Colin H on Pentangle 1969-73
The first half of the tale, chronicling 1967-69, with supplementary diversions on repertoire, releases and broadcasts during that period, appears here:
It seems that there must be a word limit to threads, as I’ve had difficulty uploading the next installment on the original page. So here, in the comments, is Part 3 (of 4) of the tale, with similar supplementary diversions to be added.
PART 3 (of 4): THE TALE CONTINUES…
Basket of Light
Back home, after the Belgian casino affair, it was time to appear at the 9th National Jazz, Pop, Ballads and Blues Festival where, according to MM’s review, they were well on form and none the worse for all the recent travelling. A few days off was followed by a week in the studio ‘completing the last two tracks of their next album Hunting Song [sic],’ according to Jo’s latest spin. And after that: the Isle of Wight.
The Pentangle’s Isle of Wight festival appearance, on a bill topped by the recently elusive Bob Dylan, would be their biggest single concert yet, with 200,000 expected and many more turning up. Jo, meanwhile, was busy organising a third US tour, pencilled in for October, and later shifting to November/December when October was set aside for a British tour. This would coincide with the planned release of the new album, and take in the kind of major venues covered during the band’s previous British tour of November ‘68. He’d also negotiated a deal for the Pentangle to provide a theme tune and three pieces of incidental music for a new BBC Television 12-part drama series called Take Three Girls, due to begin in November. ‘We may issue a single of the theme tune,’ said Jacqui, quoted in one of Lustig’s press handouts. The following week it was a definite: the single would be released to coincide with the British tour’s kick-off at the Royal Albert Hall on October 4.
It is perhaps an irony that the single most important vehicle for the elevation of the Pentangle’s public profile to its greatest height had very little to do with any of Jo Lustig’s tireless efforts on their behalf. Although he would claim the credit for securing the soundtrack opportunity for the BBC’s hugely popular series Take Three Girls, the idea for using a known band – and the Pentangle in particular – had come from the show’s producer. It was to be the BBC’s first drama series in colour, had contemporary setting and appeal, and obviously the choice of music was very much a part of the whole package. The producer had been impressed with the use of Simon & Garfunkel’s music in ‘The Graduate’, and saw the Pentangle fulfilling a similar role. ‘The number that became the theme tune,’ says Jacqui, ‘was something we’d already been working on. Part of it was Bert’s, part of it was Terry’s and part of it was John’s – a total group number – and I wrote the lyrics with a little help from Danny. The three girls were all very nice actually. We met them a few times – I think they were all more worried about their own parts but they seemed to like the music, well, they said they liked it. We met up with them again when they did Take Three Women in 1983, and we went back and did the music for that.’
‘That theme song was very important,’ Jo Lustig recalled, ‘and yet they made a musical decision then that really stopped their progression. I wanted to put out the original theme for Take Three Girls – I wanted to put it on the album and put it out as a single – but someone said, ‘Oh, that’s not really Pentangle, we’ve got to write other lyrics’. Bert, John and Jacqui – that’s who it was. Now, people were hearing this on the hit series every week, ‘Come down to London town, watch the people there…’ and so on, and they went and changed it to ethereal lyrics that meant nothing to people. I had to put ‘Take Three Girls’ in brackets [on the record label]. Funny thing was, the single never made it, the album went to Number 1. Changing the lyrics was a wrong decision, and then ‘Cruel Sister’ was a wrong decision. That was their decision, and like I said, artistic decisions were theirs. I didn’t argue with them.’
As Renbourn says: ‘You have to look at it from the point of view of people being together and making a certain amount of music – some of which is, at the time, very important to them – and then being thrown into situations which of course were quite acceptable, but which produce other things: for example, that background music to the television series. As far as I’m concerned, I don’t think anybody considered that to be a more wonderful piece of music, or something they were more proud of than, say, any number of other songs that we had worked on. It was in interesting time and it was nice; the lyrics were something to do with the TV series, which was like going to London and running away or something, I don’t remember. So the lyrics were pretty trite and it was, I think, decided that if we were going to have to play it maybe we would like to play it with some different lyrics which were maybe better.’
Still, if an opportunity had, in Jo’s opinion, been wasted it certainly hadn’t been lost. The tune was instantly memorable, hummed by millions on their way to work, and sufficient to generate a new wave of media attention – from teenage girls’ magazines to national tabloid newspapers. Commenting on the song ‘blind’ in the Melody Maker’s Blind Date column, the response of Jethro Tull’s Ian Anderson reveals something of the respect with which the Pentangle were held by their peers: ‘I like it,’ he said, ‘it’s very good playing – I’m a bit jealous of that. It was the Pentangle? I’m glad it was, it would have been a bit rough if someone my age or younger had put together something like that. Swapping bars of 5/4 and 6/8 is really good – you can do it, but it’s rather tricky. They’re musicians, they’re not just learning like me and Family. It’s really nice, rhythmically very clever. Sounds like all the male members have had an operation.’
Hearing Jacqui’s masterful performances on such demanding arrangements as ‘Light Flight’ and ‘Sweetheart’ it’s quite fantastic to believe that here was someone who had, only months before, been subject to a whispering campaign of doubt and conspiracy. ‘Light Flight’ in particular was vocally demanding – a case of daring precision to deliver the words with clarity, hit the right notes at the right time and still find a space to breathe. And then there was the high harmony to add. Two complete takes were recorded, and Jacqui swears they issued the wrong one. Apparently she runs out of breath at the end of one verse but, really, who apart from Jacqui has ever noticed? Musicians’ Union rules at the time were such that if a group was appearing on Top of the Pops, then somebody in it had to perform live; as Jacqui puts it: ‘I was volunteered!’
Both album and single were issued on the eve of their fourth British tour, although really only their second tour of major venues. The first major tour, eleven months previous, had also followed the release of an album (in that case ‘Sweet Child’) and had likewise opened at the same place, the Royal Albert Hall. And, also as before, the man from the Melody Maker was there. A few bad notices could possibly have broken the band in the beginning but they were now reaching a point where critical accolades were mirroring or engendering increasing popular success, both at home and abroad. Nevertheless, the Pentangle’s honeymoon period with the British press was, slowly but surely, drawing to a close.
1969 had been the year of the ‘supergroup’ – a year in which music journalists spent most of their time speculating wildly about who was most likely to leave which band and join up with whom. Blind Faith and Humble Pie were the role models while the whole business had reached its apogee of absurdity with the build up to the Isle of Wight Festival. It had, apparently seriously, been suggested that George Harrison, Blind Faith, the Rolling Stones and Jack Bruce would all get up for a jam with Dylan. At the same time. This would of course be the best music on Earth, and reason enough for everyone else to tear up their record contracts and go home. In any event it didn’t happen – of course it didn’t – but the jargon was still not only valid currency, it was starting to have a back-dated effect. The Pentangle were now a qualified ‘supergroup’.
‘The big danger in supergroups,’ warned Karl Dallas, ‘is that they tend to devour their individual members. It can’t have been an accident that the hugest applause at the Pentangle’s Royal Albert Hall concert last Saturday was for Bert Jansch’s one solo number. For in gaining an acoustic group strong enough to halt the Gadarene dash into electronic cacophony, we have undoubtedly lost some of our brightest solo artists. If music could be written out on balance sheets, we might be able to work out whether our loss has been greater than our profit, for the Pentangle certainly merit the packed house they had.’
A few days later that difficult third album arrived. Difficult, not least, in following the monumental ‘Sweet Child’. As if to emphasise the point, the album, which had undergone a name change from the working title ‘Hunting Song’ to the altogether more appealing ‘Basket of Light’, kicked off with ‘Light Flight’ and ‘Once I Had A Sweetheart’: an opening salvo of top-class near-misses. The next track ‘Springtime Promises’, written by Terry ‘after a ride on the top of a Number 74 bus from Gloucester Road to Greencroft Gardens on an early spring day’, continued the idea of adding catchy melodies to quirky rhythms, with a syrup of hip lyricism. ‘Lyke-Wake Dirge’ featured John, Jacqui and Terry on echo-laden three part harmonies, bringing John’s love of early English esoterica well and truly into the band context (and predating Steeleye Span’s medieval acapella offering ‘Gaudette’ by several years). Bert’s ‘Train Song’ brought this consistently original first side to a blistering climax. Written as early as 1962, the song had previously been recorded for Bert’s ‘Nicola’ album with a brass arrangement scored by future Jethro Tull man David Palmer. As Nat Joseph recalled, in a sleeve-note some time later, it ‘didn’t work out to anyone’s satisfaction and so was never used’. Convincingly rearranged by the group, it remained in their repertoire long enough to open a set for the BBC’s In Concert programme, just over a year later, reappearing another decade down the line as a surprise element in the 1982 Cambridge Folk Festival reunion.
‘Hunting Song’, the first number on ‘Basket of Light’s less immediate second side, had appeared in the group’s repertoire during British tour of November ‘68 and, with the recent exception of ‘Light Flight’, was seemingly the only ‘Basket of Light’ track to be aired in concert prior to the album’s release. Leavening the otherwise traditional fare, side two’s obvious stand-out track – and a rare lead vocal for John – was ‘Sally Go Round the Roses’, an old Phil Spector-esque romp from the Jaynettes, ‘who seem to have disappeared for all time,’ read the sleeve notes, ‘leaving some good sounds and sad people’. What was perhaps most apparent about ‘Basket of Light’ , aside from its determinedly acoustic nature – determined as such by Jo rather than the group, and proclaimed like a manifesto on the inside of the gatefold sleeve – was the absence of any instrumentals. Unlike the first two records, there was nothing here that could with ease be referred to as jazz. Certainly, there was no shortage of interesting time-signatures, but this was very much a song-based collection, and not only that but (with hindsight at least) pushing in the direction of ‘the folk song’.
For the present, though, everything was going like a dream. The album went to No. 5 in the UK within three weeks of release (during which time the band had been hitting major concert halls around the country), and stayed in the UK album charts for a total of 21 weeks. It was ‘one of those albums you had to have’, recalled latter-day Pentangle member Nigel Portman Smith, at the time a student in London. A lot of other people agreed: ‘Their best yet,’ said the MM; ‘Sounds like Jethro Tull,’ said P.P. Arnold. ‘No, I didn’t mean that, it’s nice…’
The Turning Point
So where did it all go wrong? ‘I’ll tell you what the turning point for me was,’ said Jo. ‘The real turning point for me was I had arranged for their third American tour. I remember meeting them in a pub with a list of the dates. I remember telling them, ‘This is where we’re playing’, and someone in the band, I can’t remember who it was, said to me, ‘Jo, there’s not one gig here we’ve played before’. They were all new colleges, it was a college tour. And I said, ‘Well, so?’ And they said, ‘But they all said they loved us and they wanted us back’ [referring to previous venues]. And I said, ‘Well, I mean, this is the way you book – you try to get other gigs, other venues’. And one of them pipes up, ‘Well, I don’t know about you guys, but I don’t want to go anywhere where they don’t want me’. I said, ‘What do you mean?’ – ‘Well obviously they really don’t want us in America, so I’m not happy about playing these gigs that we haven’t played before.’ I said, ‘Don’t be ridiculous!’ ‘Oh yes,’ they all said, ‘that’s true’. I said, ‘Are you sure?’ They said yeah. So I cancelled the tour.’
Jo’s account may suggest a little more flippancy than was actually the case, but nevertheless a seven-week American tour, with dates in Canada and a ‘solo’ engagement at Carnegie Hall, had long been planned for the November/December period only to be cancelled within four weeks of commencement. Come November, Jethro Tull went off on their third US tour, but this time they went alone.
No reason for the cancellation was given to the press, but Jo’s irrepressible press releases (continuing at their usual rate) found more positive things to talk about, mostly to do with films. Shortly after the pub discussion, readers of Melody Maker learned that ‘Producer Claude Giroux flipped when he heard ‘Basket of Light’’, and therefore the Pentangle would be providing some music for his new film Twelve Plus One, featuring Vittorio Gassman, Orson Welles, Sharon Tate and Terry-Thomas. ‘No, I don’t know that one…’ said Jo, a couple of decades later. The Pentangle, of course, did not contribute anything to that particular picture, but Jo was devoting more of his time to the possibilities of the film industry. A couple of months later, the word was out that Groupie, a novel by Jenny Fabian and Johnny Byrne, was to be transferred to the silver screen by Giroux Films, directed by Tony Palmer, and co-produced by Jo Lustig and Shel Talmy. This time the name of the Pentangle was conspicuous by its absence.
Three weeks later what appeared to be a major soundtrack opportunity for the group could finally be announced. They had been commissioned to write and perform the music for ‘Tam Lin’ – a film adaptation, by Gerald Vaughan-Hughes, of Robert Burns’ poem of that name. ‘It wasn’t their fault the picture never came out,’ said Jo, in retrospect. In fact, the film was released but only just – with limited distribution and often under an alias (The Devil’s Widow, The Ballad Of Tam Lin among others). Starring Ian McShane and Ava Gardner in her last major role, it marked Roddy McDowall’s debut as a director. The signs were good – you’d have put money on it – but no, against all the odds Lustig had picked a turkey. Eventually slipping out in America, it received a panning from the critics and Roddy went back to acting. The promised soundtrack album never appeared. ‘Negotiations are also proceeding,’ continued that desperately triumphal press release, ‘for the group to write two major Hollywood film scores for a fee of $150,000.’ It didn’t happen.
Back in November ‘69, with the tour cancelled or, rather, ‘postponed’ until April, the members of the Pentangle found themselves with a bit of free time. Around the end of the month, Sandy Denny and Ashley Hutchings decided to leave Fairport Convention, the band who had most daringly embraced and defined the possibilities of British folk-rock. Normally a concert act, playing a different, parallel circuit to the clubs and colleges that provided sustenance to Fairport Convention and most other groups of the day, the Pentangle nevertheless deputised for their fellow travellers on a couple of outstanding engagements, including the Afan Festival of Progressive Music, an indoor event at a sports centre in Port Talbot. The day before Afan, December 5, there was a booking at London’s Royal College of Art with the Strawbs, Graham Bond and others, which was probably also a fill-in for the Fairports.
Sandy Denny was shortly to form her own band, Fotheringay, featuring Gerry Conway on drums. Years later Gerry would find himself in the final line-up of the reformed Pentangle, and Jacqui would ask him how come they had never met in those days: ‘And he said, ‘Well, you were high fliers, almost unapproachable.’ I said, ‘What are you talking about?’ He’s a couple of years younger than I am, but because it wasn’t until ‘68 that other [folk-rock] bands started to come through we were looked upon as almost the ‘mums and dads’ of that, the first ones to do it. I was horrified when he said that! I don’t think we thought of it like that. We all knew each other, and there wasn’t any animosity -– well, there wasn’t from my side. I was very fond of Sandy. We always got on well. I remember the [Afan] gig though, ‘cos I’d never seen Pink Floyd live and I was quite astounded by the quadrophonic sound. I was quite impressed. I think the others just got into the van after we finished and went home, but I stayed. I don’t remember seeing them after that.’
To play these kinds of shows, in Britain at least, was unusual for the Pentangle. All but their final British concert tour were ‘solo’ tours, with the band featuring its multi-faceted two hour set. In some ways, even at the time, this was a poisoned chalice. When the group finally folded, they were outsiders on the folk scene and has-beens on the rock scene. They’d been isolated for too long.
‘The only time I ever met anybody else,’ says Jacqui, ‘was on package shows, on radio or TV or at festivals. And I got to see other bands very rarely because by the time I’d finished, say, two months in America I just wanted to get my head back to some kind of normality. Looking back now, the fact that I didn’t live in town [London], as well – I missed out on a lot, not seeing other people. I would have liked to go and see more bands. I suppose if I’d put myself out I could have done. Looking back, I do think I missed out on quite a lot.’
The Devil’s Widow
For a number of weeks either side of Christmas 1969 the group’s normally intensive concert schedule was replaced by an almost equally intensive schedule of British TV and radio appearances, including their own four-part series on Radio 1. They were also recording material for the Tam Lin project. Several of those involved on the film side of things came to the sessions, clearly in the hope of seeing a swinging pop group in action. Clearly, they had come to the wrong place:
‘You’ve got to remember,’ says Renbourn, ‘that a lot of jumping around went on on the stage with various pop bands, and in some people’s minds any kind of group was a pop group – there was no other kind of group. When we went into the studio to record the Tam Lin soundtrack, in a very big studio, many of the directors went down with their friends and girlfriends and so on and sat in the control booth drinking vodkas, looking out through the glass as if expecting a group recording to be jumping up and down on the microphones and doing some kind of mad show! I mean, nothing happened – at the live performances or anywhere else! We just sat down and played and that’s all there was to it.’
Curiously, folk club duo Dave & Toni Arthur had already demoed material for a film based on the story of Tam Lin – surely, in all likelihood, the same one. With a reputation for thoroughly researching their material, Dave and Toni had already done a lot of original work on the ‘Tam Lin’ ballad and it’s variations, which eventually became their ‘Hearken To The Witches’ Rune’ (1971) album. By the time the Pentangle came to record their interpretation of the song at the end of 1969, it had already appeared, in rather bastardised form, on Fairport Convention’s ‘Liege And Leif’. The Fairports’ new fiddler, Dave Swarbrick, had been sharing a house with Dave and Toni and others and had, in Dave Arthur’s view, eloped to his new employers with a half-remembered version of their as-yet-unreleased ‘Tam Lin’ arrangement.
Nevertheless, as John Renbourn confirms, the Pentangle arrangement of the song is in no way connected to or derived from these previous versions: ‘Jo had arranged a meeting with the producers, and a version of the ballad had to be forthcoming at short notice. I put one together and it was accepted. I had no idea that Dave and Toni had been approached and have never heard their version. The one we used didn’t do justice to the great ballad. It appeared [in the film] mainly as fragmented soundtrack material and I am fairly certain that we never even played it in its entirety. The text, which was adapted somewhat, came from The Child Collection of English and Scottish Popular Ballads.’
