Salut! Live

Andrew Curry: One of the most recent releases on Earth records is the big box set of BBC recordings. It includes the 60th anniversary concert, which you mentioned in Part One. It spans Bert’s entire career from the early ‘’60s to, I think, Tom Robinson on Radio 6 in 2009. Was that a big task?

Karen Kidson: That took two years, from deciding to do it to everything being ready to release. We’re very lucky because Colin Harper, who wrote Bert’s biography, Dazzling Stranger, is such an expert in the whole 1960s folk revival onwards. He knows so much about Bert, and his sleeve notes for the physical version of Bert at the BBC are almost like a book on all BBC sessions, from the 1960s onwards. He found a lot of the recordings which the BBC had lost, through the producer or the engineer on the day who happened to have it, or someone who had taped it off the radio. It took a long time.

Bert Jansch, Sounds of the ‘70s, 1971. Via Colin Harper’s YouTube channel.

(KK): There’s such a huge amount of music on there, quite apart from anything else. It’s great, because the classic Bert recordings from his debut album through his Pentangle years, all the Transatlantic albums, are now with BMG, and looking at what Earth have done with the catalogue has made them raise their game in terms of how they reissue it. BMG put together a compilation, Just A Simple Soul in 2018, working with me and Bernard Butler, who helped put the track listing together. It covers everything from Angie to The Black Swan, so that for the first time there is one collection that spanned his entire career. You look back and think, there’s five decades of music here, and Bert at the BBC does the same thing.

AC:  You talked about Loren in her role in rejuvenating Bert’s career, but obviously on Earth records you’ve also re-released some of Loren’s recordings. Earth describes her as being similar to Vashti Bunyan and Virginia Astley, and listening to those recordings that she did with Bert, they’re a real treat.

KK: She recorded those in the 1980s, as part of a collaboration with a man called Richard Newman, as well as Bert. Richard Newman wrote a lot of the songs on it, some with Bert, it was released on a self-financed label, Christabel Records, that Loren set up to put it out, so it had quite a small footprint at the time. It was Loren’s voice but it wasn’t her lyrics. When the catalogue of Bert’s recordings reverted to him and were offered out on licence, Loren added her records to it, and they were reissued on a CD by Castle, and they were part of the catalogue that Earth also took on. We had a lot of out-takes for that, so there was quite a lot of extra material we could add in to make that lovely re-issue. She didn’t really record a lot, although she sang with Bert on tour later on, and there are tracks on his later records that you hear her on.

AC:

The Foundation’s quite a small venture, but I was interested that over the past couple of years you’ve had a couple of young artists that you’ve been supporting, Sam Grassie and Dariush Kanani.

KK: Sam’s band Avocet was named after one of Bert’s records. Darius is touring with Clive Carroll and doing a John Renbourn programme. He’s not only a great musician but he’s a great organiser, and he’s put together a lot of the workshops we’ve done. We didn’t have a big agenda with the Foundation, and we’ve never had a full-time person in the charity, so we’ve always sought to link up with partners who can work with us. We see it as a place to record stuff and connect people who’re interested in his legacy, and in Bert’s way of playing. We’ve just released after two or three years’ work Volume 2 of the Bert Jansch Songbook. The first one came out in 2017, the new one came out in August.

AC: Who’s worked on the Songbook?

KK: Jon Riley is the leading light, he’s worked with other people but he’s done the majority of the transcriptions and he’s very good at it.

AC: It’s possible that there are people reading this who don’t know Bert’s music at all,and it’s also possible that there are people who know the ‘’60s stuff really well, but don’t really know the later stuff. As someone who’s spent your time immersed in it, where would you tell them to start?

KK:  Well, Just a Simple Soul gives you a taster of every part of his career, so that would be an obvious entree. If you don’t know anything, that gives you the highlights that people will talk about, and a taste of everything else in between. [NB: It’s only available on vinyl and CD — Ed]
The albums from the 2000s, when he had a home studio and was really recording on his terms, show his traditional material that he was revered for, as well as his collaborations with younger artists that show he was always challenging himself. I think The Black Swan is the epitome of that.

AC: One of the things I was struck by listening to The Black Swan and Crimson Moon again was that even the arrangements of the familiar songs are quite different, perhaps because he’s working with other artists who’re bringing something into the room as well.

KK: He always used to play around with everything, when he performed live he would never play the same thing twice. Bernard Butler talks about trying to play with Bert on stage and having to really look to see what he’s doing. You had to be at the top of your game to play with him, because he could go off in any direction.

* ANDREW CURRY is a regular contributor to Salut! Live. See his blog at https://thenextwavefutures.wordpress.com/ and early items at Substack