Bert Jansch
A look back on the life and music of this hugely influential folk guitarist, with help from his friends
From his seismic arrival on the 60s folk scene to his tragic death in 2011, Bert Jansch led a life where friendship and music lit the way through the darkness. With new testimony from those who knew and played with him, this is the beautiful, bitter-sweet tale of a much-missed maestro…
In 1964 there was an interloper on London’s folk scene. It began with a brusque business card pinned to the noticeboards of record shops across the capital (‘Bert Jansch – The Best Blues In Town’). From there, the trail led to the city’s smoky club circuit, where the folk cognoscenti gathered to see if this Scottish upstart lived up to his billing. Dig out some elbow room at The Scots Hoose in Cambridge Circus, or Les Cousins on Greek Street, and you’d see a dishevelled man climb onto the stage, alcohol on his breath, a cock-eyed cigarette clamped in his lips, a mumbled introduction (if you were lucky).
“The first time I ever saw Bert play,” recalls folk veteran Ralph McTell, “he was slightly over-refreshed. I remember him stumbling into the playing position. In those days, he didn’t have a guitar and would turn up to gigs and borrow whatever was there. I remember he took a box of matches from his pocket and blew the tray out, scattered the matches all over the room and said, ‘That’s an old folk custom.’ If you were told he was a plumber’s apprentice from Scotland, you’d have believed it.”
Despite the negligible razzmatazz, when Jansch started playing, the clocks stopped. “I was this 17-year-old kid, all starry eyed,” remembers Gordon Giltrap of his first encounter at Les Cousins. “I just couldn’t follow his playing – the positions were all over the place. Bert was an original thinker and his playing was immaculate that night. You couldn’t compare him to anybody else. He wasn’t an improviser like Martin Taylor or John Etheridge. Technically, John Renbourn was a superior player. With Bert, he was a bit rough around the edges, but you could forgive that because of the tone, the emotion and the atmosphere. Bert was the man. He was just a one-off. He would do things on guitar and you would think, ‘Oh, I never thought of doing that…’”
Jansch never ran with the pack. At 20, his headspinning command of genre implied a man of the world, with folk, blues and jazz crashing into Middle Eastern stylings. His palette swirled the disparate influences of Brownie McGhee, Miles Davis, Big Bill Broonzy, Charles Mingus and, above all, Davey Graham: the wayward visionary whose globe-trotting, genremulching genius had prompted Jansch to quit the folk clubs of his native Edinburgh, busk across Europe and soak up the sounds of Morocco. “In the early days,” Jansch told The Independent, “I didn’t conform to anything, be it school, work, where I lived… there were no rules. If you put a rule in front of me, I would break it, because it would get in the way of the process of living.”
By the time he washed up in London, this soft-spoken iconoclast was fully formed. “Quite simply,” says McTell, “nobody had ever played acoustic guitar like that before. Most of the players you see now have relegated the acoustic to a rhythm instrument again, which is what it always was. But there were moments in a quiet room where one bloke with an acoustic can pin an audience to the wall. And that’s what Bert would do. His technique was definitely best exemplified by the acoustic guitar.”
A Builder, An Artisan
Jansch’s skill on the acoustic guitar was nowhere more evident than on 1965’s deathless Bert Jansch. This
debut album might have been recorded with a Revox reel-to-reel at a kitchen table, but it proved a masterclass of touch and technique, from the nimble bend-and-pluck of Strolling Down The Highway to the sorrow-swept rolling arpeggios of his tribute to an overdosed friend on Needle Of
Death. “That first album is still a landmark,” says Giltrap. “It’s just full of poetry. Bert’s writing was astonishing and his guitar playing was otherworldly, technically beyond a lot of guitar players at that time. You put that album on and the atmosphere changes in the room. It’s hard to describe the feeling you got when you were listening to it. It was mystical, almost spiritual. His version of Davey Graham’s Anji is still the finest recorded version I’ve ever heard.”
“That debut album broke all acoustic guitar records and changed everything,” picks up McTell. “You can date all the guitarists pre-Bert and after Bert. He was an innovator of guitar who soaked things up. He was interested in harmony and intricate little patterns that he would repeat and weave his songs around. I remember, Bert stayed at my house. He liked to play in the morning and he’d build his songs; make the first riff, play it over and over, then explore where it would go. It was like putting bricks on top of each other, then he would commit those to memory – and muscle memory. He was a builder. He was an artisan in that sense.”
