by Colin Harper
The creation of Bert’s songs up to the point where he feels sufficiently confident to commit them to record has, in some cases, been a process of years. The process after recording is to either re-shape them continually onstage or simply forget them. The recording of Circus was, consequently, the end of the line for most of its songs. By the time Live At The 12 Bar: An Authorised Bootleg was recorded, towards the end of his residency, all but four of the fourteen Circus titles were absent from the set list. Before the end of the decade it was unusual to hear even that number on a typical Bert Jansch gig. There were plenty more songs to be written yet.
‘I probably only met Bert two or three times,’ says Mick Houghton, the man largely responsible for his critical renaissance. ‘I’m not even sure he knew who I was. The truth was, I was such a fan I was actually a bit in awe of him. We dealt mainly through Alan King. I guess he was a bit of a wide-boy but he was good for Bert at that time because he was such an enthusiast. He created such a good vibe around Bert.’
It would be inappropriate to detail any of King’s dodgy deals: at the time of writing aspects of his legacy are still being delicately resolved. The Live At The 12 Bar album was one fairly harmless King wheeze, a representative, straight-to-DAT souvenir of a typical Jansch gig, mopping up the otherwise unreleased cover of Brownie McGhee’s ‘Trouble In Mind’, a staple of Bert’s live repertoire at the time, and introducing one new and as yet untitled instrumental. Appearing in 1996, it was the second release on King’s ‘Jansch Records’. The first, the previous year, had been a CD salvaging of the long-lost Moonshine. One final triumph for Alan King’s ducking-and-diving regime was the netting of three live television spots. Two of these, on Sky TV’s Selina Scott Show and the Welsh language channel S4C, were of little consequence; the third, on BBC2’s Later With Jools Holland, was more like it.
As an increasingly credible name living within easy reach of the show’s studio, Bert had actually been on the ‘subs’ bench’ for this flagship live music series for a few months before finally appearing, on 15 June 1996, alongside ZZ Top, Nigel Kennedy, Altan and others. Irish traditional band Altan were promoting Blackwater, an album featuring their version of ‘Blackwater Side’, a song Bert was synonymous with. The show’s producer, Mark Cooper, felt a duet was appropriate – in the event, a Bert cameo in Altan’s arrangement. More representative was the ‘difficult’ title track of Circus, performed with presenter Jools Holland on piano. There were more accessible tracks on the album but, at the very least, on this, his first appearance on national television since Acoustic Routes, Bert’s enigma remained intact. Meanwhile, Alan King’s house-on-sand management edifice was in the process of falling apart.
Bert had finally realised that Arthur Daley was a television character and anyone carrying on like him in real life was in danger of causing long-term disaster for all concerned. He approached Cooking Vinyl, who suggested a number of options including Artistic Upstarts, an Edinburgh-based operation fronted by Andrew Hunter.17 Within six months of agreeing to take Bert on, Hunter employed Kresanna Aigner with specific responsibility for their new client’s tour management. ‘As I understand it,’ says Kresanna, ‘Cooking Vinyl came to Andrew and said, “Help! We have an artist who’s just been through the mill with an atrocious manager. We’re trying to relaunch him and we need someone to deal with the touring, sort out the contracts and so on.” So Andrew inherited this mess. What he attempted to do was to sift through a lot of contractual stuff, where people maybe hadn’t paid Bert royalties for given periods or hadn’t raised royalty percentages when they should have, various scandals like that. And he only ever got to the tip of that iceberg during the whole time we worked with Bert.’
What Andrew Hunter sought to redress immediately was the touring situation, which had trickled on without focus for nearly two years. The first thing Andrew needed to do was find a good agent – any agent. After various refusals (Bert’s reputation with alcohol died hard) the burden was eventually laid at the door of another Edinburgh man, John Stoneyport – ‘totally the right person’ in Kresanna’s view. ‘He understands Bert, he’s from the same era, he’s got similar artists like Dick Gaughan on his roster. Plus Bert’s also Scottish, which people forget.’
