A History of Rock Music in 500 Songs - PLEDGE WEEK: “Light Flight” by Pentangle

Episode Date: July 26, 2025

Erratum: At one point here I say “Cannonball Adderley” when I mean “Nat Adderley”. 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/andrewhickey . Whether you do or not, I hope you enjoy this one. (more…)

This episode is part of Pledgeweek 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 an earlier podcast referred to Bert Janch, but pronounced his name as if it had a Y, yanch, 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 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 Janch, dazzling stranger. Bert Janch is the person who gets talked about most when talking about Pentangle, because he is the member of the group whose influence on other musicians,

especially in the rock sphere, is most profound. Johnny Maher said, Bert gave me new goals as a guitar player. Jimmy Page said, At one point I was absolutely obsessed by Bert Janch. 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 singing a classical guitarist. All the inversions he was playing were unrecognisable. He was the innovator of the time. Neil Young said of him, as much of a great guitar player as Jimmy was, Bert Janch is the same thing for acoustic guitar. Janch 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 Janch 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 knocked though, a big buyer of records. He grew up poor and never got into the habit of, 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 Bruinsie. I've never seen anything saying which EP it was, but around that time a number of Brunsey EPs released in the UK contained the track Big Bill's Guitar Blues, so there's a fair chance that he featured this track. Janch bought that record when he was 16 or 17, more or less just because he liked Brunzies' 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 Brunzy. who he later described as one of the only three people he ever tried to copy before finding his own style. Janch soon started to frequent a folk club called The Houth, and while he never got to see Big Bill Brunsey, who last toured Britain a year or so before Janch discovered his music, he did get to see Sonny Terry and Varnie 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 Brunsey once Brunzie grew too ill to travel. According to stories Janch's friends told of him He sat in front of McGee and watched him play Key to the Highway The old blues song that Brunsey had popularised and which McGee and Terry had recently recorded with Joe Meek Jansch asked McGee to play the song a second time while Jansch watched his hands and from the next day Jantz was playing the song

Jansch apparently showed McGee some of his own playing and McGee, impressed, asked how long he had been playing Janch replied six weeks Janch's early repertoire as a performer would be made up largely of Brunsey and Ronnie 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 Janche fell in love with Janch 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 guitarist Janche ever wanted to imitate, and who around that time made a small number of records with his sister Ray. As I was walking, all, I heard to walk or be's mocking a vein. The t'in'n and tea, the teller did say, O' or so we gang and down the day, oh, borsel we gang and down the day.

It's in a hint here on all failed I. Fisher later joked, Bert 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, Fisher taught Janch 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 Fisher the basics of the technique,

making him the only person in Scotland at the time who knew how to play it. Jansh'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 Janch, he was good enough that he took over as the house teacher. But Janj remained in contact with Doyle,

and when she got sent a tape of an EP her half-brother had recorded with Alexis Corner, Janch got to hear the most important track before it was released. That was Janj'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 art-musical interests and would often go off foraging to other countries from months at a time and so never built a reputation outside those who loved obscure music. And it would become Jansch who would popularise Graham's most famous tune, Angie, in particular by adding a jazz influence, bringing in a portion of Cannonball Adderley'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 Janch's interpolation of work song and reworked that into the Simon and Garfunkel track. We got a groovy thing going. Donovan later said of Janch's performances of Angie. Nobody would teach how to play the guitar in my group, but when I went to Burt, 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,

sunny 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 Janch, 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 if he didn't mind showing you, and that is the great magnanimity of the artist. Bert Janch 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 Brunsie, the combination of bluegrass claw hammer 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 Janch 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 Jansh what he'd learned. Janch became flatmates with Robin Williamson and Clive Palmer, who later formed the Incredible String Band, and also briefly dated Liquish McKechnie, who would also later join that group. Jansh 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. Janch has rather hampered by him still not actually owning a guitar and being reliant on borrowing other people for his shows. The two moved down to London for a short while in 1963, and there Jansch encountered the singer Anne Riggs, who would be an on-off musical and occasional romantic partner for a long time. Williamson made her She did say

Oh, it will not be long long Till I Williamson made his way back to Edinburgh for the moment But Janch, essentially homeless In Dossing and 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, Janj wrote the song that made his reputation as a songwriter in the small London folk scene, Needle of Death. When sadness fills your heart, and sorrow hides the longing to be free.

