All-Star Birthday Concert for Bert Jansch

A special 80th birthday concert will be held at the Southbank Centre’s Royal Festival Hall in London on November 4 for legendary Scottish folk musician Bert Jansch. The all-star line-up will include Robert Plant’s Saving Grace, Sarathy Korwar, Sam Lee, Bernard Butler, former Pentangle bandmate and singer Jacqui Mcshee, and many others, all there to celebrate the enduring legacy of Bert Jansch’s peerless guitar playing and songwriting.

One of the UK’s most influential songwriters and guitarists, Jansch inspired countless artists, including Jimmy Page, Robert Plant, Neil Young, Nick Drake, Donovan and Paul Simon. A leading light of the 1960s British folk revival and a founding member of folk-jazz supergroup Pentangle, his career spanned five decades, inspiring generations of musicians with his ground-breaking acoustic guitar technique and passionate songs.

Jansch, who died in 2011, had a long history of performing at the Royal Festival Hall. In fact, Pentangle’s first major performance took place there in 1967, and they recorded part of their 1968 album Sweet Child there. Furthermore, the original Pentangle line-up reformed to play the same hall exactly 40 years later, and it was a Pentangle show at the Royal Festival Hall in August 2011 that proved to be his last performance. Therefore, it’s rather fitting and bittersweet that this celebration be held there too.

Other names in the line-up include Brigid Mae Power & Steve Gunn, Kathryn Williams, Martin Simpson & Louis Campbell and James Yorkston & Ranjana Ghatak, with Stewart Lee taking on compere duties. 

In honour of this concert, celebrating his life and musical legacy, Earth Recordings will reissue three of his albums on vinyl: 1978’s Avocet, which will come in a long out-of-print art edition, 2002’s Edge of a Dream, now revisited on cream vinyl, and 2006’s The Black Swan on jade green vinyl. You can pre-order the vinyl on Bandcamp.

Tickets for Southbank members are available now, with general tickets available from 10am on July 7, via this link: earthrecordings.lnk.to/BertJansch80