PLEDGE WEEK: “Light Flight” by Pentangle

This episode is part of Pledge Week 2025.

For five days this week, I will be posting old Patreon bonus episodes to the main feed to encourage people to subscribe to my Patreon.

If you want more of these, and only if you can afford it, subscribe for $1 a month at patreon.com/slash Andrew Hickey.

Whether you do or not, I hope you enjoy this one.

Just a quick note before I begin this one.

I have several times in earlier podcasts referred to Bert Jansch, but pronounced his name as if it had a Y, Jansch, which is how most people pronounce it and how I'd always heard it.

In researching this episode though, I've discovered that he pronounced it with a J, Jansh, and so that's how I'll try to do it here and in any future episodes where he comes up, though I might easily slip up because I've been talking about him off and on for 30 years or so.

Also note that this episode contains some references to alcoholism and a song about drug addiction.

Finally, I like to acknowledge when episodes rely heavily on one particular source.

In this case, much of the information comes from Colin Harper's biography of Bert Jansch.

Dazzling Stranger.

Bert Jansch is the person who gets talked about most when talking about Pentangle, because because he is the member of the group whose influence on other musicians, especially in the rock sphere, is most profound.

Johnny Marr said, Bert gave me new goals as a guitar player.

Jimmy Page said, At one point I was absolutely obsessed by Bert Jansch.

His first album had a great effect on me.

It was so far ahead of what anyone else was doing.

That was what got me into playing acoustic.

I watched him playing once at a folk club and it was like seeing a classical guitarist.

All the inversions he was playing were unrecognisable.

He was the innovator of the the time.

Neil Young said of him, as much of a great guitar player as Jimmy was, Bert Jansch is the same thing for acoustic guitar.

Jansch was born in 1943 and grew up in Edinburgh.

And like most people of his generation, he was infatuated as a kid with Elvis Presley, and it was through Elvis that Jansch felt his initial connection to the blues, saying later of him, He was folk as well.

All his early songs were from the old blues singers.

I rejected Bill Haley and stuck to Elvis.

Then I left school and started going to folk clubs, and it was there that I slowly became aware that there was a lot more music than was being pumped out on the radio.

Young Bert was not, though, a big buyer of records.

He grew up poor and never got into the habit of buying them.

But the first record he bought with his own money was more or less on a whim, an EP by Big Bill Brunsy.

I've never seen anything saying which EP it was, but around that time a number of Brunsy EPs released in the UK contained the track Big Bill's Guitar Blues, so there's a fair chance that it featured this track.

Jansch bought that record when he was 16 or 17, more or less just because he liked Brunsy's name, and it was that more than anything else that led him soon to buy his own first guitar.

He wanted to play like Big Bill Brunsy, who he later described as one of the only three people he ever tried to copy before finding his own style.

Jansch soon started to frequent a folk club called The House, and while he never got to see Big Bill Brunsy, who last toured Britain a year or so before Jansch discovered his music, he did get to see Sonny Terry and Vani McGee there, among many other great performers.

McGee and Terry were touring with Chris Barber and playing a few shows themselves, recommended to Barber by Brunzi once Brunsy grew too ill to travel.

According to stories Jansch's friends told of him, he sat in front of McGee and watched him play Key to the Highway, the old blues song that Brunsy had popularized, and which McGee and Terry had recently recorded with Joe Meek.

Build out

I'm bound to go

I'm gonna leave it running because

walking is most too slow

I'm going back

to the border

Where

I'm better known

Jansh asked McGee to play the song a second time, while Jansh watched his hands and from the next day Jansh was playing the song.

Jansh apparently showed McGee some of his own playing, and Magee, impressed, asked how long he had been playing.

Jansh replied, six weeks.

Jansh's early repertoire as a performer would be made up largely of Brunzy and Brownie McGee songs, but the reason he was at the club at all was that he'd seen that people there were offering guitar lessons.

There were two teachers at the club, Jill Doyle, who Jansh fell in love with.

Jansch apparently fell in love very quickly and out of love almost as quickly.

He seems to have spent the vast majority of his life moving from one two-month relationship to another, never without a partner, but who quickly ran out of things to teach him, and the more advanced Archie Fisher, Doyle's partner, who was the second of the three guitarists Jansch ever wanted to imitate, and who around that time made a small number of records with his sister Ray.

