Fairport Convention - Suzanne

 #Fairport Convention #Sandy Denny #Ian Matthews #Ashley Hutchings #Richard Thompson #folk rock #British folk rock #electric folk #British folk #psychedelic folk rock #1960s #Leonard Cohen cover

Fairport Convention has long been British folk-rock with the emphasis on British and folk, but listeners most familiar with their revved-up interpretation of traditional English ballads (and like-minded originals) often forget that the band started out as the U.K.'s response to Jefferson Airplane. Heyday collects 12 performances (ten of them covers) recorded for the BBC during the early period when Sandy Denny and Ian Matthews were both singing for the group (and a bus accident had not yet taken the life of original drummer Martin Lamble). While most of the songs were written by noted American folk-rockers of the day, the Fairports put a very individual stamp on every selection here; if you don't think you ever need to hear another version of Leonard Cohen's "Suzanne" or Bob Dylan's "Percy's Song," you might well change your mind after hearing Fairport work their magic with them, and their takes on Joni Mitchell's "I Don't Know Where I Stand" and Gene Clark's "Tried So Hard" actually improve on the very worthy originals. Fairport Convention approaches these songs with taste, skill, and subtle but potent fire, and Richard Thompson was already growing into one of the most remarkable guitarists in British rock (and if you're of the opinion that he doesn't know how to be funny, check out his goofy double entendre duet with Sandy, "If It Feels Good, You Know It Can't Be Wrong"). While Fairport Convention would create their most lasting work with Liege and Leif and Full House, Heyday offers delightful proof that this band's talents (and influences) took many different directions, and it captures one of the band's better lineups in superb form.  From: https://www.allmusic.com/album/heyday-bbc-radio-sessions-1968-1969-mw0000201000

Suzanne takes you down to her place near the river
You can hear the boats go by, you can spend the night beside her
And you know that she's half-crazy but that's why you want to be there
And she feeds you tea and oranges that come all the way from China
And just when you mean to tell her that you have no love to give her
Then she gets you on her wavelength
And she lets the river answer that you've always been her lover

And you want to travel with her, and you want to travel blind
And then you know that she will trust you
For you've touched her perfect body with your mind

And Jesus was a sailor when he walked upon the water
And he spent a long time watching from his lonely wooden tower
And when he knew for certain only drowning men could see him
He said all men will be sailors then until the sea shall free them
But he himself was broken, long before the sky would open
Forsaken, almost human, he sank beneath your wisdom like a stone

And you want to travel with him, and you want to travel blind
And then you think maybe you'll trust him
For he's touched your perfect body with his mind

Now, Suzanne takes your hand and she leads you to the river
She's wearing rags and feathers from Salvation Army counters
And the sun pours down like honey on our lady of the harbor
And she shows you where to look among the garbage and the flowers
There are heroes in the seaweed, there are children in the morning
They are leaning out for love and they will lean that way forever
While Suzanne holds the mirror

And you want to travel with her, and you want to travel blind
And then you know that you can trust her
For she's touched your perfect body with her mind

Fairport Convention - Time Will Show The Wiser

 #Fairport Convention #Ian Matthews #Ashley Hutchings #Richard Thompson #folk rock #British folk rock #electric folk #British folk #psychedelic folk rock #1960s #music video

Fairport Convention’s wonderful performance from the French TV Show "Bouton Rouge" was broadcast live on 27 April 1968 and features the original Fairport Line up of Judy Dyble, Iain Matthews, Simon Nicol, Tyger Hutchings, Richard Thompson, and the late Martin Lamble playing Morning Glory, Time Will Show The Wiser and a simply awe-inspiring mind-melting performance of Reno, Nevada. At this time Fairport had just released their first album and were very influenced by American folk rock and psychedelic groups like Jefferson Airplane, Bob Dylan and The Byrds. The sound, look and name of the band led many to think that either they were an American band or at best just a British version of Jefferson Airplane. The star of the show is definitely Richard Thompson who is seen here in mega guitar hero role. After a fairly muscular solo in Morning Glory he delivers an astonishing perfectly paced 4 and a half minute six string marathon in Reno Nevada - so full of power, invention, imagination that the solo seems to run away with itself. Is Richard playing the guitar or is the guitar playing Richard? For the duration of this nearly 5 minute solo they are no longer the British Jefferson Airplane copying their heroes but arguably go beyond anything the Airplane, Grateful Dead or other San Francisco bands were doing in early '68 (although it must be said that the Dead would start to achieve similar high levels of  jazz inspired improv syncopation before the year was out but that is another story and post). And to top it all the band just look so damned cool. As the solo finishes Judy Dyble slowly gets up and wanders back to the microphone and the whole band just have a look of “Hey, this is nothing special. We are this shit hot every night.” After this performance they signed with Island Records, Judy Dyble left the band to be replaced by Sandy Denny and they went off to reinvent British folk rock.  From: http://strangerthanknown.blogspot.com/2013/01/fairport-convention-bouton-rouge.html

