In this review of British folk-influenced music in 1970 we cover artists who are known for taking folk into the freer worlds of jazz and improvised music. One is a quintet that was at its peak of fame and success that year, the other a family act that would lead to a brilliant solo career later in the 1970s.
1970 was the year Pentangle, a mostly acoustic band experimenting with the folk tradition by adding jazz influences, tasted the unlikely flavor of success. This was a time when masses of youth on both sides of the Atlantic flocked to music venues and festivals that combined the likes of Miles Davis, The Grateful Dead, Laura Nyro, Jethro Tull and artists of all corners of the music universe in a single event. Pentangle started receiving the attention usually reserved to popular acts, after their single Light Flight was used as the theme song for the BBC1 TV series Take Three Girls in 1969. In 1970 they recorded music for a film, released a studio album, toured the UK and US and performed at the largest human gathering in the world, no less.
1970 opened for Pentangle with a recording of film music. After they saw success with the music they contributed to the TV series Take Three Girls, band manager Jo Lustig was on a quest to find them more opportunities in that field. At the end of 1969 they were contracted to write music for the movie Tam Lin, a British retelling of the legendary traditional ballad, starring Ava Gardner and Ian McShane. The movie ended up a flop, and the promise of a soundtrack album sank with it. A few tracks survived, including the tune ‘The Best Part of You’, played over the opening titles. It is an oddity in the band’s repertoire for its production and arrangement. This is how the band might have sounded if they pursued a career as a pop act:
As the band name became more popular thanks to the TV series and live performances, it was invited to perform at various TV shows in the UK and elsewhere. Lead singer Jacqui McShee remembers such an appearance on French TV: “It was called ‘La Grande Spectacle de something-or-other, in an old abattoir. We were on with Hare Krishna, Cilla Black, Don Partridge, Jean-Luc Ponty… crazy, crazy acts!”
In August of 1970 the group performed in front a crowd that dwarfed anything they experienced before. This was the third and final year of The Isle of Wight music festival in its original form. The band had already played the festival in 1969, but this time they performed in front of a crowd estimated at 600,000 people. Their set was spoiled by numerous disruptions, including the Rolling Stones helicopter hovering over the stage, a bad sound system and finally, as Jacqui McShee remembers: “This woman got up and trod on my foot and said, ‘This should be a free festival!” Pentangle’s performance was sandwiched between Donovan and The Moody Blues on the last night of the festival, to be followed by Jethro Tull and Jimi Hendrix.
Musically the group functioned very similar to a jazz quintet, with plenty of room for each musician to express their ideas either during ensemble pieces or solo spotlights. Bert Jansch: “We used to have solos in the band. That would involve a 20-minutes solo from Danny Thompson. We got into the jazz habit of actually leaving the stage. We could leave anybody on the stage. We got to the point that when we wanted to have a drink, we would devise it so that Jacqui will be left on the stage on her own and we all managed to get to the bar. Sometimes we would forget that she was still up there.”
At the end of 1970 Pentangle released their fourth studio album, Cruel Sister. The band opted to feature only traditional songs, but the eclectic influences that were abound on the previous albums are all still here. McShee: “We wanted to do a completely traditional album. It was a conscious decision. It was mainly John Renbourn’s influence. I suppose John and I were really the traditionalists, if you like, in the band, and I think maybe at the time he thought we were losing direction and he was gradually delving back further – John was becoming more influenced by baroque and medieval music, you can tell that by his solo stuff.”
Renbourn started using the electric guitar on Cruel Sister, adding an electric amplified instrument for the first time on a Pentangle album. He later said: “I had a thing called a Boss Tone, which would go to the guitar, and if you just got it at the right setting it was a rather ambiguous kind of sound. It didn’t sound like a heavy electric at all – it was rather ethereal, and seemed to work pretty nicely as a tonal quality.” Talking about the album, he said: “With a lot of the songs the arrangements would stand several melodic lines rather than a chord structure. I first started using the sitar, for instance, as another color that would play a parallel line to the vocal.”
