Rick: And that leaves you with?

Renbourn: Things to do on my own. Like early music, early folk music. That's a gas, for me. Like I dig Sandy Bull, from Boston.

Rick: Bert, you said Rock and Roll player. Do you play any?

Jansch: Not me. I'm your complete folk type. I'm your actual folk. (laughs) All the others (waves hand) are ultra genius guitar jazz players, they're the incredible rhythm jazz section. I'm just your simple Donovan at heart...

McShee: Noooo....

Rick: Did you ever play with Donovan?

Renbourn: Bert never played with Donovan. Donovan used to play exactly like Bert, he learned a lot of Bert's things. That's why it sounds like Bert playing. He recorded a lot of Bert's songs.

Jansch: What he used to do is send his managers around while I was drunk out me mind in a pub and say, "Look, sign this bit of paper", and I'd go (groans) and sign.

Rick: So you never played on his albums?

Jansch: No, it wasn't me. Look, you listen to Led Zeppelin. They do it on "Black Water Side"...

McShee: They called it "Black Mountain Side"...

Jansch: (laughs). That's my song.

McShee: Pinch

Rick: Yeah, I see. Jimmy Page even plays it the same way: he sits down and he gets an old battered guitar and he gets all hunched over...

Jansch: I don't do that, do I? Get an old battered guitar and play...

McShee: No, he means he's got a special guitar for the song. Actually I think it's a very rude thing to do. Pinch somebody else's thing and credit it to yourself. It annoys me.

Rick: You'd think Page wouldn't have to do that.

McShee: In all the English papers at home he's always talking about Bert. Says he's influenced. I mean,why say that and then put something on an LP and say Jimmy Page?

Rick: I recognize many of the traditional things Pentangle comes up with. The English folk ballad seems quite further advanced than the typical North American folk song.

Renbourn: Some of the old ballads are amazingly complicated. But there's a lot of the traditional ballads around and they're being revived, like a Pete Seeger type thing here. But you can hear people like Doc Watson, Jean Ritchie.

Rick: So the songs are easy to find?

Jansch: No, we create them. (laughs)

Rick: Your jazz sound, is it premeditated, or does it just happen?

Jansch: I don't think we do anything consciously, do we?

McShee: No. I don't think so either. I mean, that's the way we got together, wasn't it?

Jansch: Consciously?

McShee: No, I mean I'm saying, unconsciously, it's always been like that. That's the way Danny plays, that's the way Terry plays.

Jansch: They're very jazz influenced.

Rick: Does that account for the jazz-folk thing you get going?

Renbourn: Well, what happens, if we use a traditional tune, what Danny and Terry put down is essentially a jazz slanted thing, particularly with Terry using a drum kit instead of a hand drum.

Rick: What about the sitar number?

Renbourn: We only use it on one song,with the banjo, from our last album.

Rick: You opened tonight with an old Jaynettes number "Sally Go Round The Roses", a cut from Basket of Light, How did that song happen, it's fairly obscure.

Renbourn: That song was hardly worked out at all, we did it more or less in the studio. It's only a blues thing, but it's nice.

Rick: What's going to happen after the tour, in England?

Renbourn: Well, we've got to take a rest. There's festivals and things. We've been trying to cancel out a lot of things, you know, just not do it. There's a lot of things happening, like the concert at the Isle of Wight. We'll be there. There's a festival here at the moment, isn't there?

Rick: Yes, one called Strawberry Mountain, except it's an island.

Renbourn: Someone said Albert King was there...

Rick: No, Albert Collins. He was here last fall with Bo Diddley and Little Richard.

Renbourn: Oh wow. That's amazing. A lot of places we've played have just had blues festivals. We come in and they've just had every guy that's available. We've always just missed them. I'd love to get round to one. See Robert Williams or Sun House.

Rick: What about the current music scene in England?

Renbourn: Well, it's pretty good. Fairport Convention were over here. But there are a lot of good groups. And it's changed a lot; a lot of people that I used to know that would be folk singers have now got groups together and are doing wild things.

Jansch: Is this an underground station you're doing this for?

Rick: No, it's an underground newspaper.

Jansch: I thought it was underground radio.

Rick: No, we haven't got there yet.

Jansch: Your Paper got a name?

Rick: It's called the Georgia Straight.

Jansch: Georgia Straight?

Rick: It's a pun.

Jansch: I don't get it. (laughs)

Rick: It's a local play on words... the water off Vancouver is called Georgia Strait... s-t-r-a-i-t... we spell our Georgia Straight s-t-r-a-i-g-h-t in the cool sense....

Jansch: I still don't get it. (laughs)

Rick: OK, man. What about people who have never heard Pentangle? How would you turn them on?

McShee: The best way, I think is just to listen to the music. Actually we don't talk much about ourselves.

Rick: Well, if it has got to a point where what you do is mainly unconscious, that's a definition of the group's musical ability.

McShee: Yes, well, the thing is when you've been together as a band for over three years and when you're together like that - when you think about most of the groups that are going, they might last a year and then they break up and another group breaks up and then they combine and you get sort of satellite groups around one group. When you've been playing together you get to know each other not only as a person but musically as welt Just knowing.

Rick: I'm trying to get you to come up with a self definition.

Jansch: It's impossible. No one has ever done it yet. There's one thing we never talk about, music. We don't. We never talk music to each other. You understand? It's like, we talk about what we're going to do next. Where we're going, what bars we're going to visit, whether we can have a game of golf at all, or who won the football game. We never talk about music, never. You talk about everything else, but never music. The only time we ever talk about music is to say "Let's have a rehearsal" and that's it, we get together and play. If anything comes out there you go. Other than that you don't talk, you know? Cause you don't need to. And we find it hard to talk to anyone else about music cause we just don't.