Song 178: “Who Knows Where The Time Goes?” by Fairport Convention, Part One, Going Electric

A History of Fucked Music in 500 Songs by Andrew Higgy Song 178 Who knows where the time goes by Fairport Convention Part 1 Going Electric Before we begin, this episode has some minor discussion of alcohol abuse and ends with a description of a fatal car crash. If you're likely to find those things upsetting, you may want to read the transcript or skip this one. Folk music went electric twice, and both times Joe Boyd was there when it happened. Boyd is someone who has turned up in the background of several previous episodes of the podcast in one capacity or another, but we've not really looked at him in great detail before. But he's someone who absolutely needs to be talked about, because from the mid 60s through the early 70s, Joe Boyd was one of the vital links between the US and UK versions of the counterculture and the musical underground, and his influence can be heard all over the music made both on the west coast of America and by British folk rock, psychedelic and progressive musicians of the period. Boyd grew up in Princeton, New Jersey, and his love of music really started when in 1954, when he was 11, his family got a TV set and he started watching Bandstand broadcast from Philadelphia. Not yet American Bandstand, which at the time was almost entirely devoted to Black R&B and Do-Wop acts, who Boyd started twidling eyes. In Boyd's telling of the story in his autobiography, Dick Clark taking over the show in summer 1956 marked the point at which Boyd started to lose interest in it, but Boyd soon had an even better source for discovering Black music. Because 1956 was the year that RCA released what Boyd in his autobiography describes as �one of the great compilation LP's of all time�. Except that's downplaying it a bit, because the RCA Victor encyclopedia of recorded jazz is not just one LP, but a 12 LP box set. I have to say here that it is possible that Boyd is talking about a different collection. He calls it the RCA Victor encyclopedia of jazz without the recorded. And one of the artists he mentions as being on it, Sleepy John Estes, is not on the collection I am talking about. But I think the preponderance of evidence is that Boyd is talking about this set. This was given to Boyd by his grandmother as a Christmas gift, more or less as a random choice as she knew he liked music but didn't know anything about it. And it introduced Boyd to multiple whole worlds of music he'd never been exposed to before. The collection contains Dixieland from King Oliver, Big Band Swing from Benny Goodman and Tommy Dorsey, Folk Music from Hudy Ledbetter, Boogie Woogie from Meadlux Lewis and Jimmy Lunsford and recordings from Jelly Roll Morton, Cab Calloway, Big Spider Beck, Lionel Hampton, Dissy Gillespie, Charlie Parker and many others. It was about the best possible introduction to black influenced American music, not just pure jazz, that anyone could hope for at that time. Boyd and his brother were both hooked and started collecting every blues and jazz record they could get their hands on, along with a new friend of theirs with a similar interest, Jeff Muldore. It was in 1960, around the time he turned 18, that Joe Boyd made the decision that would change his life. He had been reading the country blues by Samuel Charters, the first history of what we now think of as the blues, but which was still at that point just a mostly ignored sub-genre of the blues. The music made by solo performers, usually male, usually accompanied by guitars, people like Robert Johnson, Blind Lemon Jefferson and Blind Willie MacTell. Charters book is, as Charters himself would later acknowledge, a very flawed book, but it was a hugely important one and it is the book that codified the idea of blues music that became the one held by all the white musicians in the 60s blues revival. But what fascinated Boyd was reading about Ralph Pia, the record producer we talked about last time. While, as we have said many, many times in this podcast, there's no first anything, Pia was the record producer who is credited with what are at least popularly considered both the first blues record, Mamie Smith's Crazy Blues, which, while it was not the first, was certainly the most important early blues record, and the first country record, Little Log Cabin on the Hill by Fidelin John Carson. Pia also recorded hundreds of important early blues folk and jazz records, including the famous day when in the same session he produced the first records by both the Carter family and Jimmy Rogers. And in reading about him, Boyd realised something. He knew he could never be a musician. He'd tried learning the piano as a kid and got nowhere. I knew he just didn't have the talent in that area, but he was absolutely certain he was a good listener. He knew a good record from a bad one. He could hear things in the music and see connections to other music, and he could understand how it was put together and how it could be improved. He had an ear. He could be a record producer. Except. All the music he liked was pre-war blues and jazz music. He'd grown out of the rock and roll he'd listened to as a kid. That was music for dancing to at parties, but it wasn't for listening to, and it wasn't like there were many job openings for a band. And then he heard a record on the radio that made everything click into place. He suddenly realised. Fat Stomino was clearly from the same tradition as Jelly Roll Morton. The rock and roll that kids were dancing to at parties was the same stuff as the blues and jazzy band listening to for years and training his ears on. He actually could be a record producer. There would be several years before he made this ambition a reality, but 1960 was also the year when he took his first very tentative steps into the music industry by promoting his first concert. We've talked a little about Lonnie Johnson in this podcast before, but as a refresher he was one of the biggest black artists of the 20s through 40s. In fact in many ways he was three of the biggest black artists of the period, because he had three overlapping but distinct careers, all of which were massively influential. One of these was his career in jazz guitar. Johnson is in fact often credited