Danny Thompson: Pentangle's most valuable player

Ian Malin

The recent death of Danny Thompson, known best for his distinctive double-bass playing in the revered band Pentangle, struck a chord with many. Thompson founded the group but he played on records of a raft of artists, from Nick Drake and Kate Bush to Everything But The Girl, riding the wave of the Fifties’ skiffle revolution with a tea-chest bass he rebuilt himself before becoming a big player in the Soho folk and rock scene of the Sixties when he joined Alexis Korner’s Blues Incorporated.

Pentangle, or The Pentangle as they were sometimes called, were formed of Jacqui McShee, a London singer who was a well-known figure on the folk club circuit, guitar heroes Bert Jansch and John Renbourn, with Thompson and drummer Terry Cox forming the rhythm section. Thompson’s beloved possession was a French Gand double bass made in 1865 he bought in Soho for £5 when he was 15; the aptly named Victoria would accompany him for most of his career. He was 86 when he died.

McShee rivalled Sandy Denny as the finest female singer in the new genre of folk-rock and Pentangle’s greatest album, 1969’s Basket Of Light, rivalled Fairport Convention’s Unhalfbricking and Liege And Leaf as the best example of that style in a year of wonderful LPs.

Except Pentangle were never really folk-rock. Both Pentangle and Fairport Convention remoulded traditional English folk songs they discovered at Cecil Sharp House, London home of the English Folk Dance and Song Society, but Pentangle could more accurately be described as jazz-folk. Jansch and Renbourn did occasionally play electric instruments but the pair were more at home with acoustic guitars; Thompson, if he could be categorised at all, was more jazz musician than rock musician. Certainly Thompson was unique in that he played an upright double bass as if it were a lead instrument, straying beyond root notes.

Whatever they were, traditional folk purists did not like Pentangle. But then traditional folk purists did not like Bob Dylan. Anyway, the record-buying public loved them and Basket Of Light became one of the best-selling albums in the history of Transatlantic Records. Basket of Light begins with a song made popular by a TV drama, Take Three Girls, which features three young women navigating their way through life in Swinging London. Light Flight is a song introduced sardonically by McShee as ‘here is our hit’ when the quintet reformed to play a dozen concerts in 2008.

The song is not a traditional tune but instead switches time signatures from 5/8, 7/8 and 6/4. I was at one of those concerts with my pal Ian Tasker, fellow contributor to this website, and we both marvelled at how Pentangle could still sound so remarkable nearly 40 years on from their heyday. At the heart of their sound was the Devon-born Danny Thompson, a one-time schoolboy footballer so good that he was once on Chelsea’s books.

His highly creative collaboration with fellow jazz lover John Martyn bordered on the brotherly and in an interview two years ago Thompson picked out stirring performances of Solid Air and May You Never on the BBC Transatlantic Sessions as particularly special.

During the annual Transatlantic Sessions concert series fronted by American dobro master Jerry Douglas and Scottish fiddler Aly Bain, Thompson would amusingly point out on a crowded stage among Irish, Scottish, US and Canadian players that he was the only Englishman present. Manchester-born piper Michael McGoldrick didn’t like to spoil the joke.

Once I Had a Sweetheart, from Basket of Light, is oddly Pentangle’s only other UK singles hit, reaching a heady No46 in May 1969. Nobody knows who wrote it or when. It just sounds like something from a century earlier. Jacqui McShee floats above a beguiling song, anchored by Thompson’s bass and featuring Cox’s shimmering glockenspiel and Renbourn on sitar, an instrument popularised in the West by George Harrison in the late Sixties.

Like everything Pentangle did, it was defiantly uncommercial. It may be a revival of the past but the theme of a broken-hearted, cheated woman singing to the person who has spurned her is very modern and the theme of countless pop songs. But you could not imagine them singing it on Top of the Pops.

Once I had a sweetheart, and now I have none

Once I had a sweetheart, and now I have none

He’s gone and left me, he’s gone and left me

Gone and left me in sorrow to mourn

To its tragic end when the jilted woman predicts her own death:

I’ll set sail of silver and steer toward the sun

I’ll set sail of silver and steer toward the sun

And my false love will weep, my false love will weep

False love will weep for me after I’m gone

The song ends with Jansch joining in an outro with his distinctive growl ‘after I’ve gone’. Once I Had a Sweetheart is Thomas Hardy set to music. And like everything Pentangle did unique, whatever the folk diehards may say. And, like Fairport, Pentangle’s music was ever evolving with the footballer Danny Thompson the star striker in an outstanding team.

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