As I was walking,

I heard twokor bees marking a main

thirteen and tither teller did say oh

burst of gang and nine the day oh bar so we gang

the day

it's in a hint

old feld

Fisher later joked Burke came along spent one lesson with Jill and learned all she knew and then spent two lessons with me the reason it took me two lessons was I took him out and got him drunk during the first one.

But in fact, Fischer taught Jansch how to do claw hammer picking, normally a banjo technique, which Fisher had learned from Ralph Rinsler, an American bluegrass player who had played one gig in Scotland and taught Fischer the basics of the technique, making him the only person in Scotland at the time who knew how to play it.

Jansch's guitar was stolen soon after he purchased it, and for the next few years he would actually not own a guitar, but he had a remarkable knack of making friends with people who would let him use theirs, and by the time Doyle and Fisher moved from Edinburgh to Glasgow, a few months after starting to teach Jansch, he was good enough that he took over as the house teacher.

But Jansch remained in contact with Doyle, and when she got sent a tape of an EP her half-brother had recorded with Alexis Corner, Jansch got to hear the most important track before it was released.

That was Jansha's introduction to the third musician he ever tried to copy, Davey Graham.

And he said, After hearing Davy play, it was just all there.

Graham, as we've talked about in the main podcast, was the first major player in the genre that became known as British folk baroque, a style which involves playing multiple contrapuntal lines, all finger-picked, often using alternate tunings, and playing modal melody lines that often show an influence of Indian or Middle Eastern music, as well as of traditional folk.

While Davy Graham was undoubtedly the most inspired guitarist of his generation, He was something of a reclusive figure with odd musical interests and would often go off voyaging to other countries for months at a time, and so never built a reputation outside those who loved obscure music.

And it would become Jans who would popularise Graham's most famous tune, Angie, in particular by adding a jazz influence, bringing in a portion of Cannonball Adelaide's work song into his arrangement.

Paul Simon would, of course, later perform Angie on the second Simon and Garfunkel album, but he also took Jansha's interpolation of work song and reworked that into the Simon and Garfunkel track, We Got a Groovy Thing Going.

Donovan later said of Jansch's performances of Angie, Nobody would teach how to play the guitar in my group, but when I went to Bert I saw things that I wanted to learn.

This descending pattern of Angie, this seminal song that opened up stairway to heaven for Jimmy Page, Sonny Good Street for me, probably thousands of songs.

The descending pattern can be taken back to Johann Sebastian Bach, but when it finally arrives at Bert Jansch, he's doing things with it and he becomes a kind of doorway for lots of people.

And what I found when I would go to Bert's place was that he didn't mind showing you, and that is the great magnanimity of the artist.

Bert Jansch shared.

But that would be a few years in the future.

For now, Jansch had the three ingredients of his own style, the folk blues of Big Bill Voonzey, the combination of bluegrass clawhammer and traditional music of Archie Fisher, and the Eastern influenced Baroque folk of Davy Graham.

Though as is the way of the folk tradition, most of what Jansch learned of Graham's technique he didn't learn from Graham himself, as the two men were always a little wary of each other.

Rather, Martin Carthy, who regularly visited Edinburgh to play and was friendly with both men, would learn techniques from Graham and then show Jansch what he'd learned.

Jansch became flatmates with Robin Williamson and Clive Palmer, who later formed the Incredible String Band, and also briefly dated Licorice McKechnie, who would also later join that group.

Jansch and Williamson would live together for a couple of years, sometimes with Palmer, often in squats with basically no possessions, as they both tried to start their own careers in music.

Jansch is rather hampered by him still not actually owning a guitar and being reliant on borrowing other people's for his shows.

The two moved down to London for a short while in 1963, and there Jansch encountered the singer Anne Briggs, who would be an on-off musical and occasional romantic partner for a long time.

My young love said to me,

My

mother won't mind,

and my father

won't slight you

for your lack of kind.

Then she laid her

hand on me,

and this she did say,

Oh,

it will

not be long lost

till our wedding day.

Williamson made his way back to Edinburgh for the moment, but Jansch, essentially homeless in dossing in friends' homes, decided to stay semi-based in London, reasoning that while you couldn't make money playing there, you could get your name printed in the Melody Maker, and that would mean that every folk club in the country would book you, so you'd be better positioned to get gigs in Leeds or Hull or Manchester if you were based in London than anywhere else.

