Pentangle - former Nesmith player finds contentment with band
The
ROB ADAMS July 10 2008
From The Herald:
Bert Jansch is a happy man. This, it has to be said, doesn't involve
turning cartwheels. As he heads towards his 65th birthday later this
year, the Glasgow-born guitarist, hero to Jimmy Page, Neil Young and a
growing mob of younger talents including the Smiths' Johnny Marr and
nu-folkie Devendra Banhart, exudes a more sedate contentment. He's
also not long out of bed and it's just gone midday.
The reason for both his state of mind and the lie-in is that
Pentangle, the band Jansch and his then flatmate, fellow guitarist
John Renbourn, formed in early 1967, has reconvened in its original
form and, despite some of its members not having seen each other in 25
years, has managed to recapture the spirit of its early days.
Cambridge the night before had marked the third gig of a tour that
brings the quintet to Glasgow this weekend, and was, says Jansch, with
a tone that insists this isn't just the party line he's trotting out,
really good.
"I never thought I'd see the day when all five of us got together
again," he says, "and it's a pleasant surprise that we can get the
same feel as before. The first rehearsal we had for the tour was
really exciting and while I don't think we're quite ready to go into a
studio and record an album, we've got the music up to a standard that
works well onstage, loosely organised and with a little edge to it."
"Loosely" was possibly a degree more organised than Pentangle's
original state. There was, says Jansch, no point at which he and
Renbourn said, "Let's form a band". It developed organically from them
playing together in their flat and on their 1966 album, Bert & John.
Towards the end of that same year, they had a try-out with a bassist
and drummer, whose names long ago passed from memory, but nothing came
of it.
By this stage, Jansch, who had been building a reputation on the folk
scene as the guitarist at the head of the pack, was beginning to
progress from the intimacy of the folk clubs to small concert halls.
Renbourn had a duo with a singer, Jacqui McShee, and got occasional
calls to do TV programmes. On one of these he met bassist Danny
Thompson and drummer Terry Cox, who were accompanying transplanted
American folk singer Julie Felix and worked together in the trio that
blues godfather Alexis Korner fronted on a children's programme where
their co-stars included the puppets Ollie Beak and Fred Barker.
Thompson and Cox had already been around for some years - the former
also had a trio that included guitar hero-to-be John McLaughlin - and
they could fit in with almost anything. So when Renbourn invited them
along to the regular Sunday session that he, Jansch and McShee had
established at the Horseshoe Hotel in Tottenham Court Road in early
1967, they were "well up for it".
"There was no plan," says Jansch. "We had no leader or director; we'd
just go onto the stage, each of us would do in turns what we did on
our own gigs, or one of us would say, I'll do this, what d'you think?
And it just seemed to gel. We'd have traditional ballads that John and
I had researched down in Cecil Sharp House, the home of the English
Folk Dance and Song Association, Charles Mingus tunes that we all just
loved, blues and all sorts, really. We'd just go where the fancy took
us."
The Horseshoe developed into one of the legendary folk music hangouts.
Guests - friends really - including such illustrious names of the time
as Korner, Davey Graham, Wizz Jones, Anne Briggs and Ralph McTell,
would do spots and since, in Jansch's immortal understatement, "We all
liked a pint," the audience might be treated to anything from the
sublime to the shambolic.
Out of this informality, however, grew a band that seemed to go from
running its own jam session to headlining at the South Bank's Royal
Festival Hall at an unlikely speed.
"It did happen very quickly," says Jansch. "A manager arrived, Jo
Lustig, who was a very business-like American. I'd been doing bigger
and bigger gigs on my own away from the Horseshoe nights, so the
potential audience for the band was there, I suppose, and suddenly we
were playing major halls all over Britain and then the world. Within a
year we were touring the US and Australia."
By the end of 1968, the Pentangle (it was always "the Pentangle" in
the early days) had released two albums, the second - Sweet Child,
being a double partly recorded at the Festival Hall - and were
reaching an wider audience through Lustig's remarkable ability to get
his charges on to television and radio programmes. One of the TV gigs
he secured next involved the group composing the theme song, Light
Flight, and performing incidental music for Take Three Girls, the
first BBC drama series to be broadcast in colour. The album that
captured this period, Basket of Light, took Pentangle into the top 10.
Rather than being a platform for more success, however, this third
album saw the band at the crest of their particular hill. Overwork
began to kill their creativity.
"Once you get on that level, where there's tour after tour, and you're
expected to produce - or at least you were in those days - two albums
a year, you're getting so much attention that you just take it all on
board," says Jansch. "We had virtually no time off. We'd get home for
a day or two and then we'd be off, doing something else. There was no
time to come up with new material. The days when John and I would go
down to Cecil Sharp House and find six or seven variants of a
traditional song and juggle them around until they fitted were now a
past luxury. We kept going, somehow, for a year or two more but
eventually it ground to a halt. I think individually and as a band we
were just exhausted."
The five went their separate ways, reconvening fitfully in various
permutations. Jansch picked up his solo career, recording with former
Monkee Mike Nesmith and experiencing peaks and troughs until a
concerted revival over the past decade resulted in his best album for
years, The Black Swan, in 2006. Renbourn worked steadily, recording
and touring solo and with, among others, former Incredible String
Bandsman Robin Williamson. McShee co-led a new Pentangle with Jansch
before assuming the name for herself and what amounted to John
Martyn's band on downtime. Thompson recovered from years of madness
with Martyn himself to extend his CV to encyclopaedic length - start
with Tim Buckley, work backwards through A, Z etc and you'll
eventually reach Kate Bush - and Cox moved to Menorca, where until he
"retired" and sold up recently, he ran a restaurant.
Their reunion tour is hardly in the "boost the pension" league. It's
not, as Jansch says, as if they're going to make millions of pounds.
They're doing it because the time felt right, although at the back of
their minds there must be a sense of time also wearing on, and they're
enjoying it because the music feels right.
"We're doing stuff that the audiences are expecting, from various
points in our repertoire," says Jansch. "But although we're going back
and it feels familiar, we never know what direction the music's going
to go in. If one of us wanders off musically, the others follow quite
easily - that was always the way. So we still don't have a plan,
really, but if we're all still alive at the end of this tour and if
we're all still enjoying each other's company, then I see no reason
why we can't continue."
Pentangle play Glasgow Royal Concert Hall on Sunday.
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