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The music retailer ('record shop' doesn't quite work any more, does it?) Fopp have a smallish venue in their basement, which this evening hosted a one-hour set by Fairport Convention, about to celebrate their fortieth birthday, though only one member remains from the line-up of North London teenagers who emerged from the youth clubs into the psychedelic rock underground of 1967, and from the reshuffled group who all but founded English folk rock with 'Liege & Lief'. I've got lots of Fairport recordings but have never seen them live, and as a backlog of work has been building up I decided to make the research trip to London today and follow it up with the Fairport gig.
Fairport seem a relaxed band - when I arrived they had eschewed the green room and were mingling with the audience, about half of whom were regulars. Dave Pegg, on bass guitar since 1970, was downing a swift pint. The set kicked off with Simon Nicol introducing the band, mentioning that he had played the first Fairport gig in May 1967 six miles up the road, and then plugging the new album before saying that it would be churlish to just play material from it at this kind of event when there were people who weren't hard core fans and people who had wandered in from the shop and would want to knwo what Fairport were about. So the memory of Sandy Denny was invoked, and the band launched into the song recently voted the best folk track of all time in the Radio 2 Folk Awards, 'Who Knows Where the Time Goes?'. Simon is no Sandy of course, and although he sings it with familiarity there's also a leavening of experience which changes the song from the young person's sudden consciousness of mortality, to one about a life lived.
Chris Leslie, who has been with Fairport for ten years now, then sang the song from the new album that's receiving the most promotion, 'Keep on Turning the Wheel'. This one doesn't have it, sadly, and this nostalgic song about camping holidays in the 1960s also plays into Fairport's image as a nostalgia piece. The other new songs have more individuality. 'Hawkwood's Army' was a rock-inclined song about the fourteenth-century condottiere, which had a crowd of veteran metalheads and a youthful goth with them (offspring?) behind me stomping and cheering that it was the track they'd been waiting four albums for. Of the older songs, the one I was least familiar with was 'The Widow of Westmorland's Daughter' - Simon disclaimed on behalf of the band and the venue any consequences of anyone who followed the gynaecological advice contained in it - and it was played too loud for me to follow the story. I'll just have to find a copy of the track - I think it's on one of this month's re-releases from the late 1970s.
I ran into an old colleague from TGW there, whom I'd discoursed on folk music, old television and especially Doctor Who with on several occasions. "I didn't know you were a Fairport fan," he said.
"Ish", I replied. It turned out that my ex-colleague, whom I'll call Clement in a piece of lateral thinking, started going to see Fairport around 1975, during Sandy Denny's second time in the group. We had a brief chat outside the store in which I heard Clement's view of 'Rising for the Moon' the album of that year which ended Fairport's hopes of breaking through into the mainstream - good material but let down by an ignorant producer who didn't understand the band - and that the live performances have been consistently better than anything Fairport have produced in the studio since 'Full House' (1970).
So. Am I a Fairport fan? In an armchair sense and not in a Cropredy-going sense, probably yes. I even wrote down the setlist and I'll add more reflections when I've retrieved it and am not on a coach typing in the dark.
Added in the early hours: I definitely still prefer the early stuff and the rock arrangements of traditional material to the new songs, though that might be because most of the new songs aren't up to the standard of, for example, 'Crazy Man Michael' from 'Liege and Lief', which was performed tonight. Simon pointed out that the song was written by two ex-Fairporters, Dave Swarbrick and Richard Thompson, who 'wised up and left'. Afterwards Clement remarked that the problem the band has always had is that its most celebrated periods were when it was full of people who were just too talented to stay together very long, and that inevitably the group will suffer if it's compared with the period when its members included Sandy Denny and Richard Thompson.
On stage, Simon Nicol observed that there have been many 'sad parallels' between the careers of Fairport and the Rolling Stones - but that not all of them hold true, particularly when it's considered that the Stones only paid 1.8% of their income to the Exchequer last year, allegedly. In his introduction, Simon also reflected that the band's longevity might be something to do with their always having been slightly outside the mainstream of popular music: the cynic in me imposed the subtitle 'Almost no-one buys our records'.