Around this time, Jansch wrote the song that made his reputation as a songwriter in the small London folk scene, Needle of Death.

sorrow hides the longing to be free

When things go wrong each day

You fix your mind to escape your misery

Your troubled young life had made you turn

To a needle of dust

That song was about an addict friend who had died, but most people assumed that it was about Jansch himself, even though Jansch's drug of choice was always alcohol, not heroin.

Pete Townsend, who was acquainted with Jansch at this time, said later, I'm sure whenever I saw him I thought two things.

One, he was a really good musician, and two, was he carrying?

My take at the time was that there was a possibility that Burt was a junkie.

He did look like one.

In hindsight, he actually looked quite poor.

But I suppose how we interpreted that in middle-class West London was that he must have pissed it all away.

But Needle Needle of Death was an impressive song in a British folk scene which had not yet turned to singer-songwriters, and Janch was becoming known as a major songwriting talent, regularly getting compared to that American bloke Bob Something who had come over to London briefly a few months before Burke got there.

The song was so impressive in fact that a decade later, Neil Young accidentally plagiarised it for Ambulance Blues.

Back in the old folky days

The air was magic when we played

The river boat was rocking in the rain

Young Wood in 2013 recorded his own version of Needle of Death as a belated acknowledgement.

And Riggs became Jansch's big booster on the scene, and persuaded Bill Leader, a folk record producer, to record an album with Jansch.

There were, at the time, only two record labels releasing stuff from the folk scene, Topic Records and Transatlantic Records, and Leader was one of the major producers for both.

Topic, though, preferred musicians who were either very traditional or who had strong left-wing politics.

Jansch was never a political person, except in the vaguest way, and he was playing his own material, so Transatlantic was the only option.

Leader recorded the album in his own kitchen, soundproofed with egg cartons and blankets, and sold the resulting album outright to Transatlantic for £100 with no royalties.

The album included Jansch's version of Angie, an instrumental inspired by Charles Mingus, and most of Jansch's club repertoire, including Needle of Death and one of his best-known songs, Strolling Down the Highway.

highway

I'm gonna get them highways

Just still don't go

Can you hear my guitar rubbing while I stroll

on down

the highway

People think I'm a crazy It took a few months for the album to come out and in that time Jange got a new flatmate, John Remborne, another guitarist with a similar style, who was generally regarded as a technically better musician than Janj, but less innovative.

Remborne was at the time primarily working as the accompanist for a black American folk singer, Doris Henderson, with whom he would appear regularly on the pop show Gad Zeukes It's All Happening and record two albums, one in 1965 and one in 1967.

And if my true love

was only

waiting,

And I could hear his heart softly palmed

If only he

was lying by me

And I could sleep in my bed

once again

I can't see my reflection in the wall.

Remborne was an acoustic player, but he would also occasionally dabble in electric guitar, as in this 1967 cover version by Henderson of Love's A Message to Pretty.

the one.

Cause I'm on the search, search, you both slip the way

And I don't need you

to help me find Jansch and Renbon started occasionally playing together as a duo, especially after, on the same day that Jansch's first album came out, the 16th of April 1965, a new folk club opened up.

It was meant to be pronounced Les Cousins in the French manner, but everyone who went there talked as if it was an English name, Les Cousins.

At this time, Jansch was still very unprofessional.

There exists a note from him to a promoter around this time, which reads, Dear Brian, I am terribly sorry I could not make it on Monday.

I ran out of money and couldn't find anyone to borrow from, and I'm afraid I was in no condition to hitchhike.

There was also the problem of finding a guitar.

Hoping this did not inconvenience you too much.

Yours sincerely, Bert Jansch.

There's another story of Pete Townsend having opened up a folk club and, looking for musicians, asking Jansch if he wanted to earn a pound, and getting the reply, no thanks, I've already got one.

Jansch became the most regular performer at Les Cousins, which became the best-known folk club to the Cognicenti, thanks to regular adverts in the Melody Maker, which boosted the reputations of its performers, and especially Jansch.

As a result, the club became a magnet for anyone interested in the guitar, particularly, from across the UK, and any drop-in visitors from the US.

It became the home of British folk baroque guitar playing, and established that style in a generation of players.

Jansch had a regular residency there, and both John Renborne and David Graham performed there often.

The list of people who performed there, though, includes almost every major figure of British folk music of the next couple of decades, with a special emphasis on the young generation of folk baroque guitarists like Paul Simon, who brought the style across to the US around this time, Martin Carthy, Al Stewart, Malf MacTell, Roy Harper, and Jackson C.

