I first met Clive Carroll in an airport when we both were on the way to Swannanoa Gathering in North Carolina, where Carroll would be teaching several guitar classes. Our conversation turned to the late John Renbourn, when Carroll mentioned that Renbourn's music manuscripts had been saved from being sent to a landfill. The existence of music composed by the guitarist but which had never been performed stimulated Carroll's curiosity and was a factor in undertaking a survey of Renbourn's work, a two and a half-year project that resulted in The Abbot, which is reviewed in the November 2023 issue of Minor 7th.

John Renbourn initially gained public attention as a groundbreaking fingerstyle guitarist, backing Doris Henderson on two albums and soon afterward recording his debut solo album and accompanying Bert Jansch. Renbourn and Jansch formed Pentangle, an ensemble that drew its repertoire and arranging approach from acoustic blues and the jazz of Charles Mingus, in combination with British folk songs. During and after Pentangle's first run, Renbourn released more solo recordings, broadened his stylistic palette, and developed impressively as a composer of works for solo guitar and ensembles. Concurrently, he recorded and toured with Stefan Grossman and his own John Renbourn Group. In the early 1980s he scaled back on performing to study music formally for several years at Dartington College of Arts, after which he toured tirelessly as a solo act, with Pentangle, Jacqui McShee (Pentangle's vocalist), Robin Williamson, Wizz Jones, and the young Clive Carroll. Renbourn released fewer recordings from this point forward, although albums like The Nine Maidens, Traveler's Prayer, and Palermo Snow display his expanding musical vision as well as his great guitar playing. He died in his home in 2015 while preparing to give a concert that evening, leaving behind unreleased recordings and a large trove of original music in manuscript, which is now being processed for access at Newcastle University.

I interviewed Clive Carroll on September 15, 2023 as he was preparing to launch a tour of the United Kingdom and Ireland highlighting Renbourn's music.

Pat Ragains: How did you meet John Renbourn?

Clive Carroll: I came home one weekend, in about 1997, to my parents' house. At that point I would have been in my third year at Trinity College in London, and I came home to do the usual things that students do, you know, get fed really well and totally abuse the washing machine. I happened to notice that John Renbourn was playing at my local folk club. So I phoned up the organizer and asked if I could play support and, subsequently, I turned up with a bunch of John Dowland numbers, some Joe Pass-inspired pieces and few of my own compositions as well. I met him briefly before the gig, but what I didn't know was that he actually stayed for my set, and things moved on from there. It was at a pub called the Red Lion, in Manningtree, in Essex.

PR: Why did you want to do this project?

CC: : I felt that his music needed to be brought to a new audience. Had it not been for the hassle of being locked down, I probably wouldn't have had time to do something like this, because, you know, you're always on the go, aren't you? Now, all of a sudden, as a self-employed musician, you had time at home and time to learn pieces that you always wanted to learn but never had time to. So, one afternoon I pulled a book of Renbourn solo guitar pieces off the shelf and started to learn a few of the classics that I just wanted to have under my fingers, like "The Hermit" and "The Lady and the Unicorn," perhaps "My Dear Boy," "Lady Goes to Church." After committing those to muscle memory, my curiosity took me deeper into his treasure trove. I'd already recorded a piece called "Estampie" for the 2006 film, Driving Lessons, which stars Rupert Grint, you know, the red-haired boy from Harry Potter, and Julia Waters. And John Renbourn and and myself cowrote the soundtrack for Sony Picture Classics, and they wanted a version of "Estampie," by John. We pretty much stuck to his original, just with a few changes to fit the script and the visual. But when I got my hands on the original manuscript for "Estampie," which is probably my favorite track from John's album, Traveller's Prayer, I noticed he wanted more of a Moorish flavor. So, that's Middle Eastern percussion, perhaps bansuri flutes, which were popular in the thirteenth, fourteenth centuries in the Middle East, especially. I thought it would be great to try and create something new, something, perhaps, that he actually intended, rather than what could be afforded at the time of the original recording. So, once I had these solo pieces under my belt and I started to think about how I could reshape some of the ensemble pieces, it suddenly sprang to the fore that I could possibly create an album's worth of takes of his music with my stamp on them. I guess there's no point in trying to recreate what's already there, you know. I wanted to try to do something new with them, which is in the same spirit that John always approached his pieces. He was constantly rewriting and rearranging his compositions

PR: This would have been a big project as a regular length album, but it's nearly two hours of music. Can you talk about how you recorded it? Were there any special obstacles or challenges you encountered?