Further fannishness was revealed when I sang along to 'Meet on the Ledge', the traditional encore; but there was no 'Matty Groves', alas (though a recent performance by the present line-up, and one by a reconstituted version of the 1969 one, can be found on YouTube) though it would have been odd to be present when the song isn't being acted out.
Fairport seem a relaxed band - when I arrived they had eschewed the green room and were mingling with the audience, about half of whom were regulars. Dave Pegg, on bass guitar since 1970, was downing a swift pint. The set kicked off with Simon Nicol introducing the band, mentioning that he had played the first Fairport gig in May 1967 six miles up the road, and then plugging the new album before saying that it would be churlish to just play material from it at this kind of event when there were people who weren't hard core fans and people who had wandered in from the shop and would want to knwo what Fairport were about. So the memory of Sandy Denny was invoked, and the band launched into the song recently voted the best folk track of all time in the Radio 2 Folk Awards, 'Who Knows Where the Time Goes?'. Simon is no Sandy of course, and although he sings it with familiarity there's also a leavening of experience which changes the song from the young person's sudden consciousness of mortality, to one about a life lived.
Chris Leslie, who has been with Fairport for ten years now, then sang the song from the new album that's receiving the most promotion, 'Keep on Turning the Wheel'. This one doesn't have it, sadly, and this nostalgic song about camping holidays in the 1960s also plays into Fairport's image as a nostalgia piece. The other new songs have more individuality. 'Hawkwood's Army' was a rock-inclined song about the fourteenth-century condottiere, which had a crowd of veteran metalheads and a youthful goth with them (offspring?) behind me stomping and cheering that it was the track they'd been waiting four albums for. Of the older songs, the one I was least familiar with was 'The Widow of Westmorland's Daughter' - Simon disclaimed on behalf of the band and the venue any consequences of anyone who followed the gynaecological advice contained in it - and it was played too loud for me to follow the story. I'll just have to find a copy of the track - I think it's on one of this month's re-releases from the late 1970s.
I ran into an old colleague from TGW there, whom I'd discoursed on folk music, old television and especially Doctor Who with on several occasions. "I didn't know you were a Fairport fan," he said.
"Ish", I replied. It turned out that my ex-colleague, whom I'll call Clement in a piece of lateral thinking, started going to see Fairport around 1975, during Sandy Denny's second time in the group. We had a brief chat outside the store in which I heard Clement's view of 'Rising for the Moon' the album of that year which ended Fairport's hopes of breaking through into the mainstream - good material but let down by an ignorant producer who didn't understand the band - and that the live performances have been consistently better than anything Fairport have produced in the studio since 'Full House' (1970).
So. Am I a Fairport fan? In an armchair sense and not in a Cropredy-going sense, probably yes. I even wrote down the setlist and I'll add more reflections when I've retrieved it and am not on a coach typing in the dark.
Added in the early hours: I definitely still prefer the early stuff and the rock arrangements of traditional material to the new songs, though that might be because most of the new songs aren't up to the standard of, for example, 'Crazy Man Michael' from 'Liege and Lief', which was performed tonight. Simon pointed out that the song was written by two ex-Fairporters, Dave Swarbrick and Richard Thompson, who 'wised up and left'. Afterwards Clement remarked that the problem the band has always had is that its most celebrated periods were when it was full of people who were just too talented to stay together very long, and that inevitably the group will suffer if it's compared with the period when its members included Sandy Denny and Richard Thompson.
On stage, Simon Nicol observed that there have been many 'sad parallels' between the careers of Fairport and the Rolling Stones - but that not all of them hold true, particularly when it's considered that the Stones only paid 1.8% of their income to the Exchequer last year, allegedly. In his introduction, Simon also reflected that the band's longevity might be something to do with their always having been slightly outside the mainstream of popular music: the cynic in me imposed the subtitle 'Almost no-one buys our records'.
Further fannishness was revealed when I sang along to 'Meet on the Ledge', the traditional encore; but there was no 'Matty Groves', alas (though a recent performance by the present line-up, and one by a reconstituted version of the 1969 one, can be found on YouTube) though it would have been odd to be present when the song isn't being acted out.
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