Frank, but also people from other areas of the folk and blues scenes, Long John Baldry, Alexis Corner, The Watersons, The Incredible String Band, Sandy Denny, Cat Stevens, and many others.

Jimmy Page was a regular at the venue, and almost all of Page's guitar technique, especially when playing acoustic or 12-string, comes from studying these players, especially Jansch.

But the biggest cultural effect Les Cousins had in the short term was as an influence on Donovan, who was an occasional performer and frequent audience member there and was already becoming a pop star.

Jansh gave Donovan the song Deed I Do for the latter's second album, one of the few Jansh originals that he never recorded himself.

Now you don't believe me when I say I love you babe.

I wanna know the score, all I want is more,

Indeed, apparently Donovan's managers thought that they had bought the rights to far more songs by Jansch than that.

According to Remborne, they would go around to the flat where Jansh and Rembone lived and try to buy songs from Jansch, knowing that Donovan admired his work and that Jansh had sold him the rights to Dee Dai Doo relatively cheaply.

But Janshan Rembone's flat was something of a social hub and usually had several other musicians using it as a temporary base.

And Donovan's management team was so clueless about the music they were promoting that they'd go around and ask to buy a song from Jansch, and one of the other musicians there would pretend to be him and sell them a song.

And they never realised that they were buying from a different burnt Jansch each time.

For a while, Donovan and Jansch were also both romantically involved with Beverly Kuttner, later to marry and become Beverly Martin, as we discussed in the bonus on Happy New Year.

And Donovan later recorded the song House of Jansch about that love triangle.

I give you baby contact high.

By this time, Jansh and Remborn were semi-regularly performing as a guitar duo and exploring the possibilities of combining the folk baroque guitar style they both played in with both jazz Jansch was a big admirer of Charles Mingus and much of his original material was inspired by Mingus and the traditional folk songs that Rembaugh was increasingly becoming interested in.

At the time, it was generally a little frowned upon among folk purists to accompany traditional song, and most of those songs were performed in rather austere a cappella versions.

But a few people, notably Martin Carthy and Archie Fisher, had already started performing guitar accompaniment for these older songs, and Membone was becoming interested in that.

Jansch had also started occasionally working out arrangements of these songs with Anne Briggs, combining new guitar parts invented by Jansch with the traditional songs.

These two strands, traditional music and jazz, combined in the guitar duets that Jansch and Membone would play.

These started to be recorded, initially on solo albums by the two.

Vimbone's first eponymous album, which still showed the strong influence of the acoustic blues that had initially inspired both men, included two duets with Jansch.

And Renbaugh played on a couple of tracks on Jansha's second album, It Don't Bother Me, including a version of Renbaugh's instrumental, Lucky 13.

By Jansh's third album, Jack O'Rion, Jansh was becoming more and more influenced by traditional song, where his previous albums had been almost entirely originals, with one or two covers of guitar showcases written written by his peers on the scene thrown in per album, Jack O'Rion was, other than an instrumental cover of Ewan McCall's First Time Ever I Saw Your Face, entirely made up of arrangements of traditional folk songs of the kind he'd been working out with Anne Briggs.

Half the tracks on that album featured Rembrandt playing a second guitar, but the most influential track on the album was one that Jansch played solo and had originally worked out with Briggs, a version of the old ballad Black Waterside, with a new guitar accompaniment of Jansch's own composition.

One morning fair,

I took the air

down about

Blackwater side.

Knowing my audience, a lot of you will have found that guitar accompaniment very, very, very familiar.

Al Stewart, another folky who regularly played Les Cousins, taught himself that guitar part as soon as that record came out.

But he wasn't as good a player as Jansch and fudged it a bit, and also got a few bits wrong, as you might when teaching yourself from a record.

Stewart then did a recording session, and while he was there, he showed the session guitarist his attempt at playing Jansch's part, and Jimmy Page learned the part as Stewart thought it was played, rather than as it was.

Jansch was, to put it very mildly, annoyed three years later, when the first Led Zeppelin album came out with a track called Black Mountainside, consisting just of Jansch's guitar part, as slightly misremembered by Stewart, but with the songwriting credited to Jimmy Page.

Jansh and Rembun also recorded a duo album together around this time, mostly of new originals showing their jazz influences, along with one song by Anne Driggs and a cover version of Mingus's Goodbye Pork Pie Hat.

