John Renbourn

Pentangle’s third album, 1968’s Basket Of Light, propelled them towards the big time and even gave them a rare hit single!

Pioneers from a time before labels like ‘progressive rock’ had assumed common coinage, Pentangle made music that really was impossible to categorise. A self-consciously arty hybrid of blues, folk, jazz, classical and something unnameable that could only be produced when the five individuals in the group stood – or, more usually in their case, sat – in the same room together. “It was all down to chemistry,” agrees Pentangle singer Jacqui McShee, 40 years on since they released their most famous album, Basket Of Light.

These days Pentangle tend to get lumped in with the folk-rock of the late-60s, and certainly the roots of the group’s main creative voices – McShee and guitarists Bert Jansch and John Renbourn – lay in the then-thriving UK folk scene. But as Jacqui points out: “We all had much broader musical backgrounds. Although I brought most of the traditional songs into the band, I didn’t actually own any folk records! I was into jazz, Miles Davis, John Coltrane. It was about experimentation. We all had an equal say in every song, jamming along, working on each tune together. Nobody was told how to play or sing; you just did what you liked.”

Although Jansch and Renbourn were familiar faces on the folk circuit, with several highly-regarded if uncommercial solo albums between them – including Bert And John, recorded during their time sharing a flat together in London’s St John’s Wood – the almost instant success that Pentangle achieved could not have been foreseen when its principle members first came together, playing for free at the Horseshoe Hotel in Tottenham Court Road in the spring of 1967.

.

Memorably once described as “a man who seems in silhouette even in daylight”, Jansch was a disciple of fellow Scot, Davey Graham, whose modal tunings, learned on travels to Morocco, would also influence Jimmy Page, a man “absolutely obsessed with Bert Jansch” in the mid-60s. Described by Neil Young as “the Jimi Hendrix of the acoustic guitar,” Jansch took folk and added baroque, jazz, blues and rock. “I used to get thrown out of folk clubs for not singing the right songs,” he told me in 2006. “I was too influenced by all the non-folk music.”

Renbourn was more traditionalist, though no less experimental, looking beyond folk to medieval and early classical music for his inspiration, taking the acoustic guitar to inscrutable new heights as he weaved in and around Jansch’s enigmatic improvisations. As Jacqui says, “Nobody plays like Bert and nobody plays like John; put them together and it shouldn’t work but it just does. Sitting with them while they play, it always makes me smile, it’s so… hypnotic.”

The other pieces of the musical jigsaw, drummer Terry Cox and double-bassist Danny Thompson were equally catholic in their musical influences; both shared a love of improvisational jazz, had been part of Alexis Korner’s blues band, and jammed with future Mahavishnu Orchestra leader John McLaughlin. Thompson was also a larger than life character who liked to party.

“We were all drinkers,” Jacqui recalls with a laugh. “Going to New York for the first time, we were outrageously drunk all the way over on the plane, arrived at the hotel and it was all expenses paid by Warner Brothers. We were like kids in a sweet shop.”

Read more