During the film, which was restored from Roddy McDowell’s own print for a US video release in 1999, the song acts as a narrative device, mirroring or elucidating the plot. Verses crop up at appropriate junctures and in styles ranging from a bright, full band arrangement to the menacing sound of Jacqui’s voice over the dissonant strains of strings and recorders, arranged by orchestrator Stanley Myers (in whose orchestra Terry Cox would occasionally perform during the Pentangle era). While a complete recorded version probably never existed, a coherent version can be reconstructed from the fragments in the film. In addition to the title song, there were also a couple of what Jacqui recalls as ‘pop songs, probably written by Terry’ recorded, as the American directors seemed to want, with an exaggerated English accent (some with electric bassist Herbie Flowers replacing Danny Thompson). One such, a remarkably commercial piece probably entitled ‘The Best Part Of You’, plays in full over the film’s title sequence while snatches of another tune, probably ‘The Name of the Game’, are heard as background sounds during a party sequence. Lyrically and musically, and notwithstanding Jacqui’s delivery – which she remains at pains to point out was requested and required by the film people – both these songs offer a fascinating glimpse of how the Pentangle might have sounded had they pursued a pop/rock direction. Only ‘The Name of the Game’ was performed in concert (and then only briefly, on the British tour of February/March 1970). Featuring in one of the group’s four-part Radio 1 series, from which an off-air copy survives, it was also the only memento of the film to be otherwise recorded.
Sadly, the music from the Tam Lin project never surfaced on record at the time. While there were many TV and radio recordings featuring the band over the years, very few of these offered any otherwise unavailable material. Likewise, barring the first album, the group’s album sessions rarely resulted in anything that was not at some point released. The Tam Lin recordings are the most significant cache of unissued Pentangle material. The whereabouts of the masters remain, of course, a mystery.
The Fifth British Tour
Kicking off at Liverpool’s Philharmonic Hall on February 6 1970, comprising 26 dates spread over a two-month period, the Pentangle’s fifth British tour was their longest yet. It was a catch-all assortment of venues too, with universities, clubs and colleges added to the usual round of major theatres and town halls, and included several places, like Dublin, previously unreached by the band. A charity concert at the Royal Albert Hall for the World Wildlife Fund provided Jo with another excellent PR opportunity: not only had Buckingham Palace ‘granted permission to sell the Royal Box’, but they had also asked for 16 tickets. (Where were they going to sit?) Raising £100, the box went to the highest bidder. There were at least three TV shows squeezed in amongst the tour dates: one in Belgium, one in London for Granada and, most memorably, one in Paris:
‘I remember every minute of it,’ says Jacqui, reeling at the recollection. ‘It was called ‘La Grande Spectacle de something-or-other’, in an old abattoir. We were on with Hare Krishna, Cilla Black, Don Partridge, Jean-Luc Ponty… crazy, crazy acts! We played in a boxing ring where there was a net above us with clowns leaping about, and there was all this dust and sparkly stuff coming down on us and we were all choking! It was totally bizarre. Our dressing room was a caravan, shared with the Hare Krishna mob. I think it was over two days, and nobody was told anything – when they were performing, when the sound check would be or anything – so people were just wandering around this huge circus arena, bumping into one another saying, ‘What’s happening?’ There were other nationalities there, and the French don’t have much patience if you don’t speak their language – and if you try to speak it badly they have even less patience. Jo was with us too, and it was wonderful ‘cos he wasn’t getting anywhere. Shouting and screaming at the French did nothing at all – really quite funny!’
The Granada experience was much better. The group’s performance was one of a series of staged-for-the-cameras gigs with a live audience at the Two Brewers pub, and has a natural feel to it. Broadcast during May, while the band were in America, the half-hour edit remains a useful insight into the Pentangle’s repertoire at the time, comprising either new songs from ‘Basket of Light’ or as yet unissued material. Of the three entirely new pieces on the broadcast, ‘Sarabande’ – John’s effective arrangement of a Bach tune for electric guitar – would appear on his next solo album, ‘The Lady and the Unicorn’, while the group arrangement of Cyril Tawney’s ‘Sally Free And Easy’ would have to wait rather longer, eventually turning up on the group’s swansong ‘Solomon’s Seal’ (1972). Danny’s fearless, Lee Marvin-esque interpretation of Thelonious Monk’s ‘Blue Monk’ was a poke in the eye to those who accused the band of taking themselves too seriously and became a stage favourite. But you really had to be there.
While the rest of what became the British folk-rock community, centred around Fairport Convention and its offshoots, enjoyed an almost fluid interchangeability of members, the Pentangle and its constituent parts remained largely outside of the loop. ‘I would think,’ suggests producer Bill Leader, ‘the only person those people would have any respect for would be Bert. I can’t see Ashley Hutchings admiring Danny Thompson as a bass player! But they’re completely different. There was a great interest in exoticism – if you can’t count the time signature then it’s in, and if it’s in an obscure mode then that’s even better, and if you can’t understand the lyrics, great! If the title’s in some medieval Italian, even better still. So there’s an exotic thing there, whereas the whole Ashley Hutchings thing is down-home, functional social music: ‘Let’s do something the folks can dance to,’ sort of thing.’
With all this recent exposure, and with the new album riding high in the charts, the Pentangle were finding their British tour reaching a still wider audience, as Terry Cox noted at the time, during an interview with Jerry Gilbert at MM: ‘TV seems to have had something to do with our success. We get kids of about 12 coming along to our gigs now, and we deliberately make them sit through two hours before playing ‘Light Flight’, which is really what they’ve come for. But they really seem to like everything we do; you wouldn’t have found this with kids of that age a few years ago. We seem to be on a rock’n’roll kick at the moment. John’s currently playing electric guitar; he’s got this thing about sustained notes which you can’t hold on acoustic. We’re still breaking up on stage – with some numbers just featuring Bert and John, others with percussion added, and so on – but we always finish with a free-form freak-out number to let off steam [an outrageously extended version of ‘Pentangling’]. We work on a system of cues. We hope no-one notices but we each improvise until the cue is given, then we all return to the worked-out passages until the next cue. The thing about this is that you have to be ready for the cue because if you miss it, there’s an almighty cock-up.’
The Third American Tour
Two days after Belfast, the final date on the tour, the band were off to the States for that rescheduled third American tour. Within 24 hours of arriving they were playing Carnegie Hall in New York. Certainly a step up from the Fillmores. Despite competition from any number of other British acts elsewhere in town (Family, the Faces, Pink Floyd) the audience included a ‘who’s who of the New York music press’. The performance gained ‘almost universally favourable response’, and for once Jo’s PR seemed, if anything, to undersell the story. But it was still to be a gruelling tour – one-night stands in clubs and on campuses the length and breadth of the country, and over into Canada, climaxing with the now traditional week’s residency at the LA Troubadour. It spanned the better part of two months and, as Danny told one reporter at the time, ‘two months in America is too long for an American let alone us’.
Speaking on the telephone to the Melody Maker, it was clear that whatever misgivings the band may have had about further American tours back in October, they were now being proved spectacularly wrong: ‘It’s just ridiculous,’ he said (several times). ‘We’ve been away so long that we’re exhausted, and we’re all missing our wives (and husbands) like mad. The Carnegie Hall was the first gig, and that was just ridiculous – in fact, everywhere’s been ridiculous. We started out six weeks ago, but once we managed to get into the gigs things have been terrific. It’s our third tour of the States but easily the most successful; in fact our manager Jo Lustig was crying his eyes out after the Carnegie Hall concert. Can you imagine that?
‘We’ve worked bills with James Taylor, Tom Paxton and John Sebastian – in University gymnasiums which hold 15,000 people. You imagine the Albert Hall holding six and a half thousand and then realise that we’re regularly playing to eight thousand; I just can’t get a hold of it all. I honestly didn’t expect this kind of reception, and the kids in America are talking about us in terms of a legendary group. But we’ve been on the road since Christmas, and we absolutely need a break. We come back in a couple of weeks’ time, then we go into the studios to start recording our next album, then we take a couple of months off [or so he thought]. We’ve got a lot of new stuff, but the problem is managing to get it out. It’s a question of finding the opportunity to get together and just do what we want to do and work things out musically. At the moment there’s no chance of that as we’re travelling several thousand miles a day, but fortunately our roadie Billy Forsythe’s been brilliant.
‘On stage we’re doing the usual sort of thing, and they all love Bert and John, while Jacqui’s like a Van Gogh picture to them. The trouble is, when you’re playing every night, sometimes you’re really into it, and others you’re really fed up. On the whole we’ve managed to keep to a pretty high standard simply because you’ve just got to play good. I mean, we were working at The Village Gate in New York, and just around the corner was Miles Davis, and also in the vicinity was the Thad Jones/Mel Lewis Big Band and Doc Watson. When you’re competing against those sorts of people you’ve got to play well. Some nights we’ve really gone with a bang; they were stomping, shouting, screaming for more in the Carnegie Hall… But as I said, we just want to go home now.’
A couple of weeks earlier some students had been shot by the National Guard in Ohio and ‘close to half the nation’s colleges’ had erupted in sympathy. The booking schedules of several groups were thrown into chaos at the time. One Pentangle show, at Renssalaer Polytechnic, NY, was cancelled ‘when rampaging student dissidents took over some of the college buildings’. Jo Lustig flew in from Pittsburgh to assess the situation (‘scary’ was how he described it at the time), while the band went down to Williamstown, Massachusetts, for a gig that was still on. A following week of college dates, prior to the Troubadour shows, was ‘expected to evaporate, in light of the current crisis’. This was a freak situation, in which the Pentangle were innocent bystanders. In the event, the following week’s shows went ahead as planned, and were all ‘roaring successes’.
By the time they got home, at the tail end of May, there were only a couple of weeks to recover before being plunged into Sound Techniques studio with the expectation of an album to match or surpass ‘Basket of Light’. They’d been on the road solidly for the previous four months, and it was only seven months since first ‘road testing’ their relatively new ‘Basket of Light’ repertoire. Of the still newer, unrecorded numbers being played in concert by this stage, most were individual members’ solo pieces – Renbourn, for instance, was working in material that would appear on his forthcoming ‘The Lady and the Unicorn’. Of the unrecorded ‘group’ pieces making their stage debuts there was certainly ‘Sally Free and Easy’, the hillbilly ‘trad arr’ numbers ‘Rain and Snow’ and ‘Will the Circle Be Unbroken?’ (both of which, spirited and funky arrangements, would perhaps unwisely be held in reserve for album four, ‘Reflection’, the following year) and the English trad arr ‘A Maid That’s Deep In Love’. Quintessentially English and exhibiting a certain poise in its execution, this latter would provide the template and tone for the new album.
No More Festivals
Thankfully, for the exhausted members of the Pentangle, the planned studio sessions in June were postponed to September. Nevertheless, there was still no chance of Danny’s hoped-for two months holiday materialising in its place. While most of July turned out to be free, barring a couple of Town Hall shows, June was liberally sprinkled with TV bookings: one in Aberdeen, one in Holland and a tele-recording in London for a prestigious new BBC colour programme called In Concert, for broadcast in January 1971. A further booking in this period, for an LWT show, South Bank Summer, was wishful thinking on the part of the broadcaster – a rare example of Jo Lustig turning down an opportunity for his group and, ironically, one which turned out to be the making of the replacement group, Deep Purple’s, national reputation.
During the same month Jacqui had been falsely advertised as appearing solo in Glasgow. False bookings and unscrupulous promoters simply came with the territory. On one occasion an entire American tour was falsely advertised by some con man in the States but generally, in Britain, the worst promoters the band had to deal with were more incompetent than unscrupulous. And seemingly among the most incompetent were Brian Highley and Derek McEwan, whose Yorkshire Folk, Blues & Jazz Festival of August 1970 proved to be the most infamous event mismanagement of its generation.
Prior to the Yorkshire debacle, the group had headlined the Cambridge Folk Festival. The Pentangle played on the Saturday (August 1), with its members playing solo sets the following evening. The group performance was speculatively filmed by the BBC’s Late Night Line-Up team, ostensibly there to make a film ‘for international distribution’ on the 700th anniversary of nearby Trumpington Church. The church was named after Sir Roger Trumpington – a brass rubbing of whom featured on the cover of Renbourn’s ‘Sir John A lot’. The Pentangle were also supposedly to write a musical score for the film, and appear for the cameras at the church. Whether the Festival set was ever broadcast anywhere is unclear but excellent performances of ‘Lyke Wake Dirge’, ‘No More My Lord’, ‘Moon Dog’ and ‘Train Song’ (all filmed at the church) turned up in the Trumpington programme, shown in Britain on Christmas Day.
The Yorkshire festival, at Krumlin near Halifax, rollercoastered along to its disastrous climax during a year in which the idea of the massive outdoor pop festival was reaching its dizziest heights. The registrar at the £30,000 bankruptcy hearing later in the year was sympathetic: ‘This was a venture,’ he said, addressing the hapless Highley and McEwan, ‘in which obviously you were posed with great problems. I am satisfied you made an attempt to cope with these problems but there were defects in your administration, and a lack of adequate control and supervision.’
The whole thing had started well, with a policy of having no American acts and thereby trading as an admirably all-British companion to the already proven international capabilities of the Isle of Wight Festival, occurring a fortnight later and now in its third year. Highley and McEwan wanted to make theirs an annual event, only featuring American acts once they had ‘gained more experience’. The event promised, said MM, ‘to be the most ambitious festival ever staged in the north of England’, and they weren’t wrong. ‘We’ve been offered Captain Beefheart,’ said Highley, at the time, ‘but we think too many would have turned up, and we don’t want the same situation that happened at Bath. We’ve been limited to 50,000 people by the police, and we think we will get this amount. Actually, we could comfortably take 150,000, but we dare not hope for that many.’ In the event only 15,000 turned up.
Optimistic press releases were in abundance, and vast ads were taken out in the national music press. ‘The only festival in Britain,’ claimed the advertising, ‘ever to offer fifty hours of top bands.’ Advertising had already appeared billing the Who and the Pentangle as the two headlining names over a sizeable bill of worthy, if essentially second league, British folk, blues, jazz and rock acts. But nobody, according to the Who, had bothered to ask them first. ‘They asked us about the group and we said no, but they carried on advertising,’ said a spokesman for the Who. ‘They definitely won’t be appearing.’ And neither they did. Pink Floyd were added to the bill but losing the Who was one sure way of greatly decreasing the volume of people likely to travel to the middle of nowhere for a pop festival. The weather was another. The line-up, the running order of the line-up, the ticket prices – all seemed to fluctuate with each new ad. On the day all semblance of order and organisation was, literally, thrown to the wind. Chris Charlesworth, Melody Maker’s rising star, stood in the rain and watched it all unfolding to the bitter end.
‘There can be few people,’ his review began, ‘who attended last weekend’s Yorkshire Pop Festival who can honestly say they enjoyed it… The tiny village of Krumlin, which the organisers had hoped to turn into another Woodstock, was ravaged by wind and rain. The weather was so bad that the event was called off by police on Sunday. For many this may have been something of a relief because by that time it had become obvious that many of the groups billed to appear were not turning up to play. After Saturday night’s devastating rain and wind, hundreds of fans were taken away to hospital suffering from exposure. The crowd never rose above 15,000, and many had gained entry with forged tickets. Bill-topping Pink Floyd – who many must have come to see – never appeared. The Move – not advertised in the press or programmes – arrived but didn’t play because their van got stuck in the narrow lane leading to the stage. Manfred Mann was another casualty, along with poor Amazing Blondel and all the groups on Sunday, which included Ginger Baker’s Airforce. And there was a rumour he was bringing Peter Green along to play with his band. Of the groups that did appear, Elton John was the star on Friday night, and Fairport Convention made Saturday worthwhile… Saturday’s concert got underway at about midday instead of the advertised 10 a.m. Jo-Ann Kelly, Ralph McTell, the Johnstons and Honey Dew were all punctuated with rain, and Pentangle received the first big ovation with a set of electric folk which included ‘Basket of Light’[sic] and their anthem ‘Take Three Girls’[sic].’
The show went on with the Groundhogs, Fairport Convention, Graham Bond and Fotheringay. It ground to its final, miserable end with a bravura performance from Alan Price and Zoot Money, before stopping ‘because the rain was pouring into the stage and there was a danger of electrocution’. Jo Lustig was far from impressed at the time but, as always, had the last laugh:
‘Yorkshire,’ he recalled, ‘the funniest festival of them all. I was the only one who collected. I think I got the money for the Johnstons too. I wouldn’t let the Pentangle go on till they got the rest of their money and the promoter didn’t have it, so I had to go round all the ticket boxes. I had a mini then, and it was weighed down with ten penny pieces. But it was very funny. I was the only one who collected at that festival.’
‘It was a mudslide,’ says Jacqui, recoiling at the very thought of it, ‘It was absolutely dire, and the sound was awful, and half of it didn’t work. Everybody was complaining and I think the people who were in the audience should just have got up and walked out and got their money back. It was just dire – an embarrassment to be part of. It seemed that just anybody thought they could do it – ‘We’ll put a festival on’ – and usually you didn’t get paid. But this one at Yorkshire was just so abysmal. Everybody was arguing and shouting. All the other bands were in the same position – they were feeling just as bad, just as angry – and the people who were organising it had disappeared. Jo went down to the gate where people were paying their money and came back with this bag of threepenny bits!’
A few days earlier, Karl Dallas’ MM review of the (still running to this day) Cambridge Folk Festival had ended on a curiously prophetic note: ‘People,’ he said, ‘who are talking about 1970 being the last year of the festivals should have been to Cambridge. For there, in a quiet Cambridgeshire garden, along with no more than 10,000 others, we had a festival that lived up to the name. Perhaps it was because they were folk people, or perhaps it was merely because quality is a more reliable statistic than quantity. But ‘Three days of peace and love’ was what we actually had, and that’s no movie company’s hype. It’s the truth.’
A week after Yorkshire an MM headline reflected Lustig’s verdict on the shambles: ‘Pentangle: No More Festivals’. The Pentangle, it continued, ‘will be making their last open air festival appearance at the Isle of Wight next week. The decision will not affect future Cambridge Folk Festivals or appearances at festivals like Edinburgh or Harrogate [both indoor events]. Their decision follows the hassles at last weekend’s Yorkshire Festival at Krumlin. The conditions the group had to play in and the difficulty which manager Jo Lustig encountered have influenced their decision. Jo added that his remarks did not apply to the Isle of Wight Festival. ‘They are very good organisers,’ he said. ‘Sunday at the IOW should be Pentangle’s kind of day.’