At one point, the Burton John album was at number one on the Melody Maker folk albums chart, while Jansch's Jack Orion was at number two.

Over the next year or so, both Jansch and Rembone released more albums.

Jansch released an album called Nicola, generally regarded as one of his weaker albums, an attempt to make an orchestral pop album, now most notable as featuring the first arrangement work of future Jethro Tull keyboard player Dee Palmer.

He also started touring larger theatre venues as a solo act, while continuing sometimes to play with Renborne.

Renborn released two more albums in the same time period and was starting to look for other musicians to play with instead of or as well as Jansch.

His second album, Another Monday, featured on a couple of tracks a bluesing he'd been working with since Doris Henderson had briefly returned to the US, Jackie McShee.

Sister, she taught me how to read.

Final reading my soul below's

Rembone and McShee performed occasionally as a duro and sometimes as a trio with Jansch.

Both Jansch and Rembone had become interested in the possibilities of the rock scene, though Jansch soon realised that he would not fit in a standard rock band after he ended up on a bill a couple of times with Jimi Hendrix.

The two men both quickly realised that neither could do what the other could, and developed a mutual respect, and Jansch decided to stick to the acoustic as a result.

Jansch and Rembone decided it might be an idea to form a full band, to give them more possibilities to branch out, a larger instrumental palette.

The drummer they decided to work with was a session player named Terry Cox, who had become one of Britain's most in-demand session drummers for a while, playing on sessions for Elton John, David Bowie, Charles Ajnavour, Scott Walker, the Bee Gees, and many more over the next few years, outside his membership of the band.

Cox would go on to play on Rembone's third album, Sir John a Lot of Merry Englandy's Musik Thing and Ye Green Knight, an odd album which, as the title suggested, had a lot of influence from very old music, but also featured a cover of Booker T and the NG's Sweet Potato.

That record came out in early 1968, by which time the new group had been together for about seven months but had not yet recorded.

The group was named The Pentangle, though the band members and record labels would refer to it with and without the definite article, and in later years, like other peers like The Pink Floyd and The Cream, it's mostly referred to without.

Remborne, who was most active in pulling the band together, chose the name because there were five members of the group, but also after the symbol on the shield of Sir Gawain, in the story of Gawain and the Green Knight, a story which meant a lot to him.

In that story, the pentangle symbolised truth and honesty, but also symbolized the five senses, various attributes of Christianity, and also the five fingers on a hand, showing that a true knight, or true musician, can trust in their own hands.

The fifth member, bass player Danny Thompson, was well on his way to becoming Britain's most sought-after session double bass player.

Thompson has, throughout his life, only played one double bass, saying if he tried to play any other double bass, it would feel like he was being unfaithful.

He did, though, play bass guitar on one tour early in his career, when he was booked to play bass with Roy Orbison on the tour that Orbison did with the Beatles in 1963.

Thompson disliked the experience and remained an acoustic player from then on.

Cox and Thompson came as a unit.

They'd originally started playing together in Alexis Corner's band.

I won't

That song was written by a friend of Corner's, Duffy Power, who had started his career as a minor Larry Parnes teen idol.

After his brief period as a wannabe heartthrop had ended, Power had gone on to play more interesting music.

He'd recorded a version of I Saw Her Standing There in 1963, with a backing band consisting of Graham Bond, Jack Bruce, Ginger Baker and John McLaughlin, and had soon become a regular on London's blues circuit, as well as often popping into Les Cousins.

Power had sung with Blues Incorporated for a while, and had then formed his own band, Duffy's Nucleus, with McLaughlin, Thompson and Cox, which had only released one single, a cover version of Hound Dog.

But Powell was suffering from severe mental health problems and got paranoid and refused to gig.

McLaughlin and Thompson got in a flute player and started playing jazz gigs as the Danny Thompson trio, which would continue after Pentangle Fawn for a while, and Cox was doing his session work, but they were both eager to join Jansch, Rembone and McShee in their new project, which would combine traditional folk, blues and modern jazz.

The music they were playing had some resemblance to underground bands like The Pink Floyd, who Jansch admired, and to the new folk rock groups that were springing up like Fairport Convention, and to Jansh's old friends The Incredible String String Band.

But it would be very different from anything else around.

The new group got a residency at a club, the Horseshoe Club, where their initial gigs were by all accounts very rough, as they were still working out how to blend the various styles of music they were interested in into a cohesive whole.

