Pentangle (band)
Pentangle are a British folk band, formed in London in 1967. The original band was active in the late 1960s and early 1970s, and a later version has been active since the early 1980s. The original line-up, which was unchanged throughout the band's first incarnation (1967–1973), was Jacqui McShee (vocals); John Renbourn (vocals and guitar); Bert Jansch (vocals and guitar); Danny Thompson (double bass); and Terry Cox (drums).
Pentangle
The Pentangle
London, England
- 1967–1973
- 1981–present
Jacqui McShee's Pentangle
Bert Jansch
Terry Cox
Danny Thompson
John Renbourn
Mike Piggott
Nigel Portman Smith
Rod Clements
Peter Kirtley
Jerry Underwood
The name Pentangle was chosen to represent the five members of the band. It was also the device on Sir Gawain's shield in the Middle English poem Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, which held a fascination for Renbourn.[1]
In 2007, the original members of the band were reunited to receive a Lifetime Achievement award at the BBC Radio 2 Folk Awards and to record a short concert that was broadcast on BBC radio. The following June, all five original members began a twelve-date UK tour.
History[edit]
Formation[edit]
The original group formed in 1967. Renbourn and Jansch, who shared a house in London in St John's Wood,[2] were already musicians on the British folk scene, with several solo albums each and a duet LP, Bert and John.
Jacqui McShee had begun as an unpaid floor singer in several London folk clubs. By 1965 she was running a folk club at the Red Lion in Sutton, Surrey, and established a friendship with Jansch and Renbourn when they played there. She sang on Renbourn's Another Monday album and performed with him as a duo, debuting at Les Cousins club in August 1966.[3]
Thompson and Cox were jazz musicians and had played together in Alexis Korner's band. By 1966, they were both part of Duffy Power's Nucleus, a band which also included John McLaughlin on electric guitar. Thompson was known to Renbourn through appearances at Les Cousins and from having worked with him on a project for television.[4]
In 1967, the Scottish entrepreneur Bruce Dunnet, who had recently organised a tour for Jansch, set up a Sunday night club for Jansch and Renbourn at the now defunct Horseshoe Hotel in Tottenham Court Road. London.[5] McShee began joining them as a vocalist, and by March of that year, Thompson and Cox were being billed as part of the band. Renbourn claims to have been the catalyst that brought the band together, although he credits Jansch with the idea of getting the band to play in a regular place, "to knock it into shape".[6]
While Pentangle was nominally a folk group, the individual members had wide musical tastes and influences. McShee had grounding in traditional music, Cox and Thompson a love of jazz, Renbourn a growing interest in early music, and Jansch a taste for blues and contemporary performers such as Bob Dylan.
Style[edit]
Pentangle are often characterised as a folk-rock band, although Danny Thompson preferred to describe the group as a "folk-jazz band."[26] John Renbourn rejected the "folk-rock" description. He said, "One of the worst things you can do to a folk song is inflict a rock beat on it. . . Most of the old songs that I have heard have their own internal rhythm. When we worked on those in the group, Terry Cox worked out his percussion patterns to match the patterns in the songs exactly. In that respect he was the opposite of a folk-rock drummer."[27] This approach to songs led to the use of unusual time signatures: "Market Song" from Sweet Child moves from 7/4 to 11/4 and 4/4 time,[28] and "Light Flight" from Basket of Light includes sections in 5/8, 7/8 and 6/4.[29]
Writing in The Times, Henry Raynor struggled to put the band's music into a category. "It is not a pop group, not a folk group and not a jazz group. What it attempts is music which is a synthesis of all these and other styles, as well as interesting experiments in each of them individually."[30] Even Pentangle's earliest work is characterised by this synthesis of styles, and songs such as "Bruton Town" and "Let No Man Steal Your Thyme" from 1968's The Pentangle include elements of folk, jazz, blues and early music. Pete Townshend described their sound as "fresh and innovative".[31] By the time they released their fourth album, Cruel Sister, in 1970, Pentangle had reverted to traditional folk music and had begun to use electric guitars. Folk music in Britain had moved towards a rock sound and the use of electrified instruments, and Cruel Sister invited comparison with such works as Fairport Convention's Liege and Lief and Steeleye Span's Hark! The Village Wait, which caused Pentangle to be referred to as one of the progenitors of British folk rock.[32]
In their final two albums Pentangle returned to their folk-jazz roots, but by then the genre's musical tastes had moved to British folk rock. Colin Harper commented that Pentangle's "increasingly fragile music was on borrowed time, and everyone knew it."[16]
Awards[edit]
In January 2007, the five original members of Pentangle were presented with a Lifetime Achievement award by Sir David Attenborough at the BBC Radio 2 Folk Awards. Producer John Leonard said Pentangle had been one of the most influential groups of the late 20th century, and it would be wrong not to acknowledge the contribution they had made to music. The group played together at the event for the first time in over 20 years. Their performance was broadcast on BBC Radio 2 on Wednesday 7 February 2007.[33]