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John Rebourn, Faro Annie (1971)

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Colin H on Faro Annie

I was searching for something else on back-up disc today and came across a sleevenote for an early 90s reissue of one of the least-known but, in my view, the best of John Renbourn’s album’s, 1971’s ‘Faro Annie’. I see from amazon that even the reissue CD is now rare. You might as well find the original vinyl, though there’s a download available. I’ve tweaked the text slightly. Here it is, just because it’s a bit of buried treasure once again.

FARO ANNIE

With a contractual situation which had recently become weighted against them, the members of the Pentangle – formed in 1967 and slowly progressing to a dissolution in the early weeks of 1973 – had known and accepted that their 1971 album Reflection, recorded in March and released in October of that year, was to be their last album for Transatlantic. But it was not quite the last from the Pentangle family. That honour goes to lead guitarist John Renbourn’s Faro Annie, recorded around August 1971 and released on 14 January 1972. While some in the group were gnashing their teeth and looking for someone to blame – manager Jo Lustig and label boss Nathan Joseph being two contenders for the flak – Renbourn was rather stoic about things:

‘I remember with quite a lot of fondness and gratitude,’ he said, ‘the fact that I made any records at all. I saw Nat as being quite a benefactor and I developed a genuine respect for the type of music that came out of the Transatlantic company as a whole. All those people that recorded for Transatlantic – they were an interesting bunch. I think it was quite a legacy. But I think our contracts with Transatlantic were all about to expire, and the American company that had leased material from Transatlantic – Warner Brothers, or the branch of Warner Brothers that was called Reprise – wanted to take up our personal contracts: Bert’s and mine as solo artists, and the group’s. This is how I remember it. I had one more record to do for Transatlantic and in a moment of some wistfulness, thinking back to the old days, I decided to make a record that was going to be, in my view, like the first one [John Renbourn, 1966], just to make it a complete cycle. I was going to get all my mates in and make a bluesy record. So I got Pete Dyer, who used to play harmonica at the Roundhouse; Dorris Henderson, who I’d been in contact with all the time; and Danny and Terry [bass and drums with the Pentangle] kindly came in and played a little bit. By that stage I was able to afford an electric guitar! Basically, we got it together and played a bunch of bluesy things, which, I felt was an appropriate way to say, ‘Well, I came in this way and I’m going out this way too!’

‘We had some technical problems on that one,’ says Bill Leader, who produced the album with engineer Nic Kinsey. ‘John had developed this delicate guitar style – that was inaudible! We were literally fighting noise, because the mike was turned up so high and he was playing so quietly that very often the loudest thing was his sleeve moving across the guitar! But the sessions were quite good, I think. He marshalled all his girlfriends for that one – Sue Draheim and his previous young lady, Dorris Henderson, who hit the studio like a bomb. She was a very exuberant lady. Perhaps Sue felt a little awkward, but not much ever phased Dorris! A lot of time was spent in the pub; a lot of Pernod was drunk by John, I seem to remember. But there was some good playing.’

John and Dorris had worked as a duo for a year or so in the mid-60s, resulting in two albums, There You Go (Columbia, 1965) and Watch The Stars (Fontana, 1967), the latter appearing during the early days of the Perntangle, long after the pair had stopped working together on the road. Since then, Dorris had briefly been a member of Trevor Lucas’s pre-Fairport Convention folk-rock band Eclection, recording one single with them, and had also tried her luck with the unrecorded Tintagel. Bar one obscure Dutch film soundtrack EP, Faro Annie would mark the swansong of her recording career.* In contrast, Sue Draheim’s was only just beginning. Like Dorris, Sue was from California – hooking up with John in Ireland during the summer of ’71 while the latter was holidaying and searching vainly for fleadhs with Bert Jansch. Specialising in old-timey fiddle music, with a parallel penchant for Bach and the Grateful Dead, Sue’s recording career prior to arriving on the English folk scene consisted of one track on a 1969 album, Blue Ridge Mountain Field Trip (released in the UK on Leader/Trailer). Along with the Faro Annie sessions, she would spend the latter part of 1971 contributing to Royston Wood’s first solo album, angling for a UK work permit, and living on a barge on the Thames with Renbourn. Recording and touring opportunities with the Dransfields and the first, short-lived version of Ashley Hutchings’ Albion Country Band were also on the horizon.

