I’m sitting, looking out the window at the snow swirling out of a steel-grey sky – and I’m assailed with a very northern sense of wintery melancholy…time to feed it some Sibelius…

https://youtu.be/3oCyrf2RMbo

Here’s a glimpse from a day of digitising off-air Bert Jansch recordings in my collection. It seems appropriate to the moment (in Britain) – obviously, as Locust will confirm, Stockholm is under six feet of snow with howling winds, bears and marauding trolls 365 days a year 🙂

Rod Clements created a duo with Bert for a couple of years in the late 80s, at a time when Bert’s career was in its nadir. The album they made, ‘Leather Launderette’, for a small North-East label, Black Crow, remains under-rated and is probably unique in Bert’s canon in being unavailable on CD (ownership complicated).

Assuming the ‘Bert Jansch at the BBC’ project I mentioned elsewhere comes to fruition, that hole in Bert’s musical story will be partly addressed through two Radio 2 sessions, both from May 1988, representing between them six songs from the album, a Woody Guthrie cover they did for a tribute LP on the same label, and three classics from Bert’s past – of which ‘The Snows’ is one. This version comes from ‘Night Ride’, from the days when Radio 2 was MOR and cosy, but veteran artists like Bert could still sneak on with a » Continue Reading.