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Pentangle is a British folk rock (or folk-jazz) band. The original band was active in the late 1960s and early 1970s; its successor 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, guitar; Bert Jansch, guitar; Danny Thompson, double bass; and Terry Cox, drums.
The name Pentangle was chosen to represent the five members of the band, but the pentagram symbol also has a number of mystical associations and is the device on Sir Gawain's shield in the Middle English poem Sir Gawain and the Green Knight which held a fascination for Renbourn.
In 2007, the original members of the band were reunited to receive a Lifetime Achievement award at in the BBC Radio 2 Folk Awards and to record a short concert that was broadcast on BBC radio.
The original group formed in 1967. Renbourn and Jansch were already popular musicians on the British folk scene, with several solo albums each and a duet LP, Bert And John. Their use of complex inter-dependent, guitar parts, referred to as "folk baroque", had become a distinctive characteristic of their music and was featured on Bert and John and in some of the duet tracks on Jansch's Jack Orion album. They also shared a house in St John's Wood, London.
Jacqui McShee had begun as an (unpaid) "floor singer" in several of the London folk clubs, and then, by 1965, ran a folk club at the Red Lion in Sutton, Surrey, establishing 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.
Thompson and Cox were already well-known as 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 well known to Renbourn through appearances at Les Cousins and working with him on a project for television.
In 1967, the Scottish entrepreneur, Bruce Dunnett, who had recently organised a tour for Jansch, set up a Sunday night club for him and Renbourn at the (now defunct) Horseshoe Hotel in Tottenham Court Road.[5] McShee began to join them as a vocalist and, by March of that year, Thompson and Cox were being billed as part of the band. Renbourn claims to be the "catalyst" that brought the band together but credits Jansch with the idea "to get the band to play in a regular place, to knock it into shape".
Although nominally a 'folk' group, the members each shared catholic tastes and influences. McShee had a 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 contemporaries such as Bob Dylan.
The first public concert by Pentangle was a sell-out performance at the Royal Festival Hall, on 27 May 1967. Later that year, they undertook a short tour of Denmark — in which they were disastrously billed as a rock'n'roll band — and a short UK tour, organised by Nathan Joseph of Transatlantic Records. By this stage, their association with Bruce Dunnett had ended and, early in 1968, they acquired Jo Lustig as a manager. With his influence, they graduated from clubs to concert halls and from then on, as Colin Harper puts it, "the ramshackle, happy-go-lucky progress of the Pentangle was going to be a streamlined machine of purpose and efficiency".
Pentangle signed up with Transatlantic Records and their eponymous debut LP was released in May 1968. This all-acoustic album was produced by Shel Talmy who has claimed to have employed an innovative approach to recording acoustic guitars to deliver a very bright "bell-like" sound. On 29 June of that year they performed at London's Royal Albert Hall. Recordings from that concert formed part of their second album, Sweet Child (released in November 1968), a double LP comprising live and studio recordings. Showcasing the group's eclectic approach (and Jansch's growing songwriting ability), it is generally regarded as their creative high point.
Pentangle are usually characterised as a folk-rock band: however, this designation is misleading. Danny Thompson preferred to describe the group as a "folk-jazz band". John Renbourn refuted the "folk-rock" categorisation, saying "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."[26] The practice of following the internal rhythms of a song is very characteristic of the sound of the original Pentangle and is apparent throughout their work: for instance, it is equally apparent in "Let No Man Steal Your Thyme" (the first track of their first album) and "Jump Baby Jump" (the penultimate track from the final album). 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 and "Light Flight" from Basket of Light includes sections in 5/8, 7/8 and 6/4. However, the changes appear natural, in the context of the songs and not forced for effect.
Henry Raynor, writing in The Times struggled to characterise their music: "It is not a pop group, not a folk group and not a jazz group, but 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 that synthesis of styles: songs such as "Bruton Town" and "Let No Man Steal Your Thyme" from the 1968 The Pentangle album include elements of folk, jazz, blues and early music. At the time that the album was released, apart from Davey Graham's pioneering work,[31] there was almost nothing comparable to Pentangle's fusion of styles with, for example, Pete Townshend describing it as "fresh and innovative". However, by the release of their fourth album, Cruel Sister, in 1970, Pentangle had moved more towards traditional folk music, and towards the use of the electric guitar as an instrument. By this time, folk music had itself moved towards rock and the use of electric instruments, so Cruel Sister invited comparison with, for example, Fairport Convention's Liege and Lief and Steeleye Span's Hark! The Village Wait.[34] Pentangle is thus often credited as one of the progenitors of the electric folk style, even though their most well-known album is recorded entirely with acoustic instruments.
In their final two albums, the original Pentangle returned closer to their folk-jazz origins but by then, the predominant musical taste had moved to electric folk-rock. Colin Harper sums things up by saying that Pentangle's "increasingly fragile music was on borrowed time and everyone knew it"