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 one dollar a month at patreon.com slash Andrew Hickey. Whether you do or not, I hope you enjoy this one. On the down, down, and round, we'll sway with these waves. In the spell, on the broken market with a mother's seat. Just a quick note before I begin this one. I have several times an earlier podcast referred to Bert Junch, but pronounced his name as if it had a Y. Junch, 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 the J. Junch, and so that's how I'll try to do it here in an any future episodes where he comes up. Though I might easily slip up because I've been talking about him often 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 Junch, dazzling stranger. Bert Junch is the person who gets to talk about most when talking about Pentangle, because he is the member of the group whose influence on other musicians, especially in the Roxphere, is most profound. Johnny Mars said, Bert gave me new goals as a guitar player. Jimmy Page said, at one point I was absolutely obsessed by Bert Junch. 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 seeing a classical guitarist, all the inversions he was playing were unrecognizable. He was the innovator of the time. Neil Young said of him, as much of a great guitar player as Jimmy was, Bert Junch is the same thing for acoustic guitar. Junch was born in 1943 and grew up in Edinburgh. Unlike most people of his generation, he was infatuated as a kid with Elvis Presley, and it was through Elvis that Junch felt his initial connection to the blues, saying later of him, he was focused well, all his early songs were from the old blues singers. I rejected Bill Haley and stuck 12s. Their left school 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 bang of records. He grew up poor and never got into the habit 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 Roonsy. I've never seen anything saying which EP it was, but around that time a number of Roonsy EPs released in the UK contained the track Big Bill's guitar blues, so there's a fair chance that it featured this track. Junch bought that record when he was 16 or 17, more or less just because he liked Roonsy's name, and it was that more than anything else that let him soon to buy his own first guitar. He wanted to play like Big Bill Roonsy, who he later described as one of the only three people he ever tried to copy before finding his own style. Junch soon started to frequent a folk club called The Half, and while he never got to see Big Bill Roonsy, who last told Britain a year or so before Junch discovered his music, he did get to see Sonny Terry and Vrannie 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 Roonsy once Roonsy grew too well to travel. According to stories Junch's friends told of him, he sat in front of McGee and watched him play Keats the Highway, the old blue song that Roonsy had popularized, and which McGee and Terry had recently recorded with Joe Meek. Junch asked McGee to play the song a second time, while Junch watched his hands, and from the next day Junch was playing the song. Junch apparently showed McGee some of his own playing, and McGee impressed, asked how long he had been playing. Junch replied, six weeks. Junch's early repertoire as a performer would be made up largely of Roonsy and Vrannie McGee songs, but the reason he was at the club at all was that he'd seen the people there were offering guitar lessons. There were two teachers at the club, Jill Doyle, who Junch fell in love with. Junch 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 to month relationship to another, never without a partner, but who quickly went out of things to teach him, and the more advanced Archie Fisher, Doyle's partner, who was the second of the three guitarist Junch ever wanted to imitate, and who around that time made a small number of records with his sister Ray. 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 Junch how to do claw hammer picking, normally a banjo technique, which Fisher had learned from Ralph Rinsler, an American blue guest 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. Junch'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 Junch, he was good enough to heat up over as the house teacher. But Junch remained in contact with Doyle, and when she got sent a tape of an EP, her half brother had recorded with Alexis Conner, Junch got to hear the most important track before it was released. That was Junch's introduction to the third musician he ever tried to copy, David Graham, and he said, after hearing David play, it was just all air. Graham, as we've talked about in the main podcast, was the first major player in the genre that became known as British Folk Barak, a style which involves playing multiple contrapuntal lines, or 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 David 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 voyaging to other countries for more to the time, and so never built a reputation outside those who loved obscure music. And it would become Jan, she would popularise Graham's most famous tune, I'm Jee, in particular by adding a jazz influence, bringing in a portion of Cannibal isolation skills that isolation skills skills skills skills skills