Читать книгу The Mojo Collection - Various Mojo Magazine - Страница 171

Record label: Island

Produced: Joe Boyd and Simon Nicol

Recorded: Olympic Studios, London; January–April 1969

Released: July 1969

Chart peaks: 12 (UK) None (US)

Personnel: Dave Swarbrick (fiddle, mandolin, v); Sandy Denny (v, g); Richard Thompson (v, g); Marc Ellington (v); Ashley Hutchings (b, v); Trevor Lucas (g, pc, triangle, v); Simon Nicol (v, g); Martin Lamble (d, vn); Ian Matthews (v); Marc Wellington (v); John Wood (e)

Track listing: Genesis Hall; Si Tu Dois Partir (S); Autopsy; A Sailor’s Life; Cajun Woman; Who Knows Where The Time Goes?; Percy’s Song; Million Dollar Bash

Running time: 35.42

Current CD: Island IMCD61 adds: Dear Landlord; The Ballad Of Easy Rider

Further listening: What We Did On Our Holidays (1968); Liege & Lief (1969); Sandy Denny – The North Star Grassman And The Ravens (1970). Hear an alternative take of A Sailor’s Life on Watching The Dark, a 3-CD retrospective of Richard Thompson. Other favoured Fairport albums are Full House (1970) and Rising For The Moon (1975)

Further reading: Meet On The Ledge: Fairport Convention, The Classic Years (Patrick Humphries, 1997); www.fairportconvention.com

Download: HMV Digital; iTunes

In its long, chequered history, Top Of The Pops has screened many bizarre TV moments. Few, perhaps, quite as mad as the sight in 1969 of Fairport Convention performing the Bob Dylan song If You Gotta Go, Go Now – Cajun style. With Richard Thompson on accordion, Ashley Hutchings playing double bass with a French loaf and Dave Mattacks on washboard, the song leapt to the dizzy heights of Number 21 in the British charts, their only hit. ‘We were,’ mused Hutchings, ‘very impetuous in those days, very sparky. There was certainly a feeling of experimentation, great energy then.’

Unhalfbricking played a crucial role in the Fairport story, marking the arrival of Dave Swarbrick on fiddle and the first hint of their epochal step into serious folk music territory. It was also the album they’d just finished when drummer Martin Lamble was killed on the M1 in May ’69 as roadie Harvey Branham drove their transit van near Scratchwood Services on the way back from a gig in Birmingham. The band were still in shock when the album was compiled by Boyd and released, and they almost split completely. Eventually they opted to regroup with Swarbrick as a full-time member and Dave Mattacks as drummer. (It was this line-up that cut Liege & Lief.)

Unhalfbricking stands as a folk rock benchmark; Thompson believes it’s better than its more celebrated successor. While there was a real sense of fun about the Cajun influence of Million Dollar Bash, Cajun Woman and If You Gotta Go (which they translated into French), Thompson weighed in with a dramatic composition which provided a signpost to his songwriting future, Genesis Hall, and singer Sandy Denny contributed her greatest song, Who Knows Where The Time Goes? But most profound of all was their epic arrangement of A Sailor’s Life. ‘Sandy used to sing Scots ballads in the bus or dressing room, and that’s really what got them intrigued by British traditional music,’ explains producer and manager Joe Boyd. ‘She specifically played them A Sailor’s Life, which she used to do in the clubs. I went to see them in Bristol and heard them do it for the first time and it was wonderful. How do you put a rock’n’roll attitude to a traditional ballad? There it is.’