CC: The first challenge is the fact that I could record only two hours of music. Just to give you an idea, most of his manuscripts are held in quarantine at University of Newcastle in the northeast of England and, right now, they've scanned just over 10,000 pages of composition. So, I'd probably go as far to say, most of John's music hasn't been recorded yet. There's still so much to explore. Part of the lot is just ideas. You know, he was always noodling. When we were flying together, he'd have manuscript out and he'd just be dreaming up ideas and jotting them down. But there's still so much music yet to be discovered. So, there was the big question. I was just thinking about a single album, you know, twelve to sixteen tracks, something like that. I even wrote to a few friends to ask which Renbourn pieces they'd most like to hear on an album, and there were quite a few answers that linked all these people together. The answers were not too dissimilar. So I had a core body of pieces that I thought would be good to include and try and do something different with. And then the second angle of three is that I had lots of experiences with John. I wouldn't say I lived with him for two years, but I spent most of two years, from 2000 to about 2002, with him, touring with him. We came to the USA, in fact. There were lots of pieces that mean something specifically to me and from our time together. So, that's why some of the pieces I'd chosen are on this record. You've got some classics, you've got the personal connection of what I wanted to include, there are pieces sometimes that aren't by John, like "Watch the Stars," or at least with "Little Niles," these are tunes you just associate with John, that I can do something different with. And then the third chapter is to try and find music that I thought really ought to be heard. Because my personal feeling is that they are such strong compositions, and also, he never performed them live. I just felt that I had to get them out there and try and get people to listen to these. There's one piece I'm thinking, right now, specifically, it's "Pavan d'Aragon," and sometimes, John would just do kind of a throwaway answer about how he wrote it. In actual fact, you can see in the detail that these are very complex, very well thought out and executed pieces, and a pleasure to read off the score, to be honest. I suppose that an extra bonus is I discovered a few of John's pieces that hadn't been recorded before, so it was a fun challenge to arrange them, because they were in a kind of skeletal form, but I put them together myself. I arranged them and then recorded them.

PR: Are you talking about "Intrada and Danse Royale"?

CC: That's right. I was in a fortunate and privileged position to be able to be able to go through John's original handwritten scores and that one sprang out at me, because he'd already started writing parts. A lot of his pieces didn't get that far, so this one was definitely intended for a future project. I have a friend (Robert A. White) who specializes in medieval and renaissance music, who blows all of those instruments, so we spent a couple of days in his studio, knocking out recorder parts and shawm parts, you know, those medieval instruments, and then we fused those with John's original instrumentation, which was guitars and electric bass (laughs).

PR: I've always loved "The Pelican." Did John write it out? How did you learn it?

CC: I managed to grab hold of the solo guitar main part from a friend of mine, Mike Walker, who was a good, old, close friend of Renbourn's for decades. They were actually teaching some of John's pieces in a guitar camp down in the Isle of Crete. A lot of the famous Renbourn pieces had been transcribed already, so it was easy just to ask Mike for a transcription of the main part of "The Pelican." But all the other parts you hear, this is in keeping with what I was saying before, trying to do something with each piece. As you know, "The Pelican" is originally for two guitars, but, in this instance it's for bass clarinet, cor anglais, glockenspiel, guitar, and accordion. The main guitar part is (arranged by) John, and the rest of it's me. I took various fragments of the original "Pelican" recording. I tried to stick with notes or phrases that were within that original score, but then used them elsewhere. But all motifs relate to the original "Pelican" composition.

PR: It came off very well. Do you have a sense of what else is in Renbourn's archive?

CC: I have no idea, because he had such a wide musical palette. He was into folk trios and he enjoyed arranging folk tunes and he had a very specific vibe to his arranging technique. You only need to hear a couple of bars and you know it's a Renbourn arrangement. You've got the blues stuff and the jazz tinge, and all those gospel tunes, you know, he loved arranging those for guitar, or two guitars. So, who knows what else is in there, really. He had a grand piano in his place and, after he died, they found a manuscript of a piece that was half completed, and it was called "One For Leonard." Nobody knows who Leonard is, but I suspect it may be Leonard Cohen, because I think, perhaps, he'd just died.

PR: You had mentioned that a lot of his output was never made public, never recorded or performed.

