Pentangle

Pentangle split in 1973, and the original line-up returned twice: briefly in 1982, then from 2007 for a run of concerts and broadcasts that ended in 2011. Reunions gathers both returns on four CDs, most of it previously unreleased, and follows the band from the Cambridge Folk Festival stage in 1982 to their last appearance there in 2011.

The quintet was Bert Jansch and John Renbourn on guitars and vocals, Jacqui McShee on vocals, Danny Thompson on double bass and Terry Cox on drums. Cox was recovering from a road accident in 1982, so the Cambridge set and the Six Fifty-Five Special television spot were played by the other four. The 2007 Radio 2 Folk Awards, where David Attenborough presented the group with a lifetime achievement award, brought all five back on one stage. The set is dedicated to Jansch and Renbourn, who both died before it appeared.

Disc one comes from the BBC archives: the 1982 Cambridge set for the World Service, the Folk Awards, a Freak Zone session for Radio 6 Music and two 2008 visits to Later With Jools Holland, closing with Bruton Town from Cambridge in 2011. The Cambridge Train Song ends on a long coda led by bowed double bass. Disc two draws on two Italian concerts from December 1982, at Thiene and at the Teatro Orfeo in Milan. McShee sings A Bold Young Farmer unaccompanied, Jansch and Thompson play Blackwater Side as a duo, and a twelve-minute Pentangling stretches out at the end. Discs three and four reproduce Finale: An Evening With Pentangle, selected from the 2008 UK tour, with Jansch overseeing the mix and sequence and Renbourn preparing the masters.

That double album first came out on Topic Records in 2016. Reviewing the box for Prog, Johnny Sharp wrote that the playing shows how "the fundamental musicianly skills that first bewitched in the early 1970s didn't fade in the slightest". He also noted that the Italian disc sounds "on the dusty side", which is fair: these are archive tapes, sequenced from two nights to get the best sound. The 2008 material, with Thompson and Cox locked together under the guitars on Goodbye Pork Pie Hat, is the reunited band at full strength.

Four CDs in mini-LP card sleeves inside a clamshell box, on Cherry Tree (Cherry Red), catalogue number CRTREE4BOX027, 2023, with a 28-page booklet including an essay by Mick Houghton.