Slightly predating the advent of Andrew Hunter’s management, which was to focus on repairing Bert’s touring situation, Bert had decided to help that very cause by removing himself, after a year’s worth of Wednesday nights, from the 12 Bar. It had been a curious little castle in which he had been king, but the musicians around him on that scene were arguably looking to Bert – owner of a celebrated if somewhat rudderless career at the time – to help them get their own acts together. Bert had happily helped out a number of lesser-known musicians over the previous few years – Loren Auerbach, Maggie Boyle, Janie Romer, David Hughes, Bobby Barton and Jenny Beeching among them – on recordings and/or in providing opportunities to join him onstage or play as special guests at his shows. During the 12 Bar era Bert was now regularly in the company of a whole host of people trying to make their way in the music business, many of whom were enjoying the benefits of his generous spirit. A number of those associated with Bert during the nineties, including his time at the 12 Bar, could be viewed as coat-tailing opportunists. But Bert was never one to pre-judge character: ‘I have faith in people,’ he told one questioner at the time. ‘I still defend my right to accept somebody as they are. I’ve always stood by that. I think that’s possibly why I’ve never actually made it in the music biz.’18
During the latter half of 1996, Bert saw through various concert and festival commitments arranged largely prior to his change of management: a summer club and festival tour of the UK (ironically, his most cohesive since Alan King had dismissed Chas Cole from the team), three festivals in Canada and a foray through Hong Kong and Australasia, where Cooking Vinyl had licensed Circus to Festival Records. The Australian press were more than happy to make Bert’s ‘renaissance’, a term now commonplace in Jansch publicity, global. But the real fruits of Hunter’s new management policy were revealed in February 1997 with Bert’s first substantial solo tour of Europe in a long time: twenty-three dates covering Switzerland, Germany, Denmark, Norway and a lot of miles in between. Kresanna Aigner, vivacious, efficient and raring to go, was Bert’s driver and organiser.
‘I knew nothing of Bert beforehand,’ she admits. ‘All the fans, the superstardom – which obviously unravelled as the tour went on. I remember somebody showing up in Sweden with every single album Bert had ever done, wanting Bert to sign every one! I was gobsmacked – I just had no idea what a legend he was. The tour itself was touch and go in places, a little on the depressing side. He would do everything from a really terrible gig with six people to a handful of good concerts with two or three hundred. It was a time when gigs in Germany were getting difficult for a lot of people. There were new tax nightmares for touring artists and the audiences were going down. We then did Denmark, which Bert was looking forward to. But it was a first-year relationship with a new agent and again the gigs were mixed. Bert just felt, “Well, I know I need to tour but I’m too old for this palaver.”
‘We were on the road for four or five weeks and it was ten-hour drives a day to get to most of the gigs. He had also had a hernia operation a week or two before the tour so it was really hard going for him. I think what kept it okay was my enthusiasm, and I think Bert enjoyed that. He’d had never had a woman tour manager who wasn’t a wife or girlfriend and it was also my first trip to Europe, so it was a novel experience at least. I was all very organised and had researched every route, with maps and notes to hand, to which Bert would be saying, “Ah, just follow the sun, it’ll be up here somewhere …” And actually I can see now that he’s right: when you’ve toured for a while you can go to a city and very quickly get a sense of where the gig is. He’s a very serious, focussed person offstage: he doesn’t say very much but he takes it all in, the scenery, the people he’s with, passers-by. When we came back to London
we went down to the 12 Bar to have a drink and a lot of his friends there said it was the happiest they’d seen him coming off a tour.’
In April Bert began a UK tour, the first to be organised by John Stoneyport. Again, Kresanna was road managing, with sax player Mark Ramsden as special guest and prospective biographer. Organising a biography had been another of Hunter’s priorities and Ramsden was game to try: ‘I don’t know why anybody ever thought he should write the book,’ says Kresanna. ‘I think he just wanted to hear the “sex, drugs and rock’n’roll” stories, but it was quite frustrating for him because there’s big chunks of his life that Bert simply can’t remember. But what I noticed at a lot of the gigs were fathers, the initial fans thirty years ago, coming along with their sons and daughters and a whole new generation discovering him. I think in 1997 he started to realise his age, started thinking a bit more about his past.’