John’s wistful recollections of Faro Annie’s conception, while certainly true, are only a part of the story. Interviewed by Rosalind Russell for Disc during the week of the album’s release, John expanded on the back-to-basics approach:

‘It was done in a hurry, because we were changing record labels and I still owed Transatlantic an album… and as the studio was being knocked down and rebuilt around our ears, the whole session was chaotic to say the least. The way it turned out is strange. It’s like my first album – there’s no worked out stuff on it, just folk songs. The other songs I was working on needed more time to be worked out.’

John was referring here to a batch of self-written songs, unique in his canon of instrumental music and folk/blues interpretations, which would eventually comprise his ultimately shelved Warner’s album of 1973, provisionally titled Just Like Me (finally slipping out as The Lost Sessions on Demon Records in the late 90s). Further work that John had completed around the time of the short and sharp Faro Annie sessions was the producing and guesting-on of an album (Right Now, Columbia 1972) for another of his heroes from the early days, Wizz Jones, and, with the Pentangle, writing and recording the soundtrack to a Bill Travers and Virginia McKenna documentary sequel to Born Free called The Lion At World’s End (sometimes known as Christian The Lion or variations thereof). In similarly nostalgic fashion, he let slip to Rosalind Russell the (never fulfilled) possibilities of making another duo album with Bert Jansch, reprising the now legendary Bert And John album of 1966. However, ‘when we get together and have a glass or so of wine to clear the thoughts, rehearsing becomes a little difficult’.

If the concept behind Faro Annie was fuelled by nostalgia, the material itself was largely fresh and unheralded. Only ‘Country Blues’, featured on a BBC radio session in December 1969, had any documented history in Renbourn’s repertoire. ‘Willy O’Winsbury’, a folk-rock classic in the making, had been appeared on albums by Sweeney’s Men in 1968 and Anne Briggs in 1971 but was still far from hackneyed. It would turn up in an arrangement very similar to that on Faro Annie on the final Pentangle album, Solomon’s Seal, to be recorded around February 1972. Beyond those tracks and the Draheim fave ‘Little Sadie’ – mentioned as a definite for inclusion in a July 1971 Melody Maker interview with Sue – little on the album could have been predicted. ‘Back On The Road Again’ was a compelling ‘part two’ from the rare pen of Alex Campbell, whose ‘Been On The Road So Long’ had long been a classic of the British troubadour experience. Along with ‘Shake Shake Mamma’, ‘Kokomo Blues’ and the jammed instrumental title-track it comprised a quartet of Pentangle-ish arrangements, all featuring Danny and Terry (although the original sleeve credits were a little confusing on this point). Even the Robert Johnson cover ‘Come On In My Kitchen’ was not one of the spiritual godfather of blues-rock’s more widely covered items.

Faro Annie was indeed a fine piece of work and, while he was still waxing lyrical to interviewers about the joys of Early Music (‘you’d never listen to me again,’ he promised Rosalind Russell, if only she’d check out David Munrow’s Early Music Consort), it was a refreshing contrast to the previous, somewhat studious direction of his solo work. As with Bert’s Birthday Blues, it felt at times like a virtual Pentangle album in terms of sound and personnel, with the distinctive voice of Dorris Henderson replacing, as it were, Jacqui on three numbers and John tinkling away on sitar and splashing liberal doses of his distinctive low-volume wah-wah guitar about. Leader and Kinsey’s production clinches it.

Sadly, and as would be the case with much of the material both John and Bert recorded as solo artists during the Pentangle era, very little of the music on Faro Annie would have much life beyond the record. Only ‘The Cuckoo’ would feature onstage, as a duet with Terry Cox, during the final year of the Pentangle and, alongside the now Jacqui McShee sung ‘Willy O’Winsbury’, only ‘White House Blues’ would enjoy any regularity in John’s repertoire as a soloist, duo performer or in the subsequent John Renbourn Group format with Jacqui after the group’s demise. Nevertheless, it remains a wonderful snapshot of its time endowed with a rich, luxuriant sound and mellow groove at odds with the hurried nature of its execution.

* Postscript: After a 1999 CD reissue of ‘There You Go’, Dorris Henderson reappeared for another, this time final, swansong album Here I Go Again in 2003.

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Comments

  2. Gorgeous album. He might have thought it was a blues-y album, but it was real fusion music, before anybody knew what that was. His use of the sitar was, at that time, already nostalgic. Renbourn’s modest, heartfelt style (it was never “about him”) showed the respect and love of a man lost in music.

    Timeless.

  3. Lovely stuff Colin. Faro Annie is perhaps my favourite Renbourn album of the 70s and the back to basics folk/blues approach was, as you say, “a refreshing contrast to the previous, somewhat studious direction of his solo work”.

