Bert Jansch

One of Britain's greatest acoustic guitarists, Bert Jansch influenced Jimmy Page, Johnny Marr and Nick Drake and remains an icon of the UK folk scene. Raised in Edinburgh, Scotland, he started playing at his local club The Howff in his teens, before roaming and rambling around Europe and learning his trade from the likes of Martin Carthy, Ian Campbell and Anne Briggs. Settling in London in the mid-1960s, he was central to the British folk boom, with his debut album Bert Jansch (1965) becoming a seminal record of the time and producing the protest song Do You Hear Me Now (later covered by Donovan). Jansch gained widespread recognition with the folk rock band Pentangle and his finger picking techniques, dark melancholic style and unusual guitar tunings became hugely influential, though heavy drinking left him seriously ill. Giving up alcohol in 1987, Jansch gained a new lease of life and recorded some of his finest work on the albums The Ornament Tree (1990), Crimson Moon (2000) and Black Swan (2006). In later life he toured with Neil Young (whose track Needle And The Damage Done draws heavily from Jansch's classic Needle Of Death) and worked with a younger generation of artists including Beth Orton, Devendra Banhart and even Pete Doherty; as well as performing reunion gigs with Pentangle at Glastonbury Festival and the Royal Festival Hall. He died aged 67 in 2011 after suffering from cancer.