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Bert Jansch at the Garden Café in Regent’s Park with his wife Loren |
Musician with great taste
Pentangle frontman Bert Jansch left Scotland to launch his career in London in a 1960s folk band that influenced some of today’s big names, writes Sara Newman
SINCE musician and former lead singer of 1960s folk band Pentangle, Bert Jansch, hitch-hiked his way from Edinburgh to London with only his guitar for company, he has not stopped moving.
Today he is sitting beside his wife Loren (also his manager), in the Garden Café in Regent’s Park, where the couple celebrated their sixth wedding anniversary two years ago.
Loren, who tends to their huge garden in Kilburn, is particularly drawn to the restaurant for its beautiful gardens where you can sit indoors but feel as if you are outside.
Bert first lived in Kilburn with his band-mate John Renbourn and a busker named Les in the 1960s.
“It was chaotic,” said Bert. “We lived below a band called the Young Traditionals who sang acapella. Every day and every night there was music going on in the house somewhere so we hardly ever slept.”
The restaurant is an obvious choice for a man who, although renowned for his deft finger-picking guitar style, has also tried his hand at cultivating the soil. Prior to his troubadour years he was a nurseryman, and in 1973 bought a farm in Wales with his second wife, Heather.
The Garden Café menu, which changes with the seasons, boasts fresh organic vegetables that where possible are bought locally. To start, Bert had the parsley ham terrine, while Loren tried the smoked salmon with lemon, capers and soda bread (£7.95), and I plumped for the rich plum tomato and red onion soup (£4.95).
My main course of smoked mackerel with a horseradish dressing, accompanied by a huge mountain of chopped fennel, , priced at £8.50, was equally intense. Loren and Bert’s choice of sumptuous thyme and lemon chicken with roasted vegetables cooked to perfection was a reasonable £10.50.
Bert first set eyes on a guitar at the tender age of seven and was so fascinated by its shapely curves that he carved up his mother’s dining table in the vain hope of making his own. But it was for a different reason that Bert’s mother objected to his aspirations.
He was brought up in Glasgow with his two older siblings, his grandfather (a docker), and his mother, who worked as a cleaner to make ends meet.
He said: “As my mother understood it, when you reach 16 you go out and get a job.”
In the past four decades he has recorded at least 25 albums and is about to embark on a solo tour of the west coast of America. Meanwhile, there are plans to re-form the band.
And this year alone he has appeared as a special guest alongside Pete Doherty, collaborated with Beth Orton and Bernard Butler and performed at the Royal Festival Hall.
But he said: “I get embarrassed when I get that kind of attention from that age bracket. It’s not in me to go overboard with flattery. Although I do quite enjoy it.”
He owes his reputation to Pentangle’s serious approach to music: “Pentangle was never a sing-along band. You can tell when a record company has had an influence on the band. With Pentangle there was no attempt to commercialise.”
Although his career has been peppered by protest songs, from his debut album track Do You Hear Me Now? to Texas Cowboy Blues on his latest album The Black Swan, Bert says he would rather write a song than go on a march.
There was no protest about the desserts, however, which are all priced at £3.95, although I think I got the best one: tartufo chocolate ice cream and Jamaican rum covered in Dutch cocoa is definitely the one to pick.
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