with having invented the guitar as a lead instrument in jazz and being the first person to play single note string bending solos with a pick. The style that became the standard in almost all guitar based popular music. Though, again, there is no first anything. In the 1920s Johnson had played guitar on Louis Armstrong's Heart of the Met. And on Duke Cullington's The Mooch. That work is generally considered to be the most influential guitar playing of the 1920s, maybe of the 20th century, in the way it changed people's approach to the instrument. His most commercially successful work though came in the 40s, when he became a singer of sophisticated blues based pop music in much the same style as Nat King Cole or Bill Kenny of the Inkspot, with records like I Found a Dream. And his multi-million selling at R&B number one, Tomorrow Night. That was also one of the first songs covered by Elvis Presley in his initial sessions at Sun, even before recording That's All Right Mama. So the career that was the most influential in the long term was his other career as a country blues solo performer. Playing records like 1927's Lonesome Ghost Blues. Or 1928's Life Saver Blues, which Robert Johnson later rewrote as malted milk. Robert Johnson indeed particularly idolised Lonnie Johnson and used to pretend he was related to him to impress people. By the early 1950s, Johnson regarded that material as passe and not worth thinking about anymore. And the black audiences for whom he performed had moved past it to newer styles like his smooth pop songs. But a small audience was growing for that material among white music lovers on both sides of the Atlantic. The first Johnson knew about this was when, as we discussed in the episode on Mock Allen Line, he travelled to the UK in 1952 to perform for an audience that, it turned out, expected country blues and what utterly baffled by Azerbaijan's new material, though one of the other performers on the bill, Tony Donoghan, changed his stage name to Lonnie in memory of performing on the same bill as one of his musical heroes. That trip to the UK had been his last performance for many years. On his return to the US he moved to Philadelphia and by the late 50s the man who 10 years earlier had been having multi-million selling hits was working as a janitor. But then he had been rediscovered by a local DJ, Chris Albertson, who produced albums of new material for him, starting in 1960. Joe Boyd was a regular listener to Albertson's show, and before he even took Johnson into the studio, Albertson mentioned that he'd tracked him down. Boyd and his friends were astonished. The actual Lonnie Johnson was living in Philadelphia, only 90 minutes from Princeton where they were. He was a real person, not just a name on old record sleeves. Why, you could probably just phone him. And they did. They found his name in the phone book and asked if he would come and play a gig for them. He said he would for $50, so they got him to perform in a neighbour's living room and told all their friends they would have to chip in. They ended up raising $100 for what was Lonnie Johnson's first gig in 8 years. He explained to the teenagers that when he'd got back from the UK trip where he'd gone down very badly, he'd found his girlfriend had run off with his money in his guitars and had been demoralised and given up on music. Johnson at first insisted on singing standards and ballad material for his teenage audience, telling them, White people always think Negroes just play the blues, I can sing anything. Estanze would become known for taking over the next decade as he was rediscovered by young white college crowds like Boyd. But on this occasion at least, Johnson eventually relented and played some of his blues repertoire. Over the next short while, Boyd would put on similar gigs for other artists like Big Joe Williams. And Sleepy John Estes. But as he put it in his autobiography, I was beginning to grasp some of the recurring themes in my life. The tension when artists from a poverty stricken community confront the spoiled offspring of the educated middle class, and the conflict between the latter's desire to hear the real thing and the former's desire to be up to date. Hearing traditional musicians when they first emerge from their own communities is a wonderful experience but impossible to repeat. The music is inevitably altered by the process of discovery. Boyd spent his student years in Mechden, the Massachusetts folk scene, hanging out with people like Eric Von Schmidt, a big influence on Bob Dylan, and he took a semester off from Harvard to work for a small record label in LA. When he graduated from Harvard he approached Joan Buyers as manager Manny Greenhill to see if he could help him get involved in the music business. Greenhill was also the manager of Sonny Terry and Brianne McGee, and he contacted George Ween, the jazz pianist who founded the Newport Jazz and Folk festivals on Boyd's behalf. Green was promoting a European package tour to be called the Blues and Gospel Caravan, which featured Terry and McGee along with Muddy Waters, sister Rosetta Tharp, cousin Joe Pleasant, Reverend Gary Davis and Otis Spann. He needed a tour manager and Boyd got the job. Boyd's responsibilities included looking after the musicians on the tour, all of whom he was a fan of, comparing them on stage, picking the backing musicians, and generally organising the show itself. This initially led to some problems. Muddy Waters, for example, was annoyed that not all of his own band would be travelling with him, and Boyd had naively assumed that all these musicians would know each other's work and be willing to join each other on stage at different points in the show. Instead, many of them didn't know of each other prior to the tour, and of those who did, some didn't like the people they did know. But over the course of the tour, the musicians ended up becoming much closer to each other, and collaborating in the ways that Boyd had fantasised about. Happily we have footage of that tour. Johnny Hamp, the head of light entertainment at Granada TV in Manchester, was known primarily for two very different types of programming. He was the creator of hugely popular series like The Comedians and The Wheel Tapers and Shunters Social