Fairport Convention - It's Alright Ma, It's Only Witchcraft

 #Fairport Convention #Ian Matthews #Ashley Hutchings #Richard Thompson #folk rock #British folk rock #electric folk #British folk #1960s

It could be said that Fairport Convention was the first true second-generation folk-rock band, in that its initial repertoire and model came not from folk songs, but from imported folk-rock records. In our days of worldwide simultaneous releases and block-long music megastores, it can be easy to forget that in 1967, even LPs on Vanguard and Elektra could be hard to come by in England. To learn songs by Love, Richard & Mimi Fariña, and Jim & Jean commanded the same kind of obscurist archivism that American teenagers of the late 1950s and early 1960s needed to locate Alan Lomax field recordings, Library of Congress LPs, and Folkways releases. This is what Fairport Convention, formed in North London by guitarists Richard Thompson and Simon Nicol and bassist Ashley Hutchings, did to master a repertoire that likely was unduplicated anywhere in the British Isles in 1967. Over the next few months the lineup was filled out by drummer Martin Lamble, singer Judy Dyble, and singer Ian Matthews. Except for Hutchings, all were still in their teens (Nicol was only 16), and, except for Matthews, who'd been on a 1967 pop-rock single by the Pyramid, none of them had played on any records.
"When I received the invitation to check out Fairport I knew absolutely nothing about them," recalls Matthews. "All I knew was that they were beginning to establish themselves as an underground favorite, by playing regularly at the UFO club in Covent Garden. But the crowd I was running with at the time were listening to a completely different genre of music. The day I met the band for the first time they had gathered in a small studio in south London called Sound Techniques, to record their first single. I was between homes at the time and I walked in with my suitcase and a dozen albums under my arm: Tim Hardin, Richie Havens, Tim Buckley, The Byrds, David Ackles etc. I believe these albums got me the job, because it was coincidentally exactly what they were all listening to, plus Dylan, Joni and Richard Farina, of course.
"At the time no one in the band was writing with any seriousness, so we dug deep into that type of approach for inspiration and for stage material. I don't think anyone apart from possibly Joe Boyd had any vision of where the band was headed, or what we might become. We were developing something and placed no boundaries on it. At the back of our minds American folk-rock was the happening thing, both musically and inspirationally. We loved the Airplane, and the two lead vocalist approach appealed to us. Because of our name and our scruffy onstage presence, lots of people around that time thought we were American, and considering the possible rewards, we were not about to attempt to dispel that presumption."
"Wherever Fairport played when we started in '67, there were groups playing improvisational music to a large extent," says Hutchings. "They'd start out on a chord formation and maybe sing a few words, and that would just be the vehicle to go off and paint colors instrumentally, for long stretches. There was really almost no one else tackling the best singer-songwriters and what one might loosely call contemporary folk music. Eclection were the only band I can think of right now touring England at that time who impinged on our territory. Why that is, I don't know. It's just how it was. "And I'm glad it was, really, because we wouldn't have stood out. And we did stand out as a band. In the early days, we weren't that good. But we stood out because we played these short, intelligent, rather lovely songs, and no one else was doing them. Pentangle came from a whole different area. We didn't consider that we were anything like Pentangle. They played acoustic instruments, but also they came largely from the jazz side. They swung the folk. We rocked the folk."
The band's first album, 1968's Fairport Convention, is often dismissed as an irrelevant curiosity due to its dissimilarity to the group's later, more British folk-fueled efforts. To the contrary, it is a highly credible and enjoyable, if derivative, West Coast-styled folk-rock album, owing much to the early Byrds and (particularly in the male-female vocal harmonies and vocal solo tradeoffs) Jefferson Airplane. The songs they covered would have been obscure to almost anyone on either side of the Atlantic: Joni Mitchell's "I Don't Know Where I Stand" and "Chelsea Morning" (both of which she had yet to release), Jim & Jean's "One Sure Thing," the Merry-Go-Round's "Time Will Show the Wiser," and Ben Carruthers's "Jack o' Diamonds," the last of which is a true affidavit to their record-collecting prowess, as it's doubtful the original 45 could have sold more than a few copies. More importantly, the band showed itself capable of writing strong original material in the same mold.  From: http://www.richieunterberger.com/fairport.html 