skills skills skills skills skills skills skills skills skills skills skills skills skills skills skills skills skills skills skills skills skills skills skills skills skills skills skills skills skills skills skills skills skills skills skills skills skills skills skills skills skills skills skills skills skills skills skills skills skills skills skills skills skills skills skills skills skills skills skills skills skills skills skills skills skills skills skills skills skills skills skills skills skills skills skills skills skills skills skills skills skills skills skills skills skills skills skills skills skills skills skills skills skills skills skills skills skills skills skills skills skills skills skills skills skills skills skills skills skills skills skills skills skills skills skills skills skills skills skills skills skills skills skills skills skills skills skills skills skills skills skills skills skills skills skills skills skills skills skills skills skills skills skills skills skills skills skills skills skills skills skills skills skills skills skills skills skills skills skills skills skills skills skills skills skills skills skills skills skills skills skills skills skills skills skills skills skills skills skills skills skills skills skills skills skills skills skills skills skills skills skills skills skills skills skills skills skills skills skills skills skills skills skills skills skills skills skills skills skills skills skills skills Paul Simon would of course later perform Angie on the second Sam and Garfunkel album, but he also took Janches' interpolation of work song, and we worked that into the Sam and Garfunkel track we got a groovy thing going. Donovan later set up Janches' performances of Angie. Nobody would teach how to play the guitar in my group, but when I went to birth 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 Johans Sebastian Bach, but when it finally arrives at Bert Janch, he's doing things with this 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, Janch had the three ingredients of his own style. The folk blues of Big Bill Dronesy, the combination of bluegrass claw hammer and traditional music of Archie Fisher, and the Eastern influence Barak folk of David 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. While that Martin Carty, who regularly visited that info to play and was friendly with both men, would learn techniques from Graham and then show Janch what he'd learned. Janch became flatmates with Robin Williams and Clive Palmer, who later formed the incredible string band, and also briefly dated Lik Rishma Keckney, who would also later join that group. Janch and Williamson would live together for a couple of years, sometimes with Palmer, offering in squats with basically no possessions, as they both tried to start their own careers in music. Janch's rather hamper by him still not actually owning a guitar and being reliant on borrowing other peoples for his shows. The two moved down to London for short while in 1963, and their Janch encountered the singer Anne Briggs, who would be an on-off musical and occasional romantic partner for a long time. Then she laid her hand on me, and there she did say, oh, it will not be long-loved till our wedding day. Williamson made his way back to Edinburgh for the moment, but Janch, essentially homeless and dussing in 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 leads or whole or Manchester if you were based in London than anywhere else. Around this time, Janch wrote the song that made his reputation as a songwriter with the small London folk scene, 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 Janch 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 Bert 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 Janch 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 a bird got there. The song was so impressive in fact that a decade later, Neil Young accidentally plagiarised that River boat was rocking in the rain. Young Wood, in 2013, record his own version of Needle of Death as a belated acknowledgement. Andrigs became Janch's big booster on the scene, and persuaded Bill Leeder, a folk record producer, to record an album with Janch. The work at the time only two record labels releasing stuff from the folk scene, topic records and transatlantic records, and Leeder was one of the major producers for both. Topic though, for third 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. Leeder recorded the album in his own kitchen, sound-proofed with egg cartons and blankets, and sold the resulting album outright to transatlantic for £100 with no royalties. The album included Janch's version of Angie, an instrumental inspired by Charles Mingus, and most of Janch's club repertoire, including Needle of Death and one of his best known songs, strolling down the highway. It took a few months for the album to come out, and in that time Janch got a new flatmate, John Remborn, another guitarist with a similar style, who was generally regarded as a technically better musician than Janch, but less innovative. Remborn 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 Gadsouk's It's All Happening, and record two albums, one in 1965 and one in 1967. Remborn was an acoustic player, but