’
He was wrong. Jo’s remarks about the group not playing any more (open air) festivals were to prove a little premature in the longer term. But it was a good way to get a headline – and one that Jethro Tull’s management used a couple of years later, with a similarly spurious ‘No more tours’ headline following a particularly bad tour, turning the critical fallout into a wave of sympathy. It may be no coincidence that Jethro Tull’s management at that time was, in fact, Jo Lustig. Even if the Pentangle had never again played an open air festival it would have been no great sacrifice. The band, by its very nature, was never suited to the kind of ambience and technical conditions found at festivals. That year’s Isle of Wight event would be no exception.
The notion of 1970 becoming the swansong year of the great outdoor festivals wasn’t that far from the truth. There would, of course, by further festivals in Britain the following year and every year after, but nothing to match the build-up over the late-60s that climaxed with the 1970 Isle of Wight Festival. There came at last the realisation that it was all but impossible to put on a festival beyond a certain size that stood any chance of clearing a profit. Finances aside, for the Pentangle this was just another outdoor performance disaster.
‘I don’t remember us playing at all,’ says Bert. ‘I just remember watching Jimi Hendrix, nothing else – being under the stage, actually, to listen to him. Most exciting part of the whole proceedings for me! But I do remember being onstage with the Pentangle and various things happening…’
‘During our set,’ says Jacqui, ‘the Rolling Stones arrived in a helicopter, and in the next field a haystack caught fire and all these fire engines came clanking along, and then this woman got up and trod on my foot and said, ‘This should be a free festival’! Actually, the helicopter came right over where we were playing, which I thought was a bit off. So there was all this kerfuffle in the middle of our set while everyone was looking up to see Mick Jagger. We ended up staying in the same hotel as them, being up half the night – and they opened the bar because Charlie Watts came in. We blagged him into coming in just to get the bar open! Well actually Bobby, our roadie, blagged him into it – you could never refuse Bobby anything!’
The mixing desk was a further pox on the Pentangle’s performing potential, as MM’s comprehensive review makes clear: ‘Pentangle took the stage [after Donovan] and got off to an incredibly bad start. The sound was appalling in both balance and quality, and the consequent lack of detail definition reduced their output to sheer boredom. They were also plagued by anarchists, who diverted attention from the music by attempting to rip down the walls… A seemingly interminable wait, while John Renbourne [sic] tuned his sitar and Bert Jansch did the same to his banjo, scarcely brought them favour either. But the lovely ‘Light Flight’ brought the audience back, and from thereon out they went from strength to strength, producing delightful versions of two old favourites: ‘Bruton Town’ and ‘Pentangling’.’
The Pentangle were followed by the Moody Blues, Jethro Tull (who stole the show) and Jimi Hendrix, in what proved to be his last British appearance. ‘I can remember,’ says Jacqui, ‘sitting in the Moody Blues limo, ‘cos it was getting cold. And I can tell you something else about that festival, the facilities were absolutely awful. I get very nervous before I go onstage and I have to keep going to the loo, and there were none backstage. You had to go quite a walk and it was just a huge pit dug in the ground with a plank across it. Joan Baez had her own personal one which no one else could use, which I thought was a bit unfriendly! But there was a caravan there for the press, and they said, ‘You can come and use ours’.
And the day was saved. Seemingly everyone in Europe with a film camera, mobile recording facilities or a portable radio transmitter was there. There was the inevitable live double album and there were suggestions at the time that not only would Sweden, France and Germany be broadcasting the Saturday and Sunday performances live on radio, but that the whole thing would be televised live by satellite to cinemas in Canada and the USA. Whether these plans were actually fulfilled it does suggest a situation where the Pentangle’s most recorded, most filmed, most broadcast performance was one of the worst they ever gave. There were also a number of independent film crews on the site – one of which, a multi-camera operation under producer Murray Lerner, captured at least part of every act’s performance. Although not included in his eventual Message To Love documentary, at least three if not four Pentangle songs are in the vault – the first, and least successful, half of the set. For Jacqui, as for Bert, the one redeeming feature of the whole experience was Jimi Hendrix: ‘He was just amazing to watch,’ she says. ‘They’d come over from Europe by ferry, and they’d been done over – everything had been torn apart at customs – so they were about two hours late getting there. But it was worth the wait.’
The Pentangle’s festival season drew to a close with a short residency at Edinburgh’s Caley Cinema, during the first week of September. The Pentangle, along with Rory Gallagher’s Taste and Marc Bolan’s Tyrannosaurus Rex, were being featured as the late-night ‘progressive’ element in the venerable Edinburgh Festival’s musical programme – after which Jo went to Las Vegas. When he came back he was raving about Elvis Presley’s new cabaret act and talking to the press about bringing the Great Man to England, an aspiration in which all others had failed. As one might expect, Jo was well acquainted with Presley’s manager ‘Colonel’ Tom Parker and if anyone could have done it Jo could. But, as the history books will tell you, he didn’t.
John Renbourn’s next solo album, ‘The Lady and the Unicorn’, had seemingly been recorded during this summer festival period and would be released a few weeks prior to the new (and yet to be recorded) group album, in October. The album, an all-instrumental set and one of John’s most celebrated, featured at least a couple of tracks – ‘Sarabande’ and ‘Melancholy Galliard’ for certain – that he’d been trying out on Pentangle audiences over the previous few months. It also secured his reputation as a popular evangelist for Early Music, although this was a role he was keen to diminish in interviews at the time:
‘I just do it because I enjoy it,’ he told MM’s Andrew Means. ‘It’s quite likely that someone who really digs this kind of music would dismiss the album, but I don’t care. I think the more people who play this music the better. If I do another solo record I very much doubt if it will be anything to do with this sort of music.’ John would certainly dabble in Elizabethan-esque music for some time to come but, as he guessed or predicted, his next album ‘Faro Annie’ (1972) – a collection of sublimely stoned blues – would hardly be more different. Bert was quietly working away, in between group commitments, on another solo album of his own. But the rest of September was set aside, at last, for the recording sessions to produce a follow-up to ‘Basket of Light.’
Cruel Sister
‘Of course, the record company puts pressure on you,’ said Jacqui, in an August interview with Disc, ‘but we’ve decided this time to do things in our own time and take care.’ A ‘couple of months’ had been mentioned for getting the new album together but this was wishful thinking. With minimal rehearsal, the studio work seems to have been completed during September 10-11 and 21-26. What transpired, under the guidance of John and Jacqui, and with Bert and John’s early recording mentor Bill Leader on board as producer, was a policy decision to record an album consisting wholly of traditional music, including a side-long arrangement of ‘Jack Orion’. ‘It’s not a milestone,’ said John, defending the decision in MM shortly after the sessions had concluded. ‘I don’t think it means that we have restricted ourselves. Whatever we do, even if it is a song written yesterday, it comes out in our particular style. What I feel about all the music we play is that everybody [in the group] digs everything we do.’ Given the apparent popularity of the traditional songs already in the live repertoire, setting aside an amount of existing new songs for next time and creating a wholly trad album seemed a valid enough exercise.
‘There was never any shortage of material,’ says John, still having to make the album’s defence in retrospect. ‘But what happens is – as also happened with ‘Sir John A lot’ – that certain types of material are bound to become predominant when you start recording. You only have a certain amount of time to record, and if it turns out that we have a very long ballad, and that I could do ‘Lord Franklin’, and maybe Jacqui could sing an unaccompanied one, then you wind up with a record that actually pulls together in its character and happens to be more traditional than the others. I mean, we could, presumably, have interspersed that record with other more contemporary songs, and maybe dropped in one or two of the other songs on later records or not at all. But there was also a reunion with Bill Leader, whom we liked very much and wanted to record with, and with Nic Kinsey the engineer. So I think we felt that there was no reason why we shouldn’t do it. But on the other hand it was never an intention that it was going to be a milestone in traditional music, or ‘contemporising’ traditional music, or anything along those lines. It was never uppermost in my mind what I thought the public might or might not want, or might not want to buy. We were making a type of music because we wanted to.’
Jacqui’s recollection differs from John’s in only one respect: whether the ‘all traditional’ approach simply happened or was orchestrated. Either way, the delicate balance of both musical direction and influence of personalities within the band had been, for the first time, adversely affected.
‘We wanted to do a completely traditional album,’ says Jacqui. ‘It was a conscious decision. It was mainly John’s influence, I must say. I suppose John and I were really the traditionalists, if you like, in the band, and I think maybe at the time he thought we were losing direction and he was gradually delving back further – you can tell that by his solo stuff. At that point we were working an awful lot. We’d choose a period to do an LP so no tours would be booked. But we didn’t actually see a lot of each other outside work. When you’re living in each other’s pockets for a long time, in a different place every day, when you get home all you want to do is just shut the door and not go out. You don’t even want to go to the pictures, you don’t want to see friends – you just want to sit there and vegetate. It’s exhausting, physically and mentally. John and I would get together occasionally but we very rarely got together as a whole band until material was set. The way we worked then was very different from the early days – we had nowhere to go to actually try things out any more. That tour of America was absolutely awful. The gigs were great, but we were out there for about nine weeks, and halfway through we were all so exhausted – and I wanted to come home! Everybody wanted to come home. There was an awful lot of pressure. We were so unrehearsed when we went into the studio – well, let’s say we weren’t rehearsed enough! There never seemed to be enough time to get the band together to rehearse, with the amount of work we were doing. But there was always loads of stuff to do. Bert never stops writing and everybody else had things on the go. Unrehearsed, maybe, but there was never any shortage of material.’
Bert was indeed writing at the time, albeit for his next solo release, which became several months later the exquisite ‘Rosemary Lane’ (1971). Songs were recorded, with Bill Leader engineering, at Bert’s Ticehurst cottage over a period of months from the summer of 1970 on, some of which were directly inspired by that endless American tour. During their time at Ticehurst, Heather Jansch recalls that Bert ‘rarely thought of anything except escaping the pressures’. ‘I was losing interest in the band at that point, wishing for other things to do,’ Bert admits. Discontent, disillusionment and frustration, on both business and musical levels, would eventually come to consume the group, but at the very height of their commercial celebrity it was Bert who first experienced the malaise. While there was still no shortage of latent creativity there was, for the band, a very real shortage of time in which to execute it.
With his background as a ‘transcriber’ of performances, Bill Leader was less inclined towards Shel Talmy’s all-pervasive swathes of echo: ‘When they asked me to do the Pentangle things,’ he recalls, ‘I decided I was going to break with this sort of ‘swamping in Soho’ they’d had up till then. Shel would get this scintillating tone, but I felt that gave it an awful lot of class but no substance – or it obscured the substance. When you stick reverberation on something it can make it sound more palatable, but it actually doesn’t wear terribly well. I don’t know what happened with Nat, Jo Lustig and Shel Talmy – where was he when ‘Cruel Sister’ was being done? I suppose it did seem fairly natural that if they were looking for someone to produce ‘Cruel Sister’ they would come to me, but I’ve never really worked out why they were looking for someone. They [the group] were never very happy with Shel Talmy’s production, but then they were never very happy about anything. I did John’s ‘The Lady and the Unicorn’ and Bert’s ‘Rosemary Lane’ around the same time, so from not having had very much to do with them for a while, I was suddenly involved quite a bit. I suppose from Nat’s point of view if these things can be done nice and cheaply…’
Whether or not ‘Cruel Sister’ was the right follow-up to ‘Basket of Light’ was not Bill’s concern: he was there to bring out the best in the material and performances on offer. The sessions, he recalls, went smoothly, with no apparent studio disagreements and with no visits or special instructions from Jo Lustig (as would hallmark the following year’s ‘Reflection’). Leader and Kinsey’s sound on the album made for a refreshing change. The performances were crisp and clear, with a distinctive quality about them. With John now favouring electric guitar onstage it was only to be expected that he’d want to feature it on the group’s recordings. One of the most redeeming features of the ‘Cruel Sister’ album as a whole remains the inventive use of amplification, enhancing the arrangements.
‘With a lot of the songs,’ explains John, ‘the arrangements would stand several melodic lines rather than a chord structure. I first started using the sitar, for instance, as another colour that would play a parallel line to the vocal. I also did that with guitar, and one effective way of doing it was to add fuzz. I had a thing called a Boss Tone, which would go on the guitar, and if you just got it at the right setting it was a rather ambiguous kind of sound. It didn’t sound like a heavy electric at all – it was rather ethereal, and seemed to work pretty nicely as a tonal quality.’
John’s new sound was a key part of the arrangements on ‘Cruel Sister’s two most instantly appealing tracks, ‘Lord Franklin’ and ‘A Maid That’s Deep In Love’, as well as the intoxicating instrumental section of ‘‘Jack Orion’’. It was a useful advance in terms of what the group were capable of in a studio situation, while their version of ’Cruel Sister’ itself was to become one of the most-requested items in the repertoire of the reconstituted Pentangle during the 1980s and ’90s. Nevertheless, at the time not everyone was entirely happy about the end product. Danny regards it, in hindsight at least, as the killer blow to the group’s fortunes. Terry, apparently, wasn’t wild about it either while Bert remains ambivalent. While his contributions to the later group albums, ‘Reflection’ and ‘Solomon’s Seal’, restored the balance, Bert’s creative involvement in ‘Cruel Sister’ was minimal.
‘I don’t think Bert was used properly in the Pentangle,’ observes Bill. ‘I remember times when he was being treated like a rhythm guitarist or something, which he didn’t deserve. But ‘Cruel Sister’ was, I think, symptomatic of what was going on within the group.’
Jo Lustig, whose views on the matter are contested by the musicians in question, wasn’t happy either: ‘They were lazy,’ he concluded. ‘It’s lazy to sit down and do an album with 29 stanzas – that’s lazy, it’s pure laziness! It’s easy to play long songs, easy to play epics – to pick up a folk song book and say, ‘Let’s play these…’ Because the money covered production costs, they decided to record as little as possible so they could keep as much money as they could. It wasn’t artistic, it was economic.’ Or, as Jacqui would put it, ‘It was bloody hard work!’
Commercially, the album was disastrous. Even on the eve of that arduous April/May American tour ‘Basket of Light’ had already shifted a remarkable 120,000 copies. ‘Cruel Sister’, which managed a pitiful two weeks on the album chart, peaking at No. 51 in December 1970, wouldn’t come close. Press releases mentioning advance orders of 75,000 took PR spinning into the realms of self-delusion. ‘All in all,’ concluded Jack Hafferkamp’s review for Rolling Stone, ‘‘Cruel Sister’ is rather a disappointing record for those who enjoy soaring with Pentangle’s instrumental riffs. Except for the extended break in ‘Jack Orion’ it never gets off the ground. It’s too tightly structured to convey that sense of free, tight expertise which comes of listening to ‘Pentangling’ on the first record. It’s good, but not as good as it ought to be.’
Here, pertinent to the above text, is one of the two songs ‘performed’ (mimed) on the shambolic French TV show that Jacqui recalls in Part 3 (above), ‘Train Song’:
And here is a live ‘Light Flight’ from a rather happier appearance, on BBC TV’s ‘In Concert’:
I don’t understand Jo Lustig’s claim that he wanted to use the original version (performed above) as the TV theme tune. The Take Three Girls programme was all about three bright young things coming to the big city to make something of themselves, but the original lyric explicitly says, “Let’s get away you say, find a better place, miles and miles away, from the city’s race”; hardly an enthusiastic endorsement of the Great Wen’s attractions!
At the time, I recall being particularly delighted by the fact that there was such a profound difference between the soundtrack version and the album original (which I actually prefer because then, as now, I only think of London as a dirty, smelly, unfriendly place that I can’t wait to leave whenever I visit).
Keep this coming Colin, it’s a fascinating read!
OK – part 3 coming boxing day or day after, plus supplementary bits…. Might as well finish it…
On the Lustig comment – you’ve got it the wrong way round, Vulpes: he was saying that he wanted the TV theme version – ‘Come down to London town… etc’ – released on a single, because those were the lyrics familiar to millions already. It’s a fair point, but either way new lyrics and new parts to the thing would have to have been written, whether keeping the TV theme lyrics or not – the TV version only lasted 30-odd seconds and had one verse worth of words and only one ‘section’ musically.
Thanks for the clarification; I had always assumed that the album version had been written some time BEFORE the TV theme version, and that therefore when he says that he, “wanted to put out the original theme for Take Three Girls” by “original” he meant that the album version should have been used. I hadn’t realised that the TV theme version pre-dated the fuller version on the album. Weird how satisfying it is to find these things out so many years later, when it matters very little which way round it was!