    The cover photo was also the first time we’d seen a picture of Renbourn using that big Guild J-55 jumbo acoustic. Although his website claims he played his trusty Gibson J50 on all his solo LPs up to 1976’s The Hermit, so perhaps the Guild was just used as a prop for the photo session at that stage.

    As for the electric guitar mentioned in the sleeve notes, that was a Gibson ES-335, a rare early “dot neck” example which was stolen from Pentangle’s van in Liverpool soon after.

    And how about Renbourn’s haircut? Even the most dyed in the wool folkies were getting swept along by the early 70s fashion for long hair and both Bert and John dabbled with the shaggy, hirsute look around this time. It didn’t last long though.

  4. It’s available on Spotify and I’m listening now. Most enjoyable.

    Although I‘m familiar with many of Renbourn’s recordings this one had passed me by and it’s stirring up instant nostalgia for a time in my life when I would listen to this kind of English take on “the blues” every week in the folk clubs of Chester/Wrexham, Oswestry and Shrewsbury – wonderful nights of underage drinking, and guitar playing which inspired me to fail to become proficient.

    His voice is pleasantly hesitant, the guitar playing everything you’d expect it to be and the harmonicist is a bloke out of the much loved and often discussed Stray! What more could you want?

    • Well spotted. Although Pete Dyer didn’t join Stray until 1974 and I’ve been unable to find out anything about him prior to that.

      Stray were another Transatlantic records act, of course and here’s your fun fact of the day: Charlie Kray (brother of the Kray twins Ronnie and Reggie), was their manager for a while.

      • I’d forgotten that Stray were on Transatlantic – in my head it’s a folk label. I have a box set called The Transatlantic Story – 3 CDs filled with The Ian Campbell Folk Group, Richard Digance, Bernard Wrigley, Steve Tilston, Gryphon, etc, etc and then CD No 4: Granny Takes a Trip by the Purple Gang, The Deviants, Mick Farren, Jody Grind and Skin Alley! They must have employed a new talent scout.

        I have a couple of albums by Stray (pre Pete Dyer) and am delighted to see that they both have the lovely and colourful Transatlantic label.

        • Yes, in the early 70s Transatlantic tried to jump on the prog/psych bandwagon with mixed results, although I do have a soft spot for the splendidly named Jody Grind album Far Canal.

          Back to the Transatlantic box set. The first disc was even stranger, with all that comedy/spoken word material. Portsmouth Sinfonia, anyone?

          The Transatlantic label was sold lock, stock and barrel to a company named Logo Records in 1977. In the early 80s I was writing a feature on Transatlantic for Record Collector (never finished) and went along to Logo’s offices in Holborn, central London to interview one of the new owners. What I found there was a massive open plan first floor office, still largely unfurnished with tape boxes everywhere. The Logo people didn’t seem to know what they had inherited and I spent most of the afternoon helping them identify some of the unidentified master tape boxes from the catalogue numbers alone.

          Logo guy: “TRA 125?”

          Me: “Oh, that’s the first Bert Jansch album”

          It was really that bad. The boxes weren’t all unidentified, but here were the master tapes of some of the most important British folk music ever recorded piled up on the floor or randomly stacked on shelving.

          Some of the Transatlantic reissues through Logo were very poor with even the classic Jansch/Renbourn/Pentangle LPs reappearing with new and inferior sleeve designs.

          In the 90s Transatlantic was sold again, this time to Castle Communications (later to become Sanctuary Records) and some semblance of order (and respect) was restored to the catalogue.

            • Thanks KFD. Not really that encyclopaedic. In those pre-internet days label info was hard to come by. I had the Transatlantic discography 80% completed and went to see the Logo guy with the hope of filling in some gaps. As it turned out he had very little idea and it turned into a situation of me helping him via my copious research notes.

              • This might be of interest. I’ve just written a 3000 wd note for a 2CD set of the two Dave Swarbrick Transatlantic LPs (Swarb 1 & 2) and the two Logo LPs (Smiddyburn and Flittin’), spanning 1976-83 in release terms.

                I annotated a Sanctuary compilation from these LPs plus BBC material 12 years ago and it was tempting to simply add to that note, but I opted to trawl MMs for the period and write something totally new. it was an interesting time. Fairport had really run out of both steam and critical cred by the time of ‘Gottle O’Geer’ (1976); the first solo DS LP was a revelation – widely reviewed, selling 7,000 in one week. Dave from then began a sort of parallel career by stealth, with some live solo shows at big venues and Cambridge Fest etc before FC collapsed in 1979.

