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-------------------------------------------------- Bert Jansch + Folk Farm Thursday October 5th, Riverside Centre, Newport Quay, Isle of Wight -------------------------------------------------- Bloody Marvellous Some wag, in response to our posting on the Isle of Wight newsgroup, was willing to bet that Bert Weedon was better than Bert Jansch. Spending your life listening to music fit for lifts and launderettes is one thing. Finding stuff that stands like a real pint in a proper pub is quite another. Bert Jansch is the real McCoy. A diamond in the mud. Pretty much wrote the book for anyone who has followed him. Thursday night he turned it on in double spades. That uncanny half voice drifing over some kind of baroque flamenco where Segovia meets Blind Willie McTell. Drawing his water from the same well that the Reverend Gary Davis and Hot Tuna's Jorma Kaukonen drink from. Folk singer Sally Garrett who'd been in the folk clubs during the sixties had a permanent smile on her face. Hadn't heard Jansch do some of these songs since those times. And here he was just magnificently drifting through Strolling Down The Highway, Running From Home, the one and only Anne Brigg's Blackwater Side, Davey Graham's marvellous sitar string bending marvel Angie, the powerful Soft As A Sweet Sunday Morning. A stunning Lily of the West which he learnt from Clive Palmer of the Incredible String Band. A beautiful version of She Moved Through the Fair and one of them old Pentangle standby's an old Irish love song which Jacqui McShee thought was a ghost story because she misheard the words as 'My Dead Love' not 'My Dear Love.' Lots of lovely asides like that all night. And best of all for me just one note of his stunningly beautiful instrumental, Kingfisher, was enough to put me back upstream to Wirral Creek again where I spent the afternoon in the sun. He knew my river as well as I did. You could hear all the touchstones that must have inspired Nick Drake on Thursday night. All those Davey Graham steeped in Indian mysticism guitar pulls and the ragged blues edge of Jansch's voice teaming Big Bill Broonzy with folk music as real as Anne Brigg's Blackwater Side. A pleasure to have one of the masters playing on the gritty old Quay I grew up on. Good to see a packed house and hear how much they appreciated it afterwards. A double bonus to hear Folk Farm, Martin Newnham guitar and Andy Parkin violin, our local support act playing such beautiful original music to a receptive audience up for it. Martin's dad, respected acoustic picker Keith Newnham didn't stop smiling all night. And the last word must go to that man of few words who generally lets his music speak for him, Islander Martin White. Martin had sat five rows back craning his head out in the aisle to catch Bert Jansch pull magic out of thin air. 'Bloody marvellous,' he grinned. Mike Plumbley |