Whippersnapper - Lizzie Wan

 #Whippersnapper #Dave Swarbrick #British folk #British folk rock #contemporary folk #acoustic #folk supergroup #ex-Fairport Convention

Whippersnapper were a four-piece acoustic band formed by Dave Swarbrick, Chris Leslie, Kevin Dempsey, and Martin Jenkins in Northamptonshire during 1983. Although none of the others could quite compare with Swarbrick's long experience or near-legendary status, each of the others brought something substantial to the table at the outset of the group's history - Chris Leslie was a musical instrument maker as well as an experienced violinist (who had Swarbrick's playing as a model); guitarist, singer, and percussionist Kevin Dempsey had played in Dando Shaft, and had experience with Latin music as well as Celtic and English folk repertory; and multi-instrumentalist Martin Jenkins had played with Matthews Southern Comfort and was also an ex-member of Dando Shaft, as well as a Bert Jansch alumnus. As a result, the group's work was highly anticipated by folk enthusiasts, as a unique all-acoustic supergroup. The group made its debut in January of 1984 at the Burnt Post in Coventry and subsequently played the Cambridge Folk Festival, a performance that was captured on video as well.
Their music was a deceptively complex brand of progressive folk, driven by the presence of four full-fledged virtuoso players. Whippersnapper spent most of their first year honing their sound and repertory, which started out fully formed, drawing on the song-bags of all four members. As a result, their debut album, when it came time to do it - recorded for their own Whippersnapper label - came together very quickly. The Promises long-player was recorded in December of 1984 and in stores just about eight weeks later, and well received by fans and critics. A second LP, Tsubo, didn't appear until 1987, and it was similar in form and structure to the first. A third studio album was intended, but in the interim the quartet issued These Foolish Strings, a compilation of four years' worth of live recordings. The fourth album, Fortune, was released in early 1990, and also marked the end of Swarbrick's involvement with the group. The group continued as a trio of Leslie, Dempsey, and Jenkins, and Leslie and Dempsey recorded the LP Always with You, released in 1996. Dempsey eventually teamed up with Swarbrick anew, while Leslie joined one of the latter-day lineups of Fairport Convention.  From: https://www.allmusic.com/artist/whippersnapper-mn0000247625

Fairport Convention - Doctor Of Physick

 #Fairport Convention #Richard Thompson #Dave Swarbrick #folk rock #British folk rock #progressive folk #1970s