We can hear echoes of the sitar on the title track from the album Cruel Sister, an adaptation of the murder ballad The Twa Sisters, dating back to the 17th century. Many variations of this song have been recorded, by Martin Carthy and Dave Swarbrick, Clannad, Ewan MacColl, Peggy Seeger and in later years by Rachel Unthank and the Winterset, Tom Waits and many more. Pentangle’s is one of my favorite.
Terry Cox – drums, triangle, tambourine, dulcitone, vocals
Bert Jansch – acoustic guitar, dulcimer, concertina, recorder, vocals
Jacqui McShee – vocals
John Renbourn – acoustic and electric guitars, sitar, recorder, vocals
Danny Thompson – double bass
The album also included a side-long rendition of the tune Jack Orion with a magnificent, lengthy instrumental section demonstrating the excellent musicianship of all band members. The song is a traditional (Child ballad 67, Roud 145) originally called Glasgerion, a king’s son and a harpist. In the 1960s English folk singer A.L. Lloyd performed it for the first time as Jack Orion, changing the harpist to a fiddler. The song was performed by Bert Jansch’s on his 1966 album of the same name, on which John Renbourn was guest musician. Other noted cover versions were later made by Trees and Fairport Convention. In a Downbeat review of the album in May 1971, the musicians’ skills were noted: “Pentangle, and particularly guitarists Jansch and Renbourn, are excellent musicians, and again unlike the Americans, they never presume that lyrics are pre-eminent.” The title track also got a special mention: “Augmented by electric guitar, bass, and percussion, the vocal is likewise expanded into harmonics with Jacqui McShee, plus several rhythmic variants and instrumental solo moments by the ensemble. Cox’ chime-like dulcitone and two duets by Renbourn and Jansch (first on recorders and later on electric and acoustic guitars) prove especially charming, particularly as one realizes the distant historical precedents of this nonetheless contemporary music.” The article concluded with a remark about how far artistically Pentangle took folk music: “Ultimately, such ‘folk’ music as made by Pentangle has nothing to do at all with the ‘folk’ music of Joan Baez, Bob Dylan, and so forth— and that for me is brilliance enough.”
While the album was not a success on its release in November 1970, it became a constant feature in Pentangle’s live performances while the band was still active in the1970s and later at various reunions. John Renbourn reflected on the album: “All the tunes on Cruel Sister were mainstays of the performance repertoire and have proved to be the most enduring. Those pieces, in particular, are the ones most requested still in concerts, wherever any of us play.”
We stay with John Renbourn, who was the only member of Pentangle to also release a solo album in 1970. As Jacqui McShee mentioned, he was deep into traditional music and his solo album The Lady and The Unicorn could easily be mistaken as a classical early music album, not just for the music is contained, but also by the front cover.
The cover of The Lady and the Unicorn (French: La Dame à la licorne) is the title of a series of six tapestries woven from wool and silk, from designs drawn in Paris around 1500. Renbourn dag deep into British, Italian and French early music repertoire to select various pieces of music to present on the album. In the liner notes he wrote: “I have not presumed to reproduce early music as it would originally have been played, but hope nevertheless that the qualities of the music can be enjoyed, though interpreted as they are on more recent instruments.”
John Renbourn rarely performed a solo concert while Pentangle were active. In February 1971 he played at London’s Queen Elizabeth Hall to promote the album. Melody Maker wrote in its review of the show: “John Renbourn is not a performer, he’s a musician. Hardly a word or movement from John indicated that he was aware of an audience. It was hard to comprehend how pieces that sounded so complex could be played with such complete relaxation.”
Here is the title track from the album:
We move to another unit, this time both musical and familial. In the summer of 1969, just months before the famed music festival took place only 60 miles away, John and Beverley Martyn were ensconced in a rented house in Woodstock, NY. The couple met when Beverley Martyn (then Beverley Kutner) asked John Martyn to accompany her on an album she was planning to release on Joe Boyd’s Witchseason label. She later recalled: “He was individual, rakish, all curly hair and smiles. He seemed like the ideal guy to help me out, plus of course it helped that I fancied him like mad.”