When things go wrong each day, you fix your mind to escape your misery. Your trouble of young life had made you turn to a needle of death. That song was about an addict friend who had died, but most people assumed that it was about Janch himself, even though Janch's drug of choice was always alcohol, not heroin. Pete Townsend, who was acquainted with Jantz 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 he interpreted that in middle-class West London was that he must have pissed it all away. But Needle of Death was an impressive song in a British folk scene which had not yet turned to singer-songwriters, and Jant 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. The air was magic when we played. The riverboat was rocking in the rain. Young Wood, in 2013, record his own version of Needle of Death as a belated acknowledgement. Anne Riggs became Jancha's big booster on the scene

and persuaded Bill Leder, a folk record producer, to record an album with Janch. There were, at the time, only two record labels releasing stuff from the folk scene, Topic Records and Transatlantic Records, and Leda was one of the major producers for both. Topic, though, preferred musicians who were either very traditional or who had strong left-wing politics.

Janch was never a political person, except in the vaguest way, and he was playing his own material, so Transatlantic was the only option. Lida 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 Jancha's version of Angie, an instrumental inspired by Charles Mingus, and most of Jancha's club repertoire, including Needle of Death and one of his best-known songs, Strolling Down the Highway. Strolling down the heart, I'm going to get them off. Just still don't I'm woke.

Can you hear my car? It took a few months ago, on down, on down the highway, people think I'm a craig. It took a few months for the album to come out, and in that time Janj got a new flatmate, John Remborn, and other guitarist with a similar style, who was generally regarded as a technically better musician than Janch, 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 Gadsukes it's all happening,

and record two albums, one in 1965 and one in 1967. Vimborn 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. Rembrandt and started occasionally playing together as a duo, especially after, on the same day that Jancha's first album came out, the 16th of April, 1965, a new folk club opened up. It was meant to be

pronounced Le Cousin, in the French manner, but everyone who went there talked as if it was an English name, Les Cousins. At this time, Janche was still very unprofessional. There exists a note for 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 there 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 Janch

there's another story of Pete Townsend having opened up a folk club and looking for musicians asking Jans if he wanted to earn a pound and getting the reply no thanks I've already got one Janch became the most regular performer at Les Cousins which became the best known folk club to the cognacente thanks to regular adverts in the Melody Maker,

which boosted the reputations of its performers, and especially Janch. As a result, the club became a magnate for anyone interested in the guitar, particularly, from across the UK and any dropping 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 Remborn 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 the US around this time, Martin Carthy, Al Stewart, Ralph McTell, Murray 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 Jansh. 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 Did I Do for the latter's second album, one of the few Jansh originals that he never recorded himself. what you do I love you babe

Indeed apparently Donovan's They've bought the rights to far more songs by Janch than that According to Remborn they would go round to the flat where Janche and Rembon lived and try to buy songs from Janch, knowing that Donovan had admired his work and that Janch had sold them the rights to Did I Do relatively cheaply. But Janch and Remborn's flat was something of a social hub, and usually had several other musicians using it as a temporary bass, and Donovan's management team were so clueless about the music they were promoting

that they'd go around and ask to buy a song from Janch 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 Burt Jansch each time. For a while, Donovan and Janch were also both romantically involved with Beverly Cutner, 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 Janch about that love triangle. Crystal ball is what I wish for you. Get it straight, I love the both of you.

