16 January : Basket of Light

In my second post I commented that people were likely to be spending their Christmas money on Liege and Lief, and sure enough that album is a new entry on the chart 50 years ago today. Also new in the charts (I think a re-entry) and also released in late 1969, was Basket of Light by fellow-folkies Pentangle.

Pentangle were a very different outfit to Fairport Convention, not least because they made a point of saying that all the instruments on Basket of Light were acoustic. More subtly, the interests of the band members were broad, Danny Thompson and Terry Cox were better known when the band formed as jazz musicians; John Renbourn and Bert Jansch were already known as guitar virtuosi in folk circles, with Renbourn increasingly interested in early music and Jansch having a more bluesy feel. Jacqui McShee came out of the folk clubs initially.

Basket of Light was their third album, and it’s a measure of the band’s success that the album opener, Light Flight, probably their best-known piece, was commissioned as the theme music for a BBC TV series Take Three Girls. The song was also a hit single in February 1970.

More of a slow burn than Liege and Lief, the album nevertheless remains a milestone in the development of folk-based music in the UK.

Light Flight, like most of the other tracks on the album, has a more complex arrangement than the tracks on Liege and Lief, not just the interplay of Renbourn and Jansch’s guitars (and other instruments), but also in the interplay of Thompson and Cox, and the way their various influences combine into something more distinctive. This is most pronounced, perhaps, on the version of House Carpenter, featuring McShee and Jansch singing over Renbourn’s sitar against Jansch’s banjo and a polyrythmic bass’n’drum.

The whole album is on Spotify.

Here they are performing Light Flight on TV. Yes, I know that’s a Gibson 335 that Renbourn is playing and that this performance is not, therefore, all acoustic.