Pentangle, St David's Hall, Cardiff, 1st July 2008

 

So it was with delight that I saw they were playing here, and I got my tickets as soon as the gig was announced. This proved to be a shrewd decision- myself and my dad were sat right at the very front and it wasn't possible to have had a better view, particularly welcome as the first time I came to this venue to see Jethro Tull in April, we were right at the very back. Talk about one extreme to the next! Crowd-wise, it wasn't a complete sell-out, but it was still a great turn out that came to see them.

 

The band had already played a gig a few days earlier at the Royal Festival Hall but from their performance on the night, you'd think they'd never stopped playing together as they were pretty much bang on the money from start to finish. The musical interplay between the band was dazzling to watch- they were clearly having great fun turning back time some forty years. Jacqui McShee's droll stage introductions and Terry Cox's dressed-for-the-occasion Welsh T shirt and accompanying anecdotes (apparently his wife is also from Wales, and he has friends who live in Cardiff- his bungled attempts at Welsh were greeted with a wry 'diolch yn fawr (thank you very much) for that Terry' from Danny Thompson) were particularly entertaining. The sound was brilliant, bar a technical issue with Bert Jansch's guitar lead towards the end of the set which was soon resolved by the band's crew.

 

The set-list was a mammoth; so much so I'd be hard pressed to remember everything they played as I'd say it was roughly around 25 songs they played in total. However, there were a plethora of highlights, all drawn from the band's first six albums. They kicked off with 'The Time Has Come' and it was great to hear what Jacqui McShee called 'our hit' in the shape of the wonderful 'Light Flight', and John Renbourn's turn on the sitar for magisterial versions of 'House Carpenter' and 'Cruel Sister' were also superb. Other long-term favourites like 'Once I Had A Sweetheart', 'A Maid That's Deep In Love', 'Let No Man Steal Your Thyme', whilst their completely instrumental excursions on 'In Time' and their great cover version of Charles Mingus' evergreen 'Goodbye Pork Pie Hat' with Danny Thompson on particularly sterling form were also heartily enjoyable. I had noticed recently whilst playing the riff of Miles Davis' 'All Blues' on keyboard that this bore a remarkable resemblance to one of my favourite Pentangle tunes, 'I've Got A Feeling', so it was amusing to hear Jacqui McShee pay this debt lip-service tonight (though she claimed Davy Graham had copied it before they had!).

 

Bert Jansch had a few of his own vocal turns (I have to say, his voice is remarkably undimmed by the passage of time) on 'Solomon's Seal' tracks like 'Sally Free And Easy', 'People On The Highway' and 'The Snows'. A rapturous reception guaranteed an encore, in the shape of 'Will The Circle Be Unbroken'.

 

A remarkably good performance, and the two-plus hours flew by. It has to be said though, one always feels slightly melancholic after seeing such vital displays from these veteran musicians that little of the same instrumental diversity or performance quality has come out of Britain from younger bands for years, so whilst one should be enormously thankful for bands like these still going strong, one also has to wonder where their successors are...

 

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I've noticed a few clips of this gig are already on YouTube, and it looks like more will be up soon from the same person. I'll provide the links here although the quality isn't the best and neither was the position the footage was taken from, though it will give you some idea of the performance.