent over there keeps dreaming up different ways of selling the same old act, basically. This time out it was me, John and Jacqui, next time out it’s the [current] band. America won’t take chances: I can’t get a gig out there with Peter because he’s not known. Me and Peter click together onstage. It works, and when it does it really is magic. With John I have to work really hard to arrive at anything that sounds good, however much it’s been rehearsed. My timing and John’s are two different things – that’s the most pleasant way I can put it.’
Soundboard recordings from the tour confirmed how far Bert and John now were from each other as musicians. Jacqui’s presence seemed to be the glue holding the act together, musically and otherwise, although with two guitarists of such calibre the performances were never obviously disastrous. A British TV documentary crew led by director Jan Leman had hoped to film the trio in concert at San Francisco’s Great American Music Hall, but relationships were fraught and all that could be salvaged was a pre-show set piece with Bert and Jacqui on an empty stage. It was disappointing but hardly essential: Leman had already filmed Bert and John in London, rehearsing at Bert’s Hammersmith flat and performing a new instrumental, ‘First Light’, on a darkened soundstage. Strangely, the catalyst for this work-in-progress filming that became Acoustic Routes, a largely nostalgic BBC documentary about Bert Jansch and his sixties’ peers, was Bert.
Never one for nostalgia as such, by the late eighties Bert had become concerned that many of the great British acoustic musicians of his era – Davy Graham, Martin Carthy, Roy Harper and the like – were being forgotten and, more to the point, he believed there to be little or no film record of their work. This was a strange concern from someone about whom others could have held, at that time, views of a similar nature. Bert conceived a series of half-hour TV portraits, in which he would be the anchor, interviewing and playing with each episode’s guest (which, given Bert’s reserved character, was an even stranger concept), and brought on board Jan Leman, a fan and freelance film editor based in Edinburgh. Jan had the contacts and experience to promote the project to broadcasters and, with that in mind, a short pilot film was shot in which Bert performed extracts from ‘Angi’, ‘Running From Home’ and ‘Needle Of Death’, among other personal landmarks, and reminisced about the people and places of that era.
Bert had already, in the late eighties, interviewed on tape Davy Graham and other potential guests of the intended series. He had also discussed his idea with old friend Cliff Aungier, who had then mentioned it to Richard Newman. While Bert was recovering from surgery, he was made aware that Newman was now proceeding with his own version of the concept: a mammoth undertaking involving a prospective series, documentary and all-star album. Danny Thompson became involved and brought in other players through his own influence. As Newman’s ‘project management’ partner Loren Auerbach recalls, it was a ‘big scene’.
Loren had been studying for a degree since the Auerbach/Jansch album recordings of 1984—85. Around Christmas 1988 she had, nonetheless, embarked on a new record (never completed) with both Danny Thompson and Bert Jansch among the players. By January 1989 Bert was in hospital and Loren’s projected third album had been subsumed into Newman’s wholesale adoption of the folk/blues history bandwagon. In keeping with Newman’s track record, only one part of the multi-strand project reached fruition – a video documentary Living With The Blues, broadcast on Channel 4 in 1990 and somewhat half-baked in feel.1
Three years later, with a premise to explore the contribution made to acoustic guitar music by Bert Jansch and his peers on the British folk scene of the mid-sixties, Acoustic Routes made its national broadcast debut on BBC2. It had been a long haul from Bert’s initial notion of a series focusing on other players to a one-off film based more obviously around his own story, but it had been a testament to Jansch and Leman’s tenacity that such a project had been realised at all. ‘I wasn’t really in touch with Bert then,’ says Loren Auerbach, ‘but I remember watching it and thinking, “That’s the film Richard wanted to make: Bert’s done it and he’s done it better.”’
Initially commissioned by BBC Scotland as a forty-minute regional programme, the fee-waiving involvement of Billy Connolly as the film’s anchor man – linking the performances and ad-libbing Bert’s history with humour, affection and the communal pride that comes with reliving one’s own part in a movement – allowed for the project’s extension to seventy minutes and a network screening.2 The budget had been desperately small, but the end result had the sheen of class. In one sequence, filmed at 369 High Street, Edinburgh, the old Howff premises, Bert was reunited with Archie Fisher, Hamish Imlach and Anne Briggs; in another, he was teamed up with Al Stewart and Wizz Jones for a trawl around the old haunts in Soho; Davy Graham (refusing to perform with his old rival) is seen playing solo and quaffing cappuccinos at the Troubadour; Ralph McTell explains the music’s fragility, Peter Kirtley attests to Bert’s influence and Martin Carthy revisits ‘Scarborough Fair’ under the indignity of a bogus title (neatly avoiding Paul Simon’s copyright); Bert plays ‘Heartbreak Hotel’ one more time with Albert Lee, in California, and meets his original inspiration Brownie McGhee for the first time in nearly thirty years. Brownie had not the first idea who Bert was but he was happy to entertain anyone who had known the blues.
