“Suddenly folk rock is respectable again”, read the title of an article in Melody Maker magazine in February 1970. “Two years ago, folk rock was something of a dirty word. Folkies didn’t understand why so many of their heroes were going electric, and your true rocker didn’t like anything that didn’t pound along like a thundering herd. Today, thanks to the Fairport Convention, the word could become respectable again.” I cannot think of a better introduction to this article, dedicated to the music that Fairport Convention, a British folk rock royalty if there is one, was making in 1970.
At the end of 1969, after an eventful year full of tragedies, personnel changes and no less than three albums released, Fairport Convention was again at a crossroad. Following the release of the folk rock genre-defining album Liege and Lief, two critical members of the band departed to form the own groups. Band founder and bass player Ashley Hutchings started another formidable group, Steeleye Span, and lead singer Sandy Denny formed the band Fotheringay (more on these groups in the next article in this series). For many bands that seismic event would have been fatal. But Fairport Convention was a resilient group, and as they have demonstrated a year earlier, they rebounded and had a fantastic year in 1970.
Their first task was finding a new bass player to replace Ashley Hutchings. On the recommendation of violin player Dave Swarbrick they auditioned Dave Pegg, a former member of Ian Campbell Folk Group where he played an upright bass. The band was somewhat hesitant, thinking that his traditional folk roots were too timid for the amplified sounds they were producing. But they decided to give it a go, and a wise decision it was. Richard Thompson remembers: “We were auditioning at the Roebuck pub in Chiswick, southwest London, not an easy commute from Birmingham, but we were still surprised when he turned up an hour late. He later revealed that his own car wouldn’t start that morning, so he’d had to borrow his dad’s. There was something wrong with the steering, though, and it couldn’t make right turns, so Dave had had to figure out a route from Birmingham to Chiswick only turning left!”
Dave Pegg’s commitment to the audition was one thing, but his technical and musical abilities on the bass sealed the deal. Producer Joe Boyd, the band’s manager at the time, recalls: “Throwing him in at the deep end, they took ‘Matty Groves’ and ‘Tam Lin’, with those impossible bass lines of Ashley’s, at breakneck speed. Dave Pegg blinked and tore into what Swarb had warned him to learn by heart. I watched from the doorway as Fairport’s future took shape in front of me. Pegg played everything they threw at him with a hooligan edge that Ashley could never have matched. The legendary rhythm section that would grace albums by so many different artists had just been formed.”
The new lineup of Fairport Convention was then finalized, and the only issue to resolve was the monotony of first names. Thompson: “The immediate crisis facing us was having three Daves. So no one got called Dave – we had ‘DM’ (Mattacks), ‘Peggy’ (Pegg) and ‘Swarb’ (Swarbrick).”
As they did in the summer of 1969 when they moved to a house in Farley Chamberlayne to write and rehearse what became Liege & Lief, Fairport Convention now looked again for a house where the full band plus families can live and work on their music. The premises were found at a deserted village pub in Little Hadham near Ware. The establishment, named The Angel, was spotted by Simon Nicol and road manager Robin Gee. Nicol tells us about the inhabitants and the Spartan conditions at the place: “As things turned out, the Angel was OK even though it was pretty basic and freezing cold. It ended up as quite a headcount there. Robin and Richard were the only singles at first, though another roadie called David Harry joined us later. The rest of us were married – DM and his missus, me and mine, Swarb with his wife and stepdaughter, and Peggy and Chris with their baby daughter. One bathroom, one sink, one kettle for all of us! But everybody was happy and it worked socially. We were remarkably tolerant of one another: ‘Who’s had my bleedin’ cornflakes?’ Nobody would do the washing up though – it would mount up until Chris Pegg put on her marigolds and put us to shame.”
Musically, the close proximity of the band members to each other, plus the ample room for rehearsal, did only good as they started working on their next album. There was also plenty of socializing around the hi-fi systems, as Dave Pegg testifies: “Living like that, everyone got to share each other’s musical tastes. You had to because we all had our own stereos and the walls were thin. I remember that everyone was into the Band’s ‘Music From The Big Pink’ and you’d have several copies playing at once, different tracks from different rooms, or the same track at different points but sometimes, by a rare fluke, in sync.”