CC: Yeah. It's just that when you look at his back catalogue there, it's a huge output. Especially from the mid-sixties until the late seventies, he was on fire. He must have been writing constantly. After that, the albums come out, he's like me, once every five or six years. But (earlier), he was recording a record every year. He was working hard. But, it's just when you consider how many pages go into those many albums, compared to the 10,000 pages of manuscript that have been scanned at Newcastle, that makes me wonder what else is in that trove. I've thought two hours was a half-decent effort (for The Abbott).

PR: Looking at his concert set lists from his last ten or fifteen years, there's maybe a divide between how productive he was as a composer but having a fairly conservative approach to performance. Would you agree with that?

CC: Performing new pieces or contrapuntal music is very difficult for anyone, and trying to entertain a crowd at the same time. I think John was a master at entertaining a crowd in his own way. He had a supreme command of the English language. He was able to deliver a story and have everyone in hysterics. He wanted to enjoy his time on stage, I think, and to worry about the actual delivery of the notes was something he chose to do without (laughs). I've heard from various sources that, way back in the day, he did perform "Lady and the Unicorn," and I get the feeling it was pretty tough. And it is, it's a difficult piece to pull off. When you play a piece by Bach, for example, it's very easy to jump from bar nine straight into bar one hundred and nineteen! I think John's pieces are quite challenging, you know, I don't think he was thinking about performing them when he wrote them. There's a video of "Rosslyn" on YouTube from a BBC program called Five Faces of Guitar, and he's playing brilliantly there. But certainly, later on, as you say, invariably, when I toured with him, he would start with "Sweet Potato" by Booker T. & the MGs, and then he'd go to something like "Lord Franklin," and "Sandalwood Down to Kyle," and he might stick in "English Dance" at the end of the gig.."I Saw Three Ships" (Renbourn often performed these last two pieces as a medley. pr). When I played with him, some of the most fun parts were the end of the night when we jammed together. He had a handful of blues-influenced rumbas, where he could really open up. The most fresh part is always the improvisation, so when he opened up and just improvised freely, that was the unique vibe that Renbourn had shining through.

PR: I saw him play in California in about 2006, and he played kind of a chord melody version of "Goodbye Porkpie Hat." I'd never heard him play it in that way before, but it was very nice.

CC: Absolutely, yeah. He used to play it as a duo with Stefan Grossman, I believe. Maybe Bert as well. Do you know the Bert Jansch version (on Bert & John)?

PR: Yes. You're probably familiar with Guitar Works, Marco Rossetti's folio and CD of Renbourn's solo pieces. Can you contrast The Abbott with Rossetti's album?

CC: I actually used the Rossetti book as a basis for some of the pieces. The ones that spring to mind are "The Hermit," "Lady Goes to Church," and "Pavan d'Aragon." There's staff (i.e., standard) notation only in that book. But they're very much geared toward the classical guitar. If you take a piece like "The Hermit," for example, the way it's written makes it accessible to the classical guitar player, and makes it work best on that wide fretboard. But, personal taste aspect for me, is that you lose a lot of those groovy nuances that you can hear in the Renbourn original from the album, The Hermit. For example, the bottom sixth string, it's in dropped D, so the bottom D string bends, instead of the clean A string, fifth fret D note in that book. I prefer to play the eleventh fret, sixth string, because you can bend up to the D in the bass. It's a bit more folky, a bit more groovy. I took some of the Rossetti, but some of it has repetitive phrases, but John also injects a sense of improvisation within the whole feel, so I transcribed some of the original "Hermit" myself and then fused the two arrangements. And then you've got "Pavan d'Aragon" in that (Rossetti's book), which is great, but I recorded it on baritone guitar. I was listening to a guy called Hopkinson Smith, who's a great lutenist, and I love that French lute style, where everything's really low, and there's contrapuntal lines in a super-low register. It felt really satisfying to hear that. Did you like "Sidi Brahim," by the way? Did you get that at the end?

PR: I did! Of course, musically, that piece could stand by itself, without being a collage, but it's interesting that way. What was your concept of it?

CC: When I conceived the possibility of recording a double album, there was no point in having a whole album's worth of collaborations with people who'd already worked with John. They are the real thing and you can go and buy their record already. Throughout the album, I wanted to give these pieces a new slant, a different color. But, I was thinking, it'd be great to get Jacqui (McShee) on here, it'd be great to get Wizz (Jones) on, and Stefan (Grossman), how can I do this? I was listening to an album by the Chieftains, the Irish band. At the end of one of their albums, I think it might be The Long Black Veil, or Another Country, something, you have this idea of having all the guests doing a little bit here and there, but there's some kind of musical thread that holds it all together. I thought, that's how I can get them all together. I don't know if you realize, but halfway through "Sidi Brahim," John Renbourn makes an appearance, himself, which I was really grateful to the family for, for allowing me to use his voice. The concept came late in the day, so I was frantically driving around to their houses, recording them all. That was the concept for the last piece, to get as many people as I could, who'd collaborated with John, all together on one track.