‘I was quite proud that I was able to get all those people together,’ says Bert, in retrospect.3 ‘But I personally didn’t play well during the whole film. I don’t know why.’ ‘Given plenty of airtime on the programme to assert his legend, Jansch did anything but,’ wrote David Cavanagh in Mojo, another of the new veteran-friendly music monthlies. ‘He was reticent, charming and very human
.’4
Given that the film was necessarily backward looking, it was unfortunate that most of the few ‘new’ pieces heard in the film (some on its subsequent soundtrack album) were unspectacular. Only ‘Paper Houses’, glimpsed briefly in rehearsal, gave a hint of Jansch at his best. With the wheels of Jansch grinding slowly, it would be another five years before this one made it on to a record. Nevertheless, this was the first time Bert had appeared on national television in Britain in nearly ten years,5 and he was doing so in style. It would be difficult to believe that scores of new listeners were coming on board as a result but, certainly, people who had once been fans were being compellingly reminded that their old hero was still out there and was clearly in better shape than he had been in years. Bert’s profile, through no contrivance of his own, was creeping up in other ways too: 1993 would provide the foundations to the critical renaissance that would arise so spectacularly in 1995.
In addition to the Acoustic Routes soundtrack, licensed for release to the relatively prominent British independent Demon Records, the summer of 1993 saw an avalanche of vintage material appear on CD, through various labels.6 Very little of Bert’s ‘classic’ work had yet emerged on the new format. Logo/Transatlantic themselves, still under Geoff Hannington’s ownership, had issued one underwhelmingly presented Jansch compilation in 1986, with a second set announced but never appearing,7 while Rosemary Lane had been licensed for CD to the German label Line in 1989. It was towards the end of 1992, however, that what has since manifested itself as a relentless flood of endlessly repackaged digital Jansch began in earnest: Stefan Grossman’s Best Of Bert Jansch compilation appeared on US label Shanachie, alongside a purely instrumental Bert & John set, After The Dance, while at the same time in Britain Demon covered similar ground with The Gardener: Essential Bert Jansch 1965 – 71. Having successfully tested the water, Demon systematically reissued in full for the first, and not the last, time Bert Jansch, It Don’t Bother Me, Jack Orion, Nicola and Birthday Blues.
A few weeks prior to this torrent of nostalgia, in May 1993, the Pentangle released what would prove to be their final studio album, One More Road. With some irony, just as Bert’s solo profile was seemingly back on an upwards trajectory, the band had resurfaced with their best album in years, on a British label, Permanent, and with a two-month British tour to support it. However absurd the packaging – Aran sweaters against a backdrop of sky, replicating ducks on a wall – the music inside was a triumph. Everyone was making a contribution – indeed, harking back to the original band’s policy, all the tracks were jointly credited – and with the line-up having adapted to each other for three years, the end result was a taut, spring-loaded bundle of energy and a sound that was remarkably fresh and exciting. This time, there were no excuses and none were needed.
Of the tracks that genuinely involved Bert’s compositional hand, there were plenty of surprises: ‘Hey, Hey Soldier’, co-written with Peter, was an incongruously sprightly, and consequently memorable, reflection on the Northern Irish problem; ‘Somali’ was a rhythmically powerful, African-influenced vehicle for comment on the troubles of another continent; ‘Manuel’, co-written with Jacqui, was atmospheric and expansive. ‘Travelling Solo’, in some ways the most superficially obvious Jansch song on offer, had in fact been written by Jacqui. Even the traditional material had displayed imagination in their arrangements where once there had been only stodge. Folk-rock was hardly the sound of the times, but somehow the various musical tendencies amongst the final Pentangle’s membership had found their balancing point in a convincing update of that very genre – or, alternatively, what an Irish Times critic tastefully labelled as ‘sophisticated rhythm and blues’ – with which they had never, first time around, been associated. ‘By dropping the jazz of the Renbourn/Thompson years,’ opined Rob Beattie in Q, ‘and enfolding the “rosy cheeks and ruby lips” nonsense within impeccable arrangements, there’s a real sense here of continuing and enriching the tradition.’
Over the next two years, with both his and the Pentangle’s presence in Britain enhanced, Bert would be balancing the demands of two upwardly mobile careers and doing so with increasing difficulty. On at least one occasion, in the summer of 1993 when the group were offered concerts in Sardinia, Bert’s commitments as a soloist scuppered the opportunities of the five. ‘It was incessant work for me at that time,’ he says. ‘If I was offered other work outside of the band I had to take it, meaning there was no break for me at all. In the end it was like tossing a coin: it had to be one or the other.’