Someone's gone through a cold turkey. Girl ain't nothing but a willow tree. I give you baby contact high. By this time, Janche and Remborn were Sammy regularly performing as a guitar duo and exploring the possibilities of combining the folk baroque guitar style they both played in with both jazz. Janch was a big admirer of Charles Mingus and much of his original material was inspired by Mingus and the traditional folk songs that Remborn 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 Memborn was becoming interested in that. Janch had also started occasionally working out arrangements of these songs with Anne Briggs, combining new guitar parts invented by Janch 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. Rimborn's first eponymous album, which still showed the strong influence of the acoustic blues that had initially inspired both men, included two duets with Janch. And Rennbourne played on a couple of tracks on Janch's second album, It Don't Bother Me, including a version of Rembourne's instrumental, Lucky 13. By Jansch's third album, Jack O'Brien, Jansch 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 by his peers on the scene thrown in per album. Jack O'Ryan was, other than an instrumental cover of you and McCall's first time ever I saw your face, entirely made up of arrangements of traditional folk songs of the kind of been working out with Anne Briggs.

Half the tracks on that album featured Rembeau and playing a second guitar, but the most influential track on the album was one that Janch played solo and had originally worked out with Briggs, a version of the old ballad Black Waterside with a new guitar accompaniment of Jancha's own composition. Knowing my audience, a lot of you will have found that guitar accompaniment

very, very, very familiar. Al Stewart, another fokey 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 Janch and fudged it a bit, and also got a few bits wrong, as you might when teaching yourself from a record. Stuart then did a recording session, and while he was there, he showed the session guitarist his attempt at playing Janch's part, and Jimmy Page learned the part as Stuart 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 Mountain Side, consisting just of Jansh's guitar part, as slightly misremembered by Stuart, but with the songwriting credited to Jimmy Page. Janch and Remborn also recorded a duo album together around this time, mostly of new originals showing their jazz influences, along with one song by Anne Briggs and a cover version of Mingus's Goodbye Pork Pie Hat. At one point, the Bert and John album was at number one on the Melody Maker Folk's chart, while Janch's Jackerion was at number two. Over the next year or so, both Janch and Remborn released more

albums. Janch 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 D. Palmer. He also started touring larger theatre venues as a solo act, while continuing sometimes to play with Renborn. Renborn released two more albums in the same time period and was started to look for other musicians to play with instead of or as well as Janch. His second album, another album, another Monday, featured on a couple of tracks, a blues singer he'd been working with since Doris Henderson had briefly returned to the US, Jackie McShea.

Remborn and MacShey performed occasionally as a duo and sometimes as a trio with Janch. Both Janch and Remborn had become interested in the possibilities of the rock scene, though Janch 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 Remborn 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 that 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 Aisnervoor, 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 Vembone's third album, Sir John, a lot of Merry Englandese music 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 Buccottie and the M.G'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. Remborn, 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 symbolised 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 Corners band.

That song was written by a friend of Corners, Duffy Power, who had started his career as a minor Larry Parn's teen idol. After his brief period as a wannabe heart rob 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 McClockland, 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 Power 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 Pentanglephone for a while and Cox was doing his session work but they were both eager to join Jansh, Rembonne and McShee in their new project

which would combine traditional folk, blues and modern jazz. The music they were planning had some resemblance to underground bands like the Pink Floyd who Janch admired and to the new folk rock groups that were springing up like Fairport Convention and to Janche's old friends the Incredible 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 hole. In early shows, they often did three different sets, a duo set by Remborn and McShey, a solo set by Janche, and then a short group set by all five of them, as they tried to merge their repertoire into one hole. But soon they hit on a style that would become their trademark.

The repertoire would become a mixture of originals, usually mostly written by Janche, the most accomplished songwriter, but often credited to all five, old blues songs, traditional music, often songs dating back to the 16th century or earlier, given Remburn's fascination for early music, the odd cover of a pop song, and songs from Janche and Rembeau's older albums.

These would be performed with Cox and Thompson playing as a jazz rhythm section, Jansh and Remborn playing in their folk baroque style, and McSheh, and often Janch and sometimes Cox and Remborn, singing in a traditional folk style. There would leave room for extensive instrumental solos by all the members in very loose exploratory sections, something like what the Grateful Dead was 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 Bill, 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. 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 Creation, and other loud rock bands of the mid-60s. However, other than some playing around with stereo panning that's very of its time, Talmy'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 11 Radio 1 sessions and 8 TV appearances in the remainder of the year.