he would also occasionally double in electric guitar, as in this 1967 cover version by Henderson of Lobs and Message to Pretty. Janch and Remborn started occasionally playing together as a duo, especially after on the same day that Janch's first album came out, the 16th April 1965, and you folk club opened up. It was meant to be pronounced Le Cousin, in the French manner, but everyone who went there told us here it was an English name, Les Cousins. At this time, Janch was still very unprofessional. There exists a note for him to have promote her 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 no condition to hitchhike, there was also the problem of finding a guitar. Hoping this did not inconvenience you too much, you're sincerely but Janch. There's another story of Pete Townsend having opened up a folk club, and looking for musicians, asking Janch 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 cognizant, thanks to regular adverts in the melody maker, which boosted the reputation of its performers, and especially Janch. As a result, the club became a magnet for anyone interested in the guitar, particularly, from across the UK, and any drop-in visitors from the US. It became the home of British folk baroque guitar playing, and established that style in a generation of players. Janch had a regular residency there, and both John Lennborn and David Rehm 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 Carty, Al Stewart, Malcolm McTell, Rory Harper and Jackson C Frank, but also people from other areas of the folk and blues scenes, Long John Bouldery, Alexis Corner, The Watercins, 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 Janch. But the biggest cultural effect Les Cousins had in the short term was as an influence on Dunnevin, who was an occasional performer and frequent audience member there, and was already becoming a pop star. Janch gave Dunnevin the song, Did I Do, for the latter's second album, one of the few Janch originals that he never recorded himself. I want to know the score, I don't want his moral deed to do. I want to lay it down, blue key, I love you babe. I want to turn you on to my love and be. Indeed, apparently Dunnevin's managers thought that they had bought the rights to far more songs by Janch than that. According to Remborn, they would go down to the flatware Janch and Remborn lived, and try to buy songs from Janch, knowing that Dunnevin admired his work, and that Janch had sold the rights to Did I Do relatively cheaply. But Janch and Remborn's flat was something of a social hub, and usually had several of the musicians using it as a temporary base, and Dunnevin's management team was 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 birth Janch each time. For a while, Dunnevin and Janch were also both romantically involved with Beverly Kutner, later to marry and become Beverly Martin, as we discussed in the bonus on Happy New Year, and Dunnevin later recorded the song House of Janch about that love triangle. I gave you baby contact, I gave you my love another year. By this time, Janch and Remborn were semi-regularly performing as a guitar duo, and exploring the possibilities of combining the folk-bavok guitar style they both played in, with both jazz. Janch was a big at my area with 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 found upon a month folk theorist to a company traditional song, and most of those songs were performed in rather austere accapaliverions, but a few people notably Martin Cartier and Archie Fisher had already started performing guitar accompaniment for these older songs, and Remborn was becoming interested in that. Janch had also started occasionally working out arrangements of these songs without grigs, combining new guitar parts invented by Janch with the traditional songs. These two strands, traditional music and jazz, combined in the guitar duets that Janch and Remborn replay. These started to be recorded initially on solo albums by the two. Remborn'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 when Remborn played on a couple of tracks on Janch's second album, it don't bother me, including a version of Remborn's instrumental, Lucky 13. Janch's third album, Jaco Ryan. Janch was becoming more and more influenced by traditional songs, where his previous albums had been almost entirely original with what are two covers of guitar showcases written by his peers on the scene thrown in per album. Jaco Ryan was, other than an instrumental cover of UM McCulls' first time every Sawyer face, entirely made up of arrangements for traditional folk songs, of the kind he'd been working out with Andrikes. Half the tracks on that album featured Remborn playing a second guitar, but the most influential track on the album was one that Janch played solo and had originally worked out with Dricks, a version of the old ballad Black Waterside, with a new guitar of accompaniment of Janch's own composition. One more and fair, I dug the air down a bar, Black Waterside. Knowing my audience, a lot of you will have found that guitar accompaniment very, very, very, familiar. I'll Stuart, another folky 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 footage it a bit, and also got a few bits wronged, 