Salut! Folk

Andrew Curry writes: Over at our Facebook group Pentangle was our artist of the month in July, and while I was researching the post there were some things that I hadn’t realised about the band that didn’t make it into that post for space reasons.

Almost of these came from a long long post by the music writer Colin Harper (Bert Jansch’s biographer) that he’d not found space for in a couple of other bits of writing.

Pentangle were big—very big, pretty mainstream—as the 60s turned to the 70s. They sold out the Royal Festival and Royal Albert Halls and were commissioned to write the theme song and the incidental music for a BBC TV drama series, Take Three Girls.

In the days when there were only three television channels in the UK, people noticed this kind of thing. And not any old drama series, but the first one the BBC filmed in colour. That theme song, Light Flight, opened their most successful record, Basket of Light, and got the band onto the BBC’s long-running chart show Top of the Pops. But none of this was a foregone conclusion.

Photo of Pentangle in Amsterdam in 1969 by Jac. de Nijs/Anefo. CC0 via Wikipedia

Because they were big, it’s also easy to forget how different their sound was at the time from mainstream folk music. The folk core of the band was the guitarists Bert Jansch and John Renbourn and the singer Jacqui McShee.

Renbourn and Jansch, especially Jansch, were leading lights in the 60s folk scene. They had played and recorded together already, and shared a house for several years.

Renbourn was performing with McShee, whom both had met through a folk club that she ran near London. But the bass player, Danny Thompson, and percussionist and drummer Terry Cox, were from the jazz scene, playing with John McLaughlin and also—with the bluesman Alexis Korner—at the Soho folk club Les Cousins. Five of them: hence the name, although there was a bit of Arthurian mythology buried in there as well. Renbourn was, apparently, the guiding force that brought them together, and he always thought they might be big.

 

Pentangle: part jazz, part folk

‘We’d play these folk tunes… I’d always add my improvised bits and I’d say to Bert, ‘Instead of playing the regular pattern why don’t you repeat this little section while John does a solo?’ That’s how those improvised bits came in, which was pretty new. That became the Pentangle sound.

It took them a while to get the sound together. Early performances weren’t encouraging. The band was sometimes all over the place, and people found it hard to tune into this very different sound. As with some other bands, a regular residency, in their case at a new club at the Horseshoe Hotel on Tottenham Court Road, helped the band to find their groove.

Pete Frame, later the designer of Rock Family Trees, saw them early on: they were “a shambles”. But less than a year later, the folk writer at Melody Maker, Tony Wilson (not the Tony Wilson) noted how much they had improved:

‘Then they were ragged, uninspired and generally lacking in confidence – now that has all changed. They have become a much tighter unit.”

Wilson liked the new folk songs, like Let No Man Steal Your Thyme, and also that they were playing fewer dreary blues numbers. All the same there was a period when the future of Pentangle was in the balance. It was still a part-time project (Jacqui McShee still had a day job), and people were encouraging Bert Jansch to go solo. He decided against, partly because he didn’t want to end up like Donovan with the related “screaming teenage fanaticism.”

Transatlantic Records—the leading commercial folk label in Britain—offered them a deal, although Nat Joseph thought that Bert and John would be better at the centre of a folk-rock group, and he wasn’t a fan of Jacqui McShee’s voice. (And McShee was a bit less experienced than the other band members.) He suggested to Renbourn that he should replace her with Sandy Denny, although it’s hard to imagine Denny liking the sound much. Renbourn more or less ignored him.

Because part of the success of Pentangle’s sound was the interplay of voices between McShee, Jansch, and Renbourn, with their very different vocal styles, added a layer to all of this.

The band was helped on its way by the aggressive management of Jo Lustig, an American then managing Roy Harper. He was an astute promoter who took them out of small venues for a few months to build up demand for performances in bigger venues. As Harper writes,

Almost overnight, they were transformed from a cult folk-club act to a bona fide concert attraction with an extraordinary appeal across the social spectrum and considerable, sustained media coverage.

 

The range of their repertoire seems to have been part of the appeal: folk-infused, jazz-inflected, with some early English music contributed by Renbourn. They played sitting down, which conveyed an aura of serious musicianship (including McShee, who sat down early on to cover her nerves.) Shel Talmy, who produced their first four records, had a pop pedigree, and brightened the sound a little. (Notoriously, he never let the bands near his mixes.) But he also had a sharp ear.

When their first record, The Pentangle, came out, Melody Maker ran two reviews, one from their jazz critic, one from their folk critic. The jazz critic liked it but concluded that it wasn’t jazz. Tony Wilson, the folk critic, said,

[T]here were times in the group’s embryo stages when it seemed they were never going to make it… but where will it go, if anywhere, next? The Pentangle with their first album pose a question. Is this a milestone – or a headstone?’

We know the answer to that question: they got big, and then got burnt out by success and touring. Sales of the later records, produced by Bill Leader, were disappointing. There was a bitter fight over royalties with Transatlantic. The band broke up in 1973, though re-formed, more modestly, later on.

My way in to Pentangle was through my mum, whose musical tastes veered towards the easy listening of Radio 2, and had bought a copy of Basket of Light, their biggest commercial success. I got to love the songs, some self-written, without fully realising how the folk tradition also shone through. From that record, I’ve always loved their almost a capella version of Lyke Wake Dirge, with its deep roots on the Yorkshire moors.

I came to their other records when I was a bit older, and their versions of Goodbye Pork Pie Hat and Haitian Fight Song , on the double LP Sweet Child, were a gateway for me to the music of Charles Mingus, helped along by some of Adrian Henri’s Merseybeat poems.

After we moved to the south of England my mother came by a couple of tickets for one of their Royal Festival Hall concerts. I had a teen ‘too cool for school’ moment, and my brother went with her instead.

When they reconvened in the 80s, playing smaller venues, I somehow missed gigs at places like the Half Moon at Putney in London. So I never saw Pentangle play live, but it’s not a big regret. Their rich, complex and a very different sound has been playing in my head for 50 years now. Their records always cheer me up.

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