PR: Did it feel like you were taking a break from your own artistic goals while you were doing this album?

CC: This album took two and a half years to make, but it hasn't all been Renbourn for the past took two and a half years. I have recorded other projects, specifically, some music for film and TV, not solo guitar projects. To record someone else's music, it's a bit like a classical musician, isn't it? You're an interpreter rather than a creator, you're not a creative artist, you're an interpreter of somebody else's music. The great thing for me about John's music, as I mentioned before, he liked the idea of reworking compositions, arrangements, and things, so, hopefully, he'd be okay with what I've done to them (laughs).

PR: You're playing some shows in the next few months with guitarist Dariush Kanani, focusing on Renbourn's music. What will those shows be like?

CC: It's a thirty-five date tour of the UK and Ireland. What I wanted to do is perform these pieces live that, for the most part, have never been performed since they were recorded. That's the exciting aspect of this tour. The slightly nerve-wracking aspect is that they take some doing. Dariush is the man for all things Bert Jansch, that's where he comes from, perhaps taken under the wing by Stefan Grossman and nurtured in the role of fingerpicking guitar. He loves all of that Bert and John and Stefan stuff. I haven't seen anyone with that strong a passion before, at that age, as well. I mean, he's in his thirties, and he can really play. I thought, as well as playing the solo pieces I'm going to play live, of John's, its would be great to perform some of his duo arrangements as well. Also, when I created this Abbott recording, I wanted to encompass a broad vibe of John's. It's not all solo guitar. I'd taken a few tracks off that classic Bert & John album, and some from his later output, and some pieces that hadn't even been recorded before. I worked out parts and sent them all to Dariush, and they go in one hand and come out the other, and he can play them. The idea is, we'll start the concert with perhaps three or four duos, a couple from the Bert & John record, and maybe something like "Estampie," both guitar parts, and perhaps, the two-guitar part version of "The Pelican," we've rehearsed and we've got ready to go. And then I'll play a couple of solos, Dariush will play a couple of solos, and maybe one more piece together to finish the first half. Then, for the second half I'll play a straight half-hour of pieces by John that he never performed live. For example, "Pavan d'Aragon," "Faro's Rag," "Lady Goes to Church," "The Hermit." Then, I'll bring Dariush back up and we'll hash out half an hour of Renbourn duos and then finish off with a few songs where we can start improvising and just see what happens from there. He's a great guy to have on tour. So, that's an overview of the project.

PR: What's up next for you? Do you have another album project in the works?

CC: : I haven't really thought about it, actually (laughs). I ought to! I've got quite a few projects I'd like to do. The real tricky part is paying for it all. A solo guitar album is fairly easy to finance, especially because I have a half-decent recording setup. For The Abbott, I recorded all the solo guitar parts with my own equipment, but for all the duo and ensemble stuff you hear on this record, its was all recorded in studios, mostly at a place called The Premises in London, which is a great, old, hard-working studio. I would love to carry on now and produce more ensemble music that perhaps incorporates the guitar, but paying for it is a total nightmare, and the concept of touring it and paying for everybody's hotels and food and playing bigger venues to cover the costs just doesn't seem possible.

PR: You're going to keep teaching, too, right?

CC: Oh, yeah, for sure! I host a residential guitar course in the UK, and I'm going to be spending a fair amount of time in the USA, as well. I haven't been there for quite a long time. I'm due to come over quite a lot in 2024, so I'm looking forward to that.

PR: Is there anything you'd like to add about The Abbott?

CC: I put everything into it. It actually took me quite a while to get all the ensemble pieces organized and recorded. When I listened back to the solo pieces I recorded a year ago, after performing them for a year from time to time, I felt I could play them better now, so I sat down for a couple of afternoons and I rerecorded all the solo guitar parts. I didn't really think about how much it was going to cost, and, one day, I hope to break even (laughs). That's probably not a very rock and roll thing to say! But, it's done now. Sometimes, you've just got to go for it, and I just hope people like it.

© 2023 Patrick Ragains

Here's a partial discography for Clive Carroll:

• The Abbott
• The Furthest Tree
• Life in Colour
• The Red Guitar
• Sixth Sense