“Surely
Harper can’t have anything left to say
about Bert Jansch, can he…?”
Well, no, nothing at all as it happens!
The 2006 edition of the
Dazzling Stranger biography
(see elsewhere on this site)
and
the essay accompanying the 2007 Pentangle box set closed the book
on the subject for me.
That said,
I’m delighted that other fine writers like Pete Paphides,
Rick Batey and Will Hodgkinson seem to be running with their own
enthusiasm for Bert as far as national newspaper and magazine
coverage is concerned (and, indeed, another book - Will’s
very readable travelogue-cum-guitar-history,
Guitar Man, published by
Bloomsbury in 2006), while Mark Cooper at BBC4 and, prior to that,
BBC2’s
Later… has always been
a significant champion of Bert’s.
I’ve been very privileged to have been the right man at the
right time - during the ‘90s mainly and gliding gently up to
the present - to have pushed and shoved, primarily as a fan with a
brass neck, the name of Bert Jansch to the fore with the feature
and review editors of numerous newspapers and magazines, with
impressionable adventurers at various record labels and with sundry
publishers, TV and radio people. Sometimes, in those dark days of
the early ‘90s, it really did feel like I was the only person
writing about Bert in the British and Irish media. But, you know,
you really can
get
a long way by just pushing at doors until they open - and I
wasn’t the only one after all.
I’ve lost count - quite honestly - of the number of Bert
Jansch and related reissues and compilations I’ve been
involved with, on various labels - Demon, Windsong, Snapper, Hux,
Castle, Ace... The first series of releases was via Demon in the
early ‘90s and then it just mushroomed from there.
Undoubtedly the best sounding and best presented reissues of most
of Bert’s albums proper - including all of the classic
Transatlantic albums, spanning 1965-71 - are those which have
appeared since 2001 on Castle (a division of Sanctuary). The same
label have also released high quality reissues - sometimes second-
or third-time reissues on CD - of other gems from Bert’s back
catalogue, including
Moonshine (1973),
Avocet (1978),
From The Outside (1985) and the
two albums with his future wife Loren Auerbach,
After The Long Night (1984)
and
Playing The Game (1986), as well
as releasing his current work:
Crimson Moon (2000),
Downunder: Live In Australia (2002)
and
Edge Of A Dream (2003).
I’ve been involved in all of the remastered album reissues
and in many of the compilations from the label involving Bert
and/or the Pentangle. The two compilations I’d recommend out
of the myriad available are illustrated below.
Dazzling Stranger (2000), a 2CD
set, came out to coincide with the original release of the book of
the same name and is still the most complete ‘best of’
out there, featuring tracks from 18 of Bert’s then 21 solo
albums plus some Pentangle and Loren Auerbach collaborations.
(Piece of trivia: I was also asked to compile a slightly different
version of this comp for the US, leaving out the 1974-77 tracks
licensed from Virgin for contractual reasons and replacing them
with more Auerbach and Sanctuary-owned material. I must buy myself
a copy at some point…)
Running
From Home: An Introduction To Bert Jansch (2005) is a
single disc, budget-priced set combining tracks from 1965 - 2003,
from the Sanctuary-owned/marketed albums. Kicking off with the 2003
single remix of ‘Rock Baby Rock’ I decided to try
something a bit radical with this compilation by sequencing the
tracks in backwards chronological order. Largely this was because
after having been asked to compile X number of Bert Jansch best-ofs
in the previous 15 years, there’s only so many ways you can
shuffle ‘Angi’, ‘Running From Home’ and
‘Needle Of Death’ around at the start of a disc. And
you know what? Hearing it all backwards is a breath of fresh air -
and certainly provides a compelling case for the health of
Bert’s muse vis-à-vis his ‘60s heyday.
One other
Jansch-related album I’d recommend strongly is one I pulled
together with Peter Muir at Market Square Records,
People On The Highway: A Bert Jansch Encomium
(2000) - in
short, a 2CD Bert Jansch tribute album featuring many of his peers
(Roy Harper, Wizz Jones, Ralph McTell, Duffy Power,
Donovan…) alongside more recent admirers (Johnny Marr,
Bernard Butler, Kelly Joe Phelps, Eleanor McEvoy, Chris
Smither…) and his son Adam. For such a seemingly complex
project it came together very easily, and the sincerity and
enthusiasm of all the artists involved was obvious. Clearly
I’m biased, but I do believe this to be an album of wonderful
performances of rarely covered songs, given new perspectives and
new life for the listener. If you’re a Jansch fan already,
you’ll love it, if you’ve only just dipped your toes in
the water you may even find its textures and variety more
immediately accessible than the man himself - not that there could
ever be any substitute for the real thing!
I really have
been very lucky to had the pleasure of working with Bert’s
music in these retrospective projects - projects which by their
very nature Bert is happy to leave to others - and I hope my
approach has always been sympathetic.
There are
still a few Bert
Jansch reissue and compilation projects that definitely do need to
happen - but I must stress
that I‘m not a source of information about
these!
(Bert’s own website
www.bertjansch.com will have
whatever info is available - being retired from involvement in such
stuff, I don’t have any ’inside track’, sorry!)
Firstly, the release in full of Bert’s first three albums for
the Charisma label -
LA Turnaround (1974),
Santa Barbara Honeymoon (1975)
and
A Rare Conundrum (1977) - now
owned by Virgin/EMI. I understand these will
definitely
appear, on EMI, at some point and with Bert‘s involvement.
Secondly, a full-career box set. Sanctuary commissioned me to draft
such a compilation (over 4CDs) around 2000/2001, but things have
moved on apace since then, with the release of several new studio,
live and archival albums, the 2003 BBC4 concert broadcast and so
on. Certainly, I won’t be involved in any capacity in a BJ
box set now if/when it appears, and quite how the takeover of
Sanctuary by Universal in Summer 2007 affects the Bert Jansch back
catalogue generally and any existing plans for it I’ve really
no idea. Again, Bert’s website is the place for that kind of
info.