In early shows, they often did three different sets, a duo set by Rembone and McShee, a solo set by Jansch, and then a short group set by all five of them, as they tried to merge their repertoires into one whole.

But soon they hit on a style that would become become their trademark.

The repertoire would become a mixture of originals, usually mostly written by Jansch, the most accomplished songwriter, but often credited to all five, old blues songs, traditional music, often songs dating back to the sixteenth century or earlier, given Rembone's fascination for early music, the odd cover of a pop song, and songs from Jansch and Rembone's older albums.

These would be performed with Cox and Thompson playing as a jazz rhythm section, Jansch and Rembone playing in their folk baroque style, and McShee, and often Jansch and sometimes Cox and Memborn, singing in a traditional folk style.

They would leave room for extensive instrumental solos by all the members, in very loose exploratory sections, something like what the Grateful Dead were soon to start doing in America, but at least at first with the discipline that came from all of them having been successful professional musicians.

The group also faced problems at first when they started to play away from the horseshoe.

as they got booked on a series of bad bills.

But that soon changed with their hiring a new manager, Joe Lustig, who decided to give the group an air of mystique by stopping them from performing live, together or solo, for several months until they put out their first album.

Come all, you fair and tender girls that flourish in your bride.

Beware, beware, keep your garden fair.

Let no man steal your time.

Let no man steal your time.

That album was produced by Shell Talmy, who had recently produced the first two albums by another Les Cousins veteran, Roy Harper, but who was and is best known for his productions for The Who, The Kinks, The The Creation, and other loud rock bands of the mid-sixties.

However, other than some playing around with stereo panning that's very of its time, Talmi's production is very sensitive and captures the group wonderfully.

The album had sleeve notes by the DJ John Peel, and once the group started performing live again, after their imposed layoff, Lustig got them eleven Radio One sessions and eight T V appearances in the remainder of the year.

The album made number twenty-one, and their return to the stage started with a big showcase gig at the Royal Festival Hall, which was recorded to be one disc of their second album, a double album titled Sweet Child, with a cover by Peter Blake, who had done the Sergeant Pepper cover the year before.

you know

the time has

come

for me to

the live disc of Sweet Child was a good representation of their live sets at the time, with solo spots, traditional songs, two mingus covers, including a full band version of Goodbye Poke Pie Hat, and covers of songs by people like the blues singer Furry Lewis.

The studio disc had a few traditional songs, but was mostly made up of originals, or at least ostensible originals.

Miles Davis might have been almost as annoyed at the Cox Jansch McShee Rembaugh-Thompson songwriting credit for I've Got a Feeling as Jansch later was about Jimmy Page's credit for Black Mountainside.

I

got a feeling.

The album featured solo spots for every band member, including a very rare one for Cox, who wrote and recorded this track about Moondog.

He's a beggar

on a street corner,

two most passers by.

That's all he is

playing

a blackbone broker.

The higher price for Sweet Child as a double album meant it didn't chart, but the group were by this point a massive success on the live circuit and getting regular TV and radio appearances, and were set up for the third album that would be their undeniable masterpiece.

Basket of Light is both Pentangle's most consistent and most eclectic album, drawing all their distinct influences together into something that felt of a piece despite their vastly different origins.

It included a verse of the Jane Ett's girl group song, Sally Go Round the Roses.

Roses, they can't hurt you.

Roses, they can't hurt you.

Roses, they can't hurt you.

Now the roses, they can't hurt you.

Oh,

Train song, a blues that was one of the first songs Janch had ever written when he was still learning guitar and influenced by Brunzi.

The Lyquake Dirge, a song dating back at least to the early 17th century, written in archaic Yorkshire dialect, about the punishment that would face the souls of the dead if they were uncharitable.

every

beat and all

the winners shall bring thee to the bear

and Christ received

soul

from winems, thou mayest pass

every

meeting

to bring all

And the song that would become as close as the group would come to having a hit single, Light Flight, which got used as the theme to the popular TV show Take Three Girls, and as a result made number 43 on the singles chart.

Dreams are straight,

While the single only made number 43, the TV series was popular enough that the album made number 5 in the charts.

And for a while, Pentangle were genuine pop stars, with their photos in teen magazines.

And for most of 1970, they were were getting booked in increasingly prestigious gigs, doing long tours of the US headlining at venues like Carnegie Hall, and playing at shows like the Isle of Wight Festival, where Jansch got to see his old acquaintance Jimi Hendrix play his last UK show.