The two recorded four songs at Sound Techniques studio in London. On the strength of these demos, Boyd arranged for them to spend time in Woodstock, finish writing an album and record it as a duo act. This was an ideal setting for them, as the town was home to some of their musical heroes. John Martyn remembers: “I played at a gig in Woodstock Theatre, sang a couple of things with Beverley and afterwards Dylan came up and said I played lovely guitar. I always remember him wearing white socks and black loafers and black shades. I was gobsmacked.”
Neighbors included musicians from all corners of the musical spectrum, including one of the Woodstock festival’s most memorable acts: “Jimi Hendrix owned a house literally over the road. He used to fly in every Thursday in a purple helicopter. I used to just meet him when we were walking down the road; he was very quiet, used to tell me how much he loved the animals. He was a good lad but unfortunately I never played with him or saw him play live.”
But the most important residents of Woodstock were The Band, whose two first albums, including Music from Big Pink, influenced a whole generation of musicians on both sides of the pond. Drummer Levon Helm participated in the recordings of the couple’s album. Through Joe Boyd they met other American musicians living in the artsy town, for example bass player Harvey Brooks and drummer Billy Mundi. Wonderful piano accompaniment and string arrangements were added by Paul Harris, who played piano earlier that year on Time Has Told Me by Nick Drake.
The resulting album, Stormbringer!, included ten tracks, four of them written by Beverley, six by John. For the first time on a John Martyn album we can hear him using the echoplex, the guitar effect that became his signature sound in the 1970s. Island Records manager, Chris Blackwell, who would continue to release all of Martyn’s albums in the 1970s, said of the album: “There was an idiosyncratic cosmic Celtic swing to this music, a looselimbed, countried version of what he found so fascinating about the Incredible String Band.”
Stormbringer! was released in February 1970. The same month Melody Maker wrote in its review of the album: “Stormbringer! is hardly recognizable as a British album which reveals a glaring point. That the British standard of songwriting and the American session and recording levels combine to produce a natural, funky acoustic sound.”
Back in England and following the release of Stormbringer!, Beverley and john Martyn started recording their second album. By then John Martyn’s musical tastes were expanding and he was exploring a wide range of styles. He later commented: “By the time Beverley and I recorded our second album my ears were opening a little and I was listening to a lot more music. I’d been to a lot more gigs and was hanging out with other musicians non-stop. I was exposed to more music every day through other people’s record collections, gigs they took me to and gigs I went to on my own.” New sounds were on the music menu Martyn was listening to. Pharoah Sanders’ album Karma was a major influence on his decision to start using the echoplex in order to generate sustained sounds from his guitar like a saxophone. He was also listening to Terry Riley and Weather Report.
While John and Beverley were still writing music and recording it for their second album, they rarely performed together, and most of the live gigs John Martyn did in 1970 were solo shows. The Road to Ruin, released in November 1970, is a good collection of songs, but not remembered as one of John Martyn’s career highlights. He told Supersnazz magazine: “Road to Ruin doesn’t come into the running at all for me, there’s a couple of nice songs on it. I listened to it three or so times after I made it and I’ll never listen to it again.”
Following the release of the album it was clear that John Martyn was to embark on a solo career, a combination of pressure from the record company and the unique direction he was taking with his music. In an interview in December of that year the couple talked about their musical differences. John: “Beverley’s tastes are much more jazzy than mine. Her harmonies and mine are very different. She would use tunes wouldn’t even consider.” Beverley: “After all if we were both the same we would get bored.”
Road to Ruin is important for marking the first time that John Martyn collaborated with Danny Thompson. Pentangle’s bass player extraordinaire recalls: “I met John out in Newport Festival in Rhode Island when I was with Pentangle, and he said do you fancy getting together?” This would have been the Newport Folk Festival in July of 1969, the period when John and Beverley Martyn lived in Woodstock, NY, recording the album Stormbringer! The two musicians would go on to establish one of 1970s’ most intriguing music collaborations, and the roots of that can be found on Road to Ruin. Danny Thompson plays on one track on that album, New Day:
Sources:
Pentangle: The Time Has Come, 1967-1973, 2007 CD Box release booklet, by Colin Harper
Some People are Crazy: The John Martyn Story, by John Neil Munro
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