In August Bert played the Edinburgh Book Festival; in September he toured Ireland; in October he returned to Australia, building on the groundwork of the previous tour and recording some dates, with local bass and percussion players, on digital multi-track. There were more UK dates as soon as he returned and in November he was off on a tour of the States, including a couple of shows with Archie Fisher. In Hunter’s view, if Bert was going to be able to pick and choose ‘quality gigs’, where the masses would come to him, he first had to go to the masses: to tour relentlessly and re-establish his name in the regions. Bert himself, while admitting to writing ‘with a younger audience in mind than the one that actually comes to the gigs’, had a very clear idea of just who his audience was: ‘The thirties generation might have heard of me but not enough to draw them out, and also they’ve got their babysitters. It’s the generation my age and slightly behind me – their children are grown up and they’ve got nothing to do, they see a name in the paper they used to go and see and they come out. Sometimes they bring their children along.’19
In the middle of all this touring Bert had retreated to Lochranza, a little village on the Isle of Arran off Scotland, to record the basic tracks for his next album. Tam Kenny and Vicki Hudson, proprietors of an art gallery and guest house in the village – converted from an old chapel – had been fans of Bert’s for years and had recently been organising tours for himself and others in the Highlands and Islands region. The ambience of the old church, and a van-load of portable recording gear, would provide Bert with all he needed to deliver what the commentators saw as the all-important follow-up to Circus. Jay Burnett, engineer on Circus, went along as producer. During the course of the intensive two-week sessions another old friend was in attendance: Loren Auerbach.
Loren had lost touch with Bert during the early nineties, but a friend had persuaded her to attend one of his gigs at the end of 1994: ‘I was a bit nervous but, as ever, he was pleased to see me, gave me his phone number and we got back in touch. When we went up to Arran we were just friends, and we were more than friends when we came back. I think I always knew that he was interested in more than friendship but I didn’t want our friendship to be spoiled so I pretended it wasn’t happening – in that kind of naive way that you do. Right from the start we’d always clicked in some strange way. From Bert’s point of view, he never pushed for anything more than friendship because he told me later he’d rather have had me in his life as a friend than try and push for something more and end up with nothing. It’s funny, during the 12 Bar time I was actually involved with this other guy, but I’d be going to the club practically every Wednesday, watching Bert, thinking, “This is where I want to be.”’20
Aside from the developments in his private life, Bert returned from Arran excited at the quality and feel of the recorded work. It had been two years since Circus but, away from live performances, he had been far from idle: ‘I literally spend all of my waking time writing songs,’ he told one questioner in the intervening period. ‘There’s no point in the day when I’m distracted doing other things. If I’m on a bus I’ll be thinking of writing a song. I often get on the wrong buses.’21 This was still only part of the equation: Bert had upgraded his home studio and, partly as a way of learning how it all worked, had been devoting a great deal of time and energy to producing other people. First in line were the Magic Bow, a couple of homeless buskers and their dog from Huddersfield, and then more prolonged work on full-scale albums for 12 Bar associates Dave Sutherland and Johnny Hodge.22 Work on his own album was having to progress in parallel.
Contributions from a number of other musicians (including old friend Pick Withers on drums) were recorded at Boundary Row Studios in London. To Bert’s mind the album was ready to go well before the end of the year, but Martin Goldschmidt, MD at Cooking Vinyl, had become obsessed with trying to graft on some of the rock celebrities who had been name-dropping Bert in the wake of Circus. Bert was not necessarily against the idea of working with the likes of Jimmy Page or whoever else but he was distinctly uncomfortable with Cooking Vinyl ringing round such people and creating an artificial situation. He also believed that Martin Goldschmidt had not actually listened to any of the demos that had been sent in of prospective tracks for the new album. If he had, Bert felt, he would have realised that this was not a record crying out for loud guitars. Toy Balloon finally escaped, sans superstars, on 30 March 1998. ‘They’d been hanging around for Jimmy Page for about six months,’ says Bert, ‘and when they didn’t get him they just lost interest. And because it had dragged on so much, I lost interest.’ Things were beginning to unravel again.