        • I had a friend who worked for Transatlantic about this time, and we and I used to meet regularly for vinly/book swaps, an arrangement that made both of us very happy. Got quite a lot of Warner/Reprise stuff too, including the first two or three Ry Cooder albums.

          Most of them have gone the way of all vinlys, unfortunately, including Faro Annie – so good to be reminded of this. I’ve still got (albeit in a container in Cornwall) the wonderful John James/Pete Berryman Sky in My Pie. No originals on YT, but they’ve re-recorded some of the tunes, eg this.

          • Was that the Marylebone Lane era, or after Transatlantic moved to Marylebone High Street?

            From 1967 to 1970 I was a regular at the Transatlantic offices in Marylebone Lane in my capacity as a humble messenger boy for a west end music publisher. Transatlantic (or Big T as they later re-styled themselves) had an in-house publishing company named Heathside Music. Through this they published songbooks by artists such as the Ian Campbell Folk Group, the Dubliners and of course Bert Jansch.

            In those pre-tablature days these books made no attempt to show any of Bert’s knuckle-busting guitar stylings, contenting themselves simply with the chord diagrams (many of which were inaccurate) and lyrics.

            Not only that, with their cheap appearance and type-written lyrics, the Heathside songbooks resembled home-made fanzines more than the slick folios we came to expect in later years.

            It was a big day for Transatlantic when they scored the UK rights to two Zappa related releases (Uncle Meat and a live Lenny Bruce set) and a couple of Fugs albums. Add to this all that great American folk and blues Transatlantic licensed and issued in Britain via their budget Xtra label offshoot.

            Needless to say, a lot of pilfering and inter-company “trading” went on around that time.

  5. The “Magic Carpet” album featured the sitar, also the first Glencoe album, and Shawn Phillips’ “Faces”, all released in ’72, so maybe it was enjoying a resurgence!

    Don’t know offhand if it made it to ’73 …

  6. I appear to have an abundance of John Renbourn albums, of which “Faro Annie” is one.

    Saw Wizz Jones two weeks ago and he warmly remembered, along with a few others, his friendship with the man.

    • I’ve just received a copy of a NEW Wizz & John album ‘Joint Control’ – recommended. It features a 6 minute studio version of the title track, a mythical Jansch instrumental which he recorded for ‘It Don’t Bother Me’ in 1965 but left off the album. A live fragment from c.1962 was used on the BJ archive set ‘Young Man Blues: Live In Glasgow’.

  7. Re: Stray… why is it that we keep talking about these people?!? I don’t believe I’ve heard a note of them. Perhaps Johnny C needs to write us a potted history of Mardl Boehm and his merry men.

    • Ah, Stray. The hardest working band in all of progdom. If they’d been signed to a major label Stray could well have sold many more records and achieved a good deal more fame and fortune. But the tiny Transatlantic label was founded on folk and blues and, coming very late to the psych/prog market, they couldn’t really give their small stable of rock bands the backing they needed to compete with Island, Vertigo and the rest.

      But they never stopped working, toured constantly and released 8 or 9 solid meat and potatoes rock albums. Prog, verging on heavy rock with some nice guitar work.

      Iron Maiden covered Stray’s All in Your Mind on their 1990 album No Prayer for the Dying which was probably the biggest payday they ever had.

  8. Transatlantic were rubbish when it came to picking rock bands, weren’t they? But as you say, from the sound of the above track, there’s no reason Stray couldn’t have been a solid second division/minor hit rock act for a couple of years in the period (like Juicy Lucy or similar) instead of third-division. That said, I think there’s something suspect about the time-keeping in that track plus the tempo is too fast – it feels like it should naturally be about 75-80% of that speed to sit comfortable and a have a groove that felt right…

    Is that Mardl singing?

  9. Anyway, we’ve somehow Strayed off topic… Let’s bring it back to Brit folk-blues with the maestro: Wizz Jones. JC will enjoy this – Wizz talking about a little-known guitar (with amazing provenance) and then swinging like the clappers!

  10. Wizz’s touch is just sensational – so unique and so *right* yet I’m sure it’s unteachable and probably wouldn’t work for most people. Reading the notes to the new Wizz & Renbourn CD I mentioned above, on some tracks Wizz would record a performance and John would then notate it and write his parts before recording, to account for the eccentric timings etc. John’s instinctive, pre-Dartington College leads guitar playing the Pentangle era was sublime. Somehow, he lost something with the learning (as well as gaining in other senses).

