Читать книгу The Mojo Collection - Various Mojo Magazine - Страница 51

Record label: Transatlantic

Produced: Bill Leader

Recorded: 5 North Villas, Camden, London; September 1964–January 1965

Released: April 16, 1965

Chart peaks: None (UK) None (US)

Personnel: Bert Jansch (v, g)

Track listing: Strolling Down The Highway; Smokey River; Oh How Your Love Is Strong; I Have No Time; Finches; Rambling’s Going To Be The Death Of Me; Veronica; Needle Of Death; Do You Hear Me Now?; Alice’s Wonderland; Running, Running From Home; Courting Blues; Casbah; Dreams Of Love; Angie

Running time: 38.52

Current CD: Sanctuary CMRCD204 adds: Instrumental Medley (Live); Angie (Live)

Further listening: Jack Orion (1966); Rosemary Lane (1971); When The Circus Comes To Town (1995)

Further reading: Dazzling Stranger: Bert Jansch And The British Folk And Blues Revival (Colin Harper, 2000); www.bertjansch.com

Download: HMV Digital

‘People saw him as a rival to Bob Dylan,’ says Martin Carthy. ‘When his first album came out it really was a big day.’ Along with Carthy, Bert was one of the kings of the folk music castle in 1965. The ‘folk boom’ looked like exploding on a national level and offbeat singer-songwriters were converging on London for its all-nighter folk scene. With an astonishingly original sound, blending Broonzy’s blues with Mingus’s jazz, Scottish trad and a flavour of English guitar exoticist Davy Graham, Bert had drifted down from Edinburgh.

‘[Singer] Anne Briggs took me firmly by the throat and said, “Look, for God’s sake you must do this record,”’ says freelance engineer Bill Leader. Bill had recorded Anne for trad label Topic, but there were no obvious outlets for the wayward Jansch. Not even owning a guitar, Bert recorded the album at Leader’s flat on spec using a Revox and borrowed instruments. Anne was meanwhile lobbying Nat Joseph of Transatlantic, who finally agreed to a purchase of £100 and no royalties. It was the only option. ‘Perhaps if I’d sat on it for another six months,’ says Bill, ‘we might have done a better deal. But there comes a time when a record has to be released for an artist and if you miss that you bugger up his career.’

Davy Graham’s Angie, mischievously adopting Cannonball Adderley’s Worksong as middle-eight, was the only cover – although Smokey River was essentially Jimmy Giuffre’s Train And The River while Casbah had started life as Mingus’s Better Git It In Your Soul. Mostly, though, these were intense, personal songs reflecting the lifestyle of its author, from his earliest composition Courting Blues through the swaggering imagery of Strolling Down The Highway – written in 1962 while hitch-hiking through France – to the more poignant reflections of Needle Of Death (the first anti-drugs song?) and Running From Home. Songs from the album were covered on record by Julie Felix, Marianne Faithful and Donovan while the moody cover shot of Bert with guitar in a bare flat completed the message that here was not only music to absorb but a way of life to acquire. ‘His work will touch youth with a force unknown to our present British artists,’ concluded Folk Scene. Another journal, Folk Music, nailed it: ‘It might be objected that this is not folk music, and of course it’s not. But until our categories expand Bert must be included within folk in its broadest sense.’ Rightly or wrongly, he still is.