Bert Jansch, who died on October 5 aged 67, was one of Britain’s greatest folk guitarists, but had an influence that spread far beyond the genre, reaching rock musicians as diverse as Jimmy Page, Johnny Marr and Neil Young.
A maverick character who in his early days frequently had to borrow a guitar to play gigs, he went on to form the successful crossover group Pentangle. Yet he never enjoyed the commercial solo success of many of the acts he directly influenced.
Bob Dylan, Paul Simon, Donovan, Nick Drake and Sandy Denny were all in thrall to the enigmatic, tousle-haired young Scotsman after he arrived in London in the early 1960s. As Jansch established himself in the folk music boom then taking place, the freshness of his playing won other admirers, including The Beatles, Eric Clapton, Keith Richards and Elton John.
Unlike them, however, Jansch was almost pathologically determined not to become a star. The battle between his urge to play and his urge to duck the limelight lasted his entire career. Last year, when the former was in the ascendant, he supported Neil Young on an America-wide tour. Previously, however, he had put down his guitar to become a farmer in rural Wales.
He was born Herbert Jansch in Glasgow on November 3 1943 to a family of German immigrants. His mother struggled to make ends meet after his father – who had a string of hard, manual jobs – walked out when Bert was five. They moved to West Pilton, one of the poorest areas of Edinburgh, and Bert’s earliest musical influences were the jazz and big band 78rpm records brought into the house by his elder sister Mary.
But it was the onset of rock and roll – specifically Elvis Presley and Little Richard – that led him to dream of becoming a musician. He subsequently became enamoured with the blues of Big Bill Broonzy and determined to learn the guitar, attempting to build his own instrument out of hardboard because he could not afford to buy one.
By the time he was 12 he had made an instrument that worked after a fashion and, having already grasped the rudiments of the piano, set about teaching himself to master his self-built contraption. “The strings were so far off the fretboard it was almost impossible to play — the D was the only chord I could hold down,” he recalled.
A bright pupil, he was encouraged to go on to further education; but he hated the discipline and got a job at 16, working in a plant nursery. He used his first pay packet as a down payment on a Hofner cello guitar and soon made for Howff, a coffee bar which doubled as a folk club, where he heard that free guitar lessons were on offer.
Progress was rapid. He quit his job, left home and adopted the life of an itinerant musician, sometimes sleeping on beaches, friends’ floors or at the Howff, where he became caretaker. Initially he almost exclusively played blues covers, but gradually he began to write his own music and develop a distinct guitar style, fingerpicking with varied tunings, which developed further when he started making regular visits to London and met other musicians.
Among these was Davy Graham, whose own groundbreaking guitar technique, flecked by distant and often obscure influences, notably from North Africa, had a particularly profound effect on Jansch. Indeed, Jansch’s mastery of Graham’s instrumental composition Anji effectively became his calling card as he started to take London’s nascent folk scene by storm.
He was exploring with tuning and timing himself, as well as improvising wildly, and when in 1965 Transatlantic Records released his debut album, Bert Jansch, his reputation blossomed. The record included Anji and the controversial Needle Of Death, written about the fatal drug habit of another young musician, Buck Polley, at a time when such subjects were largely considered taboo. It also erroneously fuelled the rumour that Jansch was himself a junkie.
With his second album, It Don’t Bother Me, released later the same year, he teamed up with his flatmate John Renbourn, also a guitar virtuoso, to form a duo which was soon hailed as the hottest on the folk scene.
Their partnership resulted in the landmark 1966 album Jack Orion, which was Jansch’s first genuine foray into the realm of traditional song, and included a remarkable jazz-inflected arrangement of Blackwaterside, one of several such songs learned from his friend and occasional lover, Anne Briggs. Jansch’s arrangement of Blackwaterside would remain in his set for the rest of his career, and secured wide fame when it was adopted and recorded by Led Zeppelin.
In 1966 his partnership with Renbourn produced another album, Bert and John. The pair were now clearly looking beyond the confines of the folk movement, and the following year they started playing informally with jazz musicians who congregated at the Horseshoe Hotel in London’s Tottenham Court Road. The result was the formation of Pentangle, featuring Jansch, Renbourn, the bass player Danny Thompson, drummer Terry Cox and singer Jacqui McShee.
Their fusion of traditional folk songs with jazz, blues and pop proved an instant hit, selling out major concert halls and leading to a series of successful albums, notably Basket Of Light (1969), as well as the hit single Light Flight (1970) – the theme music for the television drama series Take Three Girls.
But Jansch, an often shambling, dishevelled figure, hated the limelight. Wilfully unassuming and self-effacing, he was not cut out for celebrity and always preferred modest backstreet pubs to television studios and glamorous parties.
In 1973, driven by wrangles with other band members, legal disputes and drink binges, he split from Pentangle – although he was to return for various reunions, most recently this summer for gigs at the Cambridge Folk Festival and London’s Royal Festival Hall.
Despite the high regard in which he was held by fellow musicians and the music industry at large, various post-Pentangle attempts to launch Jansch as a major solo artist failed, despite sustained support from the label Reprise, which backed him with top American session musicians for LA Turnaround (1974) and Santa Barbara Honeymoon (1975).
Jansch, it became clear, simply didn’t want to be a star, and his career declined as his drinking escalated. At one point he even gave up music entirely to retreat to the sanctuary of farming in Wales. But admiring mentions of his name by a new generation of musicians lured him back to playing, and he recorded a trilogy of well-received albums for the Cooking Vinyl label — When The Circus Comes To Town (1995), Toy Balloon (1998) and Crimson Moon (2000), which proved that the subtleties of his guitar playing and his quietly engaging songwriting were intact and as compelling as ever.
