Well, cards on the table – it didn’t start with a disc, it started with a TV programme. Take Three Girls was an innovative BBC drama series at the end of the Sixties, the first to be filmed in colour, which followed the lives of three young women of different social backgrounds flat-sharing in Swinging London. I was a bit too young to appreciate it – and watching the surviving episodes posted to YouTube by Liza Goddard, one of its stars, I’m surprised how gritty it was – but I appreciated the theme tune, ‘Light Flight’. This intricate composition, with its interlocking guitars, honeyed vocal and unexpected shifts of time signature, was the work of Pentangle. I had to know more; the game was afoot.
Pentangle began in 1967 with a coming-together of two desperately talented acoustic guitarists – Bert Jansch and John Renbourn. They had a residency at London’s Horseshoe Hotel. Happenstance brought them together with singer Jacqui McShee and a rhythm section comprising Danny Thompson on double bass and Terry Cox on drums. They came from different directions, these individualists: McShee from the folk scene, Thompson and Cox from jazz, Jansch from the British blues revival, Renbourn via a fascination with Early Music. But each was interested in so much more than narrow genre, and they pooled their interests to make a music that could only have emerged at that moment. “An uncalculated synthesis of musical disciplines,” Rob Young calls it in his book Electric Eden, “rock and folk inflated by modern jazz’s zephyr breeze”. The band name, alluding to the sign on the inside of King Arthur’s shield, derived from Renbourn’s interest in the Middle Ages, but also conveniently embraced the five corners of this quintet of equals.
‘Light Flight’, I discovered, was the opening track on their new LP, Basket Of Light. Released in October 1969 at the very peak of their success and reaching number five in the album charts, this remains for me the perfect distillation of their art. For once, my saved-up pocket money was well spent. By then the career of this most British of bands had been supercharged by a pair of ambitious American expats: manager Jo Lustig and producer Shel Talmy. Lustig got them the gigs and the media exposure (including, I assume, the Take Three Girls connection); Talmy gave the recordings their striking bell-like clarity, thanks to judicious microphone placement and enhancements from the mixing desk.
Basket Of Light mixed the band’s original compositions with folk standards. Even the traditional songs sounded fresh when painted in a new instrumental palette. ‘Once I Had A Sweetheart’ featured glockenspiel and multi-tracked vocals. Renbourn, swapping guitar for sitar on ‘House Carpenter’, marshalled an improbable but successful duet with Jansch’s banjo. Their voices merged with McShee’s on ‘Lyke-Wake Dirge’, a chilling rendition of this Yorkshire-dialect threnody, replete with churchy echo effects. ‘If hosen and shoon thou ne’er gav’st nane / The whinnes sall prick thee to the bare bane’. Was the soul’s hazardous journey from earth to purgatory ever better evoked than in that threat? I’d no idea what “whinnes” were – thorns, I later learned – but they sounded painful.
In contrasting vein, ‘Sally Go Round The Roses’ was an upbeat arrangement of The Jaynetts’ 1963 hit, evidence of how far the band cast their net for material. Among the band’s own compositions, I always returned to ‘Light Flight’, preferring it to Jansch’s lugubrious lead vocal on ‘Springtime Promises’. But I also liked ‘Train Song’, the closing track on Side One (track positioning really mattered in the vinyl era). A line from the song – ‘Love is a basket of light’ – provided the album title. It was a reference, so Jansch confided to his biographer Colin Harper, to his “first sexual experience with a lady”; how afterwards he remembered “sitting in this flat where the light shade had a basket hanging from it.” The song alternated fast and slow sections, with McShee scat-singing as if to suggest the locomotive wheels turning, before braking gradually until only Thompson’s bowed bass was audible in the mix.
I only saw them once in concert. Fairfield Halls, Croydon, in November 1970. I was a young teen, new to live amplified music, and I remember how different they were. (Admitted, my formative experience had been seeing Herman’s Hermits blast out a set in the middle of a Christmas panto.) For a start, apart from Thompson, they all performed sitting down. McShee has explained how, in her case, this was a response to the trauma of her first gig during which her knees had been shaking so much she could barely control them. Perhaps there were more expressive singers on the circuit than McShee, women who inhabited a song better, but none whose voice so melded like a fifth instrument into an ensemble. With no strutting front man or woman to distract the eye, you listened to the music and to how these supremely talented musicians listened to each other. Even the folk-rockers had gone electric by then, but although Renbourn sometimes picked up an electric guitar, the key to Pentangle’s distinctiveness was the undertow of Thompson’s nimble acoustic bass and Cox’s restrained use of brushes in preference to sticks.
Of course, it feels wrong to talk about Pentangle as ancient history. The original band made three further albums after Basket Of Light, split, then reformed in 1981. A Lifetime Achievement Award at the BBC Folk Awards in 2007 was confirmation of their enduring impact on musical life. But while McShee still leads the band in another worthy incarnation, the deaths of Jansch in 2011 and Renbourn in 2015 mean that the personnel of the 1960s can never again reassemble. We shall not see their like.