Let’s hear another Harper’s take on the matter…
FINAL PART OF THE CHRONOLOGY of Concerts, Brodcasts, Releases
1971
January
? Recording sessions
(BBC TV Take Three Girls series two incidental music)
Wed 6 London, Royal Albert Hall
Fri 22 Cardiff, Cory Hall
Fri 29 Colchester, Essex University
Sun 31 BBC Radio Night Ride – live? (John Renbourn)
February
? BBC Radio – Night Ride recording
Tue 2 London, Queen Elizabeth Hall (John Renbourn)
Fri 6 London, Royal Albert Hall (Julie Felix with Danny Thompson)
Fri 12 Nottingham University
Wed 17 Warwick University
Fri 19 London, Queen Mary College
Tue 23 Manchester University
Thur 25 Watford Town Hall [cancelled]
Fri 26 Bournemouth, Winter Gardens
March
8 – 24 Recording sessions, Command Studios (Reflection LP)
Sat 13 Newcastle University
Sun 21 Ronnie Scott’s, London (Tubby Hayes benefit with Nucleus, Stan Getz and Annie Ross)
Mon 22 Watford Town Hall
Thur 25+ Mixing sessions, Olympic Studios (Reflection LP)
April
Cancelled US tour
Wed 22 LWT Journey Into Love tele-recording
May
Cancelled US tour
? BBC Radio Sounds of the Seventies recording
June
Wed 30 London, Royal Festival Hall Bert Jansch + Anne Briggs, COB
July
Mon 19 Solihull Civic Hall [or possibly July 18]
Thur 15 BBC Sounds of the Seventies recording (Bert Jansch)
Sat 24 Lincoln Festival
August
No commitments
September
? Probable recording sessions (John Renbourn Faro Annie LP)
? BBC Radio Night Ride recording (John Renbourn)
? BBC Radio Night Ride recording (group)
October
Sun 10 Edinburgh, Usher Hall
Tue 12 Glasgow, Strathclyde University
Wed 13 Aberdeen University
Fri 15 Stirling University
Sat 16 Dundee, Caird Hall
Thur 21 London, Royal Albert Hall
Fri 22 Leeds Town Hall
Sun 24 Leicester, De Montfort Hall
Mon 25 Brighton, The Dome
Tue 26 Cardiff, Cory Hall
Fri 29 Newcastle City Hall
Sat 30 Birmingham Town Hall
Sun 31 Bristol, Colston Hall
November
Fri 5 Manchester, Free Trade Hall
Sat 6 Harlow, Playhouse Theatre
Wed 10 Southampton, Guildhall
Thur 11 Coventry, University Of Warwick
Fri 12 Croydon, Fairfield Hall
Sat 13 Portsmouth, Guildhall
? Fly to USA
Fri 19 Santa Monica, Civic Auditorium
Sat 20 San Diego, University of San Diego
Sun 28 St Paul, O’Shaughnessy Auditorium
December
Thur 2 Chicago, Orchestra Hall
Fri 3 Cincinnati, Taft Auditorium
Sat 4 Cleveland, Allen Theater
Sun 5 Columbus, Veterans Memorial Auditorium
Tue 7 Washington DC, Constitution Hall
Wed 8 Hartford, Trinity College
Thur 9 New Haven, New Haven College
Fri 10 Medford, Tutt’s University
Sat 11 New York, Carnegie Hall
Sun 12 Philadelphia, Academy Of Music
1972
January
No commitments
February
Sat 26 Sheffield University
? Recording sessions (Solomon’s Seal LP)
March
? Recording sessions (Solomon’s Seal LP)
Sat 18 Begin tour of HOLLAND and BELGIUM + Ralph McTell
[dates unknown]
? HOLLAND – NOS TV – live?
April
? Tour USA [dates unknown]
? Probable recording session (Christian The Lion film soundtrack)
May
? Recording sessions (Bert Jansch Moonshine LP)
Sun 25 Birmingham, Yardley Folk Festival [charity concert]
June
? Granada TV tele-recording [speculative]
Sat 9 Paris, FRANCE, Theatre Bibino
Sun 10 Paris, FRANCE, Theatre Bibino
? BELGIUM – RTBF TV tele-recording
Tue 19 BBC Sounds of the Seventies recording
Sun 24 Sheffield University
July
Sat 15 Greenwich, Eltham Well Hall (two open-air shows + support)
August
Sun 6 Fly out for tour of AUSTRALIA and NEW ZEALAND
Wed 9 Sydney
Thur 10? Sydney [speculative]
? [further dates unknown]
? AUSTRALIA, ABC TV – GTK
? New Zealand TV?
Fri 25 Return to Britain
September
Sat 9 Begin two-week tour of SCANDINAVIA + Ralph McTell
October
? BBC Radio Sounds On Sun recording
Sun 8 Stockport, Davenport Theatre + COB, Wizz Jones
Tue 10 Edinburgh, Usher Hall + COB, Wizz Jones
Wed 11 Aberdeen, Music Hall + COB, Wizz Jones
Thur 12 Glasgow City Hall + COB, Wizz Jones
Sat 14 Northampton Cricket Club + COB, Wizz Jones
Sun 15 Darlington, Civic Theatre + COB, Wizz Jones
Tue 17 Harlow, Playhouse Theatre + COB, Wizz Jones
Wed 18 Exeter University + COB, Wizz Jones
Fri 20 Bristol, Colston Hall + COB, Wizz Jones
Sun 22 Liverpool, Royal Court + COB, Wizz Jones
Fri 27 St Albans City Hall + COB, Wizz Jones
Sat 28 London, Royal Festival Hall + COB, Wizz Jones
Sun 29 Oxford, New Theatre + COB, Wizz Jones
Mon 30 Newcastle City Hall + COB, Wizz Jones
November
Wed 1 Birmingham Town Hall + COB, Wizz Jones
Sat 4 Harrowgate, Royal Hall + COB, Wizz Jones
Sun 5 Croydon, Fairfield Hall + COB, Wizz Jones
Tue 7 Portsmouth, Guildhall + COB, Wizz Jones
Fri 10 Guildford, Civic Hall + COB, Wizz Jones
Sat 11 Weston-Super-Mare, Winter Gardens + COB, Wizz Jones
Sun 12 Swindon, Wyvern Theatre + COB, Wizz Jones
Fri 17 Hull City Hall + COB, Wizz Jones
Fri 24 Manchester, Free Trade Hall + COB, Wizz Jones
Wed 29 Barnsley, Civic Hall + COB, Wizz Jones
Thur 30 Leeds Town Hall [cancelled]
December
Fri 1 Lancaster University [cancelled]
Fri 8 Barry, Memorial Hall [cancelled]
1973
January
No group commitments
6 Melody Maker reports ‘Pentangle split’
7 NME carries Pentangle interview denying any split
Between January and April Bert Jansch plays low-key club gigs in NORWAY and BELGIUM.
February
? Recording sessions (John Renbourn’s then-unreleased Reprise LP Just Like Me)
? Recording sessions (Pentangle second Reprise LP) [postponed]
March
No group commitments
? Paris, FRANCE, Recording sessions (Bert Jansch & Danny Thompson, for Jansch LP)
31 Announcement of Pentangle’s split in NME – confirmed by interviews with four members
April
? Recording sessions (Pentangle second Reprise LP) [cancelled]
? John Renbourn & Jacqui McShee begin low-key British folk club gigs
Thur 19 BBC Radio The Sequence recording (Bert Jansch)
Mon 23 Birmingham Town Hall (Bert Jansch & Danny Thompson) – beginning of UK tour
Wed 25 BBC Radio Sounds of the Seventies recording (John Renbourn & Jacqui McShee)
MONTH BY MONTH:
January 1971
Broadcasts: BBC TV – In Concert January 4
BBC Radio – Night Ride (John Renbourn) January 31
February 1971
Broadcasts: BBC Radio – Night Ride February 21
Cancelled show: The Watford concert was cancelled owing to Jacqui having tonsillitis. It was rescheduled to March 22.
March 1971
Releases: ‘Light Flight’ (re-released as EP) March 5
Broadcast: BBC TV – Take Three Girls (series two) March 24+
April 1971
Broadcast: Sounds of the Seventies April 19
Cancelled US tour: A planned US tour for April – May 1971 was cancelled at short notice ostensibly because Bert’s wife Heather was expecting.
May 1971
Broadcast: Sounds of the Seventies May 17
June 1971
Releases: Bert Jansch LP Rosemary Lane [date unknown]
The John Renbourn Sampler (compilation LP) [date unknown]
Broadcast: LWT TV – Journey Into Love June 6
August 1971
Broadcast: BBC Radio – Sounds of the Seventies (Bert Jansch) August 2
BBC Radio – Sounds of the Seventies (Bert Jansch) [repeat + new] August 23
September 1971
Broadcasts: BBC Radio – Night Ride (John Renbourn) September 25
BBC Radio – Night Ride September 30
October 1971
Release: Reflection LP October 10 [probable date – originally scheduled September 10]
Broadcast?: BBC TV – Once More With Felix (Bert Jansch) [date unknown – probably this month]
Seventh British tour: October 10 – November 13.
November 1971
Broadcast: BBC Radio – Sounds of the Seventies November 29
Fourth American tour: November 14 – December 12.
December 1971
Broadcast: BBC Radio – Sounds of the Seventies December 27
January 1972
Release: John Renbourn LP Faro Annie January 14
March 1972
Broadcast: NOS TV (Holland) – [title unknown] [date unknown]
European tour: March 18 – ? This was, barring Scandinavia, the group’s first concert visit to mainland Europe. They performed in Belgium and Holland this time around plus two shows in France, in June. Unlike practically all their contemporaries they never performed in Germany nor appeared on the various German TV pop shows.
April 1972
Fifth American tour: dates unknown.
June 1972
Broadcast: Granada TV – [title unknown] June 26
Granada TV – Set Of Six June 27
July 1972
Release: Pentangle History Book (compilation LP) [date unknown]
Broadcast: BBC Radio – Sounds of the Seventies July 17
August 1972
Broadcasts: Australia ABC TV – GTK [date unknown]
New Zealand TV [station unknown] – [title unknown] [date unknown]
Australasian tour: August 6 – August 26.
September 1972
Release: Solomon’s Seal LP [date unknown – originally scheduled for August]
Scandinavian tour: dates unknown.
October 1972
Broadcasts: BBC Radio – Sounds of the Seventies (repeat + new) October 9
BBC Radio – Sounds On Sunday October 29
Eighth British tour: October 8 – December 8. Like the September Scandinavian tour and the earlier European concerts, both with Ralph McTell on at least some of the dates, the group brought some friends along on this UK tour (the only time they toured Britain with support). Like the Pentangle, touring to promote Solomon’s Seal, both acts, Wizz Jones and Clive Palmer’s COB, had also recently released albums via Jo Lustig’s management. There may be dates missing from those given, but the final three concerts were cancelled owing to ill health – which would delay planned work on a speculative new album.
December 1972
Release: Box Of Love: The Bert Jansch Sampler Vol. 2 (compilation LP) [date unknown]
January 1973
Broadcast: RTBF TV (Belgium) – [title unknown] January 4
February 1973
Release: Bert Jansch LP Moonshine [date unknown]
March 1973
The Paris sessions: Bert and Danny were holidaying together with their wives and with Ralph McTell and recorded at the studios of French producer Georges Chatelaine. Danny produced eight tracks for Bert at these studios – possibly during this visit, possibly a little later in the year – which were offered to Reprise as an album but rejected. Two of the tracks subsequently appeared in these original recorded versions on Bert’s 1974 album for Charisma, LA Turnaround. Other songs from the sessions were re-recorded.
April 1973
Broadcast: BBC Radio – The Sequence (John Renbourn & Jacqui McShee) April 27
The final BBC recordings: While Bert’s BBC radio session in May was in support of his first solo tour in years and featured only solo material, John & Jacqui’s session featured several Pentangle songs plus arrangements of future John Renbourn Group material and otherwise unrecorded tracks that may indicate songs being considered in the last days of the group.
May 1973
Release: So Clear – The John Renbourn Sampler Vol. 2 (compilation LP) [date unknown]
Broadcast: BBC Radio – The Sequence (Bert Jansch) May 11
FINAL PART of CONCERT REPERTOIRE (1971-73)
June 30 1971 – London Festival Hall (Bert Jansch solo)
Source: Two reviews, the recollection of a fan, Mike Fox, and an amateur recording of Bert’s set.
Clive Palmer’s COB: Wade In The Water / Spirit Of Love (repeated as an encore)
Anne Briggs: Blackwater Side / Sovay / Willy O’Winsbury / Tangled Man / Living By The Water / The Time Has Come
Bert Jansch: A Dream A Dream / Wayward Child / Silly Woman / The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face /Bird Song / Nobody’s Bar / Oh My Babe / Yarrow / Twa Corbies / Reynardine / Tell Me What Is True Love / When I Get Home / The Wheel / Omie Wise
MC-ed by Jo Lustig, who was by then also managerially involved with the two support acts, this was the only Jansch solo concert between March 1968 and the Pentangle’s dissolution in early ‘73. The two reviews stated that Bert concentrated almost exclusively on material from ‘Rosemary Lane’, released that very month, although neither mentioned any of its tracks specifically. The amateur recording, though, reveals that he actually performed seven of the album’s 13 tracks – comprising seven of the concert set’s 14 items. This would, however, be the only occasion that many of those ‘Rosemary Lane’ tracks would ever be performed. By the time his solo career resumed in earnest from 1974 onwards, his repertoire had moved on. Of the four ‘new’ tracks performed at the show, both ‘Omie Wise’ and ‘When I Get Home’ would be recorded for the next Pentangle album, ‘Reflection’, while ‘Yarrow’ would appear on the one after that, ‘Solomon’s Seal’, and ‘Twa Corbies’, a Scottish traditional song, would feature as Bert’s solo spot on the next Pentangle tour and be recorded for his next solo LP ‘Moonshine’ (1973) – as would his new vocal version of ‘The First Time Ever’. (He had previously recorded an instrumental version.) He performed ‘Twa Corbies’, later in the year, on BBC2’s Once More With Felix – his only solo TV spot of the Pentangle era. 1971 was Anne Briggs’ highest-profile year, with two LP releases. Given their co-compositions and shared traditional material, having her on the bill effectively reduced what Bert could play. There are, for example, three songs in her repertoire among those mentioned by the reviewers which were also in the Jansch/Pentangle repertoire. Both Anne and COB enjoyed encores. Bert left the stage 25 seconds into ‘The Wheel’, which stopped abruptly, only to be forced back on for an encore of his own. Undoubtedly nervous, his set lasted 53 minutes. Three of the ‘Rosemary Lane’ items performed on this occasion were recorded for a solo BBC radio session two weeks later (‘Tell Me What Is True Love’, ‘Bird Song’ and ‘Nobody’s Bar’) while a fourth, ‘Reynardine’, was recorded during a Pentangle radio session the previous year and would occasionally be featured as a solo spot on the group’s final tour in 1972.
October/November 1971 – Seventh British Tour
Source: One concert set list noted by a fan and two reviews, from Edinburgh at the start of the tour and Croydon near the end. The notorious ‘Welcome To Pentanglia’ review by Karl Dallas in the MM, supposedly from the Albert Hall, is discounted as fiction.
Group: Pentangling [2] / Hunting Song [2] / Light Flight [2] / Train Song [2] / Jack Orion [2] / Rain & Snow / Reflection [3] / Wedding Dress [2] / Will The Circle Be Unbroken / Lady Of Carlisle
Solo: Lord Franklin (John) [2] / Blue Monk (Danny) [3] / Twa Corbies (Bert) / When I Was In My Prime (Jacqui)
This was the tour to promote ‘Reflection’, released in October. The monolithic ‘Jack Orion’ was notably still in the repertoire alongside the similarly lengthy newcomer ‘Reflection’. Two other tracks from that album are in the list. ‘Pentangling’ was still the show-closer and ‘Light Flight’ the encore. Peggy Seeger’s ‘Lady Of Carlisle’ gets a first mention, later to be recorded for ‘Solomon’s Seal’ (1972), as was ‘Willy O’Winsbury, which, although not documented here, was featured on a BBC radio session recorded during the tour. The real surprise here, though, is a Bert Jansch solo spot with ‘Twa Corbies’. Jansch solo numbers had long been a rarity at Pentangle concerts.
Early-to-mid 1972 – ‘The Pentangle’, TV studio concert, RTBF (Belgium)
Group: ‘Will The Circle Be Unbroken / Wedding Dress / No Love Is Sorrow / Reflection / Willie O’Winsbury / People On The Highway’
A co-production between RTBF, RM Productions Munich and the ORTF for which RTBF have distribution rights. Possibly the group’s final TV appearance – certainly its final broadcast, going out in January 1973, although it may have been recorded much earlier, during their European tour of March 1972. Not a live concert, but live in a bare and cold looking studio, with everyone looking tired and dishevelled. By some quirk of fate this was the one Pentangle performance occasionally re-shown in Britain in the 1980s, in a series titled ‘Rock Of The ‘70s’. Others in the series include Atomic Rooster, Van Der Graaf Generator, If and other second-division chisellers doing their best in the same dismal studio. Phil and Tom the roadies make captioned cameos and every so often the bare backdrop splutters into life with blotches of primary colours flashing on and off as a lighting effect and somebody involved in the vision mixing has discovered how to get a ‘hall of mirrors’ effect – for painfully prolonged periods. Glasses and wine bottles litter the Orange amps and John sits out the final two songs, leaving us with a Quadrangle. It is, nonetheless, a tired but dignified swansong.
June 27 1972 – ‘Set of Six’, TV concert, Granada (UK)
Group: ‘People On The Highway / Lady Of Carlisle / Sally Free & Easy / Willie O’Winsbury / Rain & Snow / No Love Is Sorrow / Jump Baby Jump’
Probably recorded close to the day of broadcast and, like the BBC In Concert, filmed as part of a series in a TV studio before a live audience. With the exception of ‘Rain & Snow’ (featuring Renbourn on white telecaster and wah-wah pedal as opposed to sitar), all the songs are from the then forthcoming ‘Solomon’s Seal’ and are pretty faithful to the recorded arrangements. We enter in the middle of the first song and leave in the middle of the last; Bert apparently fluffs a line while singing in unison with Jacqui during ‘People On The Highway’ – she winces but keeps singing, he shrugs apologetically at the end but oddly enough, a glance at the ‘Solomon’s Seal’ lyric sheet would suggest that, unusually, it was she who had bungled the line. Everyone looks well-presented and confident throughout, Jacqui opting for an orange, white and blue rag doll outfit; lighting and sound are both good, the set is spacious and there are four or five cameras involved. A fine performance all round.
October/November 1972 – Seventh British Tour
Source: Two reviews, an amateur recording from Guildford (10/11/72) of at least bits of all songs performed, and a full or partial set list from Manchester Free Trade Hall noted by a fan, Dave Burrows.
Group: Feedback / When I Get Home [2]/ Yarrow[2]/ The Snows / People On The Highway [2] / Willy O’Winsbury / Train Song / Cruel Sister / The Shoes of the Fisherman’s Wife Are Some Jive-Ass Slippers / Haul Away
Duets: She Moved Through The Fair [3] (Jacqui & Danny) / The Cuckoo [3] (John & Terry) / My Sweet Potato (John & Terry)
Solos: The January Man (Bert) [2] / Reynardine (Bert) [2] / The Two Sisters (Jacqui?)