He subsequently gigged with Bernard Butler and Johnny Marr, and played with Beth Orton and Devendra Banhart on his 2006 album, The Black Swan. Other collaborations included a slot with Pete Doherty on the Babyshambles album Shotter’s Nation (2007) and, although already suffering the effects of lung cancer, he toured America in 2010, opening to great acclaim for Neil Young.
Despite his aversion to attention, he did attend the BBC Folk Awards to receive a Lifetime Achievement Award in 2001, returning in 2007 to get a similar accolade with Pentangle. He was forever modest, almost to the point of embarrassment, when anybody told him how much they admired him, and though this reticence cost him much in terms of financial reward, it was also a large part of why he was so widely loved.
“I don’t care what the world thinks of me,” he said in a recent interview. “I’m not one for showing off, but I guess my guitar playing sticks out.”
Bert Jansch was married three times, and is survived by his wife Loren Auerbach and two sons.
A bright pupil, he was encouraged to go on to further education; but he hated the discipline and got a job at 16, working in a plant nursery. He used his first pay packet as a down payment on a Hofner cello guitar and soon made for Howff, a coffee bar which doubled as a folk club, where he heard that free guitar lessons were on offer.
Progress was rapid. He quit his job, left home and adopted the life of an itinerant musician, sometimes sleeping on beaches, friends’ floors or at the Howff, where he became caretaker. Initially he almost exclusively played blues covers, but gradually he began to write his own music and develop a distinct guitar style, fingerpicking with varied tunings, which developed further when he started making regular visits to London and met other musicians.
Among these was Davy Graham, whose own groundbreaking guitar technique, flecked by distant and often obscure influences, notably from North Africa, had a particularly profound effect on Jansch. Indeed, Jansch’s mastery of Graham’s instrumental composition Anji effectively became his calling card as he started to take London’s nascent folk scene by storm.
He was exploring with tuning and timing himself, as well as improvising wildly, and when in 1965 Transatlantic Records released his debut album, Bert Jansch, his reputation blossomed. The record included Anji and the controversial Needle Of Death, written about the fatal drug habit of another young musician, Buck Polley, at a time when such subjects were largely considered taboo. It also erroneously fuelled the rumour that Jansch was himself a junkie.
With his second album, It Don’t Bother Me, released later the same year, he teamed up with his flatmate John Renbourn, also a guitar virtuoso, to form a duo which was soon hailed as the hottest on the folk scene.
Their partnership resulted in the landmark 1966 album Jack Orion, which was Jansch’s first genuine foray into the realm of traditional song, and included a remarkable jazz-inflected arrangement of Blackwaterside, one of several such songs learned from his friend and occasional lover, Anne Briggs. Jansch’s arrangement of Blackwaterside would remain in his set for the rest of his career, and secured wide fame when it was adopted and recorded by Led Zeppelin.
In 1966 his partnership with Renbourn produced another album, Bert and John. The pair were now clearly looking beyond the confines of the folk movement, and the following year they started playing informally with jazz musicians who congregated at the Horseshoe Hotel in London’s Tottenham Court Road. The result was the formation of Pentangle, featuring Jansch, Renbourn, the bass player Danny Thompson, drummer Terry Cox and singer Jacqui McShee.
Their fusion of traditional folk songs with jazz, blues and pop proved an instant hit, selling out major concert halls and leading to a series of successful albums, notably Basket Of Light (1969), as well as the hit single Light Flight (1970) – the theme music for the television drama series Take Three Girls.
But Jansch, an often shambling, dishevelled figure, hated the limelight. Wilfully unassuming and self-effacing, he was not cut out for celebrity and always preferred modest backstreet pubs to television studios and glamorous parties.
In 1973, driven by wrangles with other band members, legal disputes and drink binges, he split from Pentangle – although he was to return for various reunions, most recently this summer for gigs at the Cambridge Folk Festival and London’s Royal Festival Hall.
Despite the high regard in which he was held by fellow musicians and the music industry at large, various post-Pentangle attempts to launch Jansch as a major solo artist failed, despite sustained support from the label Reprise, which backed him with top American session musicians for LA Turnaround (1974) and Santa Barbara Honeymoon (1975).
Jansch, it became clear, simply didn’t want to be a star, and his career declined as his drinking escalated. At one point he even gave up music entirely to retreat to the sanctuary of farming in Wales. But admiring mentions of his name by a new generation of musicians lured him back to playing, and he recorded a trilogy of well-received albums for the Cooking Vinyl label — When The Circus Comes To Town (1995), Toy Balloon (1998) and Crimson Moon (2000), which proved that the subtleties of his guitar playing and his quietly engaging songwriting were intact and as compelling as ever.
He subsequently gigged with Bernard Butler and Johnny Marr, and played with Beth Orton and Devendra Banhart on his 2006 album, The Black Swan. Other collaborations included a slot with Pete Doherty on the Babyshambles album Shotter’s Nation (2007) and, although already suffering the effects of lung cancer, he toured America in 2010, opening to great acclaim for Neil Young.
Despite his aversion to attention, he did attend the BBC Folk Awards to receive a Lifetime Achievement Award in 2001, returning in 2007 to get a similar accolade with Pentangle. He was forever modest, almost to the point of embarrassment, when anybody told him how much they admired him, and though this reticence cost him much in terms of financial reward, it was also a large part of why he was so widely loved.
“I don’t care what the world thinks of me,” he said in a recent interview. “I’m not one for showing off, but I guess my guitar playing sticks out.”
Bert Jansch was married three times, and is survived by his wife Loren Auerbach and two sons.
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