The Fairports recall the making of 1970's Full House, the band's first album without founding member Ashley Hutchings and with new boy Dave Pegg “On my 22nd birthday - November 2, 1969 - I went to Mothers club in Birmingham with my ex-wife Christine to see Fairport Convention,” says the group’s current bassist Dave Pegg. “I had never seen them before but I knew [violinist] Dave Swarbrick from his work with Martin Carthy and I had played with him in the Ian Campbell Group.
“It was a new approach to traditional music,” he recalls. “It was such a great band: the interplay between [guitarist] Richard Thompson and Swarbrick instrumentally, and of course Sandy Denny’s singing and the great rhythm section of [drummer] Dave Mattacks, [rhythm guitarist] Simon Nicol and [bassist] Ashley Hutchings. I was blown away and said to Christine, ‘I would love to join that band.’ And bizarrely I got a call next day from Dave Swarbrick saying, ‘Ashley is leaving the band, would you come for an audition?’” Pegg, who had played in rock bands in the Birmingham area including The Uglys with Steve Gibbons and The Way Of Life with future Led Zeppelin drummer John Bonham, landed the job. The following month, Fairport released the epochal British folk rock statement Liege & Lief, but its release coincided with Sandy Denny also quitting the band.
“It was a blow to lose them both but the mood was optimistic,” Richard Thompson recalls. “We thought it would be hard to replace Sandy, so let’s not replace her. We knew that the vocals would not be as strong, but instrumentally we were a very strong band. In the history of Fairport there had always been personnel changes. This was a big one, but our attitude was to soldier on.”
“It removed the rudder and the best part of the engine room of the Good Ship Fairport,” says Simon Nicol.“But at the same time we’d got this incredible energy coming from Dave Swarbrick. He was a born-again musician because he was a full member of a band for the first time in his life. There was a sense of, ‘I really like this and I’m really going to make it work.’ He made up for the loss of the engine room in many ways. And so we became a boy band.”
On Liege & Lief, Fairport had made the decision to incorporate more traditional British and celtic elements into their music, an approach they carried on to their next album, 1970’s Full House. Stylistically, much of this was essentially still uncharted territory. Musicians had long been playing medleys of traditional jigs and reels, but not in an electric rock band. Fairport were effectively learning on the job and were all in their early 20s, except Swarbrick who was 28, and Nicol who was still just 19.
Before he joined Fairport Convention the summer of 1969 Dave Mattacks had played in a dance band and various pop groups. “On Liege & Lief I was very much, on an aesthetic level, the deer in the headlights. I had no idea what I was doing,” he says. “I was responding to the music around me and starting to grasp it. Then I had a huge light bulb moment when I got what the band was about, and it had a profound effect upon how I wanted to play and how I heard music. But even on Full House, I can still hear a very green drummer.”
Speaking to the four surviving members who played on that album, it’s striking how much they respect each other’s playing. “Ashley had a very distinctive style that contributed to the early Fairport sound,” says Thompson, “but Peggy was much more funky, more solid. And it was astonishing that he started to play jigs and reels on the bass an octave or more under everybody else. That virtuosity became a part of the Fairport sound and was unveiled on Full House.”
Pegg describes Swarbrick as a “walking library of tunes” and for Full House he had put together the dazzling instrumental medley Dirty Linen, on which the bass player came into his own. “I knew something about traditional music from having played with the Campbells,” he adds “On Dirty Linen I play the bass in unison with all the other guys and was able to keep up with them. It got me a bit of a reputation, but to be honest, the only reason I played in unison was I hadn’t got a clue what else to play on it! The Flatback Caper medley is another thing that hadn’t been done before. That was kind of proggy, with Swarb and I both playing mandolin.”  From: https://www.loudersound.com/features/the-story-of-fairport-conventions-full-house

Fairport Convention - The Deserter

 #Fairport Convention #Sandy Denny #Ashley Hutchings #Richard Thompson #folk rock #British folk rock #electric folk #British folk #1960s 

Fairport Convention may not have been the first to combine British and Celtic roots music with rock, but Liege and Lief was certainly the most effective and successful thrust in that direction, opening the ears of the music world to a new kind of sound. Surprisingly recorded while some of the members were still recuperating from injuries sustained in a horrible auto accident that killed their drummer and Richard Thompson’s girlfriend, Liege and Lief sounds as fresh and alive today as it must have sounded when released in late 1969.
“The Deserter” tells the tale of one of the unluckiest people who has ever lived. A victim of impressment into the British Navy, he tries to escape but is turned in by a comrade, for which he receives three hundred and three lashes (not of the erotic variety). A persevering little cuss, he tries to desert again and his girlfriend rats on him. This time the punishment is death, from which he is rescued in this song by Victoria’s Prince Albert in an ex deus machina role. Sandy Denny pointed out that the song’s origins went further back than the Victorian era and that it was common for broadside printers to “bring songs up to date.” The most poignant aspect of the song is the deserter’s commitment to forgiveness; after the whipping and the death sentence, the line, “May the Lord have mercy on them for their sad cruelty,” reminding us of an aspect of Christianity that has entirely disappeared from the current American version of that religion. Dave Swarbrick’s string work is marvelous on this piece, as are the paired guitars that add a certain sweetness to the tale, reflecting the essential sweetness of the deserter’s soul.  From: https://altrockchick.com/2016/09/19/classic-music-review-liege-and-lief-by-airport-convention/

Fairport Convention - Percy's Song

#Fairport Convention #Sandy Denny #Ian Matthews #Richard Thompson #folk #folk rock #British folk rock #electric folk #British folk #1960s #Bob Dylan cover