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 to play in Janch's part, and Jimmy Page learned the part as Stuart thought it was played rather than as it was. Janch 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 Janch's guitar part, as slightly misremembered by Stuart, but with the songwriting quite a bit of Jimmy Page. Janch and Wemburn also recorded a duo album together around this time, mostly of new originals showing their jazz influences, along with one song by Anne Dregs and a cover version of Mingus's Goodbye Park Pie Hat. At one point, the Burton John album was at number one on the Melodymaker Folk albums chart, while Janch's Jack O'Reyan was at number two. Over the next year or so, both Janch and Wemburn released more albums. Janch released an album called Nicola, generally regarded as one of his weaker albums, and attempt to make an orchestral pop album, now most notable as featuring the first of arrangement work, a future Jethro Tolkibor player D Parma. He also started touring larger theatre venues as a solo act, while continuing sometimes to play with Wemburn. Wemburn released two more of albums in the same time period, and was starting to look for other musicians to play with instead of of as well as Janch. His second album, End of the 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. Wemburn and McShea performed occasion as a duo and sometimes as a trio with Janch. Both Janch and Wemburn 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 Jimmy Hendrix. The two men both quickly realised that neither could do what the other could, and developed a mutual respect, and Janch decided to stick to the acoustic as a result. Janch and Wemburn decided it might be an idea to form a full band, to give them more possibilities to branch out, a large of 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 Agnivore, Scott Walker, the BG's and many more over the next few years, outside his membership of the band. Cox would go into play on Wemburn's third album, so Jan a lot of Mary Englandy's music thing and Yegvee Knight, an odd album which, as the title suggested, had a lot of influence from very old music, but also featured a cover of Booker T and the NG's sweet potato. That record came out in early 1968, by which time the new group had been together for about seven months, but 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. Wemburn, 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 Sogoane, in the story of Gawane 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, contrasted never on hands. The fifth member, bass player Danny Thompson, was well in 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 a mucous stick player from their own. Cox and Thompson came as a unit. They 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-fop at Endard, Power had gone on to play more of interesting music. It recorded a version of Isor Her Standing There in 1963, with a backing band consisting of Graham Bond, Jack Bruce, Ginger Baker and John McLaughlin, and had soon become a regular London's Blues circuit, as well as often popping into Les Cousins. Power had sung with Blues and Corp faded for a while, and it 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 there were both eager to join in Jan's, Remburn and McShea in their new project, which would combine traditional folk, blues and modern jazz. The music they were playing had some resemblance to underground bands like the Pink Floyd, who Janet admired, and to the new folk rock groups that were springing up like Fairport Convention, and to Janet'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 whole. In early shows they offered three different sets, a duo set by Remburn and McShea, a solo set by Jan's, and then a short group set by all five of them, as they tried to merge their repertoire into one whole. But soon they hit on the style that would become their trademark. The repertoire would become a mix to it with originals, usually mostly written by Jan's 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 Jan's and Remburn's older albums. These would be performed with Cox and Thompson playing as a jazz rhythm section, Jan's and Remburn playing in their folk baroque style, and McShea, and often Jan's and sometimes Cox and Remburn, singing in an traditional folk style. They 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 bills. But that soon changed with their hiring a new manager, Joe Lustig, who decided to give the group an air of mystique by stocking them from performing live together of Osolo for several months until they put out their first album. That album was produced by Shell Talmi, who had recently produced the first two albums by another Les Cousins veteran, Roy Harper, but who wasn't his 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, Talmi'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 media 1 sessions and 8 TV appearances in the remainder of the year. The album made number 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 Sargent Peppek 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 by Hat, and covers of songs by people like the Blue Singer Furry Lewis. The studio disc had a few traditional songs but was mostly made up of originals, or at least, are sensible originals. Miles Davis