Club, which preserved a very particular type of stand-up comedy, a type that has now gone out of fashion and which relied a great deal on extremely racist and sexist material, but he also made huge contributions to music TV. He was the producer who put the Beatles on TV for the first time, before their first record was even released, that footage of undoubtedly seeing of them in the cavern. He also produced the music of Lennon and McCartney TV special in 1965, and specials focusing on Little Richard, Jerry Lee Lewis and Count Basie, among others. But in particular, Hamp is responsible for producing TV specials based on the Blues tours put on by Chris Barber and others in the early 60s. When those tours would reach Manchester, where they almost always played the free trade whole, Hamp would put on a TV special featuring the artists, and so for example he's responsible for the only footage and existence of Hal and Wolfe performing Aint Superstitious, among other important bits of Blues history. And for the 1964 tour that Boyd was tour managing, Hamp devised the Blues and Gospel train. The TV special we talked about way back in the episode on Sister Rosetta Tharp, with the various participants, other than Gary Davis, who was sadly too drunk and remained unfilmed, performing at the disused train station on Wilder Humboldt in Manchester. Boyd had been successful enough in his tour management role, that he was given a similar role for a bigger, more prestigious tour that Wien was putting on, the Newport Jazz in Europe tour, which featured Tharp again, along with, among many others, Miles Davis, Cullman Hawkins, Dave Vrubeck and Rassan Roland Kirk. That tour was much less successful, but he came back to the US enthused by the British Blues and rock musicians he had seen, and went to see his old friend Paul Rothschild about the idea of forming a folk rock supergroup, as he put it, though that is undoubtedly a retroactive phrasing, as at the time there were no folk rock groups. Their efforts indirectly led to the creation of the Lovin' Spoonful, several of whose members were in Boyd's general circle, and Boyd was also responsible for the Butterfield Blues band taking on Mike Bloomfield, who Boyd introduced to the group. For the next short while, Boyd ping-ponged between the US and the UK, doing various jobs in the behind the scenes part of the music industry. Boyd had an admirably eclectic approach to music, and while he loved the blues and jazz, and was getting increasingly interested in rock music, he was also a lover of traditional British folk music, and on one extended trip to the UK he stayed for a while on the sofa of Bill Lieder, one of the most important folk music producers in Britain, whose records were largely recorded in his own kitchen or bedroom with curtains as the only noise dampening. Because of this, Boyd was present for the sessions that led to Frost and Fire by the family group The Watercens, an acapella album of traditional songs associated with the turning of the seasons, which revolutionised traditional English folk recording. But Boyd was also still involved in the very different American folk music scene too, through his work for George Wean. On his return to the US in the spring of 1965, he worked first on that year's Newport Jazz Festival, and then went straight on to work at the Newport Folk Festival. We talked about the 1965 Newport Folk Festival in the episode Unlike a Rolling Stone, and I won't cover that ground in too much detail here, but in brief there was a running feud throughout the festival between members of the festival board over the inclusion of the Paul Butterfield Blues Band. On the one side were a traditionalist faction led by Pete Seeger and Alan Lomax, who were not in favour of the group's inclusion because they weren't authentic Chicago blues. They were a multiracial band of young people and suspiciously close to rock music. If they were going to have a Chicago blues act on the bill, which Seeger and Lomax weren't opposed to in principle, why not get an authentic act like Muddy Waters or Howlin' Wolf rather than these young rockers? On the other side of the argument was P.T. Yarrow of Peter Paul and Mary, one of the other founders of the Folk Festival, but it was believed by most of the people involved that he was merely acting as a proxy for Albert Grossman, who was Peter Paul and Mary's manager, and was also now the manager of the Butterfield Blues Band. Joe Boyd was not on the board and did not have a say, and nor was Paul Rothschild, Boyd's friend who he had brought in to work the sound for the event, but it's easy enough to see where their sympathies lay, when you remember that Boyd was the one who had introduced the band to their guitarist, while Rothschild was currently in the process of producing the group's debut album. It was eventually agreed that the group should be allowed to perform, and they did so on the morning of July the 23rd. While the performance went well, the atmosphere backstage was furious. Allen Lomax had introduced the group as part of his Blues Workshop, and had given them what Grossman thought was an insulting introduction. Grossman had challenged Lomax as he came off stage after the introduction, and while that performance we just heard was going on, Grossman and Lomax were busily rolling around on the floor fighting each other physically. Lomax then tried to get Grossman banned from the festival, and nearly succeeded until someone pointed out that doing so would mean that Odetta, the Jim Queskin Jug Band, Peter Paul and Mary, and Bob Dylan would also be pulled from the bill, losing about half the major act anyone had paid to see. Partly because of this controversy, Bob Dylan, who had done an acoustic set earlier in the festival, chose for the Butterfield Band, Barry Goldberg on keyboards, Mike Bloomfield on guitar, Jerome Arnold on bass, and Sam Leon drums, to accompany him in what would be his first public electric performance. Cal Cooper, who along with Bloomfield played on Dylan's recent sessions, also joined. Boyd and Paul Rothschild were between them responsible for getting the sound set up for one of the most legendary gigs of all time. Boyd was backstage with Pete Seeger, Theodore Becquell and Alan Lomax when Dylan's set