Currently hot on the heels of Miles Davis, Jimi Hendrix and Johnny Cash as an individualist icon of 20th-century music, namedropped as an influence by an increasing array of division one guitar heroes in folk, blues and rock, Bert Jansch is just about as unassuming and low-key as a person could possibly be. The very fact that he can remain something of a mystery man over 40 years in the music industry, where look-at-me controversialists and phoney enigmas are the mainstays of marketing success, is a point worthy of interest in itself.
His is an incredible story of rags to riches to alcoholism and obscurity and thence doggedly back to the Indian summer of recent years, where widespread respect and rediscovery have been the order of the day. Here is an individual crying out for the microscope of biography, I thought to myself, some 10 years ago; Bloomsbury published the work a couple of weeks ago.
Several documentary films have explored the seemingly impenetrable workings of Bert Jansch over the years - two in recent times, Acoustic Routes (BBC2, 1993) and Dreamweaver (Channel 4, 2000), presenting a compelling if still slightly mystifying portrait between them. The thing with Jansch is not that he plays games with interviewers, documentarists or indeed biographers, not that he has constructed an idealised myth of his own past (like some of his era most certainly have), nor that he refuses to discuss any aspect of his life and work. No, the problem is that he is at once an open book - utterly without pretension - but a book in which virtually all the pages are either blank or peppered with the merest tantalising fragments of recollection.
Quietly but unstoppably driven onwards by creativity and its role in his "present", he remains essentially so unconcerned by the past that he is the last person a prospective biographer should turn to for truth and elucidation. Thankfully, there was no shortage of peers, friends and accomplices willing and able to fill in the gaps.
Jansch has been a regular performing visitor to Ireland over the past 10 years, but the first time I encountered his music was, by some surreal quirk of broadcast licensing, circa 1982 - when I would have been 14 - on a late-night Ulster Television repeat of what I would later identify as the last recorded gasp of Bert's legendary 1960s fusion ensemble, the Pentangle, originally broadcast in Belgium, January 4th, 1973. (This is the kind of obsessive information a dutiful biographer must fill his mind with for the duration of his task, then sacrifice to the editing process for the good of the reader).
Although the work could be said to have taken nearly 10 years, it was mostly the product of one relentlessly solid year of work. I had first decided to write a biography of Jansch shortly after graduating in modern history in 1989. Over the course of 1991-92 I tracked down and interviewed not only Bert, who generously made himself available, but also many of those who had worked with him or shared his private life. The publishing world would take another few years to come around to the concept of the cult hero as a commercial prospect.
Leaving the project on the back-burner, I instead accepted monotonous, but permanent, employment with a facilities management company. But although work on this magnum opus - or, to put it another way, grandiose folly - had faltered, I continued writing about Jansch in one form or another. Indeed, my first contribution to The Irish Times was a preview to a Pentangle reunion concert in Dublin in March 1993. The very next month, having realised that my new employment was merely another dead-end job with no prospects and terrible money, I resigned, and have followed the more fulfilling if precarious path of being a professional writer ever since.
Obviously, I kept in touch with Bert's career and was delighted when his 1995 album When The Circus Comes To Town was widely perceived to mark a renaissance, after more than a decade in the wilderness - much of that time blighted by alcoholism and serious health problems. A new generation of musicians joined old-timers like Pete Townshend, Jimmy Page and Neil Young in citing his influence, while a new generation of music critics had his story to tell and a readership ready to hear it. Essentially the same thing is happening all over again this year, with the June release of his splendid new album Crimson Moon, featuring erstwhile rock gods Johnny Marr and Bernard Butler, coinciding with the UK broadcast of the Dreamweaver documentary - ample opportunity for Bert's many admirers in the print media to reach, once more, for the book of superlatives and introduce yet another generation to one of the unsung masters.
My own biography of the man sets itself a more complex and ambitious task: to resurrect and explore the web of circumstances and individuals that ultimately allowed for a climate in which someone as offbeat and innovative as Bert Jansch could even make a record in the first place. In between the trad jazz boom of the early 1950s and the cultural revolution ushered in by the Beatles a decade later, what is now termed the British "folk revival" arose from the pet concerns of a handful of ethnic record buffs, proto-hippies and leftwing polemicists - Ewan MacColl, Alexis Korner, Cyril Davies, Alex Campbell among them - to become effectively the first, and least chronicled, underground movement of the 1960s.
AT its height it touched on the lives of millions in Britain - every major town had a choice of folk clubs every night of the week - yet it was a movement inherently destined for the margins. The view at the time was "pop is for dancing, folk is for listening". If a "folk" record was successful, the letters pages of Melody Maker would be full of earnest young men declaring the artist a fraud and his record a watered-down version of the real thing - which, of course, could only be truly sampled in the increasingly po-faced world of the folk club circuit. Consequently, without chart statistics to back it up, the once ubiquitous "folk boom" is today barely a footnote in pop history. Yet this was the environment which fostered many great names of the subsequent Irish folk revival in the 1970s and within which Bert Jansch became a legend - selling out, by the turn of 1967, thousand-seater halls by word-of-mouth alone, with virtually no radio or television exposure to his name.
It was at least partly for fear of becoming another Donovan - a prisoner of celebrity - that Jansch opted at that moment for the anonymity of forming a band, the Pentangle. It is perhaps ironic that with the band as his hiding place, he spent the next few years playing the biggest stages of the world, even appearing once on Top Of The Pops, before the whole adventure imploded in a mire of drink, mismanagement and personal crises. The story of the British folk revival is one half of the book; the story of how Bert survived, outlived and transcended it to become an icon is the other.