might have been almost annoyed at the Cox-Janch, McSheigh, Wemble and Thompson's songwriting credit for I've Got A Feeling, as Janch later was about Jimmy Page's credit for Black Mountainside. The album featured solo spots, including the! The high-upfice for Sweet Child, 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 media 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 fell off a piece despite their vastly different origins. It included a verse of the J-Nets girl group song Sally Go Round the Roses. Sally Go Round the Roses. Sally Go Round the Roses they can't hurt you. Roses they can't hurt you. Sally Go Round the Roses they can't hurt you. Sally Go Round the Roses. Train Song, a blues that was one of the first songs Janch had ever written when he was still learning guitar and influenced by Bruins A. The Like Wake Durg, a song dating back at least to the early 17th century written in our kayaking 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 a 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 5 in the chart. And for a while Pentangle the 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 that Carnegie Hall, and playing at shows at the Isle of White Festival, where Janch got to see his older Quintin's Jimmy Hendrix players last UK show. But there were problems in the group, mostly down to Janch. Janch was starting to feel stifled by the group setting and putting his best songs aside for solo records. Both he and Vembo and were still recording solo albums for Transatlantic along with the group records. He missed being a solo wonder going from place to place with just his guitar, or someone else's 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, we was up to Vembo and a Mcsheet to take charge of the next album, full sister. By this point Vembo and was deeply immersed in traditional music scholarship, and was also starting to play more electric guitar. So rather than the eclectic set the basket of light had been, full 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 Jack O'Vayne, the traditional song that had been in much shorter version, given Janch's third album its title, expanded with long electric solos by Vembo. The album, which was produced by Bill Leade of Odin, tell me, was far from a bad one. The album, which was produced by Bill Leade of Odin, 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 subjumbo, of female-funded British bands playing traditional songs with electric guitars, bands like Steel Ice Band and Fairport Convention, and it could have been an album by any of them. Which is not a bad thing necessarily, but it was a very good album, which was a very good album, which was produced by Bill Leade of Odin, 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 subjumbo, a female-funded British bands playing traditional songs with electric guitars, which is not a bad thing necessarily. Both those bands made some fine records, but it lost the uniqueness pentangle it 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 Jan and Vembo and 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. The 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 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. While it's already made, Trim then Red, stitched all around in a golden thread, Golden thread, golden thread, stitched all around in a golden thread. While it's already made, Trim then Green, Lydia's debut ever seen, ever seen, ever seen, ever seen, ever seen, Lydia's debut ever seen. The album is Jackie McShea's favourite pentangler album, but it was very stressful to record. According to Bill Leeder, the two pros, Danny and Terry, would be there on time. Burton John would arrive at different times depending on how much they'd had to drink and where they'd manage to lay their heads the night before. And it seems to me, in retrospect, that each day a different member of the group would decide that this was it. Sob this for a game of soldiers, I'm leaving the group, and would 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 Transit Lantic, 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 on 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 Transit Lantic had a different deal. They would pay the cost of the recordings themselves up front, and the artist would get their royalties from their first record sold, though at a slightly lower royalty than other labels. But the artist would only continue to get royalties as long as they remained signed to the label. As soon as Pentangles signed to reprise, they stopped getting royalties from their five albums to date, including the big hit, Basket of Light, and Junction Remborn also stopped getting paid for the 12 solo or duo albums that record of the label. As it turned out, they only recorded one album for reprise, an album titled Solomon Seale, generally regarded as the group's weakest. Going down the sea, you won't see me again. Going to move on by the day if my trouble and the world will be... By the time the album came out, the executive would sign the group of removed sideways, and Warner's gave it no support. Junction Remborn's drinking problem became worse. Danny Thompson had some hard problems and meant the group had to cancel a few gigs, and Pentangles 