This was the tour to promote ‘Solomon’s Seal’, released in September 1972. The surprises here are the otherwise unknown ‘Feedback’ (mentioned in a review) and three further otherwise unrecorded pieces (from the Guildford recording) that would very likely have been part of a second album for Reprise. ‘She Moved Through The Fair’, one of these three, is a more-or-less traditional Irish song, performed here as a duet between Danny and Jacqui. The other two ‘new’ pieces were ‘The Shoes of the Fisherman’s Wife’, a Charles Mingus composition, released earlier in 1972 on his Columbia LP ‘Let My Children Hear Music’ (John Renbourn would later record a version of the tune as a guitar duet on one of his albums with Stefan Grossman) and ‘Haul Away’, a rousing sea shanty, and a stirring end to the performance. If the set-list was retained for the subsequent few dates on the tour, that may well have been the last song the group played together. ‘The Two Sisters’ (from a review reference) may have been a McShee acapella performance, but is perhaps no more than a mishearing of ‘Cruel Sister’, a fragment of which appears on the Guildford recording. Bert performed one solo song per concert. This would seem to have been the debut of his classic arrangement of Dave Goulder’s ‘The January Man’, which would appear on (the already recorded) ‘Moonshine’ in March 1973. Reviewing a Pentangle festival show in July 1972, Karl Dallas noted that ‘most of the songs were taken from their forthcoming album’, mentioning only ‘Willy O’Winsbury’ specifically. Certainly, to judge from the live performance on Granada TV’s ‘Set Of Six’ in June 1972, much of ‘Solomon’s Seal’ was in the new set. On that occasion the group played six numbers from the new album plus the established concert fave ‘Rain & Snow’ (with Renbourn on electric guitar rather than sitar, presumably now abandoned for stage work). With both Wizz Jones and Clive Palmer’s COB on the tour bill, the Pentangle set on this final tour was relatively short. Although recording sessions for a second Reprise LP were scheduled in the New Year, the group had dissolved by the end of March 1973.
April 23 1973 – Birmingham Town Hall (Bert Jansch solo, British tour)
Source: A detailed MM review. Danny Thompson guested on the three tracks highlighted with an asterisk.
People On The Highway / Lady Nothing / Blues Run The Game* / Key To The Highway* / Brought With The Rain* / Soho / The Wheel / Running From Home / Angi / Reynardine / Oh My Father / Blackwater Side
The Pentangle had finally imploded four weeks earlier. This was the first concert of Bert’s first solo tour in years and his repertoire reflects the transitional nature of this period between the group’s split, including a split from Reprise who had just released his solo LP ‘Moonshine’, and his creative rejuvenation with ‘LA Turnaround’ in 1974. The reviewer, Dennis Detheridge, noted the set lasted only an hour and can have included little else in addition to the above. Two tracks were featured from ‘Moonshine’ along with the classic ‘Reynardine’ from ‘Rosemary Lane’, none of which seem to have lasted beyond this tour. This was also the Jansch debut for his arrangement of the old Renbourn instrumental ‘Lady Nothing’, due to become a staple of his mid-seventies repertoire. The wordy Pentangle epic ‘People On The Highway’, from the previous year’s ‘Solomon’s Seal’, was a surprising opener given that Bert – understandably nervous on this occasion – has always admitted to problems remembering the words. The rest of the set was a hotch-potch of old faves. By the time of his next significant British tour, in the autumn of 1974, only a loose if assuredly crowd-pleasing arrangement of ‘I’ve Got A Feeling’ would remain from the Pentangle era.
POSTSCRIPT: RECORDED MATERIAL NEVER PERFORMED ONSTAGE
Sweet Child: Only ‘The Trees They Do Grow High’ remains unconfirmed as a group stage number from this album. It was certainly performed as a John & Jacqui duet in 1967 and appeared in the group arrangement on a 1969 BBC session.
Basket of Light: There are no documented sightings of either ‘The Cuckoo’ or ‘Once I Had A Sweetheart’ as stage numbers, although both were recorded at least once each for radio sessions. The John & Terry duet entitled ‘The Cuckoo’, featured on the 1972 tour, is most likely the hillbilly song of that name featured on John’s ‘Faro Annie’ album. While the non-LP B-side of ‘Light Flight’, ‘Cold Mountain’, was often played onstage, its counterpart from the ‘Once I Had A Sweetheart’ single’, ‘I Saw An Angel’, was apparently never performed either onstage or on radio. Finally, ‘Springtime Promises’ is only documented as a radio session performance.
Cruel Sister: There are no references to ‘Cruel Sister’ itself being performed either onstage or on TV or radio. Any time ‘Lord Franklin’ was performed it seems to have been as a Renbourn solo number.
Reflection: Apparently John’s tour de force ‘So Clear’ was never performed in any way. The only reference to ‘Omie Wise’ being performed during the Pentangle era was as a Bert Jansch solo piece on a 1971 radio session.
Solomon’s Seal: ‘The Cherry Tree Carol’, undocumented onstage, was performed on a 1972 radio session, leaving only one song from ‘Solomon’s Seal’, ‘High Germany’, absent from the repertoire. ‘High Germany’, however, was certainly in the stage repertoire of the John Renbourn Group (featuring Renbourn and McShee) during the mid-70s.
Pentangle live on Granada TV’s ‘Set of Six’, 1972 – ‘No Love Is Sorrow’:
Bert managing to get through ‘The Wheel’ in 1973 (the tune that broke down at the June 1971 Festival Hall concert), shortly after the band had called it a day:
PART 4a of 4: THE TALE CONCLUDES
The Sixth British Tour
Having completed a new album, the members of the Pentangle set off almost immediately on their sixth British tour which, at twenty-nine dates over a two month period, was their longest yet. Interspersed were the now usual TV and radio spots, plus the release dates for not one but two albums: John’s The Lady and the Unicorn and, a month later, Cruel Sister, inconveniently not appearing until the very end of the tour. Following an appearance on BBC Radio’s Folk On Friday, the tour opened, as ever, at the Royal Albert Hall, September 26. And again, as ever, the man from the Melody Maker was on the scene:
‘Many were critical,’ wrote reviewer Andrew Means, ‘of the Pentangle after their Isle of Wight performance. It was suggested that their sound was beginning to be repetitious. But Pentangle’s music is a very mature concoction, as its membership would suggest. Their music is not at its best at open air festivals. It needs good acoustics, and an audience that is more aware of music than of Woodstock and the weather forecast. All this is merely an explanation of the Pentangle’s autumn tour success. For a success it will be if Saturday’s performance at the Albert Hall is anything to go by. A near capacity audience was well rewarded for its attentive mood. The group played a selection from its resourceful repertoire. The joy of listening to them is that they include nothing superfluous. Every note is an essential part of the overall plan, from the subtle reflections of the two guitars to the vibrating echoes of Danny’s bass. Their multi-instrumental combinations are as potent as ever.’
Nevertheless, the group were in a shakier position than they were probably aware of at the time. The new album hadn’t appeared yet; audiences (and new fans on the back of the Take Three Girls exposure) had already heard the Basket of Light material on an extensive British tour earlier in the year; and the musical world, in general, was changing. ‘Having seen Pentangle at Nottingham,’ wrote a Mr Tetley, of that parish, to the MM letters page, ‘I have to comment on their performance. Monotony was the hallmark of the evening. The players appeared to have no interest in what they were playing – Jacqui McShee would provide an excellent cure for insomnia with her incessant dirges. Please Pentangle – put some life into it – take a leaf out of Led Zeppelin’s book.’ Mr Tetley’s viewpoint was not an uncommon one – there were a lot of new and exciting acts on the scene, and the Pentangle, aside from being a little more veteran than most, were in danger of their delicate approach wearing thin. They needed a blockbuster album of some description, and Cruel Sister wasn’t it. ‘I suspect,’ wrote one reviewer, diplomatically, ‘that the album’s appeal will be limited to initiates’.
It wasn’t the happiest of tours either. One headline they could well have done without referred to the cancellation of a sold out show in Bristol. Someone had pinched the guitars – John’s customised Gibson 335 electric, and Bert’s hand-made John Bailey acoustic – from the group’s van after a gig in Liverpool the previous night. Aside from causing the Bristol show to be rescheduled, John was devastated. A £100 reward was offered for each guitar’s return, but they never were. Other instruments were borrowed, and the tour continued. ‘It’s just a rarity if you find [a guitar] you really like,’ said Renbourn a week or two later. ‘It was fortunate the theft happened when it did, in that work on the group’s album was virtually complete.’ Clearly, there was a possibility of yet more work to be done to the Cruel Sister project on odd days during the tour period. Whether everyone was still as enthusiastic about the album as John obviously was is open to question, but John, at least, was doing his best to present a united front: ‘I think everyone is interested in the group, to keep it alive,’ he continued. ‘It’s my idea of a really good group. You’d be hard pressed to find musicians as sympathetic and as good as that.’
‘People used to complain that we were a bit too cerebral,’ said Jacqui. ‘We used to intimidate people but that wasn’t the intention. What used to get me sometimes, at our gigs, was that the whole place would be full up and you could still hear a pin drop – and actually that was quite frightening, because they’d all just sit there and you’d think, ‘Are they actually asleep or are they listening or what?’ And there would be hardly any response from the audience until the very end! It was very hard. You need response from an audience to really push yourself. But we seemed to attract people who were very quiet. I mean, the first few rows were all young chaps transfixed to what John and Bert were doing on the guitar!’
Media-wise, the period surrounding the autumn tour was no less comprehensive than the rest of the year. Following Folk On Friday, an appearance on regional television (Show of the North) was broadcast on the day of the Albert Hall concert. Within the next week there were two further appearances on BBC Radio while a month later a Sounds of the Seventies recording followed immediately after the now-inevitable mid-tour flying visit to Europe (this time another TV bash in Paris), while Anglia Television, during November, broadcast two programmes with a Pentangle interest in its educational series Music Room.
Presented by Transatlantic recording artist John Pearse, the two half-hour shows had been recorded in September and featured Danny Thompson and Terry Cox, respectively, demonstrating their instruments. Ray Warleigh appeared with Danny, playing a breathtaking arrangement of ‘Scarborough Fair’, while John Renbourn turned up on Terry’s programme (now erased) – presumably featuring material from The Lady and the Unicorn, on which the versatile drummer and his trusty glockenspiel had appeared.
Pearse lauded the Pentangle’s achievements in a print interview at the time: ‘Pentangle,’ he said, ‘have done a great deal to show people that it’s not necessary to drive an audience into the ground with huge walls of sound and massed banks of amplifiers. They’ve shown that an audience can be attracted by subtlety and true musicianship. One result of their influence is that we’re now beginning to get a large number of very good quality acoustic guitars available in Britain – which has not always been the case.’
The tour continued on throughout England, touching briefly on Wales and Ireland, before winding up in Wolverhampton at the end of November. A press release from early in September curiously stated that this, the band’s sixth British tour, would feature the live debut of ‘Jack Orion’ and the music from Tam Lin ‘which will be on their next album’. Given that the September recording sessions took place after this announcement, it remains conceivable that including some version of ‘Tam Lin’ on the Cruel Sister album was still, at that stage, a genuine proposition.
As Renbourn reflects, though, ‘all the tunes on Cruel Sister were mainstays of the performance repertoire and have proved to be the most enduring. Those pieces, in particular, are the ones most requested still in concerts wherever any of us play. [But at that time] the group was concerned with music not sales figures.’
Transatlantic were placing a lot of confidence in Cruel Sister by taking out a full page ad in the Melody Maker. The gatefold sleeve, of Albert Durer engravings, gave the content an air of solemnity it could possibly have done without. Nevertheless, Jacqui had done better than usual in 1970’s MM readers’ poll, coming fourth in the ‘Best Female Singer’ category, behind Sandy Denny, Christine Perfect and Julie Driscoll. As a band, the Pentangle never featured in such polls.
With the end of the tour, the group’s activities for the year were over. December was free, and the Christmas telly was looking good. On Christmas day (Jacqui’s birthday) the Trumpington programme, Songs From A Country Church, and a few days later, on January 4, the band’s In Concert was at last being broadcast. Ironically, neither of these programmes, having been recorded months earlier, featured a single note from what was now the new album. Rather, both shows drew material from Sweet Child and Basket of Light. Indeed, as far one can now tell, nothing at all from Cruel Sister was ever performed on camera.
Meanwhile, the band’s ‘ghost of Christmas past’ had reappeared in the form of a re-run for the Take Three Girls series. A second series was in the pipeline, and the Pentangle had agreed to record (in January 1971) three new pieces of incidental music, one for each girl. There had been a group meeting, to that effect, with Mike Mays, the show’s producer, on a free day during the tour. Transatlantic, not missing any tricks, re-released ‘Light Flight’ in March.
There were a dozen or so scattered university shows from the band around the UK during the first three months of 1971 but nothing as strenuous as the previous year. One of these dates, yet again at the Albert Hall, had been promoted independently of Jo Lustig, the publicised idea being ‘for Pentangle to pull in the crowds so they would become acquainted with the music of Fairfield Parlour and Room’, also on the bill. To this end, it was a wasted effort – the whole show being what one reviewer described as ‘a mass of amplification problems’: ‘The Pentangle are a little too well rehearsed and computer-like,’ he went on, ‘but for once they looked as if they were enjoying themselves and not bored in their usual manner.’
February 2 saw a welcome new development in the camp with a one-off John Renbourn solo performance at London’s Queen Elizabeth Hall. Capitalising on his recent forays into Early Music, the show was John’s first solo presentation for three years, and a far cry from those Soho folk club days. Terry Cox, Lea Nicholson (concertina), Tony Roberts (woodwind) and Don Harper (violin and viola) joined John at various stages of the show, which had begun with a cruise, as one reviewer noted, ‘through some of the blues that brought to mind the days when he was still something of an ‘underground’ hero’, and ended in a ‘grand finale of numbers from The Lady and the Unicorn album.’
Andrew Means’ review, for MM, included some pertinent observations on John’s development as an artist: ‘John Renbourn is not a performer, he’s a musician. He is an artist who has to be accepted on his own terms. His concert at the Queen Elizabeth Hall last week made this abundantly clear. Hardly a word or movement from John indicated that he was aware of an audience. The audience had to be content with observation, peering at creation that continued oblivious of watching eyes. Any communication came through the music, in itself no ordinary drama. With the exception of ‘The Lady and the Unicorn’ every note seemed effortlessly perfect. It was hard to comprehend how pieces that sounded so complex could be played with such complete relaxation.’
Four months later Bert would also be given the chance to play a high-profile solo engagement. In the meantime, Jo was involving himself with Lindisfarne and Van Morrison concert promotions; John was preparing a song book for publication; Jacqui developed tonsillitis; Heather Jansch had a baby; the band pulled out of another US tour; and, at last, Bert’s solo masterpiece Rosemary Lane saw the light of day. But before any of that, there was another Pentangle album to record, and things were going downhill fast.
Reflection
Given the dense workload of the previous year, 1971 must have felt like a holiday to the members of the Pentangle. There were a handful of gigs and recording dates in the first quarter, with an American tour scheduled for April-May, only to be mysteriously cancelled. This would be the year of ‘folk-rock’. The Pentangle were indirect pioneers of the boom but it was Fairport Convention and its offshoot, Steeleye Span, who most clearly defined the blueprint for others to follow. ‘I think,’ says Jacqui, ‘we paved the way for people who had been solo artists, or who had been playing in duos, to actually form bands. I mean, it’s a lot nicer to go on stage with, say, four or five of you, than it is just one or two. There’s more room for mistakes!’
As always, Jo Lustig was on the ball, ahead of the game and in with a chance. For him, this would be a year of expanding his interests away from the Pentangle, and his instincts were by and large as good as ever. Soon after key members Martin Carthy and Ashley Hutchings had left them, at the end of the year, Jo had signed up Steeleye Span, or what was left of them. The membership turnover rate might have worried lesser men but Jo knew a winning formula when he saw it and would soon be overseeing the band’s most lucrative and successful period – on his customary commission. In May he signed up Gillian McPherson, a young singer/songwriter from Belfast, already popular in Scotland and Northern Ireland, and in September he signed the Dransfields (brothers Robin and Barry) – who would, by the end of the year, split due to ‘musical differences’. He’d already been handling the rather more reliable Ralph McTell since the middle of 1970, and by February 1972 would secure a contract with former Beatle protégée Mary Hopkin.
‘Everybody was more or less in the same musical vein,’ says Jacqui, ‘and we were all playing more or less the same venues. We began to feel that he was getting bored with us. It just seemed that he would book us out to places and we would be on the road all the time, and occasionally we’d meet up with Steeleye and find that they were complaining of the same thing. We’d been saying, ‘Don’t sign with Jo!’, but of course they did – because they saw our success and they wanted the same.’
The Pentangle’s first cancellation of a tour, at the end of 1969, had apparently been the result of a tantrum. The second cancellation of an American tour, planned for April/May 1971, remains unexplained but was probably also whimsical. Coherent decision-making on business matters was not their forte:
‘There wasn’t really a strong leader in the band,’ says Jacqui. ‘I suppose Danny was the strongest character, because he spoke louder than anybody else and he spoke more than anybody else. Bert would always slope off into the background and not want to be involved in it – anything for a quiet life, if you like. Terry didn’t really want to be involved in the business side of it – none of us did really.’
Ostensibly, to the press, the US tour was cancelled at the last minute because Heather Jansch was having a baby. Prior to the group’s previous US tour in April-June 1970, Bert had gone into print labelling the place as ‘the most violent country in the world’. After it, his view was even more dogmatic: ‘Under no circumstances will I return. All that madness and insanity, no thanks!’ With the tour cancellation and the virtual avoidance of summer festival dates – a consequence of those open-air disasters the previous year – the group members would be left with a swathe of free time right up to the autumn.
By this stage discontent was becoming endemic. Cruel Sister, promoted with a full British tour, had been a commercial disaster. Having come together in a spirit of adventure that was sufficient to fuel the first three albums – the exploratory promise of The Pentangle (1968), the abundant realisation of that promise on Sweet Child (1968) and its refinement as a commercially successful brand on Basket of Light (1969) – the energy had almost tangibly expired by the time album number four came around. True, it had a certain poise and showed aspects of musical development, particularly with John’s use of low-volume electric guitar, but it was simply not the right way to maintain the momentum of critical and popular success. Much of the music on the group’s subsequent albums would see the balance redressed, and previous heights reconquered, but with the definite science of hindsight the Pentangle’s moment had passed.