  11. Here is the only other album in John’s canon similar in feel to Faro Annie, the ‘lost’ 1973 Reprise album, for which John was paid a huge sum of money be an exec at Reprise just before he was sacked. It never came out and John thought it best not to poke the bear. It slipped out, provenance obscured, in the late 90s or early 2000s. I doubt if anyone at Warner Bros would have come after him for a couple of thousand CD sales 40 years on…

  12. Bit late to the party as usual, but back in the early seventies I was quite intrigued by the whole fingerpicking guitar thing – I guess initially inspired by James Taylor and Arlo Guthrie’s Alice’s Restaurant (aka the Word podcast theme), but I delved into early Americans like Blind Blake and listened to a bit of Bert and John.

    I did even have guitar lessons for a while, I could actually manage the fingerpicking quite well, and being of a shy and academic persuasion I bought books rather than learned from other musicians in the time-honoured way. I had a couple of instruction books by Stefan Grossman, and one book of music by John Renbourn just called “Guitar Pieces” – still have it somewhere.

    This guy has actually uploaded a pdf of the whole thing if anyone’s interested. It was originally published by Oak, through Warner Bros.

    http://www.chrisreckling.com/?p=218

      • Oh God, I had that, or maybe Book 1. Impossible, as you say – I thought that reading along with the track playing would help, but you just can’t keep up. Need one of those incredible slower-downers, which hadn’t been invented then. I didn’t have 16 2/3 as far as I can remember.

        I like his instructions: ‘Take this one fast and not at all seriously’…’should be played lightly yet rhythmically’. Hah!

        Still, might give the Earle of Salisbury a go, that looks doable.

        • I find the YouTube clips much easier to learn from that the books.

          Harping on about my years in music publishing again, in late 1967 the very first Hendrix songbook appeared and I was thrilled to get an advance copy. Until I opened it.

          Pop/rock songbooks were rare back then and as far as we could gather, were transcribed from the records by the same old geezers who’d been doing the job since the war. They had no affinity for rock and appeared to be transcribing with a Dansette and a piano!

          So, when the Hendrix songbook appeared, imagine my disappointment when all it had was the vocal melody line and some optimistic chord shapes underneath. When it reached the solo, it said, uselessly, “guitar solo, ad lib” and you were left to your own devices.

          Up until then pop sheet music had often appeared in guitar unfriendly keys such as Eb and Bb, clearly aimed at piano and brass players.

          Then in the early 70s the first guitar tablature transcriptions began to appear and things steadily got more accurate.

          • I had a Beatles songbook with the songs in brass and wind keys. They probably assumed – correctly – that illiterate teenagers would just copy the songs off the records, and their only chance of selling sheet music was to dance bands. Bob Miller and the Millermen, Billy Cotton Band and all those other mobs who used to play pop on the radio.

            Clearly no dance band was going to play Hendrix, so they presumably figured they’d better do something about it. Pretty cynical exercise, if you ask me.

            Talking of old gits, I once went to a very ritzy launch party, in Washington, no less, for a an equally book called Elvis World by Jane and Michael Stern. Instead of getting an Elvis impersonator in to do the music they got an ancient bar-mitzvah band in from New Jersey, who galumphed their way through most of the Elvis songbook in strict tempo. It was brilliant.

            • Even sheet music with accurate tabs didn’t mean it was easy to play. James Taylor’s style sounds simple, but is not that easy to mimic. I could do a reasonable Leonard Cohen, though. Stefan Grossman’s books were the most useful, I found, but the material was a little too hootenanny folk-club to impress girls. Which was what it was all about.

              • I’m quite a fan of Stefan Grossman, but I know what you mean, unlike, say, Bert and John Martyn, he had little or no rock edge to him. Great player though and he later worked and recorded extensively with Renbourn.

                I saw Grossman a few times down Les Cousins and while he was brilliant, each tune featured a long and scholarly preamble. While with John Martyn all you got was a swig of the booze, a bit of tuning, maybe an off-colour joke and away he went into the song.

                  • Exactly! I remember one time at Cousins being so close to John Martyn I could almost touch him. Then someone pointed out his jeans had split at the crotch and the family jewels were on the brink of being liberated. Martyn thought that was a great laugh though and simply adjusted his dress and carried on. He made several more references to it during the set.

            • Mike mentions Elvis impersonators above. According to a new book about The King, reviewed in ST, there were about 400 impersonators at the time of Elvis’s death.
              There are now 85,000 Elvis impersonators worldwide.

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