Shooting from the hip here, so feel free to kindly counter this claim in comments, but I suspect there was no more prolific group on either side of the Atlantic in 1969 than Fairport Convention, and only Led Zeppelin achieved more impactful strides within those 12 months.
FC is the subject of this installment of #TuesdaysWithJerry, my journey through A&M Records’s past, in tribute to that label’s late co-founder Jerry Moss. I’ll get to why you’re as likely to find UK editions on Island Records as stateside pressings.
Budding singer-songwriter and future guitar legend Richard Thompson helped launch the band in ‘67 alongside fellow six-stringer Simon Niccol and bassist Ashley Hutchings, initially rehearsing in a house called Fairport (hence the moniker) on the same Muswell Hill street where the Davies brothers grew up to become the Kinks. Heavily influenced by Dylan and the Byrds, this core cut their self-titled debut by the end of that year, issuing it in June ‘68 — by which time fans and critics alike were referring to them as ‘the British Jefferson Airplane.’
By the start of ‘69, however, everything began to change, and rapidly. Vocalist Judy Dyble was replaced by vastly superior Sandy Denny, the most vital female figure in British folk-rock history bar none. Her ethereal presence was first felt on ‘What We Did on Our Holidays,’ from January — although A&M, having just inked a US distribution deal with Island, released it as another self-titled set (Cotillion put out the real debut) with an alternate cover shot of the group, stoking both marketplace confusion and the Convention’s collective ire.
That LP contained one of Thompson’s most enduring staples, ‘Meet on the Ledge.’ The next batch, ‘Unhalfbricking’ (upper right), sported not one but three Dylan obscurities — including then-unreleased ‘Basement Tapes’ remnant ‘Million Dollar Bash’ — plus an eventual classic from Denny, ‘Who Knows Where the Time Goes?’ Closing out Side 1, meanwhile, was the piece many consider the first fusion of centuries-old British folk and contemporary rock, ‘A Sailor’s Life.’
Before that excellent if transitional album surfaced in July ‘69, however, tragedy struck.
Driving home from a Birmingham gig in May ‘69, Fairport Convention’s van crashed on the M1 motorway, injuring everyone but killing 19-year-old drummer Martin Lamble and Thompson’s then-girlfriend Jeannie Franklyn. The back-cover photo of ‘Unhalfbricking,’ with the band gathered at a dining table, instantly became a haunting reminder: ‘The shirt and the leather waistcoat I’m wearing are what I had on when the crash happened,’ bassist Ashley Hutchings later recalled. ‘I can clearly remember them being bloodstained. You don’t forget things like that.’
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Nor do you merely keep calm and carry on — and yet, after a few months of soul-searching, that’s precisely what the ensemble’s survivors did. Enlisting fiddler Dave Swarbrick as a full-fledged member (he’d first appeared on ‘A Sailor’s Life’) and filling Lamble’s sad vacancy with drummer Dave Mattacks, they quickly recorded what’s widely regarded as the most pivotal album in British folk history, ‘Liege and Lief’ (bottom right).
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Thompson and Denny continued to contribute top-shelf songs, and the group’s overall playing had never been more progressive, but the focus this time largely shifted to rearranging traditional tunes. Such material dominated this fourth Fairport effort, most evidently in the LP’s two epics: the riveting murder ballad ‘Matty Groves’ and the entrancing Scottish faerie tale ‘Tam Lin.’ UK music has never sounded the same since.
Dropping that December, ‘Liege and Lief’ was Fairport Convention’s *third* set from ‘69 — although by the time it arrived their lineup had changed once more, as co-founder Hutchings and siren vocalist Sandy Denny quit before that revisionist disc turned up in shops. Both left to further expand trad-folk in other guises, the former with Steeleye Span, the latter with her group Fotheringay.
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Thompson would last only one more album with FC, 1970’s oft-overlooked ‘Full House.’ Come ‘72, he’d offer his solo debut (‘Henry the Human Fly’) and marry creative partner Linda Peters, these days still known as Linda Thompson despite divorcing Richard a decade later. Their catalogs, together and apart, remain deep wells of masterful songwriting.
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Denny, of course, is still probably best-known to many ears as the lilting counterpoint to Robert Plant in the Tolkeinesque piece ‘The Battle of Evermore’ from Led Zeppelin’s indestructible fourth LP. An inveterate alcoholic who greatly suffered from manic depression, she had a habit of flinging herself down stairs or off stools for humorous effect — until one such slip, whether pratfall or accidental isn’t clear, ended in a head-bashing in March ‘78. A few weeks later another fall left her first in a coma, then dead at 31.