John Barrow: Bert Jansch’s former agent on his time with the star

‘I GUESS my guitar-playing sticks out.” In that seemingly throwaway comment from Bert Jansch, who died last week in London, there’s a whole riff of understatement.

I came to Edinburgh in 1964 and just missed Bert, who had headed off to live in the “Smoke” the year before. I first saw him play when Pentangle came to the Fringe in the late 1960s. What a revelation this music was! Lightness of touch and vocally pristine; what was not to like? I drooled.

The years passed, I was involved in other things, and Bert and Pentangle slid from view. Pentangle of course split up a few years later. Bert just wanted out, to escape the pressures of touring.

We met when a mutual friend suggested that Bert needed an agent to get his musical life back on track. For the 20 years or so prior to this, while Bert had recorded quite a lot of solo albums, his career wasn’t exactly heading skywards. If anything, it had bottomed out. However, he had a new lady in his life, Loren, who he would marry a few years later at a quiet wee ceremony on Arran. Loren was quite determined to ensure that this great musician was going to get a decent shake out of the world at last.

Me? Bert Jansch’s agent! Certainly. And so it was. Although Stoneyport Agency had a good reputation, having worked for some well-known folk acts, we were hardly top-flight. So to be asked to add an act like Bert to our roster was a no-brainer.

At that time Bert had a residency in the 12 Bar Club in London’s Denmark Street. Notables of the day such as Oasis’ Gallagher brothers would turn up to sit in slack-jawed appreciation when Bert was scheduled to appear. This was quite typical of Bert’s audience: undying affection and admiration from fans who got younger as the years passed. At more recent concerts here in Edinburgh there would be people who were fans from the 1960s right up to kids-of-the-day who were investigating this phenomenon for the last time.

I can’t really claim to have “got close” to Bert. He lived in London and I live in Edinburgh. But when he and I met on his annual visits to the capital we’d spend a very pleasant quiet hour or so just catching up with a coffee and a chat about mutual friends and acquaintances. And that was Bert really: an unassuming, gently spoken guy whose guitar-playing just “sticks out”.

John Barrow was Bert Jansch’s agent from 1996-2011