[BITList] Semi-obscurity, semi-celebrity

[John Feltham]

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Jansch,  Herbert  [Bert]  (1943-2011), guitarist, singer, and composer, was born on 3 November 1943 at Stobhill Hospital, Springburn, Glasgow, the son of Herbert Jansch (1911-1970), a builder's labourer then serving as a private in the Royal Army Service Corps, and his wife, Margaret Henderson Robertson (Maggie), nee Winton. Two siblings preceded him, Charlie (b. 1935) and Mary (b. 1937). The family pronounced their surname with an English-language 'J', not their forebears' original German 'Y'.

After Jansch's father finally left the family for good, around 1949, his wife never mentioned him, and Jansch spent his life until months before his death not knowing what course his father's life had subsequently taken. (He had remarried in 1955 and settled in Bradford.) Jansch was educated at Pennywell primary school and Ainslie Park secondary school. He left in 1959 and went to Leith Academy, lasting around a term before dropping out to become an apprentice nurseryman. From his weekly wages he bought his first guitar, a Hofner cello guitar. Prodigiously talented, he ran through guitar teachers, soon exhausting what they could teach him. Archie Fisher (brother of the singer Ray Fisher), like Davey Graham's sister Jill Doyle, was a short-term guitar tutor. He remarked that with Jansch it was a case of 'Lock up your guitars and your daughters'  (private information, A. Fisher).

The folk singer Anne Briggs encountered Jansch in 1960 in Edinburgh and recommended him to the record producer Bill Leader, who recorded Jansch's debut LP. Reviewing Bert Jansch (1965), Eric Winter, the editor of Sing, wrote: 'Although Bert Jansch has a very ordinary voice, his songs do not depend on his voice. He is a superlative guitarist, but his songs do not depend on his playing. His songs involve the listener deeply in their subjects ... Bert Jansch is going to be a major figure among new writers'  (Sing, July 1965, 18).

At a time when debate raged about so-called 'appropriate accompaniment'-notably guitar-in folk music, Jansch developed into the youngest of the four principal, revolutionary guitar stylists associated with the British folk revival. In order of age, preceding him were Raymond (Wizz) Jones, Davy (later Davey) Graham, and Martin Carthy. Jansch created an anti-hero image, tellingly captured in photographer Brian Shuel's portraiture of a thoughtful or pensive 21-year-old man on the cover of Bert Jansch (1965). Sartorially dishevelled, hair ruffled, he was perpetually on the brink of poverty. He hitchhiked to gigs and sometimes borrowed an instrument at a folk club. People noted that he could get the Bert Jansch sound out of anyone's guitar. Young Man's Blues-Live In Glasgow, 1962-1964 (1998) confirmed his early singularity and prowess, as did his second and third albums, It Don't Bother Me (1965) and Jack Orion (1966).

Jansch was an unaffected, instinctual songwriter. Not given to wringing strings for effect-'the fretted onanism' then prevalent  (Hunt, 'Bert Jansch', 36)-generally he let the words carry the emotional load. He had a gift for a lingering or striking image, whether that was 'strollin' down the highway' or 'needle of death'. Of 'Needle of Death', about his friend David (Buck) Polley, Jansch wrote, 'He'd been a junky for years ... He quit drugs for a while, but when his marriage broke up I guess he just couldn't cope. He took the same dose he'd been used to and OD'd'  (The Songs and Guitar Solos of Bert Jansch, 13). In 1965 a song referencing drug-taking so explicitly ('One grain of pure white snow/Dissolved in blood spread quickly to your brain') was taboo-breaking, and pre-dated the shock of the Velvet Underground's 'Heroin' (1967).

In 1966 Jansch collaborated with his fellow guitarist John Renbourn on Bert and John. This presaged the formation of Pentangle, comprising Jacqui McShee on vocals, Renbourn and Jansch on guitar, Danny Thompson on double bass, and Terry Cox on drums. The group made its public debut at the Royal Festival Hall in May 1967. Jansch's second wife, Heather, wrote of the group's internal dynamics: 'They were five very different individuals, all of them very strong characters with very different ways of relating'  (Heather Jansch, 58). The quintet hit the singles charts with 'Light Flight', the theme music for BBC Television's groundbreaking (and first colour) drama series, Take Three Girls (1969), but Jansch found the touring wearing and the group split up in 1973 (although it subsequently reformed on a number of occasions, with a final comeback at the Glastonbury Festival and Royal Festival Hall in 2011).

Jansch kept a low, yet influential profile. His biographer coined the description 'semi-obscurity/semi-celebrity of cultdom' for his post-Pentangle career  (Harper, 6). He initially withdrew from performing altogether, taking up farming in Wales, although he continued to record, and released a series of solo albums including Moonshine (1973), L.A. Turnaround (1974), and Santa Barbara Honeymoon (1975). In 1977, with Mike Piggott on violin, Pick Withers on drums, and Rod Clements on bass, mandolin, and guitar, he issued A Rare Conundrum, subsequently forming the band Conundrum, which toured Australia, Japan, and the United States. He cited Avocet (1978, 1979) as his own favourite among his recordings, but Heartbreak (1982, reissued 2012), recorded in the USA with guitarist Albert Lee, was more enduringly successful. In 1987 he gave up drinking alcohol after serious health problems, and a new lease of life followed, with a steady stream of concert performances and albums including Leather Launderette (1989, with Clements), Sketches and The Ornament Tree (both 1990), When the Circus Comes to Town (1995), Toy Balloon (1998), Crimson Moon (2000), Edge of a Dream (2002), and The Black Swan (2006). In 1992 he fronted the film Acoustic Routes for the BBC, and in 2003 his sixtieth birthday was marked by concerts at the Queen Elizabeth Hall and St Luke Old Street, the latter broadcast on BBC4.