But there were problems in the group, mostly down to Jansch.

Jansch was starting to feel stifled by the group setting and putting his best songs aside for his solo records.

Both he and Remborne were still recording solo albums for Transatlantic along with the group records.

He missed being a solo wanderer going from place to place with just his guitar, or someone else has borrowed one.

He didn't like being a pop star, and he was starting to drink a lot.

He'd always been a big drinker, but by this point he was developing a serious alcohol problem.

With Jansch checked out, it was up to Rembaugh and McSheed to take charge of the next album, Cruel Sister.

By this point, Rembaugh was deeply immersed in traditional music scholarship.

and was also starting to play more electric guitar.

So rather than the eclectic set the Basket of Light had been, Cruel Sister was made up entirely of traditional songs, often with more conventional arrangements, and the lack of material was shown by the way that one entire side was taken up by an 18-minute version of Jack of Iron, the traditional song that had, in a much shorter version, given Jansha's third album its title, expanded with long electric solos by Remborn.

The album, which was produced by Bill Leader rather than Tell Me, was far from a bad one, but it was far more ordinary than their previous three records.

By this point there was a whole sub-genre of female-fronted British bands playing traditional songs with electric guitars, bands like Steel Ice Span and Fairport Convention, and it could have been an album by any of them.

Which is not a bad thing necessarily.

Both those bands made some fine records.

But it lost the uniqueness Pentangle had had up to that point.

It certainly wasn't what the group's fans wanted, and it was a massive flop.

The group were also starting to become sloppy and unprofessional live.

Both Jansha and Remborne were also by now drinking far too much and would occasionally be unable to finish a show.

As they played guitar-seated, and a lot of the music was quite slow and sedate, they'd find themselves nodding off while hunched over their guitars during someone else's solos.

The fifth album, Reflection, was seen as something of a return to form, and many fans have said that had that been the album that came out after Basket of Light, their career might have been very different.

It was, again, mostly traditional material, but much more vitally arranged than the previous record.

Well, it's already made, trimmed in red, stitched all round in a golden thread, golden thread, a golden thread, stitched all round with a golden thread.

Well, it's already made, trimmed in green, prettiest thing you've ever seen,

ever seen, ever seen, prettiest thing you've ever seen.

The album was Jackie McShee's favourite Pentangle album, but it was very stressful to record.

According to Bill Leader, the two pros, Danny and Terry, would be there on time.

Bert and John would arrive at different times depending on 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 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 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 Jackie threw that sort of tantrum.

She was just very disappointed that this was going on.

But certainly 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.

That was to be the group's last album with Transatlantic, but at first it looked like it would just be the beginning of a new chapter in the group's career.

They got signed to a new, lucrative deal with Raprise Records, and for the first time they had major label backing behind them.

But they hadn't realised something important.

The way way a standard record contract works is that the label gives the artist an advance on their royalties, part of which the artist then uses to pay the recording costs, and they don't start to get paid royalties on their records until the advance has been paid back.

So say they got a £50,000 advance to cover the recording costs and their living expenses, and they were on a 10% royalty.

They wouldn't start to get money from the record label until they'd sold half a million pounds worth of records.

But Transatlantic had a different deal.

They would pay the cost of the recordings themselves up front, and the artists would get their royalties from the first record sold, though at a slightly lower royalty than other labels.

But, the artists would only continue to get royalties as long as they remained signed to the label.

As soon as Pentangle signed to reprise, they stopped getting royalties from their fire albums to date, including the big hit Basket of Light.

and Janshan Rembone also stopped getting paid for the 12 solo or duo albums they've recorded for the label.

As it turned out, they only recorded one album for reprise, an album titled titled Solomon's Seal, generally regarded as the group's weakest.

You just can't get away.

I'm not going to the mountains,

going by the sea.

You won't see me again.

By the time the album came out, the executive who had signed the group had been moved sideways and warners gave it no support.

Janshan Rembon's drinking problems became worse.

Danny Thompson had some heart problems that meant the group had to cancel a few gigs.

And Pentangle fizzled to an end at the end of 1972.

Their first major label album had had such a big advance and sold so poorly that even after they were dropped by the label they were still in debt to it a decade later.

The group members went on to do other things.

Rembaugh became a serious scholar of early music, going back to transatlantic records and recording several albums of early music as solo guitar instrumental albums, as well as occasionally performing in a group with McShee.