The best British folk-rock band of the late '60s, Fairport Convention did more than any other act to develop a truly British variation on the folk-rock prototype by drawing upon traditional material and styles indigenous to the British Isles. While the revved-up renditions of traditional British folk tunes drew the most critical attention, the group members were also (at least at the outset) talented songwriters as well as interpreters. They were comfortable with conventional harmony-based folk-rock as well as tunes that drew upon more explicitly traditional sources, and boasted some of the best singers and instrumentalists of the day. A revolving door of personnel changes, however, saw the exit of their most distinguished talents, and basically changed the band into a living museum piece after the early '70s, albeit an enjoyable one with integrity. When Fairport formed around 1967, their goal was not to revive British folk numbers, but to play harmony-and guitar-based folk-rock in a style strongly influenced by Californian groups of the day (especially the Byrds). The lineup that recorded their self-titled debut album in 1968 featured Richard Thompson, Ian Matthews, and Simon Nicol on guitars; Ashley Hutchings on bass; Judy Dyble on vocals; and Martin Lamble on drums. Most of the members sang, though Matthews and Dyble were the strongest vocalists in this early incarnation; all of their early work, in fact, was characterized by blends of male and female vocals, influenced by such American acts as the Mamas & the Papas and Ian & Sylvia. While their first album was derivative, it had some fine material, and the band was already showing a knack for eclecticism, excavating overlooked songs by Joni Mitchell (then virtually unknown) and Emitt Rhodes.

What We Did on Our Holidays
Fairport Convention didn't reach their peak until Dyble was replaced after the first album in 1968 by Sandy Denny, who had previously recorded both as a solo act and with the Strawbs. Denny's penetrating, resonant style qualified her as the best British folk-rock singer of all time, and provided Fairport with the best vocalist they would ever have. What We Did on Our Holidays (1969) and Unhalfbricking (1969) are their best albums, mixing strong originals, excellent covers of contemporary folk-rock songs by the likes of Mitchell and Dylan, and imaginative revivals of traditional folk songs that mixed electric and acoustic instruments with a beguiling ease.

Liege & Lief
Matthews had left the band in early 1969, and Lamble (still in his teens) died in an accident involving the group's equipment van in mid-1969. That forced Fairport to regroup, replacing Lamble with Dave Mattacks, and adding Dave Swarbrick on fiddle. Their repertoire, too, became much more traditional in focus, and electrified traditional folk numbers would dominate their next album, Liege and Lief (1969). Here critical thought diverges; some insist that this is unequivocally their peak, marking a final escape from their '60s folk-rock influences into a much more original style. This school of thought severely underestimates their songwriting talents, and others feel that they were at their best when mixing original and outside material, and contemporary and traditional styles, in fact becoming more predictable and derivative when they opted to concentrate on British folk chestnuts.

Full House
The Liege and Lief lineup didn't last long; by the end of the '60s, Ashley Hutchings had left to join Steeleye Span, replaced by Dave Pegg. More crucially, Denny was also gone, helping to form Fotheringay. Thompson was still on board for Full House (1970), but by the beginning of 1971 he too had departed, leaving Nicol as the only original member.

Angel Delight
Fairport have kept going, on and off (mostly on), for the last 25 years, touring and performing frequently. It may be too harsh to dismiss all of their post-Thompson records out of hand; Angel Delight (1971), the first recorded without the guitarist on board, was actually their highest-charting LP in the U.K., reaching the Top Ten. Nicol's exit in late 1971 erased all vestiges of connections to their salad days. Fairport was now not so much a continuous entity as a concept, carried on by musicians dedicated to the electrified British folk style that had been mapped out on Liege and Lief. 

So it continues to this day, supported by a devoted fan base (Dirty Linen, the top American roots music magazine, originally began as a Fairport Convention fanzine). Denny would actually return to the group for about a year and a half in the 1970s, prior to her death in 1978; Nicol rejoined in 1976. Keeping track of Fairport's multitudinous lineup changes is a daunting task, and the group has coexisted on an erratic basis with the various other projects of the most frequent members (Nicol, Mattacks, and Pegg, the last of whom has played with Jethro Tull since the late '70s). They began playing annual reunion concerts in the 1980s (sometimes joined on-stage by Fairport alumni like Thompson), events that turned into some of the most popular folk festivals in Europe. They also released some albums of new material intermittently throughout the last couple of decades, mostly pleasant traditional-oriented outings that appeal primarily to diehards.  From: https://www.allmusic.com/artist/fairport-convention-mn0000162233/biography