Jansch received two lifetime achievement awards at the BBC folk awards, in 2001 (as a solo artist) and 2007 (as a member of Pentangle). Although sometimes pigeon-holed as a musician 'probably best savoured by those with a connoisseurship of folk'  (The Guardian, 28 Feb 2013), his influence proved international and enduring. It profoundly affected generations of musicians as diverse as Led Zeppelin, Neil Young, the West German band Ougenweide, the French band Sourdeline, Johnny Marr, Beth Orton, Bernard Butler, and Pete Doherty. The Canadian folk-singer Vicky Taylor first introduced Young to Jansch's music. Jansch's candour and performance profoundly affected him, and his 'helpless bystander' observational standpoint informed Young's 'The Needle and the Damage Done' on Harvest (1972), while Young recorded 'Needle of Death' itself on A Letter Home (2014). Young asked Jansch to support major North American tours in 2010-11, and made a video-recording in a vintage Voice-O-Graph booth for 'A Celebration of Bert Jansch' at London's Royal Festival Hall on 3 December 2013. Robert Plant sang Anne Briggs's 'Go Your Way' at the same celebration. (The concert's edited version, The Genius of Bert Jansch: Folk, Blues and Beyond, was broadcast on BBC4 in March 2014.) Others who placed on record their admiration for Jansch included Paul Simon, Donovan, Nick Drake, Jimmy Page, and Mike Oldfield. Perhaps the most significant untested proof of his influence was 'Black Water Side' on his third LP, Jack Orion (1966). Nat Joseph of Transatlantic Records took legal advice about a possible copyright infringement against Led Zeppelin and 'White Summer'/'Black Mountain Side', but the barrister John Mummery pointed out the risks of attempting to assert copyright over an arrangement of a traditional melody.

Jansch was married three times and had three sons. Despite the banns having already been called for his marriage to Christina 'Licorice' McKechnie (a member of the Incredible String Band between 1968 and 1972), he took a fickle turn and wed sixteen-year-old Lynda Campbell instead on 4 September 1963; it was a holiday romance, in that it enabled the two teenagers to travel to Morocco. Afterwards they parted company. His second marriage, to Heather Rosemary Sewell (b. 1948), sculptor, took place on 19 October 1968; by 1974 they were drifting apart, finally divorcing in 1988. His last marriage, to Loren Adrienne Joy Auerbach (1963-2011) on 1 November 1999, ended with his death. His first son, Richard Cook (1965-2008), was with a record shop manager, Gill Cook (1937-2006); his second, Kieron (b. 1971), was with his second wife, Heather; his third, Adam (b. 1981), who played on Crimson Moon (2000), was with a music promoter, Charlotte Crofton-Sleigh.

In the final months of their lives, with both Bert and Loren Jansch diagnosed as terminally ill, the only unknown was which of them would die first. In the event, Jansch died of lung cancer on 5 October 2011 at the Marie Curie Hospice at 11 Lyndhurst Gardens, Camden. Loren outlived him, dying on 9 December 2011. Both were buried in Highgate cemetery in north London. Jansch was survived by two sons.

Ken Hunt 

Sources  E. W., Sing (July 1965) + The songs and guitar solos of Bert Jansch (1983) + C. Harper, Dazzling stranger: Bert Jansch and the British folk and blues revival (2000); 2nd edn (2006) + The Independent (28 Jan 2006); (6 Oct 2011) + The Guardian (7 Feb 2006); (6 Oct 2011); (7 Oct 2011); (28 Feb 2013) + K. Hunt, 'Gill Cook', fRoots (April 2006), 22 + K. Hunt, 'Bert Jansch', R2 (July-Aug 2011), 35-7 + The Times (6 Oct 2011); (12 Oct 2011); (17 Oct 2011) + Daily Telegraph (6 Oct 2011) + New York Times (7 Oct 2011) + Hampstead and Highgate Express (27 Sept 2012) + N. Young, Waging heavy peace (2012) + H. Jansch, Bert Jansch: living with the legend (2013) + bertjansch.com,  accessed on 8 Sept 2014 + personal knowledge (2015) + private information (2015) [Gill Cook; Loren Jansch, wife; A. Briggs; A. Fisher] + b. cert. + m. certs. + d. cert.
Archives  FILM BFI NFTVA, performance footage + Acoustic routes (1992), DVD release as Acoustic routes: 20th anniversary edition (2013) + Dreamweaver (2000), film documentary + The genius of Bert Jansch: folk, blues and beyond, BBC4, 28 March 2014 SOUND BL NSA, performance recording
Likenesses  B Shuel, photographs, 1963-9, Collections Picture Library, London · photographs, 1964-2011, Getty Images, London · B. Shuel, photograph, 1965, NPG · photographs, 1967-2009, Rex Features, London · photographs, 1972-2007, Photoshot, London · K. Morris, photograph, 1985, Getty Images, London [see illus.] · P. Millson, bromide fibre print, 2003, NPG, London · photographs, 2006-7, PA Photos, London · M. Putland, photographs, Getty Images · obituary photographs · photographs, repro. in obits · photographs, repro. in Harper, Dazzling stranger · photographs, repro. in Jansch, Living with the legend · photographs, repro. in bertjansch.com · photographs, Camera Press, London
Wealth at death  £531,822: probate, 20 April 2012, CGPLA Eng. & Wales




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