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 would drop by the label, they were still in debt to it a decade later. The group members went on to do other things. Remborn 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 McSheik. Cox joined Charles Ashenovore's band, with whom he would tour for eight years, had a brief songwriting partnership with Lindsay DePaul, and also played on sort 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 groups split up. He's played with John Martin, Richard Thompson, Kate Bush, Donovan, T-Rex, Rod Stewart, Graham Cox and Peter Gabriel, Nick Drake, Billy Bragg, Alessamoya, Everything But The Girl, and hundreds more, and has had by far the most successful non- Pentangle career of any of the band members. John was the first one to make a major artistic statement after the group broke up. His first post- Pentangle album, LA Turnaround, was widely regarded as a masterpiece. Produced by Michael Nezmith, formerly of the monkeys, it's sonnacle of a piece with Nezmith's own early 70s country rock records, and features Nezmith on second guitar, Nezmith's steel player Red Roads, bass player Klaus Vormann, and fiddle and mandolin player Byron Burline, whose name I mispronounced in the recent Rolling Stones episode talking about his playing on Country Hunk, so allow me to apologise for that here, all of whom were fans of Judge and gave him a sympathetic backing. It was a collection made up almost entirely of new originals, some of Judge's best songwriting, but the highlight is often considered to be the remake of the song that had made his reputation a survivor, Needle of Death. The song is a song that was made up of a piece with Nezmith's own early 70s and a major piece with Nezmith's own early 70s country rock records, and it's a song that has been made up entirely of new originals, and it's a song that has been made up entirely of new originals, and it's a song that has been made up entirely of new originals, and it's a song that has been made up entirely of new originals, and it's a song that has been made up entirely of new originals, and it's a song that has been made up entirely of new originals, and it's a song that has been made up entirely of new originals, and it's a song that has been made up entirely of new originals, and it's a song that has been made up entirely of new originals, And it's a song that had been made up entirely of new originals, And it's a song that had been made up entirely of new originals, And it's a song that had been made up entirely of new originals, And it's a song that had been made up entirely of new originals, And it's a song that had been made up entirely of new originals, And it's a song that had been made up entirely of new originals, And it's a song that had been made up entirely of new originals, And it's a song that had been made up entirely of new originals, And it's a song that had been made up entirely of new originals, judge and thought he was the most thoroughly nihilistic person he'd ever seen, and got all the other punks to follow Jan Shoround observing his behaviour, Jan's being too drunk to notice. According to John Membon, when Membon 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, most years away to make some quick cash. The group remained together in name for the next 14 years, but from which of that time it wasn't the real Pentangle. Membon quit the reunion quickly, going to university to study composition, and one by one the other members were replaced until it was just McShea and a drunk judge plus a bunch of lesser players. Some of these line-ups, including one where four of the original five were present, made albums, but none are worth tracking down except for the most hard cover of fans. In the late 80s, Jan finally got himself sober and found himself tied to a band that were increasingly only in existence to play in nostalgia shows. By 1994 he'd had enough and quit The Band, which then renamed itself Jackie McShea's Pentangle, and which continues to this day. I saw the show by that band around 18 years ago, and while McShea sang as well as ever, The Band were playing songs like Light Flight in Musakia arrangements with lounge sacks and cheesy keyboards. It was a sad experience. Jan 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 Mazzy Star and Baby Shambles, and recording quite a well-regarded albums which themselves featured guest appearances by other younger members of his work, like Beth Aughton, Deventre Band Heart, Brennan Butler and Johnny Mar. 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 judged out of cancer late in 2011 and then born of a heart attack in 2015. Penny Cox now seems to be retired, Jackie McShea 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 there were more influential than successful, but the guitar playing of Remborn and especially Jan was the basis for multiple generations of the specially 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 from an acoustic folk group and opened up the way for later artists like the Fleet Foxes, Joanna Newsom, Vashdy Bunyan, The Polyphonic Stray and that whole early 2000s generation of eccentric folk influenced musicians. But even so, none of the remires has ever made an album quite like Basket of Light and likely