During December 1997 Andrew Hunter had taken a month-long sabbatical, and when he came back he announced that he was leaving music management. ‘It was all up in the air,’ remembers Kresanna Aigner. ‘Bert was wondering if he’d keep me on, and I was wondering what I was going to do. I was proposing to him that he did keep me on, but I think Bert really needed someone with more experience of contract situations.’ Bert continued with Kresanna as caretaker-manager during the first quarter of 1998, in which time he completed a five-week tour of Australia. But, guided particularly by Loren’s businesslike zeal, a change in management was now regarded as the way forward. Privately, it was already apparent to Bert that it was time to remove himself from Cooking Vinyl: on his terms.
Toy Balloon, the second instalment of a three-album deal with the label, received a respectful if muted response. Mick Houghton, once again handling promotion, was no longer sure who was managing Bert and, having played the ‘career reappraisal’ card last time around, saw nothing viable in the way of a press angle. ‘One problem was the delay,’ says Houghton, ‘but also it was pretty much Circus part two. Other than Bert Jansch making another record, there was no story. If nothing else, he needed to do a prestigious concert at somewhere like the Festival Hall. The press need those things to keep writing about someone. They’re not going to write about you if your London gig is some community centre in Crouch End. The idea of bringing in celebrities was worth pursuing – Cooking Vinyl were holding out for that – but, without having direct access to Bert at the time, I sense now that it wasn’t something he wanted to do.’
What Bert had done was create an album of which at least half the tracks were on a par with the best work on Circus: between them, indeed, was one truly stunning record. Toy Balloon’s mood was less of a piece than its predecessor, moving between the monochrome guitar/vocal ambience of that album and almost incongruously upbeat R&B/soul workouts with bass, drums, and sax and more reminiscent of the Blues Brothers than the alternative rock of Martin Goldschmidt’s hopes. ‘Sweet Talking Lady’, Bert’s funky ode to his guitar, had been the track earmarked for Jimmy Page to embellish. When it became clear that Page’s diary was always full, Bert invited Charlotte’s new partner, and James Brown’s sax man, Pee Wee Ellis to do his thing on it instead.
At least half the material on Toy Balloon had been written subsequent to Circus. But few of the new album’s songs had been featured regularly, prior to release, in Bert’s live shows: ‘Bett’s Dance’ had been
aired before, as an untitled encore on Live At The 12 Bar; ‘Born And Bred In Old Ireland’ had previously been recorded for, but discarded from, Circus; while ‘Paper Houses’, a gentle reflection on homelessness in Edinburgh, had been a masterpiece in waiting since the Bert & John US tour of 1992. Of the more recent songs, the breathtakingly beautiful title track recaptured the poignancy of his Rosemary Lane lullaby ‘Tell Me What Is True Love?’.
This was an album only superficially similar to When The Circus Comes To Town but, from Mick Houghton’s perspective, not sufficiently different to warrant a further burst of attention. Nevertheless, for those who had followed Bert’s career from the start there were subtle signs that he was indeed, as Kresanna Aigner had felt, beginning to reflect upon on his own history. Two tracks into the new album, ‘She Moved Through The Fair’ was the most spectacular example of Bert’s tendency to let material gestate over a period of years. This was a song dating right the way back to Len Partridge, Bert’s mentor at the dawn of the sixties, to whom Bert would attribute its learning in concert. ‘You wouldn’t classify it as a right old laugh,’ noted one reviewer, ‘but it’s a strong reminder of his skill.’23
With a similarly retrospective flourish, the album’s opening track was an awesome and quite unexpected reading of Jackson C. Frank’s ‘lost’ masterpiece ‘(My Name Is) Carnival’. Frank had recently been ‘rediscovered’, crippled and living in welfare institutions in upstate New York. Through the intervention of well-wishers his one album, 1965’s Jackson C. Frank, had been reissued on CD in 1996 as Blues Run The Game. Rarely a listener to recorded music, Bert had long treasured his vinyl copy. For Toy Balloon he had crafted a surely definitive arrangement, adding yet more film noir profundity to an already portentous original, of a song rich in timeless metaphor which had, remarkably, never been covered on record before. In possibly his final interview,24 Jackson himself had expressed surprise that ‘Carnival’ had been neglected in this way. He died within a year of Toy Balloon’s release, and it is not known if he ever heard his old friend’s spellbinding retrieval of that very gauntlet. Blues, for Jackson Frank, Bert Jansch and all the Soho brotherhood, would always run the game. He had left behind a dark hymn to those who would play their cards in the industry of music: