BERT JANSCH - PHOENIX THEATRE, EXETER - APRIL 29, 2006

He enters unassumingly stage right, dressed in jeans and a loose fitting shirt, with a half empty pint of lager. He mumbles an offhand greeting to the capacity crowd, with the sort of energy that you might greet your neighbor with if you didn't wish to hear of the further exploits of their children in faraway lands, and sets to fiddling with the lone guitar standing center stage. He places the pint behind him, so that it won't get knocked over if he starts kicking, and promptly forgets about it for the remainder of the set. This is the man Neil Young calls “the Jimi Hendrix of acoustic guitar.”

The opening numbers are simple-simple tales, simple strumming-each introduced by a brief but rambling monologue about his teenage years. A girl who inspired him to play here, a hitchhiking trip from Edinburgh to Morocco, to impress her brother, there (“I'd never even been to Glasgow”)...it doesn't feel so much like reminiscing as coming to terms with how we ended up sitting in the same room. I half expect him to open the floor for explanations from the audience. Instead “The Blues Run the Game” moves the scene to London, and “Carnival” to something like that other dimension in Mary Poppins.

Bert's made his peace with middle age, and has a slight paunch to show for it. From his records I expected him to have laser-thin stilettos for fingers, but he has paunchy ones. The visual effect, even once Bert gets warmed up and starts playing incredibly intricate numbers that he fails to introduce with funny stories, isn't entirely unlike a tourist caressing a guitar with a handful of sausages.

He drops names throughout the evening, but it's no one you've ever heard of. Folk heroes from the streets he's lived on, long forgotten players who showed him something. He doesn't mention the wholesale appropriation of his “Backwaterside” treatment, by no less than Jimmy Page, when introducing it.

A few blues numbers are sprinkled into the mix, but there's no such thing as a transition between folk and blues for Bert Jansch. It's all water from the same well. He announces a fifteen minute interlude between sets and someone yells something about having a drink. Bert remembers his pint, then says that anyone who wants a drink should have one, but he's going to have “an interlude.”

Bert doesn't even wait for the crowd to settle in, to start the second set. He sets a newly half-emptied pint down carefully, behind him, so that he won't knock it down, and is tearing away the opening notes while most people are still looking for their seat. The interlude has served him well, he's ready to go, the carefully controlled fury of his playing feels like it could go over the edge any second.

But it doesn't. Bert swings through utter and absolute contortions with his left hand, while effortlessly, and flawlessly, picking the tormented strings with his right. Preludes of exploding notes foreshadowing the chord changes to come, now introduce each number. Not only does he never miss, he creates a sense that it's actually impossible for anyone to do so. Playing guitar, see, it's like breathing and falling down, or standing up, whatever you do is right. Just don't try this at home.

Some performers remind you of things about yourself, but Bert draws you away and into his own world. By the time that we demand an encore we're thinking of folk music in terms of note flurries, and blues in terms of folk. We're thinking in terms of the world of personal experience, and Bert's, not ours, at that. So it's more than a little surprising when he introduces “Poison” as a protest song, as sadly applicable today as when he first played it. It's a folk audience, mainly, maybe a few metal guitarists scattered about, a polite audience, an informed audience. The song returns us towards to the world we share with others beyond the hall's doors, and now that we're back to being ourselves we can go home, probably stopping a place or two along the way.

Pentangle was always more a critic's band, than a band that sold records. Bert's solo career has been even more obscure, invisible to the masses who walk the streets and scour the media for hints of the latest thing. But it's nice to know that Bert's out there, working the quiet corners without envy or concern. There is no one else who can do what he does.

This review originally appeared in FM Sound.

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