Bert Jansch

Edinburgh and the road

Herbert Jansch, known as Bert, was born in Scotland in 1943 and grew up in West Pilton, Edinburgh. He had worked as a nurseryman, and after leaving school in 1960 he set out to make his living as a musician in the folk clubs. He learned Davy Graham's Angie from a tape borrowed from Len Partridge, before Graham had released it. From 1963 to 1965 he travelled through Europe and Morocco, busking and playing bars and cafes. He also performed with the singer Anne Briggs, and the two worked up songs and arrangements together, among the first of them Blackwaterside.

London and Transatlantic

In London he became the resident singer at Bunjies. The producer Bill Leader recorded him at home on a reel-to-reel machine, and Transatlantic released the tape as Bert Jansch in April 1965. It sold about 150,000 copies, and its song about heroin, Needle of Death, is still his best known. It Don't Bother Me followed that December, and Jack Orion, his turn toward traditional song, in September 1966.

Bert and John, made with the guitarist John Renbourn in 1966, is the record most tied to the label folk baroque. Donovan's cover of Do You Hear Me Now widened Jansch's audience, and Nicola appeared in July 1967.

That first record of his is epic.

Neil Young, 1992

Pentangle

A residency with Renbourn at the Horseshoe pub on Tottenham Court Road led to Pentangle, formed in 1967 with the singer Jacqui McShee, Danny Thompson on double bass and Terry Cox on drums. From 1968 to 1972 they made six albums, from The Pentangle to Solomon's Seal. Light Flight, from Basket of Light (1969), became the theme of the television series Take Three Girls. Jansch kept his solo work going alongside the band, with Birthday Blues (1969) and Rosemary Lane (1971), which he recorded on a portable tape machine at his cottage in Sussex. He left Pentangle on New Year's Day 1973, and Melody Maker announced the split on its front page.

California, Wales and back

After Moonshine (1973), Jansch spent two or three years in California, where he made L.A. Turnaround (1974), produced by Michael Nesmith, and Santa Barbara Honeymoon (1975) for Charisma. In 1975 he was filmed for the Danish television portrait A Man and His Songs. He then farmed in Wales before returning with A Rare Conundrum (1977), Avocet and Thirteen Down (1980), and he ran a guitar shop in Fulham that closed after two years.

From the early 1980s he played in a reformed Pentangle with McShee, touring with it for the last time in 1995. He gave up drinking in 1987 after a serious illness. In 1993 the BBC documentary Acoustic Routes, presented by Billy Connolly, featured him alongside Graham, Briggs and Renbourn.

Late flowering

From 1995 he was a regular at the 12 Bar Club on Denmark Street, heard on Live at the 12 Bar (1996). Crimson Moon came out in 2000, alongside Colin Harper's biography Dazzling Stranger and a Channel 4 documentary. Bernard Butler and Hope Sandoval guested on Edge of a Dream (2002), and The Black Swan (2006), with Beth Orton and Devendra Banhart, drew five stars from MOJO. He won the BBC Radio 2 Folk Awards Lifetime Achievement award in 2001, and again with Pentangle in 2007.

He was diagnosed with lung cancer in 2009, yet toured North America as Neil Young's guest in 2010 and 2011, and played Glastonbury and the Cambridge Folk Festival with the original Pentangle in 2011. He died in a hospice in Hampstead, London, on 5 October 2011, aged 67. His wife Loren died a couple of months later.

Jimmy Page said Jansch was "so far ahead of what everyone else was doing", and drew on The Gardener for his own White Summer. Young ranked him with Jimi Hendrix and said he wrote the melody of Ambulance Blues by styling its guitar part on Needle of Death. Johnny Marr named him among his three biggest guitar influences, and Paul Simon, Nick Drake and Mike Oldfield are among the many others he shaped. A foundation in his name now supports young acoustic musicians.