Demonstrably, from this point on the one-time darlings of the media became a whipping boy, a byword for tedium and lethargy. The reasons may be manifold, perhaps not all related to the music: pressures of touring and each member’s changing social and personal circumstances were certainly factors in the ‘magic’ waning; a diminishing of commitment from their manager, increasingly busy in developing new acts, may be reasonably conjectured; a lack of financial will on the part of Transatlantic – a company with no previous experience at this level – to see the project through. But more generally every group under the spotlight of incessant publicity, as were the Pentangle, can only bask in the glory of critical interest for so long. In this respect, with a media ‘honeymoon’ period that saw the group nurtured and encouraged from shambolic pre-Lustig beginnings at The Horseshoe through the prestige gigs and daring adventures of the early Lustig era to the final triumphs of mainstream acceptance that arrived via Take Three Girls, the Pentangle had enjoyed more than three years of a good innings. Those who are built up by the media must surely be torn down by the same.
‘When Pentangle started John and I had the controlling power, I suppose,’ admitted Bert, at the start of the year. ‘At the same time the group was trying to be co-operative. But we were the ones who were doing all the pushing originally; now after three years each member of the group could do the same, so really our management deals need to change in order to put things right.’
In fact, relations with Jo Lustig were deteriorating. His contract came up for renewal in February 1971, and begrudgingly everyone agreed, in the absence of any better ideas, to re-sign for a period of three years. In a way, this lack of any imagination in providing for their own best interests is illustrative of what Jo viewed as a tendency towards complacency in the group. Bert, for a start, was never one of life’s natural hustlers: ‘At one time the group took over most of my concentration,’ he told one journalist, in July 1971. ‘I had to spend all my time thinking how to keep things going. But now Pentangle are well known and don’t need any publicity.’
Jo Lustig may well have been allowing himself a similar attitude. Aside from his various new signings, he was also involved in promoting major concerts for two promising new acts, Lindisfarne and Van Morrison, who were, true to his usual judgement, about to make it big. By March 1971, he was arranging Van’s first UK tour, for June, as a solo artist. By May, he was telling the press of his intentions to sue Morrison’s manager, Mary Martin, for Van’s decision to cancel. There were various excuses being bandied around but Lustig wasn’t impressed: ‘I am sure that Van had misgivings about coming back,’ said Jo, in his press statement, ‘but it’s the job of a manager to reassure artists.’
While all this was going on, the Pentangle were enjoying some time to indulge in extra-curricular activities as individuals. Danny Thompson, in particular, had been continuing to fit in a remarkable amount of session work and occasional non-Pentangle live appearances. Barring appearances on easy listening novelty records by the likes of Cliff Richard and Vic Lewis, most of his session work during the Pentangle era tended to be in the folk idiom, with names like Davy Graham, John Martyn, Nick Drake, Donovan, the Incredible String Band, Marianne Faithfull and Julie Felix cropping up more than once in his sessionography. Aside from the Pentangle’s Reflection, Thompson appeared on at least ten other albums recorded and released during 1971 – a reflection, perhaps, of the band’s now leaner schedule.
Terry Cox had also been keeping up a rigorous schedule of sessioneering during the Pentangle era, if a little lower-key than Thompson’s work. ‘It means a lot of hard work but I find it essential,’ he’d told MM the previous year. ‘I need the contrast with Pentangle’s style and find it stimulating to bash out rock’n’roll at these sessions.’ Danny and Terry often appeared together on sessions, and their two LP recordings with Davy Graham, Large As Life (1968) and Hat (1969), are of particular interest to fans of the Pentangle ‘sound’, as are their mid-60s recordings with Duffy Power, many of them issued at last in February 1971, as Innovations, on Transatlantic of all places.
In February 1971, Danny and Terry contributed to classical guitarist John Williams’ Changes album – the subsequent Sky front-man’s first foray into contemporary fusions. Thompson had already worked with another future Sky man, percussionist Tristan Fry, on a Julie Felix Albert Hall concert earlier that month. But the connection for the Changes project was orchestrator Stanley Myers, with whom Thompson and Cox had previously worked on the Tam Lin soundtrack. Terry would also appear in concert with Williams and the Stanley Myers Orchestra at a Festival Hall show on April 12, along with Chris Spedding, Madeline Bell and yet another future Sky man, and Tam Lin accomplice, Herbie Flowers.
Around the same time that Terry was moonlighting with Myers, David Bowie was making overtures in his direction: ‘I’ve been working with Terry Cox of the Pentangle,’ he told MM in April ‘71, ‘and getting a group together to go on the road. All the people I want are with other bands at the moment and I don’t want to start breaking them up!’ He didn’t have to. By the time they came to record their fifth album, Reflection, the Pentangle were falling apart. They may not have cared to admit it to themselves at the time but it was becoming increasingly obvious to those around them. Bill Leader, once again on board as producer, was especially well placed to notice:
‘Groups rarely fall apart because they have deep artistic differences,’ he observes. ‘It’s the social dynamics of a group that’s the problem, when they just can’t stand each other. That’s where the Spinners, of all people, had shown the way. But if the Pentangle were the sort of people who could have hung together, realised groups have difficulties and that they’d got to somehow handle that, then they would have gone on to make more music. But, at the same time, if they were the sort of people who would have appreciated that, they wouldn’t have been the sort of people they were and they wouldn’t, in the first place, have been producing such interesting music.’
After the Reflection sessions and after the sessions for Renbourn’s Faro Annie album later in the year, Bill Leader had no further involvement, professionally, with the members of the Pentangle. He had his own labels, Leader/Trailer, to run and understandably lost touch with the ins and outs of the group during their final year together. 1972 was to be their most cosmopolitan year of touring by far, with first time tours of Australasia and mainland Europe in addition to Britain, Scandinavia and America. Coupled with declining popularity, declining relations within the band and with Jo, and seemingly intractable business problems – on top of various personal issues – the final, long overdue collapse of the Pentangle had become inevitable. As early as March 1971 the coffin was being nailed. The first problem wasn’t even the band but the studio.
Sound Techniques, in Chelsea, where the bulk of the Cruel Sister album had been recorded, was a converted Victorian milking parlour, ‘a characterful little place’, as Bill recalls. Jo decided it wasn’t good enough. Making records in the backstreets of Chelsea simply had to stop: it was bad for the reputation. Better to be seen making records in, as Bill recalls, ‘preferably the sort of place with deep pile carpeting, racy receptionists and neon lights on the walls outside’. Jo had just heard about a new place that sounded just the ticket:
‘I’d had social contact with Jo Lustig over the years,’ says Bill, ‘but we’d never had occasion to have any meaningful conversations about his artists. I don’t recall Jo being present at any of the Cruel Sister sessions or coming to talk to me before, during or after. But when they decided to do Reflection Jo went out of his way to have a chat with me, saying that really he wanted something good for his lads. He thought they should have something that was worthy of them – none of these bloody cowsheds converted into studios down the backstreets of Chelsea. We ended up booking into Command, which had just appeared. It was in Piccadilly and it was an old BBC studio, famous for the fact that Glen Miller used to broadcast from it, and was newly converted and repaired and superficially looked a very good place. It had a front door that opened onto Piccadilly – which was better than the backstreets of Chelsea, or the front streets of Barnet [Olympic Studios], which we’d used from time to time. But when we got there we found that it wasn’t quite up to their standards.
‘There were technical problems. The group wouldn’t have been particularly aware of these but it didn’t help my job, for instance, that they had equipped the studio with only two sorts of microphone. The secret of a good studio is to have a wide variety of microphones available so that you could, by trial and error, find the one that gives you the sound you want. It shouldn’t be done by twisting around the equalisation on the desk. You try and get it so that the best possible sound is actually coming along the cable and into the control room, and then the minimum messing about.
‘I’d brought in Nic Kinsey as engineer, and a lot of the success in terms of the sound on Reflection is due to Nic. We’d worked together for years and we did work together as a team. He was a bright lad. We found that none of the people at the studio, in the main, knew how the equipment worked. It was new equipment from America and was rather different from ours. But we found one technician who knew how it worked, and he assisted us on the sessions. We found that the loudspeakers didn’t function. There was one classic case where Danny said, ‘I can’t hear the bloody bass!’ But we knew, from reading the meters, that it was going down on tape – you just couldn’t hear it through the loudspeaker or in the control room. We found that if you actually crouched down in a certain position between the speakers on the floor you could just about get an idea of what the bass was sounding like. It was these sorts of problems we had to bear. But the group seemed to be on a real downer of their own.’
They had just re-signed (begrudgingly) with Jo and just cancelled (acrimoniously) a tour of America. It was seemingly all down to money by this stage. The tour cancellation had been down to money, purely and simply; not wanting to sign again with Jo had been very largely down to money (in the eyes of the band it was a simple case of ‘he made it, we didn’t’). His cut was still 20% of royalties, 25% of everything else, plus expenses, as always, off the top. ‘It was in 1971,’ says Jacqui, ‘that we decided to start our own publishing company [Swiggeroux] to try and actually get some money out of the work we were doing.’ Whatever else may have been causing frustration or aggravation within the band, it was all manifest in the levels of alcohol going down. ‘I drank as much as any of them,’ says Jacqui. ‘What else could I do?’
Here were five people, with their own personalities and interests, who had been living in each other’s pockets for quite some time. It was inevitable that the creative buzz would have dulled and coupled with some sense of commercial frustration as well it would certainly make the process of making music together a lot less pleasurable. There had also been, in the wake of the band’s success during the Basket of Light period, something of a critical backlash. Tabloid newspapers, like the Daily Mirror, which had picked up on the group’s celebrity through Take Three Girls, weren’t long in sticking the knives in, and even the music press had decided to take a less favourable tone. On almost any front one could mention – personality-wise, business-wise – things were not going in the right direction. The one exception was the music. Reflection was a masterpiece, but it wasn’t born easily.
‘Jo didn’t want his boys recording in the middle of the night,’ says Bill. ‘He wanted decent sort of office hours: three hours in the morning, three hours in the afternoon. My memory, and I suppose it’s a caricature memory, was that the two pros [Danny and Terry] would be there on time, while Bert and John would arrive at different times, depending on exactly how much they’d had to drink and where they’d managed to lay their heads the night before. And it seems to me, in retrospect, that what happened was a sequence – that each day a different member of the group had decided that this was it, ‘Sod this for a game of soldiers, I’m leaving the group!’ And we’d spend most of the rest of the day either trying to get him back or doing the best we could without that particular member. I don’t think Jacqui threw that sort of tantrum. She was just very disappointed that this was going on. But with the rest of the group it was as if they’d drawn straws before coming in to see which one today was going to throw a moody!
‘A whole week that went by and there was nothing finished. Nat Joseph was saying, ‘How are you doing?’ and I was saying, ‘Well, we’re getting there…’ In the end, he wanted to know in detail what was going wrong, since he was forking out money for the studio, and I remember – because it was the only time I’ve done it – drawing him up a summary of the lack of progress. And then, I suppose, Nat went and talked to Jo Lustig about getting the act together, and Lustig was very annoyed with me because I’d actually ‘squealed’ on the lads! I suppose it seemed an unprofessional thing to do. Perhaps he was right; perhaps I was just protecting my own back. But, whatever, I think it was actually useful because we started getting somewhere.
‘Apart from having to move to another studio in the complex, because the Pink Fairies wanted to use the one we’d been using, and aside from the mixing desk going on fire at one point, I think the thing started rolling fairly well towards the end. Because they weren’t always around, I remember Nic Kinsey and myself sitting down at one point trying to do a rough mix of everything we’d got so far. I remember this distinctly, because we sat down and listened very carefully to what was going on and without them being there – they’d decided to go down the pub or something – we arrived at a mix of these tracks. And the one thing that sticks in my mind is that when we came to do the real mix, with them sitting in, how different their perception was – and how right their perception was. They had great imagination on how the tracks ought to be dealt with. I think, in the end, the combination of Nic Kinsey – he’d worked with both John and Bert before – and the fact that they were beginning to work together towards the end, chipping in very constructively during the mix-down period, meant that we ended up with an album which I was very pleased with, which sounded really good. I don’t know if it was a particularly successful album, but it deserved to get more notice than it did.’
‘We had quite a lot there to record,’ says Jacqui, ‘but it was just what we liked best and what sounded best that was put on the album. One particular number was John’s, ‘So Clear’. He spent a lot of time with Danny and Bert to get it right. John didn’t usually write much of the vocals, and that was, like, ‘his song’. Take the line ‘Toulouse circus rider’, for instance. A girl turned up in our hotel room with a painting of a clown riding on a ball, or something. There were so many bizarre incidents that happened all the time, and it was just a collection of observations.’
Everyone contributed to the fullest potential: Terry’s ‘Helping Hand’ added an element of stoned funk to the proceedings, while Bert’s ‘When I Get Home’ remains among his most compelling contributions to the group’s canon – with both his own immensely characterful vocal and Renbourn’s lead guitar surviving, despite technical flaws, from a guide take. ‘Rain And Snow’, ‘Omie Wise’, ‘Wedding Dress’, and ‘Will The Circle Be Unbroken’ – the latter pair subsequently appearing on European single releases – made up a quartet of richly atmospheric Appalachian covers, with a crack at another American trad arr, the shape-note hymn ‘O Wondrous Love’, remaining on the cutting room floor (although a version, by the group plus the Early Music Consort, was performed on a regional TV religious programme in April, with a further arrangement turning up in the early repertoire of the John Renbourn Group in 1974). But the cornerstone of the whole package was the epic ‘Reflection’.
‘There was a really great instrumental that Bert used to play called ‘Joint Control’,’ says John, ‘which had some very typical (of Bert) guitar patterns in it. Occasionally these patterns would get reused for jamming on, and I think basically that riff [for ‘Reflection’] comes from Bert. I had a part that fitted, that was lifted, I think, probably either from Chico Hamilton or Charles Lloyd. Danny, when we recorded it, tagged on a bass introduction with three basses overdubbed and it was exactly that kind of format that, for example, ‘Pentangling’ and a number of other pieces that were extended improvised pieces, were built around. Now, if you get the riff then you can figure out a melody line; then when you get a melody line, you can add some lyrics.’ The lyrics to ‘Reflection’ are undoubtedly amongst the Pentangle’s most interesting. ‘It started out like a jam,’ said Jacqui, ‘and then I wrote the words, and it became far too long!’
Shortly after the final session at Command everyone reconvened at Olympic Studios, in Barnet. Although technically inferior to Command, it had better facilities for mixing. This was the band’s most complex and ambitious recording – the first time they had used sixteen-track equipment. And with a masterpiece like ‘Reflection’, every track was used. If the album failed, they had at least given it, in the end, their best shot.
Welcome to Pentanglia
While 1970 had certainly seen the end of the massive outdoor festivals in Britain the two great institutions of a new style of festival had their low-key beginnings in the summer of ‘71. ‘Glastonbury Fayre’ was a straight continuation of the hippie idealism of the previous decade, while the first of the Reading Festivals was nailing its colours to the wall with the earthy, good-time swagger of people like Rory Gallagher, the Faces and Lindisfarne. This relative dearth of outdoor festivals made it easier for Jo to maintain his ‘No more festivals’ outburst of the previous year, although he didn’t quite manage it. For acoustic music in general, as for the Pentangle, a one-day festival at Tupholme Manor Park in Lincoln, July 24, was the big event of the Summer. A few days before that, the band would have a chance to warm up – after a good three and a half months inactivity – at the Solihull Festival of Arts (indoors). Prior to both, Bert had nervously filled Jo’s Van Morrison vacancy at the Festival Hall in June, giving support slots to old friends Anne Briggs and Clive Palmer.
Both Pentangle shows were reviewed, generously, in the Melody Maker: ‘If ever a contemporary group deserved a place in an arts festival,’ wrote Dennis Detheridge, of the Solihull event, ‘it must be the Pentangle. They gave a truly artistic performance, delicately weaving their instruments and voices to create a fascinating musical tapestry.’ At least they were still capable of delivering the goods, regardless of personality tensions. The emphasis of the group’s live set by now was on material of American origin, and on their own original compositions. Almost everything from the forthcoming Reflection was being aired, with much of the rest of the set drawn from Basket of Light. Rather surprisingly, the epic ‘Jack Orion’ was in evidence too – featuring John and Bert on recorders. According to Detheridge it ‘got a bit out of hand, Bert Jansch apologising afterwards for the group ‘goofing’ the words.’ As usual ‘Danny Thompson earned the only solo applause of the evening for his contribution to ‘Pentangling’.’
The same would be true a few days later at Tupholme Manor: ‘It was an encouraging set. Danny Thompson’s string bass solo in particular was greeted with applause and some adulation.’ With a very broad and impressive range of folk and acoustic artists from Britain and America – plus the added benefit of good weather, good site, good organising and good vibes – the festival was a roaring success. Organised by Fred Bannister, who had previously organised the Bath Festival in 1970 and who would triumph in 1972 with the Great Western Express festival, also at Lincoln, ‘Day of the quiet music’ was how the MM headlined its coverage, from Roy Hollingsworth and Andrew Means. ‘The slick efficiency with which the various musicians took the stage contributed to the contented atmosphere. One day was an ideal length, long enough to satisfy the appetite of the music-hungry 25,000 and just enough to avoid the approach of monotony.’
With names like the Byrds, James Taylor, Martin Carthy, Richard Thompson, Ralph McTell, Buffy Sainte-Marie and Tom Paxton – and not at all in the order one might expect – it must have been quite a day. Ralph McTell was followed by a storming set from Bert’s old heroes Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee ‘still playing when they were eventually driven away from the festival site.’ And then came the increasingly popular Steeleye Span, followed by a rare British appearance from Tim Hardin and then the Pentangle – heralding the day’s only significant rainfall. ‘Something Danny Thompson said must have offended the Lincolnshire deities… brother o’er-trampling brother in frenzied attempts to reach the shelter of the two marquee tents. Plastic bags appeared as if from nowhere and thus clad the multitudes dug in. Pentangle, meanwhile, kept playing…’ Even here, at a festival specialising in quiet music, the Pentangle suffered from sound problems. But if they didn’t exactly steal the show, they held their own amongst the great and the good of the folk scene. They were followed by the Incredible String Band. Remarkably, it was one of only a handful of times these two acts shared the same bill.