started. And all three older men were overwhelmed by the sheer volume, and ordered Boyd to turn the sound down. Boyd pointed out that he couldn't turn the sound down from backstage, and when he was asked where the soundboard was, he explained to these much older men that if they went round the fences and threw the gates it was a journey of a quarter of a mile, or they could always climb the fence like he did. They ordered him to climb the fence, and relay a message from the board to Rothschild at the soundboard, telling him to turn the volume down. Boyd got there to find Rothschild, Yarrow and Grossman all grinning at the reaction, and Yarrow gave two messages to convey back. The first was verbal, tell Alan the board is adequately represented at the sound controls, and the board member here thinks the sound level is just right. The other was a raised middle finger. Shortly after that Rothschild got Boyd a job working for Electra Records. Given that Boyd had contacts in the British music scene, his job was to head up the British officers of the label, and it was in that capacity that he had his first go-up reduction. Rothschild had been putting together a blues compilation, and Boyd had mentioned that there were a lot of good blues musicians in the UK, and offered to produce a few tracks to fill the compilation out. Jack Holtzman, the head of Electra, was visiting London at the time, and so officially took charge of the session. But by all accounts it was Boyd who was in charge of the production, and who put together the supergroup, Eric Clapton and the Powerhouse, that recorded the first version of Clapton's take on Crossroads. Soon after this, Boyd took his first step into the world of producing folk music. He signed to both the production and management contract, the folk group The Incredible String Band. A trio on their first album, by their second album in 1967, The Five Thousand Spirits or The Layers of the Union. The Incredible String Band were a duo of Mike Hevyn and Robin Williamson, making strange psychedelic folk music quite unlike anything else out there. The Incredible String Band were a duo of Mike Hevyn and Robin Williamson, making strange psychedelic folk music quite unlike anything else out there. By the time that album came out though, Boyd had been sacked from his Electra job, though he was still producing the Incredible String Band for the label. Fundamentally, Electra had hired him to promote the label's American artist in the UK, while he was more interested in producing records for British artists. He'd quickly become involved in the burgeoning underground scene, including being at the first meetings of the London Free School, the organisation which instigated the famous Notting Hill Carnivals. He started producing records that were connected to the hippie scene fairly early on, starting with novelty records like Granny Takes a Trip by The Purple Gang. Granny Takes a Trip always first class and she's well equipped for the movie auditions in Hollywood Town. She always turns up but she's always turned down. While also producing folk records, including one by the violinist Dave Swerbrick who had gone to play a major part in this story, with guitarists Martin Karthi and Diz Dizli. Much of this was done through Boyd's new production company, Witch Season Productions, which he named after the Donovan song Season of the Witch, and which also tried to sign the Pink Floyd, the big band in the underground scene in London at the time. The Pink Floyd's management eventually cut Boyd out of their deal, but he did produce their first single, Arnold Lane, working at Sound Techniques Studio with John Wood, Boyd's favourite engineer. Boyd learned his lesson from this and started signing acts to deals where he was the manager as well as the production company, the same kind of package deal that Andrew Oldham had done with The Rolling Stones, or that Lamerton Stamp were doing with The Who. Boyd was at this time also running the UFO club, the most important underground club in London at the time, where bands such as the Pink Floyd, the Soft Machine and The Move, Boyd had tried and failed to sign to Electra, would perform regularly, as would more eccentric acts like the Bonzo Dog Doodah band and the Albert's. And it was one of the bands to play the UFO club who would take folk music electric in a very different way than Dylan had a couple of years earlier. The song that made Joe Boyd take notice of Fairport Convention was East West. The Butterfield Blues band track had already established itself as a classic showcase for Mike Bloomfield's guitar heroics. So when Joe Boyd was watching Fairport sat at a small strip club in Soho, not especially impressed by them, he thought they were biting off more than they could chew by covering the track. But when their lead guitarist Richard Thompson started his solo, all Boyd's doubts flew out of the window. This was someone who was, if anything, better than Bloomfield. Boyd decided to sign them immediately. At the time Boyd signed them, Fairport Convention were being thought of, and essentially promoted, as a British equivalent to Jefferson Airplane. But they had already gone through several stylistic transitions in a fairly short time. They had started out as a band led by bass player Ashley Hutchings, who gave himself the nickname Tiger in homage to William Blake, in Muswell Hill. That band had performed under a huge variety of names, including the Still Waters, the Blues Reads, Dr K's Blues Band, Tim Turner's narration, the Electric Dysentry and the Ethnic Shuffle Orchestra. Their earliest gigs were played at Northbank Youth Club in Muswell Hill, which had previously been the venue for some of the King's earliest shows. One fan of the multiply-named group in those early days was a young man named Sam and Nickel, who soon joined them on guitar. According to Nickel, the group had started out as a country music drug band, playing music quite close to Skiffle with washboards and so on, before getting influenced first by the love and spoonful, and then by the birds. After Nickel joined the group, Hutchings moved into a building that had been a doctor's surgery run and owned by Nickel's father, which the family had turned into rented flats after his father's death, and