The band had to face the fact that they lost their lead singer, and not just any singer, but one of the best female singers in the history of British music. They made a brave decision not to replace Sandy Denny, or perhaps a practical one, as she was simply irreplaceable. None of the band members was a natural singer, and most of their vocal experience came from filling the duties of backing vocals. Although hesitant to boot, Richard Thompson and Dave Swarbrick emerged as the main vocalists due to the fact that they wrote most of the material and connected closely with their songs.
The band spent the time at The Angel honing their craft, and each of the members delivers a fantastic performance on the resulting album. Full House was released in July 1970 and it features some of the best instrumental sections in Fairport Convention’s repertoire. Richard Thompson talked about how he adapted his electric guitar playing to folk music: “When you introduce an alien instrument into a long musical tradition, you have to shape it to fit the modes, quirks and practices of the culture, and it was no different with the electric guitar. People like Davey Graham and Martin Carthy had molded the acoustic guitar to fit the tradition, but the electric posed different challenges, having more of a single-stringed, horn-like approach. My part-Scottish background meant that I had always been attracted to modal music and the drone of instruments like the bagpipe, and I had incorporated some of this into my playing in Fairport.” It did not hurt to have in the next room the formidable Dave Swarbrick, an expert musician when it comes to traditional British music: “From Swarb I was learning the decorations – the subtle slides, trills, turns, hammer-ons and pull-offs of the fiddle repertoire. Swarb also had an individual style that was truly English, even when he was playing Scottish and Irish music. His bowing was incredibly fluent, and I have no idea where it came from – perhaps just his own genius.”
The songwriting collaboration between Richard Thompson and Dave Swarbrick yielded my favorite song on the album and one of the best in the band’s repertoire. Thompson tells the story: “Swarb would usually start the process with a tune he had come up with. I would figure out a harmonic structure and then try to come up with a lyric. Swarb’s sense of melody was fairly unique; when I asked him about his influences, he’d mention some obscure music-hall duo from the 1920s. I never knew if he was pulling my leg, but his tunes didn’t sound like anyone else’s. I think the first song we wrote together was Sloth.”
Just a roll, just a roll
Just a roll on your drum
Just a roll, just a roll
And the war has begun
Sloth is the longest track on the record, clocking at over nine minutes. Performed live it would sometimes extend to twice that length. The band would add an instrumental section that was designed to give the illusion of a musical spiral: every time the chord sequence comes round, it appears to lift to another level.
Thompson also shades some light into the song name’s origin: “The title may be misleading; we were rehearsing two new songs, one slow and one up-tempo. The slow one had the working title ‘Slowth’ and the fast one ‘Fasth’; the latter became ‘Walk Awhile’, while ‘Sloth’ never shrugged off its temporary name.” Over the years people have wondered about the title, asking if it has something to do with the deadly sin, or about indifference in a time of war. Thompson: “As with most songs, it is what you want it to be.”
Richard Thompson talked about playing long instrumentals around that time: “In 1967 it was certainly allowed to play long instrumentals. Pink Floyd was doing it, the California bands were doing it—you could get on stage and play a guitar solo for 20 minutes and people were not surprised. They were actually expecting it in some cases; it was almost the standard at the time. So in Fairport we would sometimes include longer instrumental passages in songs, and probably the one where it becomes more patterned on the British tradition is ‘A Sailor’s Life’ on the Unhalfbricking record.”
Dave Swarbrick – vocals, fiddle, viola
Richard Thompson – vocals, electric guitar
Dave Pegg – vocals, bass guitar
Dave Mattacks – drums, percussion, bodhran
Simon Nicol – vocals, electric & acoustic guitars
Another favorite track on Full House is Doctor of Physick, also co-written by Richard Thompson and Dave Swarbrick. Thompson: “This is a traditional-sounding parody of a cautionary tale for young girls. I had been reading other nineteenth-century classics, such as Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and James Hogg’s Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner, and was here expressing some late Gothic ideas. Swarb’s melody is clearly based on traditional tunes, but it has modern twists that take it to unexpected places, both melodically and rhythmically.”
This was a unique lineup of Fairport Convention, a band who up to that point had could not keep the same lineup between two albums. The camaraderie was second to none and the mutual respect comes clear in the music. Simon Nicol was brutally honest and quite in owe of his bandmates’ musicianship: “Just as Richard as a guitar player is – and always was – first in a field of one, so Peggy is genuinely one of the great bass players. He isn’t limited by received wisdom on what can and can’t be done on the bass. Like Richard, there’s no barrier between the thought and the sound. Those instinctive intuitive musicians tend also to be very modest about their talent. I have to learn to play the more complicated stuff: in a way my body and the instrument are obstacles between what I want and the sound. Whereas with Richard, Swarb or Peggy, there is no gap, no struggle.”