‘Alexis Korner was there backstage with some of his children,’ recalls Jacqui. ‘Bert was a bit like a Pied Piper figure and these children were following him around, laughing at him because he was stumbling along. Bert had this most amazing way of walking sideways when he was really gone – he never bumped into things, he would weave through them. I don’t know how he kept his balance when he was like that! But he’d goofed, and he’d bumped into this car – this was just before Hendrix was going on – that had an alarm on it! Bert was horrified – and these two young kids were killing themselves! At that point they ran away from him. Whether or not they’d actually pushed him into it I don’t know. But he’d set this car alarm off, and it went on for ages, ‘cos nobody could find the owner. Everyone was backing away, and Bert was standing next to this thing that was going ‘Nee naa nee naa’… I certainly wasn’t going to go and help him!
Six weeks later, and on the very eve of the Pentangle’s seventh British tour, Reflection was released, boasting a lavish gatefold sleeve, full of candid and relaxed photographs of group members at home, on stage, in museums, churches, cafeterias and even (Bert and John) messing about in a photographic studio. ‘This American, Shepperd Sherbell,’ said Jacqui, ‘was taking the photographs and we could all choose where we wanted them taken. I wanted to go to the British museum, where the Elgin marbles were, but they wouldn’t let us photograph in there. He phoned up, but they wouldn’t let him, so mine were taken at the V & A [Victoria & Albert Museum]. The rest had theirs all taken at their homes and in the studio. Some of them were taken in a studio when we were doing the music for a film, The Lion at World’s End.’
The Lion at World’s End soundtrack was recorded in London – at a studio near Portland Place – at some time during the otherwise uncluttered Summer of ’71. It was a stylised documentary film starring Bill Travers and Virginia McKenna, released theatrically as Christian The Lion in 1976 but apparently destined to debut as an American TV movie, first shown during the Autumn of ‘72. ‘We wrote a song for it,’ said Jacqui, ‘probably quite atrocious!’ Bill and Virginia came along to the soundtrack sessions and later invited Jacqui and Jock to a private showing at a hall near their home in Dorking. As with the Tam Lin music, where the master tapes are now is anyone’s guess. Among the numerous incidental pieces were several strong ideas unique to the film while others re-used themes from ‘Reflection’ and ‘Jack Orion’ alongside the as-yet unrecorded – and possibly yet unwritten – ‘People On The Highway’. As with Tam Lin, the central song was used in extracts as a narrative device. ‘It was tricky,’ said John, of the incidental music during an interview with Disc at the time, ‘as some of the parts were only a few seconds long. We just sat in front of the film and played as we felt.’
John’s pics on the Reflection sleeve were taken at and around his home, in a village near Petersfield in Hampshire. Some of Danny’s were taken at his home. Terry was living with his wife Jill and their family in Minorca by this stage (although he still kept a flat in London) so his were taken around London and in the studio – as were most of the ‘group’ shots. Bert is seen onstage and in rehearsal at the Festival Hall; Jacqui’s husband Jock appears in several of the studio shots; and there’s a stray snap of Jacqui looking unhappy at, apparently, the Isle of Wight Festival. For a band whose album sleeves had to date steered largely clear of photography it was quite a departure.
Mixing traditional material with originals, Reflection was everything that Cruel Sister should have been – fresh, dynamic, boasting good songs, great performances and a fuller, warmer sound. Given that much of the material had been in the group’s repertoire, or in John and Jacqui’s repertoire, for some time, there is no reason why such an album couldn’t have been delivered a year earlier. As a follow-up to Basket of Light it would surely have sustained momentum and continued to broaden their appeal in every way that Cruel Sister had failed to do. There were two or three possible singles on the album, and a promotional film for ‘Will The Circle Be Unbroken?’ was certainly shot (presumably for use in Europe), although no single would be issued in either Britain or America.
Karl Dallas previewed the group’s excellent return to form – with a clear sense of relief – in a September issue of Melody Maker. The piece was tellingly headlined ‘Pentangle beat the boredom barrier’: ‘After a series of albums that seemed to become increasingly soporific, threatening at times to decline into a sort of folk muzak, Pentangle’s latest brings back the excitement and sense of extending musical boundaries that distinguished the band in the days when they were getting it together every Sunday at the Horseshoe. Perhaps it is because they have been less concerned to preserve their traditional bona fides, for though half the numbers on the record may loosely be described as ‘trad’, the remainder are the sort of five-handed collaborations that only Pentangle can produce, with as much connection with jazz as folk. ‘Reflection’, the title track is undoubtedly the best of these… Jacqui’s singing throughout this album is superb, without the overpowering blandness which she has sometimes given to even the most vicious ballads of murder and mayhem in the band’s repertory… Perhaps what really makes this album so successful is that it is a group recording. Pentangle have always prided themselves on this group identity, but in recent years we’ve tended to play favourites as we listen to them, waiting for Bert’s too rare vocals, anticipating Danny’s exuberant solos, watching members of the band come and go from the stage as they explore the various permutations of duet, trio, quartet and quintet possible with their five-man line-up. Though a certain amount of that happens on this record, the whole record really hangs together as a corporate work of art.’
And that, in a nutshell, was where it differed so crucially from Cruel Sister. Initially scheduled for release on September 10 1971, Reflection seems to have been delayed until October 8 – a couple of days prior to their seventh British tour. ‘The famous five sweep aside any suggestion that their creativity has crumbled with a first rate album,’ declared Andrew Means, in MM. In a review peppered with words like ‘vitality’ and ‘conviction’, he was clearly as relieved as Dallas to have good things to say about this now venerable institution of British music. ‘Instrumentally the album is stimulating,’ he concluded. ‘While the musicians’ styles are all distinctly recognisable, they combine with a freshness and imagination which the last album just seemed to lack. The record is the most exciting product from Pentangle since their early days.’ For Sounds, Jerry Gilbert declared the album ‘quite probably their best’, highlighting as his colleagues had the sterling return to ensemble work and viewing side two, and most especially ‘Reflection’, as ‘a complete masterpiece’.
The tour began, unusually, at Edinburgh’s Usher Hall on October 10, and was promoted in conjunction with the album on a lavish full page ad in MM. There were further Scottish shows – at the Universities of Glasgow, Aberdeen and Stirling, and at Dundee’s Caird Hall – before the tour made its customary stop at the Albert Hall. As you’d expect, the man from the Melody Maker was waiting – seemingly in the bar. To the best of Jacqui’s memory, the show was a disaster from start to finish. They knew Karl Dallas was in the building, and no-one was looking forward to his review. They needn’t have worried:
‘Come with us now to a magic kingdom, of crimson waterfalls and crystal pasturelands,’ he burbled, in a prose that has rarely been equalled in purpleness, ‘where maidens weave arabesques of melody from lonely towers besieged by dark knights, a dreamworld idyll. Verily, this is the magic five-sided kingdom of Pentanglia, for this night circumscribed by the critics of the Royal Albert Hall, which as students of white wizardry will tell you is a very potent symbol indeed. A quiet, reflective place like the enchanted land of Sleeping Beauty, where the soft strands of music echoing and re-echoing around the huge dome above us only plunge us ever deeper into meditation, where the enthusiasm of the populace putting their hands together at the conclusion of each more delicate construction comes as a rude interruption. A pause, and the more vulgar citizens of this lovely land rush rudely to the bar, but the majority stay to sport and play, laughing and clapping their hands with unrestrained and childlike joy as pretty paper airplanes soar down from the heights around us. At one moment there are fully a dozen of these airy paper constructions swooping around in the currents of the upper air, and when he returns with his fellow rulers, Bert Jansch picks one up from the stage and sends it sailing down into the stalls. The music now is more modern, with more emphasis upon rhythm, but still the rude outside world cannot intrude. We are riding now down the beautiful parkway they have constructed through the mountains of this fair land, seated in the soft leather upholstery of an air-conditioned Cadillac. Through the darkened windows we can see great soaring skyscrapers of steel and plastic, filled with the music of the spheres, which comes to us electronically, for each of us is secure in his four-wheeled cocoon. Then it is over and we leave the country of Pentanglia for the ugly outside world of panda crossings and queues for the 73 bus. But behind us a lovely girl in a long dress hums the haunting theme of ‘Pentangling’ and we know that, unreal or no, we have carried a piece of our visit away with us to lie, like a glittering crystal of ice diamonds, slowly melting in the palm of our hands.’
The tour continued through England and Wales, ending at Portsmouth Guildhall on November 13. Six days later they were opening their fourth American tour with a concert at Santa Monica’s Civic Auditorium, California. It was mostly the halls and auditoriums this time, entirely without support acts and travelling towards the east coast from the west, with shows in Minnesota, Illinois, Chicago, Ohio, DC, Connecticut, Massachusetts and ending up at Philadelphia’s Academy Of Music on December 12. The penultimate stop was a return visit to Carnegie Hall. As Renbourn told NME subsequently: ‘It was quite an intense tour for the short period of time that we were there. In fact it was too intense for me. It seemed like we were there for about eighty years, doing a last gig in New York.’
Alas, for all the roadwork and the critical hurrahs – and notwithstanding a creditable three weeks at the low end of the US charts – it didn’t really sell. It may simply have been the changing nature of the music scene. Reflection was listed in the MM’s ‘Album of the month’ round-up. Perhaps significantly, out of sections devoted to pop, jazz, blues and folk, it was in the pop section, along with albums by John Lennon, Diana Ross, Jefferson Airplane, Terry Riley and T. Rex, which gives some indication of the spreading, eclectic nature of popular music in 1971. The music press had certainly changed its approach markedly from its late-sixties template, when a handful of acts could count on massive coverage to the obvious exclusion of others. Every journalist still had his or her (mostly his) faves, of course, but the coverage was more evenly spread. For popular music, 1970-1971 represented, in hindsight, not so much the beginning of the seventies as the gradual petering out of the sixties.
Artists like T. Rex and Elton John had emerged during 1970, and would come to real prominence over the next couple of years alongside the likes of Slade, Mungo Jerry, Deep Purple, Lindisfarne and Steeleye Span. On the other side of the coin, a whole host of artists indelibly associated with the sixties had failed, in one way or another, to make the transition. Jimi Hendrix had died; the Beatles had split; so had Taste and the Bonzo Dog Band. Blodwyn Pig had even managed to split twice in the same year while Julie Driscoll, the most arch of sixties icons, had lain low for a year and would consequently never recover a commercial profile of any relevance. It was no longer possible to talk of rock and pop or even folk in quite such an assured manner. There were now many different branches of each. Popular music had expanded considerably and the Pentangle, like everyone else, were just one among many unusual and diverse acts on the scene. In Reflection they had certainly delivered a strong piece of work but the Pentangle were inextricably a part of the sixties, and their time was slowly but surely coming to an end.
Farewell Transatlantic
The cancellation of that American tour earlier in the year, the increasing squabbles within the group itself and what Jo viewed as the ‘laziness’ of the Cruel Sister project had all surely dampened whatever enthusiasm for the band, on a personal level, he may have had. The group’s footing with Transatlantic was also unsound with only two of the five, Bert and John, actually contracted to the label by name – the others having, effectively, no legal standing in the event of any problems. By the end of the year such problems had arisen.
Discussed more fully in Dazzling Stranger: Bert Jansch and the British folk and blues revival (Bloomsbury, 2000), circumstances had developed during 1971 wherein the financial relationship between Transatlantic and the Pentangle changed markedly – in Transatlantic’s favour. Some of the group felt Nat Joseph was in the wrong; Nat quite validly referred them to their manager, whose responsibility contractual niceties surely were. Bert and John themselves felt bad, as they were the only members of the group named in the contract and thus the ones who could have or should have noticed and renegotiated any problems before anything was signed. ‘Lots of Transatlantic artists have cried on my shoulder about the way Nat’s treated them,’ says Bill Leader. ‘But he’s treated them absolutely squarely within his rights. Nat was fair. Nat was very well-informed on business matters and Nat had an ‘unfair’ advantage over artists who were not. He’d be quite merciless in the arrangement he’d come to with you, but having come to an arrangement he would stick to it. He was a very successful businessman. Now, Jo Lustig was also supposed to be a successful businessman…’ Whatever the perceived rights or wrongs of the situation, it was probably time for the group – if they wanted to progress their career – to move on anyway.
They had known and accepted that Reflection was to be their last album for Transatlantic prior to its release, but it was not quite the last from the Pentangle family. That honour goes to Renbourn’s Faro Annie, released on January 14 1972. Renbourn himself was admirably stoic about the situation:
‘I remember with quite a lot of fondness and gratitude,’ he says, ‘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, 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 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. ‘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.’
The resulting album, Faro Annie, was indeed a fine piece of work and a refreshing contrast to the previous direction of his solo work. As with Bert’s Birthday Blues, it was virtually a Pentangle album in terms of sound and personnel. Cox and Thompson were used on more than the two tracks they were credited for on the sleeve, and on a couple of the more ‘solo’ pieces, John blends acoustic guitar and sitar together as only he can. With the distinctive voice of Dorris Henderson replacing, as it were, Jacqui on three numbers and John splashing liberal doses of low-volume wah-wah guitar about, the comparison is still more compelling. Leader and Kinsey’s production clinches it. Probably recorded during July/August 1971, the most interesting deviation from the Pentangle sound came from the fiddle playing of Sue Draheim, an attractive young lady from California with a taste for old time country music and with whom Bert and John had taken a holiday in Ireland during the summer. It was a fruitful trip for all concerned – Bert was inspired to write ‘Jump, Baby, Jump’ after visiting the vast Cliffs of Moher on the west coast while John found himself in possession of a Celtic harp, with no idea as to how he came by it and only the vaguest memory of drinking lots of Guinness and searching vainly for a fleadh.
Within a few months John’s marriage to Judy had broken up and he would end up retreating to the backwoods of Devon with Sue, who had by then toured and recorded with a number of British folk artists, including Royston Wood, the Dransfields and Ashley Hutchings’ Albion Country Band. For the Pentangle, meanwhile, there was little or no period without a recording contract. The transfer to Reprise was made with great speed and, initially, enthusiasm.
There were glimmers of hope too from the music press, whose writers were beginning to realise that the Pentangle’s durability, as both a group and as the same five individuals who had started out as such, was worthy of respect. ‘Pentangle: five years of stability’ was one headline, in English Dance & Song, at the turn of 1972, while ‘Pentangle – five years of togetherness’ was the NME version a week or so later. As Karl Dallas noted in the EFD&S piece: ‘It’s been fashionably hip on both sides of the Atlantic to put down Pentangle for a year or two now. [Yet] at a time when it was almost impossible for them to get a good review they were still capable of filling the Royal Albert Hall or Carnegie Hall.’ He also paraphrased a Bert Jansch comment of seeing the group lasting perhaps another four years, and put their longevity thus far (and much of the recent press frustration) down to the unusually co-operative, no-front-man aspect of their work.
PART 4b of 4: THE END
Solomon’s Seal
Solomon’s Seal is the oldest known rite of ritual magic; it was also to be the final album from the Pentangle. With the advent of full-scale electric folk-rock, let alone their own troubles individually and collectively, the group’s increasingly fragile music was on borrowed time and everyone knew it. ‘Pentangle beat the boredom barrier’ had been the damnably faint praise lavished by the Melody Maker on Reflection. That album had failed to chart but the seeds of an artistic renaissance were definitely there, and the signing of a new three-album group contract – plus Jansch and Renbourn as solo artists – with Reprise in the early weeks of 1972 resurrected a sense of hope.
‘I can remember going to sign the deal,’ said Jacqui. ‘We went up to the Warner Brothers offices and it was like a big champagne party. There was a lot of interest – we were going to do this, going to do that… But there was a lot of internal politics going on there at the time, which we didn’t realize until after, and the guy who had signed us, the head of WEA [in Great Britain], wasn’t exactly given the sack, but he was moved sideways or downwards or something, and then someone else came in. I think, then, the interest waned.’
Recording for the album began promptly and, after a low-key 1971, the New Year promised a touring schedule to rival that of their glory days, with tours of mainland Europe, Scandinavia, Australasia, Britain and America all scheduled. Being an American label, Reprise was particularly keen to develop that market. The short US tour of November/December 1971 was a mere preamble to a fuller visit in April. But it was not to be.
‘Every time Jo exerted pressure on the Pentangle he would get an album,’ recalls Ralph McTell, ‘and they would get an advance and then they would have to tour. And they would therefore earn money, and Jo was very interested in earning money – for the band and for himself. The tours the Pentangle did were horrendous in the amount of work and travel they had to do. And because there was five of them – and let’s say they didn’t skimp on anything – they often came back with absolutely nothing to show for their labours, and that was the downfall, as I recall, of the [planned] fifth tour of the States. Danny just said in a meeting, with Jo, ‘All I wanna know is how much are we getting?’ And Jo said, ‘Well, I can’t tell you that Danny, ‘cos it depends what you spend’. He said, ‘I wanna know how much we’re getting or I’m not going’. And when Jo was unable to say, he said, ‘Well, I’m not going’, and they all said, ‘We’re not going either’, and that was about the end of it. That’s how Danny told it to me.’
Jacqui put things a little more diplomatically at the time, explaining the group’s by-then mysterious low-profile to Sounds’ Penny Valentine in July 1972: ‘We said we didn’t want to go back to America under the conditions we’d had before – fourteen nights on the trot, all that travelling. When we finally stopped on the last American tour we just collapsed. We’re not the kind of band that value some kind of status and think of the financial aspect all the time. It’s more important that we feel right – so we just decided it was time to have a rest and cut the album… We really wanted to get away from the very long tracks [this time] – mainly because it was always such a painful experience to do them onstage the first few times. Nobody could ever remember which passage they were supposed to be playing. We’re very happy with Solomon’s Seal, it’s the first album we’ve had total control over and recording it with our engineer John Wood was really enjoyable.’