the group started rehearsing in some of the space in the building, which was called Fairport. The next person to be brought in was a young guitarist named Richard Thompson. Thompson had been brought up in a family with a very strict father, but one who had multiple sides to him. Thompson's father was a Scottish Presbyterian who had moved to London to become a policeman, but had also always had an interest in both literature and in music. Thompson Sr. played a little guitar, and while he liked a lot of the mainstream pop music that people of his generation liked, much of which is Sundesmisters Gros, he also liked the music of the Scottish accordion player Jimmy Shand, who later became a huge influence on his son. And it was something of a jazz lover, especially the music of Django Reinhardt. He would later, when his son became a rock musician, try to suggest that he should add Dinah, a song which Reinhardt had recorded with Stefan Grapelli, to his set lists. While Thompson would later laugh about that suggestion, he was clearly influenced by Reinhardt. His 2015 song Guitar Heroes, about the musicians who inspired him, includes Thompson performing perfect renditions of solos by Reinhardt, as well as Les Paul, James Burton, Chuck Berry and Hank Marvin. Thompson's father gave him his first guitar, and his elder sister's boyfriend, who was a music lover, showed him a few chords, and also introduced him to a wider world of music. Starting with rock and roll but soon progressing to Sonny Terry and Vrani McGee, Snoog's Eagle, and Lightning Hopkins, and the first couple of albums by Dylan, while Thompson was a preteen and in his early teens. By the time he was eleven he was in a band playing Shadows and Dwayne Eddy covers, though that seems not to have gone very far. So when he was in his early teens, he formed a trio with a drummer named Nick Jones and a school friend named Hugh Cornwell, who Thompson taught to play bass, and who later went on to be bassist and lead singer for the Stranglers. By the time he met Hutchings and Nickel, he was determined to become a professional musician, though at the time he was still holding down a day job as an apprentice making stained glass. The group's first gig with Thompson was also their first gig under the name Fairport Convention, the name that has stuck with the group for nearly sixty years. There was also the first example of what would be a recurring pattern in Fairport Convention's career, a change in line-up. The drummer for that first gig, which saw Fairport Convention playing a set of cover versions including Dylan's My Back Pages and Love's Seven and Seven Is, was one's Sean Freighter, who had played with the group when they were called the Ethnic Shuffle Orchestra. But at that first gig two people showed up who had helped shape the band. One was Kingsley Abbott, later to become a well-known music journalist who has written books on the Beach Boys, Phil Spector and Motown. The other was Abbott's friend Martin Lamble. Lamble came up to the group after the show and said that he was a much better drummer than Freighter. After listening to him they agreed, and Lamble was now in the group. The band started to learn more obscure songs, largely from records owned by Abbott and his friends Danny and Richard Lewis, with an emphasis on American West coast performers like Dino Valente and Jefferson Airplane, and singer-songwriters like Bob Dylan and Phil Oakes. Because at this point none of the group was very confident as a singer. And so as this started performing bigger venues and getting more professional, they were on the lookout for singers. First to join was Judy Dible, who had previously been the singer with a group called Judy and the Folkman, who had only played one gig at Hornsey Conservative Association, but of which there is a surviving recording, later released by Dible on a compilation CD. According to Dible, I was sitting in Alexandra Palace one evening when a little man called Tiger Hutchings came along, and I told him I didn't like Eric Clapton, and he said, Oh really, you're mad, would you like to join a group? According to Thompson's autobiography, even before the group fully formed, Dible and Thompson had started dating and Hutchings had introduced them. So the timeline may be a little suspect, but either way Dible joined the group very early on, and it was this line up, Hutchings, Nickel, Thompson, Lamble and Dible, who Joe Boyd first saw performing live, playing at a small strip club. Boyd gave them a gig at the UFO club, and when they went down well with the crowd there, he decided to send them to which season. At that point, Hutchings was the band leader, Dible the lead singer, and Nickel the frontman who made the onstage announcement. But Thompson was clearly the star, and Boyd in particular thought of the band as Thompson's group first and foremost. He wrote in his autobiography, Richard was the key, he can imitate almost any style and often does, but is instantly identifiable. In his playing you can hear his evocation of the Scottish Piper's drone and the melody of the Chanta, as well as echoes of Barney Kessels and James Burton's guitars and Jerry Lee Lewis' piano, but no blues cliches. Like Bix Beiderbecke or Django Reinhart, he is unapologetic about his whiteness. Thompson was though chronically shy at this point, and basically hid on stage when not playing his solos. The group were attempting to emulate Jefferson Airplane with male and female singers, and Thompson was taking the bulk of the male vocals as the best male singer in the band, but at that point he was very uncomfortable doing so, and the group were looking for another male singer. Joe Boyd talked with his friend Denny Cordell, who suggested a singer who at that point was known by his birth name, Ian Macdonald, but who had changed his name in the late 60s to Ian Matthews, partly to avoid confusion with another Ian Macdonald who had a musical association with Dible, so I'll be referring to him as Matthews throughout this episode. Matthews had been in a band called The Pyramid, who had released one single on DRAM produced by Cordell, the summer of last year, at Beach Boys Knockoff with John Paul Jones on bass. With Matthews in the group, they were ready to put out their first