The one-album deal with Permanent and negotiations with the BBC regarding Acoustic Routes had been handled by Deke Arnold, a friend of Charlotte’s and agent for Dennis Waterman and other stars of the small screen, who was effectively now acting as Bert’s manager. ‘He showed me, with Permanent, how to storm into a record company and lay down the rules of what you want out of a contract,’ says Bert. ‘So he had a go. But, like all managers, he got to a point with me where he didn’t know what to do any more.’
Charlotte was still in touch with Bert via their son Adam, whom Bert was seeing on a regular basis. An interview with Edinburgh’s Evening News from this period, just prior to the Scottish regional broadcast of Acoustic Routes, provides a clear insight into how comprehensively he had cleaned up his act from the boozing, self-centred days of the eighties.
‘When I’m not on the road, Friday evening is spent at home. I usually have my eleven-year-old son Adam round. I pick him up at school, cook a curry and he stays the night. He’s into Blackadder, so we watch hours and hours of it on video. Hopefully he’ll watch Acoustic Routes when it’s on. The idea for the programme was one I’ve had for years and it’s great it’s finally been made. I wanted to document the various guitar players I’ve known and who I consider have influenced the music scene. You never see them on the box.
‘Travel is a way of life for me. Most of my concerts these days are in Germany or the United States. That’s where the money is. Interestingly, although I’m on the move so much, in this country as well, I’ve never owned a car or learned to drive. In the days when I was drinking it would have been absolutely lethal for me to drive and nowadays, with the number of cars on the road, I don’t think I could handle one. Anyway, assuming I’m at home, I’m up on Saturday between 8 a.m. and 9 a.m. Banjo [Bert’s dog] wakens me and I take her for a walk in the park. Breakfast is tea and toast. I tend not to eat dairy products as I’m trying to cut down on cholesterol. I gave up smoking a long time ago. At lunchtime Adam and I go to the park and on to McDonalds. If I’m on my own I don’t have set times for doing anything, but with Adam I have to sit down and actually plan a meal for the evening. He stays over again on Saturday night and we spend the evening watching videos or he gets his games out.
‘I don’t play guitar if there’s someone here, but if I’m on my own I’ll put in an hour or so. I’m always working on something new. Sunday I’m up again at 8 a.m.. I have to get Adam back over to Earl’s Court and that takes all morning by the time we potter about in the park. Sometimes we go to the Lyric Theatre, in Hammersmith, where they do live music at lunchtime. Once Adam’s home I spend Sunday afternoon working on my computer or playing guitar. In the evening I’ll watch a bit of television. Mostly I make a curry but if I’m really lazy I go out for one. Some weekends I’ll not be in London at all, of course. I’ll either be on tour or up in Edinburgh visiting my sister Mary and various friends. I think I’ll eventually retire there, but I don’t know when that’ll be. I’m one of those people who can’t turn down the work. I think I’ll be playing till I drop.’8
The key facets of Bert’s post-alcohol domestic life were evident: his son Adam, his dog Banjo, copious quantities of tea and a predilection for Indian food. There was also a total focussing on his work, aided now by an embracing of modern home-recording and music notation technology.9 Bert’s conversion from technological luddite to digital self-sufficiency had been a reaction to the indifference he had experienced at the h
ands of those who had engineered From The Outside in the mid-eighties. Never again would he put himself in that situation: he would continue to use studios, when the nature of the work demanded it, but for guitar/vocal work and demos of more elaborate conceptions he would have no reason to leave the flat.
The newly remixed version of From The Outside slipped into Britain via Hypertension during 1993’s mid-summer flurry of Jansch product. Its representing allowed for the inclusion of two genuinely new tracks, the first to be recorded at home: ‘I don’t think we should use all the technology that there is in the world to create music,’ Bert mused at the time, ‘but we should definitely be aware of it. That, I think, is one of the differences between the new band and the old band. In the old days we were quite advanced in putting ideas together but we didn’t necessarily keep up with technology. We were left behind.’
Bert appeared as a guest on BBC Radio 1’s Bob Harris Show in July. It was the first time in over ten years that Bert had appeared on what was then still the nation’s favourite station. With Acoustic Routes, the Pentangle’s One More Road and all the reissues there was plenty to talk about. Bert, true to form, was not the most forthcoming of interviewees but agreed with Bob’s observation that the music of his early albums had remained largely timeless not least through the very simplicity of the recordings. Be it the sixties or the nineties, a guitar and vocal performance still sounded essentially the same. As the owner of an increasing array of computer technology, music software, DAT machines and sound modules – the nineties equivalent of Bill Leader’s Revox – it was a point not lost on Bert: ‘I could actually make [an album at home],’ he said, ‘although I never actually do do much recording. I’ve got all the right gear except the microphones, which I’m slowly getting around to!’10