Whether the experience was really quite so blissful as Jacqui suggested is a moot point, but one positive idea already brewing within the camp – having, by chance, just played a couple of dates with Ralph McTell in Amsterdam – was to perform with other muso friends as often as possible. Bringing along pals like Ralph, Wizz Jones and Clive Palmer’s COB as support acts wherever possible was a conscious attempt to bring some camaraderie back into the picture. But it was all papering over cracks by this stage: ‘I just seemed to spend my life on aeroplanes and in hotels and going from one gig to another,’ says Jacqui. ‘I just got very tired! Various members had personal troubles at the time and there was a lot of drinking going on. It was hard to cope. It just wasn’t enjoyable anymore.’
In hindsight, Solomon’s Seal is a record of people’s weariness, but also the product of a unit whose members were still, however low the ebb, among the best players, writers and musical interpreters of their day. Everyone wanted it to work, and said as much to interviewers at the time, although they had given themselves very little time to prepare: ‘It’s probably my favourite of our albums,’ says Jacqui, ‘but we worked on it in the studio as much as anything. There wasn’t much rehearsing – there wasn’t time.’
Musically less adventurous and sonically dryer than Reflection, the new album was released in September. Of its content, the group had been playing Cyril Tawney’s ‘Sally Free And Easy’ (sung by Bert) in concert for years; ‘No Love Is Sorrow’ was a rare and striking song contribution from Danny; while Bert offered two compositions, ‘Jump Baby Jump’ and ‘People On The Highway’. The latter, sung in unison with Jacqui, was a beautiful melody and guitar figure softening a desperate strength-in-adversity lyric that reflected Bert’s current creative viewpoint: ‘It’s better to be moving, better to be going, than clinging to your past.’ It remains arguably his most compelling statement of the Pentangle canon. The rest of the album was traditional: ‘Willy O’Winsbury’ – a song inadvertently ‘created’ by Andy Irvine cross-referring a set of lyrics to the wrong tune in a folksong manuscript – having previously appeared on Faro Annie, sung by John. But simultaneously the most powerful and delicate of the trad arrangements was ‘The Snows’, a chilling song of loss recorded previously by both Anne Briggs and Archie Fisher. ‘You get the feeling they’ll go on for decades like this,’ concluded one reviewer, ‘making pretty, well-played, unstartling albums, enjoying themselves in their own mild way and not causing any commotion.’ He was wrong – on both counts.
The Final Tour
‘In a world where changes in rock groups are the most continual theme of music paper headline writers, a group which manages to stay together unchanged for five years begins to seem like some sort of freak.’ Such was the view of Karl Dallas, in his introduction to a comprehensive, two-page ‘band breakdown’ Melody Maker feature on the Pentangle in September 1972. All five members were interviewed and none really hinted at the tensions within, although Bert – now speculating that there might yet be another three years left in them – offered one new idea to keep things fresh: ‘I’d like to see the band not so tight,’ he said, ‘even if we created other bands. Not that we’d fold Pentangle, but there’s no reason why Danny shouldn’t also have a jazz band of his own… I might get back into doing some solo work, actually playing on gigs. Who knows, something’s going to happen for sure.’
Well, he wasn’t wrong there. In fact, Danny had been doing odd jazz club gigs with the likes of Tubby Hayes and Stan Tracey, while Terry was still sessioning away, most recently on Elton John recordings. ‘I’d like to be a farmer in Minorca,’ said Terry. ‘I like the idea of life as such now. At the age of fifty I’m going to play all these albums and I know I’m going to be very proud I was involved in that. Whatever else you say, there’s never been a group like [us].’
One way or another, something had to give. Consequently, the British tour of October-November 1972 became the Pentangle’s valedictory parade. A number of live reviews from odd shows around Britain during the summer had been surprisingly positive, deferential even, with commentators increasingly realising that here was a real rarity, a group of five individuals in their seventh year as a creative unit. But there were still those who marvelled at how strangely soporific the Pentangle concert experience could be. Even Bert, the group’s staunchest apologist at the time, will not on reflection deny it:
‘Oh, the Pentangle could be dull, absolutely boring,’ he says. ‘I wouldn’t go to one of their concerts! Like the Incredible String Band when they played the Albert Hall and had the whole stage littered with instruments and just wandered round looking at them, picking them up and twiddling with them for a while – the Pentangle were very like that. The tuning up was horrendous. People used to fall asleep on stage, quite regularly – me and John, because we had the guitars to lean on. If we didn’t have anything to do we’d be hunched over them with our arms folded and before you knew it you were asleep, getting a gentle nudge from Danny or somebody letting you know your part was coming up soon. It got too into its own self, that was the problem.’
‘We knew things were getting tired,’ says Jacqui, ‘we knew it was beginning to fall apart. We actually did have thoughts about folding, to get rid of Jo, and then reforming as something else!’ As it was, they came to an arrangement with Jo prior to that final British tour wherein their relationship would conclude by mutual agreement on New Year’s Eve. Holding things together till then was the problem.
‘It had really gone sour for them,’ says Wizz Jones. ‘There was a lot of drinking on that tour – a hell of a lot of drinking.’ This was the Pentangle’s only British tour to include support, and though it was never planned as a farewell, they were going out in style: ‘The management chose to send me and Clive Palmer’s COB along on the same bill, to give us both a leg up,’ says Wizz. ‘But it really was an incredibly shambolic affair. Danny Thompson had this sport that he insisted on every night of persuading, bribing, the night porter to open the wine cellar – and he cleaned out every hotel wine cellar on that tour. I mean, God – the kind of stamina you needed to do that! But everyone was involved really, it was the classic ‘rock tour syndrome’. Jacqui was wonderful, she was just so used to working with these people – I don’t think any other woman would have put up with it. I remember on one occasion saying to someone at a hotel at about one in the morning, ‘Have you seen Bert?’ and they said, ‘Well, the last time I saw Bert he’d just gone into the lift with a tray of drinks…’ The last thing the guy saw of Bert was the doors closing, the lift starting and Bert toppling over with this tray of twenty or thirty drinks, crashing in a heap. I’d have loved to have been there at the other end when the doors opened and there he was! A wonderful vision, and it really sums up what that tour was like.’
Solomon’s Seal had been strongly exposed, with two BBC radio sessions and TV concerts for Granada and RTBF in Belgium – appearances that, though barely months apart, show a group with new life and a group with its life visibly extinguishing. The Belgian show, a half-hour live in a dismally bare studio, was broadcast in January 1973, though recorded before the British tour. The tour itself was of a lower key than before, but was nonetheless well-received, with even some completely new group material being aired. Bert had regained the confidence or interest to take regular solo spots, and both ‘Reynardine’ and ‘The January Man’, a Dave Goulder song learned from Martin Carthy, are known to have been featured. Fred Woods, for Sounds, attended the Festival Hall show and declared it remarkable that, five-plus years in without a personnel change (an observation that was apparently still raising eyebrows in music press circles), ‘their freshness and spontaneity are apparently also undimmed.’ The tour was scheduled to finish up at the Memorial Hall in Barry, Glamorgan, on December 8, but Danny took ill, with heart trouble, and the final three dates were cancelled. Seemingly, the Pentangle, launched in blaze of publicity at the Festival Hall back in 1968, played their last note in public at a Civic Hall in Barnsley on a cold Wednesday night in November 1972.
‘I think it was the evening of New Year’s Day,’ says Jacqui, ‘I got a phone call from Bert. It was really late at night and he was pretty drunk. ‘I can’t take any more,’ he said, ‘I really can’t take any more – the band has split.’ I phoned John the next day and John said, ‘He can’t split the band, it’s not his to split, it’s a five-way decision.’ So he came to see me the day after that and said, ‘What shall we do about it?’ And then there were phone calls all round. And just somehow nothing happened.’
Pentangle Split
‘Pentangle Split’ was the front page headline in the first Melody Maker of the New Year, January 6 1973: ‘It’s been on the cards for six weeks, but we haven’t got round to sorting out the details,’ said Jo Lustig. Jo had finally been sacked by the group but was conspicuous in being the only person quoted in the story. MM writer Andrew Means commented, like many others would subsequently, that the only surprise was the five members managing to hang together so long. For all the music press eulogising about five years of Pentangular bliss, rumours and denials of splits had been periodic for two years. News of the Pentangle’s dissolution, he concluded, was ‘an anti-climax’.
The following week the NME could judge the reported split as ‘the biggest non story of 1973’. Lustig was denying that he had put the story about, while acknowledging that the group had been due to leave his management ‘amicably’ on December 31 – an arrangement that had been agreed before the autumn tour. The group’s new manager Roger Myers, an accountant for the Rolling Stones with little experience at the front-line, led the damage limitation exercise but conceded that Danny’s illness had put any group plans on hold: ‘You can say that the others will be pursuing their individual careers for the moment’ he stated. This was certainly true. Renbourn was writing material for a new solo album – part of the group/solo deal with Warners/Reprise. Even Jacqui was talking seriously about a solo album. ‘We’re all pottering about doing bits of music here and there,’ said Renbourn, ‘getting it together until it works.’ He was, in fact, about to start work, with Nic Kinsey producing, on a solo album for Reprise – for the first time, an album of original songs with full group accompaniments. A Pentangle tour of America was being pencilled in for the autumn, while it was hoped that Danny may even be well enough to allow the group to record a new album within a couple of months. Terry Cox was in Minorca, Bert Jansch was ‘in bed with the flu.’ His own new solo album, Moonshine, would be released at the end of the month.
To Bert’s mind Moonshine was ‘an album that never surfaced – I don’t think anyone knows it exists.’ He could say that only two years later. For all its rough-edged beauty and daring, it was an album out of time: promotionally unsupported by the record company, by then undergoing an internal shake-up, and musically an artefact of the Pentangle era which was itself fizzling down to the embers of an undignified close. Produced by Danny Thompson, arranged by Tony Visconti and produced by Danny and featuring various outside contributors from the folk and jazz worlds, the album remains a delightful curio in Bert’s canon. With an atypical wordiness, unwieldy in places and not retained on later work, a renewed vigour jostled for attention in the playing field of sparseness and serenity carried over from Rosemary Lane. A flute consort added Elizabethan poise to the dark tale of ‘Yarrow’, a traditional song that had been fronted onstage by Jacqui during the last days of the Pentangle, while one or two other tracks – ‘The January Man’ and ‘Twa Corbies’, for instance – could be viewed as Pentangle left-overs.
While it now feels like a beautiful piece of work, critical reaction at the time was cool. The reviewer for Let It Rock, a new monthly, viewed the album as ‘precisely the way not to bring folk into rock or rock into folk’. Moonshine was a brave experiment with outside musicians, intricate arrangements and a mixed bag of material but it still felt like a product of the sixties: if Bert was to remain relevant as a creative force he needed to make a giant leap forward. How that would ever have happened in the context of remaining a part of the Pentangle is difficult to imagine. Within weeks of Moonshine’s release, that problem was resolved: the group finally imploded.
‘Pentangle dies… with a whimper’ was the Melody Maker headline of March 31 1973. Karl Dallas interviewed four of the five members and this time the facts were right. Studio time for a projected group album had been booked for February then rescheduled for April, but Terry had decided to leave. Danny, unhappy with the circumstances of Terry’s departure, decided that he too would go. The other three had lost the will to deal with it. Ralph McTell’s brother Bruce May was following the situation with interest:
‘Roger Myers just couldn’t believe it,’ he says. ‘The Pentangle had walked out on Jo but they still had a binding contract with Warners, under the terms of which they only had to deliver an album to pick up, I think, £5000 – in those days a fortune. And so bad was the atmosphere between the band that they just flew apart. All they had to do was spend another few days together and pick up £1000 each.’
For Dallas, the dissolution of the Pentangle marked ‘five years which had begun in the excitement of exploring new musical territories and ended in something close to tedium.’ Jacqui was talking about a solo album – something that had been on her mind for a couple of years, but which would remain unfulfilled until the wryly titled About Thyme in 1995. John, while doing odd gigs with Jacqui as a duo, was recording his solo album for Reprise (with Terry on drums and Jacqui on backing vocals) and was thinking about moving abroad. ‘A new group is the last thing I am thinking about at the moment,’ he said, firmly, while also admitting his unease at the prospect of constantly doing solo things. ‘I feel reborn,’ said Danny, who was also talking about a solo album, using some of the players he had assembled for Bert’s Moonshine project, and was ‘looking forward to the next gig, whatever it may be.’ He was also enthusing about the John Martyn album Bless The Weather, which he had recently sessioned on: ‘I played more on that than on all the group albums.’ Of all the group, he sounded most relieved to be a free agent again. He had also just recently returned from Paris where a holiday with Mr and Mrs Ralph McTell and Mr and Mrs Bert Jansch had turned into a recording session with one George Chatelain (two tracks from which would eventually surface on Bert’s 1974 ‘comeback’ album LA Turnaround).
Like John and Jacqui, Bert had been using the enforced lay-off since January to play some low-key club gigs, in Norway and Belgium as well as England, but the idea of carrying on in this capacity was unappealing: ‘I certainly don’t want to do it for the rest of my life,’ he said. ‘I always need some kind of challenge and though it has taken a bit of nerve to go out on my own after playing with the group for nearly six years it hasn’t been an artistic challenge. Another problem is that I’ve lost touch with the club scene. There are all these thousands of guitarists and singers floating around and it’s a new world to me.’
Postscript
Within weeks Bert Jansch was back on the road as a solo artist, nervously finding his feet again with long-unplayed material from his Soho days and including in his set, for a brief period, the odd relic from the Pentangle era. He was accompanied on a few dates by Danny Thompson. Given the internal politics at Reprise he was now without a record deal and, with his wife Heather as the driving force, moved to a remote part of Wales, momentarily gave up music and tried to become a farmer. By the end of 1974 the marriage had failed and Bert was relaunched as a legendary solo artist on the Charisma label.
John Renbourn, having moved to the backwoods of Devon, was delighted to be out of the pressure cooker – if only by not having a telephone that worked. His solo album for Reprise, though completed, had slipped through the cracks of the Pentangle fallout. A delicate treasure, it would finally slip out at the end of the nineties as The Lost Sessions. Meanwhile, delighted at being regarded by the everyday country folk nearby – for whom the concept of a professional musician was too absurd – as ‘the magician’, John nevertheless soon drifted into forming the John Renbourn Group, with Jacqui McShee, Sue Draheim, Kesh Sathe and old pal Tony Roberts.
Danny Thompson never realised his initial hopes for a solo album but created a celebrated duo with John Martyn for a few years in the mid-70s, reuniting briefly on stage and record with Bert Jansch around the superb all-instrumental album Avocet (1979). Remaining on board long enough to record only the first of the reunited Pentangle albums, Open The Door (1984), he revived his public profile by fronting his own indefinable and acclaimed fusion group Whatever towards the end of the eighties and early nineties and has continued to work with a remarkable range of top level artists across musical genres.
Terry Cox semi-retired to Minorca, helping his wife run a restaurant and occasionally slipping out for the odd tour with French cabaret/jazz sensation Charles Aznovour. Injured in a road accident just prior to the first of the Pentangle reunion shows, at Cambridge in 1982, he completed the subsequent Italian tour in a wheelchair and remained with the group for two albums, Open The Door (1984) and In The Round (1986) – both featuring his remarkable songwriting and singing talents let alone his extraordinary drumming.
Jacqui McShee remained primarily loyal to John Renbourn, drifting effortlessly back into the duo format they had briefly enjoyed before the Pentangle had ever been and then subsequently into the John Renbourn Group, right up to the reunion of the Pentangle in 1982. Alone of the original five, she remained throughout the various line-up changes of the reformed group from that point to its dissolution in 1995, after which she recorded the virtual solo album (co-credited with drummer Gerry Conway and keyboardist Spencer Cozens) About Thyme. Further albums and tours, expanding on the musical template of About Thyme, have been made as Jacqui McShee’s Pentangle.
A Pentangle reunion took place in 1982 and included that year’s Cambridge Folk Festival (minus Terry, incapacitated at the time), an Italian tour, German dates and a subsequent Australian tour. John, under the enthusiastic pleading of his Italian agent, had made the calls and everyone had been up for it. Terry had approached Jo Lustig, of all people, for management. Jo’s wife said ‘absolutely not’ and no doubt a lot of aggravation for everyone concerned was succinctly avoided. By the time the first new album was made, John had departed to study music at Dartington College, injecting his own work with new ideas and authority. Danny left the group before album two; Terry before album three. Bert and Jacqui, with a regular trickle of replacements, kept the group going as a part-time touring and recording concern all the way through to 1995. On a good night, they could still be great. Under pressure to choose one way or the other since the gradual revitalising of his solo reputation (in the doldrums during the eighties), Bert opted in 1995 to dedicate all his energy towards his own commitments and opportunities and, after a handful of dates with Cat Stevens’ guitarist Alun Davis filling his shoes, the group finally dissolved. Jacqui subsequently revived the name, working with the blessing of other original members as Jacqui McShee’s Pentangle – delivering at last on her own musical promise, no longer under the shadows of four towering reputations. A further Pentangle reunion took place in 2007.
And finally… two otherwise unrecorded songs from that final tour: ‘Haul Away’ (trad arr, I think) and ‘The Shoes of the Fisherman’s Wife are some Jive Ass Slippers’ (Mingus).
Thanks for the posting Colin – an intriguing read. I’ve learned a lot I didn’t know about the band’s history, and as a result I’ve sought out copies of the two albums with Terry Cox on board resulting from the 1982 reunion – they’ve had to be sourced from the states, so I’m looking forward to dipping in to the new(er) material sometime in January.
Thanks Vulpes, I think it’s just you and I, here at the end… You’ll enjoy the first two of the 80s reunion albums. Here’s ‘Street Song’ from ‘Open The Door’ (1984) – a kind of follow-up to ‘Market Song’, with Terry Cox on co-vocals with Jacq and supplying a fabulous drum solo near the end. Personnel: all the originals bar Renbourn, with Mike Piggott added on violin.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K6TceEg0Z4I