single. Which season had come to an agreement with Track Records, the label that Kit Lambert and Chris Stamp, the Who's Marriages, had founded, and Fairport's first record was planned to be the first route of that arrangement. As none of the group was strong songwriters at the time, though Thompson and Matthews were at the beachside, they were looking for material that would not be super familiar to their audience, and they found their first single in Boyd's record collection. If I had a ribbon bow was a folk song popularised in the 1930s in a dance band version by jazz singer Maxine Sullivan. Sullivan's version had been popular with the early 60s American folk revivalists that Boyd had known, and had been recorded by Odetta and Caroline Hester. But none of those versions were particularly known in the UK. The group's version had a diable singing lead and playing harmonium, and the group found Tristan Fry adding vibraphone. It's actually quite a strange production, veering from psychedelic strangeness. To sections that appear up free war jazz, with Thompson's guitar showing the clear influence of Django Van Hart and Lovie Johnson. The track is absolutely unlike anything that Fairport Convention would later become known for. But at a point when free war music was being adopted in various ways by people like the Bonso-Dog-Doodle band or Tiny Tim, and when British psychedelic music was incorporating large elements of nostalgia for music of the era, could have been a success. Unfortunately, it largely fell through the cracks, partly because it came out on track records just at the point that the who would become huge in America as a result of their appearance at the Monterey Pop Festival, and so Lambert and Stamp were understandably putting most of their efforts elsewhere. But it's perhaps not surprising that the band had not yet found their style. The first gig the original four man version of Fairport Convention ever did was in June 1967. Patrick Humphries's biography of Richard Thompson places the gig on the first of June. The same author's book on Fairport Convention says it was the same day that Sergeant Pepper and R.U. Experience were released. But those records were actually released on different dates, the 26th and 12th of May. However, many sources wrongly have Pepper being released on the first of June, so that seems to be the likely estate. If I Had a Ribbon Bow was released in February 1968, barely 8 months after that first gig, and in that time it had three line-up changes with the additions of Lamble, Dible and Matthews. If I Had a Ribbon Bow would turn out to be the group's only release on track. But it was looking around for a more permanent home for which seasons releases, and at first he thought he'd found it in the German company Polydor, which had been distributing track. Boyd decided to release which seasons records directly through them, and Polydor initially made a handshake deal, paying for which season's studio time and operating costs, but letting which season otherwise operate independently. And so the first album by Fairport Convention came out on Polydor. That album showed the kind of act that the very early Fairport Convention were. While seven of the album's 12 tracks were original material, mostly co-written by Hutchings and Thompson, that material was for a large part imitative of American models, and not particularly promising. Often just throwaways that were little more than studio jams. The other five songs were cover versions, mostly of American and Canadian singer-songwriters. In particular, there were two songs by a Canadian songwriter who had not yet released her own first album, Joni Mitchell. Boyd had acquired a demo of her work while he was in the US, and introduced the group to her songs, which instantly became huge inspirations for them. The less successful of the two Mitchell covers on the album, I don't know where I stand, was still impressive enough that when Richard Thompson put out a career retrospective in the mid-70s, it was the first track on the collection. The other, their version of Chelsea Morning, is bemusing for anyone whose knowledge of the song comes from Mitchell's own later version, or from Judy Collins's hit single version of the song the next year. It seems rather to be muddled on the version of it that Dave Van Monk, an acquaintance of Boyd's from his days in the folk scene, though one he rather disliked, released on his album Dave Van Monk and the Hudson Dusters, the first version of the song to be released. However, if it is muddled on that recording, they must have had access to an advance copy of Van Monk's album, as while it was released in April 1968, before a Fairport's album came out, that was several months after the recording sessions for the album had taken place. But Fairport's version does seem to be very similar, though it had some percolating percussion from Lambeau that almost sounds like the electric jug band sound of the 13th The first eponymous Fairport Convention album started an unfortunate tradition that would continue, for several reasons, through their first five albums, of the band changing lineups between recording and releasing the album. In this case, the band decided to get rid of Judy Dible in May 1968, the month before the album came out. Various different reasons have been given for this by different people over the years, with most saying that Dible was simply not a good enough singer. Matthews, for example, said later, I think it became a bit strange between her and everyone, it was increasingly clear that she really wasn't going to make it as a singer in that band, she had a tendency to sing sharp. I don't think I know any other singer that has that tendency. Hutchings concurred, saying, it was very difficult and very sad, I think the band was getting stronger, heavier, and Judy's voice, which had always been light, was suffering because of it. When we started we were quite a light band and played acoustic guitars on occasions, but after we joined we were getting heavier. However, Joe Boyd in his autobiography heavily implies that Dible's sacking was because she and Thompson had ended their romantic relationship. Though Boyd also thought her voice weak, and Dible implied something similar on our own