Giltrap was amongst the thousands of aspirant folk stars who tried to dissect that slippery material. “You’d think, ‘How is he doing this?’ Particularly his blues stuff. Bert would do a lot of unison stuff – he might slide to the A on the sixth string and play the open fifth string together – so it often sounded like a 12-string guitar. He had very strong hands and he’d do a lot of hammering on and pulling off. I was round at Bert’s flat once, playing his guitar, and beyond the 12th fret, the strings were completely flat on the frets – unplayable. But he told me: ‘I don’t play up there’. Just think about that: the great Bert Jansch never played beyond the 12th fret. Because everything he needed to say or do was within those parameters. That was quite a revelation for me. The stuff Bert was doing was pioneering. But I remember him saying to me, ‘I didn’t try to be a pioneer of the guitar, I’m just doing what I do.’”
Indeed, Jansch’s laconic demeanour suggested that fame would be anathema (as he once told The Guardian, he’d “rather prop up a bar somewhere with no-one knowing who the hell I was”). “At one point,” points out McTell, “our mutual manager did stick Bert up as a potential
“I didn’t conform to anything, be it school, work, where I lived… there were no rules”
‘British Bob Dylan’. But Bert would not have been interested in that at all. His music was far too complex for popular music.”
Even as he shirked the spotlight, Jansch’s rise continued with 1965’s It Don’t Bother
Me and 1966’s Jack Orion, the latter breathing new life into folk standards like
Blackwaterside (later ‘borrowed’ by Jimmy Page for Zeppelin’s Black Mountain Side), with Jansch handling banjo on instrumental opener The Waggoner’s Lad. “Jack Orion was unbelievable,” says Giltrap. “To take some fairly bloody traditional tunes and really get inside them and explore the darkness. And then, to take a Ewan McColl song like The First Time Ever I Saw
Your Face and turn it into a sublime masterpiece… it doesn’t get any better than that. Where do you go from there?”
Jansch already knew the answer to that one. Also in 1966, he partnered John Renbourn on the double-header Bert And
John album, and that friendship spilled into Pentangle: the folk-jazz supergroup whose early albums like 1968’s Sweet Child and 1969’s Basket Of Light gave the thrilling impression that anything could happen. “He was different to everybody else,” says vocalist Jacqui McShee. “You knew Bert was special, because everybody just sat with open mouths. His playing was aggressive and he attacked the guitar. Compared with John, who almost stroked the guitar. To watch the two of them was just magic.”
“There are only two artists, I think, that ever got near the charts with anything out of 3/4 or 4/4,” adds McTell, “and that’s Dave Brubeck’s Take Five and Pentangle with
Light Flight, which was in 5/4 or something. Bert took great delight in tricky time signatures. Danny Thompson told me he’d once asked Bert, ‘What bloody timing is that?’ And Bert had said, ‘It’s all in one.’ He could tap his foot in ‘one’, and it didn’t matter if it was 7/8 or 11/9 – it was all ‘one’ to Bert. He loved puzzles and he was never afraid to try something new and difficult out in front of an audience. And if it broke down, it broke down – and he just got on with it.”
sparks off the fretboard
The 70s dawned with promise, as the everprolific Jansch released another brace of classic solo albums in 1971’s Rosemary Lane and 1973’s Moonshine. By 1974 there was the masterful LA Turnaround. “That was one of his most engaging and charming pieces,” contemplates Gordon Giltrap. “I remember trying to work it out. I thought it was in an open tuning, but it was in standard. And some of those stretches… it was relentless.”
It had been an astonishing early run. Yet Jansch’s hot-streak cooled a little with Pentangle’s first break up in 1973. “It was Bert’s instigation,” says McShee. “Our manager, Jo Lustig, had put us on the road, and we were all getting very tired. We wanted to make another album but there wasn’t time to do anything creative. Bert became terribly tired and he just said, ‘I can’t hack it anymore. I just need a break. I just need to get away.’ He was a very solitary man.”
Jansch retreated from view, slipping into a quiet life on a Welsh farm that nodded to his early career as a nurseryman. When he reappeared two years later, the moments of genius – including 1979’s all-instrumental
Avocet album alongside Thompson and Martin Jenkins – were laced with the sense of a man trying to regain momentum. “The problem Bert had,” says Giltrap, “was that because his early work was a force of nature, it was a hard act to follow.”