Full House was released in July of 1970 with a gatefold sleeve that included what Simon Nicol described as, “a bizarre take on mediaeval sports and games almanac in the style of an hallucinating Tolkien.” Here is one example: “AT SUHHY-SHEW: At a game of endurance, Sir Pat’s stamina and evasiveness made him a popular winner at Hardwicke last Handsel Monday. Several ropes cut by desperate opponents, White Lady suffering a broken spine and several internal rapture of spleen and kidneys. Brought to a sudden finish by appearance of headless horseman.” Richard Thompson, who created these nonsensical tidbits, said this about his idea of liner notes: “I felt liner notes should not yield relevant information on a first reading; rather, they should puzzle and confuse, and continue to yield next to nothing over a period of years.”
After the band completed recording the instrumental tracks for the album at Sound Techniques studios in London with sound engineer John Wood, they went on their first US tour in May 1970, playing venues such as the Fillmore West (opening for Jethro Tull) and a week-long engagement at the famed Troubadour club in Los Angeles. Sitting at a table in the club was a young Linda Ronstadt, eyes glued to the stage. The enthusiastic audience in the club kept calling the band for encore after encore, until the band ran out of songs to play. From the stage they asked the lovely Linda to come up and sing. “I know no British folk songs”, begged the damsel, distressed. “No problem, we know all of yours,” replied the stage. Joe Boyd continues the story: “She was shoved onto the stage by her friends, and Simon Nicol asked if she still did ‘Silver Threads’ in the same key as on record. She nodded and bravely sang the first two acapella notes, not knowing what to expect when the band came crashing in. To hers and the audience’s amazement, they played her arrangement perfectly.” Unfortunately that performance was not recorded.
But we do have a live document from that year, captured when the band returned to the US only a few months later. This time they played the Fillmore East in New York, the Fillmore West in San Francisco, the Philadelphia Folk Festival, the Boston Tea Party and again a week at the Troubadour. And who comes to one of their performances at the club but their British mates Led Zeppelin, who dropped in after playing to 20,000 fans at the L.A. Forum. Richard Thompson recalls a story involving two drummers, world apart in nature: “John Bonham sat at DM’s kit and went through the head of the snare drum in thirty seconds, before just about destroying the rest of the kit, all to the horror of an ashen-faced DM in the front row of the crowd.” Joe Boyd recalls how the feeling of amazement reciprocated when it came to RT’s finesse on the guitar: “I remember Fairport doing one of those jigs and reels pieces while Page tried to play it. It was a pretty good attempt and then Richard Thompson took over and played the rest. Page just looked at Richard with this ‘What planet are you from?’ look on his face. He just couldn’t imagine how Richard could do what he did, that fast.”
The shows at the Troubadour in September 1970 were recorded, later released on the album Live at the L.A. Troubadour. Here is a take on one of Fairport Convention’s classic tracks, Matty Groves, originally from the album Liege & Lief. Joe Boyd on that performance: “Richard can’t be said to improve on Sandy’s reading, but it is much more violent and probably fits the song and arrangement better.”
Full House’s release garnered positive reviews in the press. Melody Maker wrote in its review of the album the month it came out: “The band’s entity, although experiencing changes in musical shape at each turn, has survived the alterations in personnel to emerge with increased solidity and esprit de corps. The successful outcome can be heard to great effect on their latest album, Full House, where they perfectly reveal their talents of depth, sensitivity and sureness of touch, placed within the context of English folk-rock.”
We close with another favorite song of mine. Towards the end of that eventful year, the band released a single. The A-side is the wonderful ‘Now Be Thankful’, written by Richard Thompson and Dave Swarbrisk and sang by the latter. The B-side had the following curious title, an attempt to get into the Guinness Book of World Records: “Sir B. McKenzie’s Daughter’s Lament For The 77th Mounted Lancers Retreat From The Straits Of Loch Knombe, In The Year Of Our Lord 1727, On The Occasion Of The Announcement Of Her Marriage To The Laird Of Kinleakie”.
Sources:
Beeswing: Losing My Way and Finding My Voice 1967-1975, by Richard Thompson
White Bicycles: Making Music in the 1960s, by Joe Boyd
Sleeve notes from Full House booklet, 2001 CD release
Sleeve notes from Live at the L.A. Troubadour booklet, 1986 CD release