Over the decades, Scottish musicians have made many classic albums that have stood the test of time. Today, we look back on Bert Jansch, the debut album by the acoustic guitarist Bert Jansch.
IN the opening scene of Acoustic Routes, a BBC documentary, Billy Connolly speaks with a connoisseur’s pride of an album that first seen the light of day in 1965. On its cover is a moody shot of the artist, Bert Jansch.
“This”, Connolly says to camera, referring to a vivid blue panel running down the left-hand side of the cover, “is the Bert Jansch ‘blue’ album. This is a legendary piece. This was the ace album to have, and have it on top of your pile of albums … This was always on top, and made you look really trendy.
“Not only was the music extraordinary and original … but everybody wanted to look like this”, Connolly adds, tapping the picture of Jansch. “…They wanted their flats to look like this – he’s sitting on bare boards and all that, so Glasgow suddenly was full of completely empty houses with skinny people sitting in them, playing ‘Strolling Down the Highway”.
The record, in Connolly’s view, “is probably the biggest influence of any modern folkie album”.
Jimmy Page, at the time of the album's release was a talented young session guitarist, later acknowledged that the album “had a great effect on me. It was so far ahead of what anyone else was doing”.
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Rab Noakes, who would become a renowned songwriter and producer, was similarly affected by the record, which he first glimpsed in a London shop window display. “I remember being entranced by the photograph and intrigued by the name”, he told Colin Harper, author of Dazzling Stranger, an excellent biography of Jansch. “I went into the store and played the record in a little booth and I can honestly say I had never heard anything like it”.
Back home in Scotland, Noakes tried with limited success to replicate Jansch’s distinctive finger-picking guitar style. “Much of it remains, and remains still, out of reach”, he added.
For his part, Ralph McTell, interviewed for author J.P. Bean’s superb history of British folk clubs, Singing From the Floor, says he believes that Jansch is the most important thing that has ever happened to Britain’s acoustic guitar scene.
Jansch’s influence via what the great Richard Thompson has termed as his “blend of Scottish, blues and baroque styles”, is considerable. Johnny Marr, the solo artist who was formerly in The Smiths, puts it like this, in a 2006 forward to Harper’s book: “With the release of his first album in 1965 he completely reinvented guitar playing and set a standard that is still unequalled today.
“He influenced Nick Drake, Neil Young, Donovan (who then passed on his discovery to The Beatles), Jimmy Page, Bernard Butler and countless other guitar players, some of whom don't even realise they’ve been influenced by him one step removed. Without Bert Jansch, rock music as it developed in the sixties and seventies would have been very different”.
Bert Jansch was born in Glasgow, on November 3, 1943, and his family moved to West Pilton, in Edinburgh, when he was just three months old. From an early age he had an abiding interest in music and in the guitar. The American blues guitarist and singer, Big Bill Broonzy, was a key early influence on Jansch, as was Archie Fisher, the Scottish folk singer-songwriter.
“I went to a folk club when I was about fourteen after making several attempts at making a guitar”, Bert told the Acoustic Routes documentary. “I went to this club and I actually had my hands on a guitar for the first time, and that was it.
“The club was the Howff, in the High Street [in Edinburgh, opposite St Giles’ Cathedral], with Hamish Imlach, Josh MacRae, and of course Archie Fisher used to play quite a lot there. Brownie McGhee I saw play there, and Sonny Terry. I mean, I was hooked from that moment on”.
The Gaelic singer DolinaMacLennan told J.P. Bean: “The Howff was were Bert Jansch started. He was a nuisance. He was fourteen and he got under everyone’s feet, wanting to learn this and that on the guitar. There was a night when we were expecting a lot of people … and the toilet broke. So we sent Bert out with sixpence to the Macamba cafe to buy himself a cup of tea and steal the ballcock from their loo”.
“I remember this lad coming in with a borrowed guitar,” Archie Fisher recalled in 2016. “I think his own guitar had been stolen. Pretty soon he was living in the Howff, where there were quite a few interesting characters to be found. One of them was Len Partridge, who had the first 12-string guitar we ever saw and who I’m pretty sure taught Bert Come Back Baby Blues.”
“I did show Bert how to play some things I was playing,” added Fisher, who is a hugely significant figure in the story of the Scottish folk music scene. “But I was only an influence on him in so far as I had a guitar as well. He’d watch me playing and ask me how I played certain progressions and chords but he did that with other people, too. Somebody once called him a pick-pocket guitarist and I’m not sure that’s fair. He just seemed to absorb things by osmosis.”
Already, there was no denying Jansch’s prodigious, precocious fluency on the guitar.
At length, he began busking in Europe and playing gigs in London and around the British folk-club circuit, impressing audiences and fellow musicians alike with the sheer dexterity of his guitar playing. A popular part of his repertoire was his interpretation of Anji, Davy Graham’s composition, long the acoustic guitar picker’s rite of passage
In London, Jansch’s “insouciant angst and shy, unprepossessing stage manner struck a chord at the capital’s edgy folknik pow-wows”, observes author Rob Young in his book. Electric Eden.
Pete Townshend was an early admirer of Jansch. Paul Simon, when he played the English folk clubs between 1964 and 1968, was hugely impressed by such guitarists as Jansch, Graham and John Renbourn. Indeed, it was Jansch who taught him how to play Anji.
“He came on the London folk scene maybe six months after I did”, Simon recalled in an NPR World Cafe interview in 2011, shortly after Jansch’s passing, at the age of 67. “He was a really interesting blues player, an interesting way of pulling at the strings and slapping and pushing his guitar. Also, his persona was a little bit wild – you didn't know what he was going to do or whether he was going to show up. But he was a great musician, and he remained a great musician”. Jansch, he added, “was a beloved guy. I liked him and I used to hang out with him a lot.
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By the autumn of 1964 Jansch had moved to London. As J.P. Bean records, the British folk scene was dividing between traditionalists and enthusiasts who leaned towards American roots or contemporary music. A new wave of singer-songwriters was emerging, with Jansch at its forefront. Word of his remarkable reputation reached Bill Leader, a well-known recording engineer and record producer, and they began work on what would become his debut LP.
“I was nineteen when I made my first album”, Jansch says on the Acoustic Routes documentary. “I sold it to Transatlantic Records for one hundred pounds. You can still buy it today, which is quite remarkable. It was recorded in Bill Leader’s kitchen in London, on a Revox [tape recorder]. In fact, I made quite a few albums like that”.
“I made Bert’s very first recording in my flat", Leader recalled in a 2023 interview. "I had to borrow a decent microphone (I didn’t have one of my own, at the time). Bert had to borrow a guitar (he’d had a mishap with his own, the night before)”.
From the opening track (Strolling Down the Highway) onwards, the album was a superb introduction to Jansch’s innovative guitar technique and powerful songwriting abilities. Needle of Death was a moving elegy to an musician acquaintance, David ‘Buck’ Polley, who had died in 1964 of a drugs overdose: “Your troubled young life/has made you turn/to the needle of death”. Many years later, the song would be covered by Neil Young.
Before long, Jansch would release another two albums – It Don’t Bother Me (December 1965) and Jack Orion (September 1966), his musical horizons and his guitar styles developing all the time. “By the end of 1965”, writes Rob Young, “he had been anointed the London folk-blues scene’s de facto king”.
In the same month as the release of Jack Orion, Jansch collaborated with John Renbourn on a duet LP, Bert and John. Two years later, an acoustic supergroup, The Pentangle, consisting of Jansch, Renbourn, singer Jacqui McShee, bassist Danny Thompson and percussionist Terry Cox - released its eagerly-awaited debut LP.