website, saying, Richard and I have been sort of going out since before I joined the band as singer, but the act round was an unspoken halt and then I was unceremoniously dumped by the band just before the album was released. Hmm. Thompson, in his autobiography, seems to split the difference between these two versions of events, saying, Judy, who to my mind, Sean in a quieter setting like a folk club, did not have the vocal strength to sing over a band that was becoming more muscular. She ended up sounding strained and it was doing her a disservice. She had been with us from the beginning, sharing vocals with Ian both on stage and on our first LP, and had been a friend even before she joined the band. She was also my girlfriend, although our relationship had slowly faded away over time under the constant demands of Fairport. She and the band parted ways. We all lived for the band and very little was able to exist outside that. At 18 years old I was fairly hopeless as a boyfriend. I had seen a lot of French cinema where the men were moody and monosyllabic, but while that somehow worked like magic for Jean-Paul Belmondo, it just made me incredibly hard to get along with. It took me a while to get past that. I have to say that on the evidence of the recording she was on, the accusations that Diable's voice was weak don't seem to stand up. She is not as impressive as her eventual replacement, but very few people were, and on her own term she was a fine singer. Diable fairly quickly joined another group though. She had started dating a keyboard and woodwind player named Ian McDonald, the man who prompted Ian Matthews to change his own name, and they placed an advertisement in the Melody Maker looking for musicians to join their band. They got a reply from a band who were already in existence. I know a man and his name is George. A man I know is George and his name. No I know a man George is his hand. George is I know, a man and his name. Giles, Giles and Fripp as their name suggested consisted of brothers Michael and Peter Giles and Robert Fripp, a guitarist who had answered an ad looking for a singing organ player despite being neither a singer nor an organ player. They had released one album, The Cheerful Insanity of Giles, Giles and Fripp, which supposedly only sold 500 copies and were now looking to change their style. Diable and McDonald joined Giles, Giles and Fripp, and over the summer of 1968 they recorded demos for a projected second album. Unfortunately for Diable, the record company weren't impressed with those demos, and soon after that Shea McDonald split up, and she ended up leaving Giles, Giles and Fripp just before Peter Giles left. With Peter Giles' replacement Greg Lake and non-performing lyricist Pete Sinfield, Ian McDonald, Fripp and Michael Giles went on to form King Crimson and to have almost immediate success. Diable instead formed a duo, Trader Horn, named after John Peel's nickname for his children's nanny, with Jackie McCauley, the former keyboard player from them, and they released one album, Morning Way, which has become one of those legendary albums that's talked about with awe among people who love to uncover lost gems of obscure sub-jambers. And one non-album single, Here Comes the Rain. A music festival, the Hollywood music festival in Newcastle Under Lime, was meant to be the group's big break, but before the show Diable quit the duo having had a breakdown of sorts. Their place was given to another act with the same manager, Mungo Jerry, and that group's appearance at the festival helped propel their debut single in the summer time released the day before, to number one. After that, Diable toured briefly with an experimental jazz prog group made up of saxophonist Lull Coxill, Coxill's occasional collaborator Steve Miller, of the band Delivery, not the more famous musician of the same name, and Miller's brother Phil, of Matching Mole, Caravan and Hatfield in the North. That group didn't last long and never recorded. She then retired from music to raise a family for 20 years, before returning to making occasional records and playing shows, sometimes with their old collaborators, until her death in 2020. Fairport Convention's initial plan was to perform without a female singer at all, but very shortly realised that the audiences were asking why Diable wasn't there. As Nichole later said, we felt it would be okay but everybody who came to see us wanted to know where the girl was. We hadn't realised just how much of an infreshing she had created, and we didn't want to go cap in hand to Judy. As it happened, Joe Boyd had already had an idea of someone he thought would be the perfect singer for the group, except that he thought she would intimidate them too much with her hard living lifestyle and they would never go for it. But when they held auditions they came to the same conclusion. The only possible singer to replace Diable was Sandy Denney. Boyd said later, I got a call that Judy was going to leave and that they had been having some talks with Sandy Denney about joining. I was a little alarmed because I felt that she was temperamentally very very different from them and I didn't know how it would work out. But I was impressed that they had gone and talked with them and felt it was a good sign, because they were, at that time, very shy and different people. And Sandy was, to say the least, a very extrovert, strong personality. I was afraid she might dominate the band, but I think I underestimated the stubbornness of Richard and Ashley. Boyd had had good reason to worry though. There were very few people in the British music scene with as stronger personality as Sandy Denney. She had, like Richard Thompson, been born in London to Scottish parents. But while Thompson had had a strict authoritarian father, Denney had been born into a very matriarchal family, dominated by a very straight laced conventional mother, for whom her daughter could never be good or normal enough. This seems to have contributed to opposing tendencies in Denney's personality. She was an inveterate people pleaser and was especially desperate for the approval of her parents which she never got to the extent she wanted. But she was also, unlike most women of her generation, utterly convinced of her own ability and