“It shows how the founding five’s skills that first bewitched in the early 1970s didn’t fade in the slightest”: Pentangle’s Reunions clamshell box

Big-name bands may get back together on a roughly bi-weekly basis now, but it was not always thus. When the original line-up of UK folk linchpins Pentangle reunited for a string of performances in 1982 after nine years apart, it was quite the event.

That restored line-up was short-lived, though, and despite the quintet’s perennial voice Jacqui McShee continuing to front various incarnations of the band to this day, much excitement also greeted the reunion of the founding five – McShee plus guitar virtuosos Bert Jansch and John Renbourn, plus Danny Thompson on double bass and drummer Terry Cox – in 2008, which lasted until Jansch’s death three years later.

This box set focuses on performances from those anticipated gatherings, and it shows how the fundamental musicianly skills that first bewitched in the early 1970s didn’t fade in the slightest with the subsequent decades.

In fact, years of professionalism and improved technology seem to have improved their renditions of live favourites, such as the traditional murder ballad Bruton Town and the jazzy, Miles Davis- influenced lilt of I’ve Got A Feeling.

Even if the sound quality is on the dusty side on a disc of recordings from their 1982 Italian tour, Jansch and Renbourn’s rich finger-picking tapestries, along with McShee’s yearning vocal, pierce the soul just as surely on If A Had A Lover as they do again – in higher fidelity – on a sparkling BBC TV performance from the same year.

The inclusion here on discs 3 and 4 of the original line-up’s 2008 live album Finale: An Evening With Pentangle may reduce the appeal of the package for those who already own that album. But on its own merits, it shows the by-now-pensionable Pentanglers on sublime form, with even the complex time signatures of Light Flight failing to hinder its spritely groove.

So if the original Pentangle burned relatively briefly, this collection shows just how brightly, even after the flame was rekindled.

Reunions: Live & BBC Sessions 1982-2011 is available now via Cherry Red.