The album made No. 21, 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. 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 Pork 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 Miles Davis might have been almost as annoyed at the Cox-Janch-Mex-She-Remborn Thompson's songwriting credit

for I've Got a Feeling as Jansch later was about Jimmy Page's credit for Black Mountainside. The album featured solo spots for every band member including a very rare one for Cox who wrote and recorded this track about Moondog. The higher price for Sweet Child at 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 Pentangles' most consistent and most eclectic album, drawing all their distinct influences together into something that felt off a piece despite their vastly different origins. It included a version of the J-Nett's girl group song, Sally Go Round the Roses. Train song, a blues that was one of the first songs Janchard ever written

when he was still learning guitar and influenced by Bruinsie. The like Wake Durg, 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. 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. While the single only made number 43, the TV series was popular enough that the album made number five 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 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 Janch got to see his old acquaintance Jimmy Hendrix player's last UK show. But there were problems in the group, mostly down to Janch. Jansh was starting to feel stifled by the group setting and putting his best songs aside for his solo records. Both he and Remborn 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 Janch checked out, he was up to Remborne and Macsheed to take charge of the next album, Cruele's sister. By this point, Remborn was deeply immersed in traditional music scholarship and was also starting to play more electric guitar. So rather than the eclectic set that 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 Jaco Ryan, the traditional song that had, in a much shorter version, given Janch's third album its title, expanded with long electric solos by Remborn. The album, which was produced by Bill Leeder 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 Ban 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 Jancha and Remborn 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. Their 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 a 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. The album was Jackie McShe's favourite Pentangle album, but it was very stressful to record. According to Bill Leder, 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 reprise records, and for the first time they had major label backing behind them. But they hadn't realised something important. The 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 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 on 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 Janschen Remborn also stopped getting paid for the 12 solo or duo albums they'd recorded for the label. As it turned out, they only recorded one album for a freeze,

an album titled Solomon Seal, generally regarded as the group's weakest. By the time the album came out, the executive who had signed the group had been moved sideways, and Warner's gave it no support. Janche and Remborn's drinking problems became worse. Danny Thompson had some hard 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. Remborne 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 McShey.

Cox joined Charles Aisnervo'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 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 Moyet everything but the girl and hundreds more, and has had by far the most successful non-pentangle career of any of the band members.

Janj was the first one to make a major artistic statement after the group broke up. His first post-pentangle album, L.A. Turnaround, was widely regarded as a masterpiece. Produced by Michael Nesmith, formerly of the Monkeys, it's sonically of a piece with Nesmith's own early 70s country rock records, and features Nesmith on second guitar, Nesmith's steel player Red Roads, bass player Klaus Rorman 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 Janch and gave him a sympathetic backing. It was a collection made up almost entirely of new originals, some of Jantz'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. A smile from ever That a couple of years 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 Jansh and thought he was the most thoroughly nihilistic person he had ever seen. and got all the other punks to follow Jansh around observing his behaviour, Jansh being too drunk to notice. According to John Memborn, when Remborn visited the area a few years after that, there was a legend in the punk community about a mythical figure known as the Burt. 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 McSheh and a drunk Janch plus a bunch of lesser players.

Some of these lineups, including one where four of the original five were present, made albums, but none are worth tracking down except for the most hardcore of fans. In the late 80s, Janch 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 McShe's pentangle, and which continues to this day. I saw the show by that band around 18 years ago, and while McShe's sang as well as ever, the band were playing songs like Light Flight in musacky 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 Massey Star 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, Grenad 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 Janch died of cancer late in 2011 and Remborn of a heart attack in 2015. Terry Cox now seems to be retired, Jackie McShey 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 Janj 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 Fleetboxes, Joanna Newsom, Vastie Bunyan, the Polyphonic Street, 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. Rock and roll. Bipola, la, la.

Yeah.