Cox joined Charles Ajnavore's band, with whom he would tour for eight years, had a brief songwriting partnership with Lindsay DePaul, and also played on some of Scott Walker's 70s solo albums.

Danny Thompson had continued playing sessions while he was he was in Pentangle, and went back to being a session player full-time after the group split up.

He's played with John Martin, Richard Thompson, Kate Bush, Donovan, T-Rex, Rod Stewart, Graham Coxon, Peter Gabriel, Nick Drake, Billy Bragg, Alison Moyer, Everything But the Girl, and hundreds more, and has had by far the most successful non-Pentangle career of any of the band members.

Jansch was the first one to make a major artistic statement after the group broke up.

His first post-Pentangle album, LA Turnaround, was widely regarded as a masterpiece.

Produced by Michael Nesmith, formerly of the Monkees, it's sonically of a piece with Nesmith's own early 70s country rock records, and features Nesmith on second guitar, Nesmith steel player Red Rhodes, bass player Klaus Vohorman, and fiddle and mandolin player Byron Berline, whose name I mispronounced in the recent Rolling Stones episode talking about his playing on Country Honk.

so allow me to apologise for that here, all of whom were fans of Jansch and gave him a sympathetic backing.

It was a collection made up almost entirely of new originals, some of Jansch's best songwriting, but the highlight is often considered to be the remake of the song that had made his reputation as a writer, Needle of Death.

friends that you won't say

what to move.

Young light fit a minute

to a needle.

But Jansch's drinking got so bad that a couple of years later he was regarded by the influential West Coast punk band Flipper as a major inspiration after he visited Berkeley.

Bruce Luce, Flipper's bass player, met Jansch and thought he was the the most thoroughly nihilistic person he'd ever seen, and got all the other punks to follow Jansch around observing his behaviour, Jansch being too drunk to notice.

According to John Memborn, when Remborne visited the area a few years after that, there was a legend in the punk community about a mythical figure known as The Bird.

Pentangle reformed in 1981, mostly as a way to make some quick cash.

The group remained together in name for the next 14 years, but for much of that time it wasn't the real Pentangle.

Remborne quit the reunion quickly, going to university to study composition, and one by one the other members were replaced until it was just McShee and a drunk Jansch plus a bunch of lesser players.

Some of these line-ups, including one where four of the original five were present, made albums, but none are worth tracking down except for the most hardcover of fans.

In the late 80s, Jansch finally got himself sober.

and found himself tied to a band that were increasingly only in existence to play nostalgia shows.

By 1994 he'd had enough and quit the band, which then renamed itself Jackie McShee's Pentangle, and which continues to this day.

I saw the show by that band around 18 years ago, and while McShee sang as well as ever, the band were playing songs like Light Flight in musak-y arrangements with lounge sacks and cheesy keyboards.

It was a sad experience.

Janch spent the late 90s and early 2000s in a kind of elder statesman role, returning to touring solo, making guest appearances on records by young fans of his old work like Mazzy Starr and Baby Shambles, and recording quietly well-regarded albums which themselves featured guest appearances by other young admirers of his work, like Beth Orton, Devendra Banhart, Bernard Butler and Johnny Marr.

Pentangle reunited in 2008 after receiving a Lifetime Achievement Award from Radio 2, and toured in 2008 and 2011, playing major festivals like Glastonbury and headlining venues like the Royal Festival Hall.

The group was sounding as good as ever, and working hard on new material, but sadly Jansch died of cancer late in 2011, and Remborne of a heart attack in 2015.

Terry Cox now seems to be retired, Jackie McShee still tours with her Pentangle, and Danny Thompson continues to be a sought-after session musician, though he seems not to have been very active in the few years since COVID hit.

Pentangle's career was only brief, and they were more influential than successful, but the guitar playing of Remborne and especially Jansch was the basis for multiple generations of especially British guitarists.

Everyone from Nick Drake to Led Zeppelin to the Smiths owes a debt to them, and Pentangle as a group stretched the boundaries of what was possible for an acoustic folk group and opened up the way for later artists like the Fleet Foxes, Joanna Newsome, Vashti Bunyan, the Polyphonic Spree, and that whole early 2000s generation of eccentric folk-influenced musicians.

But even so, none of their admirers has ever made an album quite like Basket of Light, and likely none ever will.

and roll and roll and rock your way.

Up and down, round and round, we'll sway with these well

in the spell called the rolling, rockin' rhythm of the sea.