Music: Pentangle

Published on Friday 27 June 2008 15:43

BERT Jansch opens the door to his garden flat in Kilburn, North London, and leads the way down to the living room, a pleasant space lined with CDs, books and musical instruments.

There was a time, back in the early to mid-Sixties, when Jansch was a kind of James Dean/Jack Kerouac angsty beatnikish figure who, despite being regarded as the hottest acoustic guitar player in London, was too much of a hobo to actually own a guitar. Now, he has several – I count 10, plus a banjo – and yet, at a heavy-set 64, there is still something of the taciturn existentialist about him. Jansch once admitted that he finds it difficult to say anything to anyone before 2pm; when I ring his doorbell, it is not quite 11 in the morning.

Early in our conversation I ask about Jimi Hendrix. They played on the same bill at a London concert in 1967, and met afterwards, but like Jansch, Hendrix was a quiet person off stage and the conversation proved stilted. "We were like two mutes sitting there," Jansch recalls with a laugh.

An introvert, Jansch has always preferred to express himself through his playing. He was an acclaimed solo artist, part of the same transatlantic folk revival that saw the emergence of Bob Dylan and Martin Carthy, and in 1966 he joined Pentangle, a highly successful group that combined traditional music with jazz and the progressive mindset, if not the actual sound, of psychedelic rock.

Jansch and John Renbourn, the two guitarists, were the creative core of the group. Danny Thompson and Terry Cox, a pair of jazzers, played double bass and drums. Jacqui McShee sang, her beautiful voice the perfect vehicle for the traditional material. Having grown used to hearing her youthful, other-wordly singing on record, it's odd to meet her and discover that she's an earthy 64-year-old south Londoner who talks, quite cheerfully, about the nerves that made her need to pee before Pentangle concerts, and how overdoing it with the composter has left her with tendonitis.

Pentangle released five excellent albums and toured the world several times before splitting in 1973. There was a brief comeback of the original line-up in the 1980s ("a disaster," says Jansch) which was scuppered, in part, by his heavy drinking, but more generally by a lack of public interest. The world had moved on, and Simply Red's airbrushed soul seemed more relevant to more people than Pentangle's rendition of, say, 'Lyke-Wake Dirge', an ancient Yorkshire ballad about the soul's journey through the afterlife.

Now, however, Pentangle have reformed once more, and this time the musical context makes a great deal more sense, as artists including Devendra Banhart, Espers and the much-hyped Fleet Foxes have been open about the influence of the group on their work; indeed Banhart has worked with Jansch, singing on his most recent album, The Black Swan, and performing with him in America. And it's not just the so-called "freak-folk" artists who cite Jansch's influence. Johnny Marr, Bernard Butler and Pete Doherty are friends and admirers. Jansch played guitar on the Babyshambles song 'The Lost Art Of Murder' and the pair duetted live on Jansch's 'Needle Of Death', a cautionary tale about drug addiction that Doherty was keen to sing.

Jansch was born in Glasgow in 1943 but moved to Edinburgh when he was three months old. He became obsessed with the guitar aged 10 when a teacher brought one into school. It was an object of wonder, and he set about trying to make his own. In his mid-teens he took guitar lessons at a local folk club and by the time he was 16 began giving them. In 1962, he lived in a series of Edinburgh squats with Robin Williamson and Clive Palmer, who would later form the Incredible String Band; one of these was on West Nicolson Street.

"Robin and I got involved with Clive, who had a room in this flat with this other guy called Rod, who turned out to be the laird of an island off Oban," Jansch recalls. "He wore a kilt the whole time and had a huge beard. I think it was ginger. Most days we'd sit around just playing guitars and smoking pot for hours and hours and hours. That went on for years."

From Edinburgh, Jansch moved to France, then Morocco, before finally settling in London. He worked regularly in the Soho clubs, where he came into contact with Ewan MacColl, the godfather of the folk revival, whose unsmiling enforcement of tradition represented everything to which Jansch and Pentangle, musical mongrels, were opposed. "He used to have a place called The Singers Club," Jansch recalls. "They had this policy where you could only sing a song or play an instrument from the area you were from. So if you were Scottish you could only play a fiddle or squeezebox. Ridiculous, all these really strict rules, especially as Ewan MacColl himself came from Salford and used to sing Scottish songs."

One night, Jansch went up on stage and played Davey Graham's famous guitar instrumental 'Anji'. He was asked to leave and not come back. "I didn't care, though," he says.

Jacqui McShee began performing on CND marches and was a regular on the London folk scene by the time Jansch came south. She remembers him as a classic bohemian – dirt poor but rich in talent. "The first time I saw Bert play, he had a girl's cardigan on," she says, sitting in the sunny back garden on her home in Surrey. "It was pale green and all the buttons were done up in the wrong holes. John Renbourn tells the story that the first time he saw Bert play he went outside after the first half of the concert and Bert was throwing up in the gutter."

The five Pentanglers bonded over a shared love of Charles Mingus and honed their fusion sound with a residency at the Horseshoe Hotel on Tottenham Court Road. They released both their eponymous debut and the classic follow-up, Sweet Child, a double album, in 1968. The first side of the latter is a live recording of their concert at London's Royal Festival Hall on June 29, 1968.

The comeback tour, which arrives in Glasgow next month, begins tonight at the Royal Festival Hall on the 40th anniversary of the 'Sweet Child' show. Jansch can't remember anything at all about the original performance; indeed the only Pentangle shows he recalls are the American concerts where they played alongside the big underground rock acts of the day.

"That didn't make much sense to me," he says. "We were sandwiched between Rhinoceros and Canned Heat and our amplifiers were no bigger than that." He points to a titchy wee amp. "When they started playing, the whole building shook. It was strange to go from that to this little folk band."

McShee, for her part, remembers playing San Francisco with The Grateful Dead, and being warned by locals not to accept any food or drink from the band as it was invariably spiked with dope and acid.

McShee believes she was the quiet centre of a group composed of virtuosos with big egos; her influence was to calm everyone down. She says that their manager, Jo Lustig, had wanted to hire Sandy Denny to sing with Pentangle, this being a little before Denny joined Fairport Convention, but the rest of the group vetoed the suggestion. This was just as well, McShee believes, as Denny was forceful and volatile; with her in the group, Pentangle would probably not have lasted for as long as they did.

"Sandy was quite a forceful character, quite out there," says McShee. "I remember singing 'Make Me A Pallet On Your Floor' with her at the Christmas party at the Horseshoe. She was pissed and I was quite sloshed, and she lost her balance and we both fell into the audience. I liked her a lot."

Pentangle split in 1973 because the pressure of touring meant they had little time to concentrate on writing new material, and the whole thing began to feel creatively stale. The eventual reformation came about because the organisers of the BBC Folk Awards offered to give a lifetime achievement award to Pentangle if they would perform at the ceremony. "It wasn't complex to arrange," says Jansch. "It was more about having the courage to phone various members of the band. Once I got over that hurdle it became a lot easier. Why did it take courage? Well, when you haven't spoken to someone for over 20 years, it's very hard to suddenly become friends."

Having performed at the Folk Awards, the group decided to tour. Rehearsals began after Christmas last year, and they have worked on 26 songs, from which they will choose a set. "When we were playing the songs through it was really quite strange," says McShee. "It was as if time had stood still. I couldn't stop grinning, just seeing them all sitting there again. But I'm afraid we spent a lot of time reminiscing, so not a lot of serious rehearsal was done." v

Pentangle play Glasgow Royal Concert Hall (0141-353 8000), July 13 www.myspace.com/pentangle