Even then, with a guitar in his hands, Jansch could show you magic. “We played a college in Santa Cruz in the early-80s,” recalls Ralph McTell. “We used to flip a coin – Bert would open one night, I’d open the next. That night, I’d done my set, so I tucked myself in the dark at the back and listened to a stunning performance. Bert was just on-song and played some of his most beautiful songs. There were two girls in the front and they were totally entranced by him. Bert’s playing was incredibly sexy, even blokes would say it. You can’t teach someone to play like that. It’s an intuitive feel. Like, ‘I might slap the guitar, I might miss a note here, but you know what I’m trying to do.’ I remember one reviewer saying it was like watching sparks fly off the fretboard.”
Off the stage, however, Jansch was suffering the fallout from his hard living. Thompson once affectionately dubbed the Scottish guitarist a “26 pints-a-night man” and McTell concurs (“Our culture in acoustic music was about alcohol, and Bert was reliant on that for a long time”). In 1987, Jansch noted that he was given the stark choice of “either giving up alcohol or simply giving up” – and mercifully chose the latter. “He kicked it,” nods Giltrap, “and got back to doing what he was doing.”
It would prove the start of a heartening late-bloom. Following an acclaimed mid-90s residency at the 12 Bar Club on
“Bert’s playing was incredibly sexy, even blokes would say it. You can’t teach someone to play like that”
Denmark Street, Jansch’s resurrection gathered pace with 2000’s Crimson Moon and 2002’s Edge Of A Dream: both spellbinding albums where the old master’s still-vital touch jostled with the fretwork of star guests including Bernard Butler and Johnny Marr. By 2006, many argued he had regained the form of his life on The Black
Swan, flanked by luminaries from Beth Orton to Devendra Banhart. “The fact that Bernard, Johnny and others came forward to add their support meant a great deal to Bert,” explains McTell. “He was such a quiet guy. He really wasn’t flamboyant. But he did admit, when he was pushed, that by the time the 70s came, he would have liked to have had just a little more recognition. I don’t think he realised he had it. Because you really can’t quantify what Bert did in terms of record sales.”
“That respect was always there from the old school,” stresses Giltrap. “From me, Ralph, Jimmy Page and Wizz Jones. But with the younger players, I think his lovely wife Loren saw it as a good career move.”
the Passing of A Magician
With cruel timing, as his profile rose, Jansch’s health was faltering. In 2005, he underwent heart surgery. “I think he played differently after his operation,” says McTell. “I remember missing that edge there was in the voice, the strength. Bert’s voice was another unique feature. You couldn’t make any mistake about who it was. Bert had a very strong, loud voice before the operation, but when I first heard it after, I thought he was almost afraid his stitches would burst. I loved Bert’s voice anyway – I just noted there wasn’t so much edge and push in the vocals as there used to be.”
The diagnosis blackened. In 2009, Jansch was informed he had a golf ball-sized tumour on one lung. Two years later, the world awoke to the shattering news that the 67-year-old guitarist had died in the arms of his wife at a Marie Curie hospice. The biting sense of loss, says McTell, was soothed a little by the peace of his final years. “We were seeing Bert happy, content in his relationship with Loren. He was free from the chains of drink. He was still excited by creativity. He enjoyed the improvement in people’s regard for him, and he was working away. Towards the end of his life, he had a little garden studio that he took great pride in. He was making some great music again. It makes me incredibly sad to think how quickly it all went pear-shaped in the end. But the degree of comfort and happiness he shared with Loren made up for a lot of the sad and difficult times. Bert coped with life very well considering, and brought us into his world through his music. If you really want to know the real Bert, you have to go into his songs.”
“I honestly don’t know what direction Bert would have gone in if he was still here,” considers Giltrap. “I don’t think he would have veered very far from what he was doing. I think Bert said all he wanted to say.”
That extraordinary catalogue is ample to assure his legacy. “When you’re playing guitar and you delve into the great mysteries of it, there are people that will definitely come up,” concludes McTell. “Big Bill Broonzy will definitely be someone you look at. Some people will go back further and find Arthur ‘Blind’ Blake and Blind Boy Fuller. Some will find jazz and Django Reinhardt. And some will find Bert Jansch and go: ‘What the fuck?’
“When I was a kid, I always used to want to know how the magician did the magic. These days I just like watching the performance. And that’s how I am about Bert. I don’t care how he did it. I just like hearing it…”
“Bert loved puzzles and he was never afraid to try something new and difficult” Ralph McTell