she expected to be listened to as an equal by the men with whom she was working. Her first musical loves growing up were Fat Swallow and the Inkspots, both of them favourites of her fathers, and she would cover both acts in the 70s. Like many musicians we've talked about in these episodes, she had piano lessons as a child, but her teacher gave up on her when she realised that young Sandy was playing the pieces from memory rather than reading the sheet music. She had a good enough ear and memory from music that she couldn't be bothered to learn to read. As a teenager she did some work as a trainee nurse, but by all accounts she was too sensitive a person to cope well with the job. She took it too hard when patients died and she could never properly get used to the sight of blood, but she soon switched to studying at Kingston Art College, a college she picked in part because of its proximity to the barge at Folklub. She had become interested in folk music through a friend of hers who had introduced her to the music of Bob Dylan, and she soon taught herself a few guitar chords and started going to local folk clubs where you could get in free if you would do a few songs. She suffered intensely from stage fright, she would always be terrified of going on stage, but she also found that she loved the feeling of validation she got from the applause of the crowds. At Art College she started hanging around with more folkies, like fellow student John Remborn, soon to become one of Britain's most admired folk guitarists. At this time, Denny Belly knew anything about folk music. Her early sets consisted largely of Bob Dylan and Joan Byers covers, but she soon started to become fascinated with traditional songs. There were at the time numerous splits in the British front music scene, people who were interested in recreating tradition against people who wanted to move the music forward, people who was interested in the music was primarily political, against those who were more interested in the art form as an art form, and so on. In most of these, Denny's side are with what she called the layabouts. Musicians like Remborn and Bert Jancz who were like magpies, picking up bits of music from wherever, rather than people who advocated for a kind of scholarly vigor. She had a genuine love for the old traditional songs she was learning, but it was a love of them as live, current songs, not as artefacts of the past. Carl Dallas, a music journalist and advocate for the ultra-political, ultra-scholarly side of folk music, said of her, she'd stand up and she'd say, I'm gonna sing so and so and I don't know what it's about and I can't remember who wrote it, and made herself look a right idiot. I said, look you can't do that. You must research your material. You must tell them this is a song from Kentucky, tell the story. Well I never even saw her try and do that, it just wasn't sandy. But Dallas was nonetheless impressed by her, saying later, what was later to become an engaging gosheness was at that time sheer wooden amateurism. But that voice even then, before maturity had conferred the understanding that was to make her a supertive interpreter of her own and other people's lyrics, stood out in the crowd. When I heard her I knew, I absolutely knew that this was something else, and I thought she was in totally the wrong place. I thought this woman will never be a folk singer. She's greater than anything like that. I thought that she should be a jazz singer, because I could hear the vocal control. She had a way with a melody even in her very earliest days that was unique in the folk scene. And I told her that. I said, listen to Billie Holiday, listen to Ella Fitzgerald, listen to these people, because you got the voice, what you need is the technique. Gunny soon moved into what were essentially two overlapping communes. One based in a house inhabited by the members of the folk group The Young Tradition, the other the boarding house that Judith P. F. ran for members of the folk community. Other than the Young Tradition, the people in her circles at the time included Janchen Remborn, Roy Harper, Al Stewart, Donovan, and a young aspiring singer named Linda Peters. Most of these were regulars at Les Cousins, the club which became the centre of British folk baroque guitar playing. And their circle also attracted a couple of Americans who were in Britain at the time. Paul Simon and his friend Jackson C. Frank, who became Denny's partner. Frank was a musician who never had the success that he deserved, but he was a huge influence on the entire British folk scene and on Simon who produced his first album. I did a 15 minute bonus on him a few years ago that I later released to the main feed in one of my pledge weeks. So I won't cover too much of that grand again here, but suffice to say that every introspective British singer-songwriter you've heard of, people like Denny or Cat Stevens or Nick Drake, were listening to Frank and learning from him. Denny was one of the handful of people present at the recording of that first album, along with Simon, P.E.P. and Al Stewart. It was apparently her who suggested, when he was having trouble studying his nerves in the recording studio, that he needed alcohol to function. The two would only be together for a short time, but Frank had a profound influence on Denny, and some of the earliest recordings we have of her are home recordings of her singing songs of his, like Blues of On The Game. But while Frank was a massive influence on Denny, he was also someone who was no good for her self-esteem, and the two soon went their separate ways, and it was only then that Sandy Denny really started to flower. Al Stewart said later, it seems as though she was there as this ghostly figure, and then after Jackson went back to America it was like somebody had put their foot on the accelerator, and all of a sudden she was everywhere, and she was a lot better. I think Sandy found another gear in the gearbox after Jackson went back to the States, she became a lot more confident. After Frank returned to the US, Denny dropped out of art college to become a full-time musician, and started seriously writing her own songs. She was also though becoming steadily more hedonistic, gaining a reputation among even the hard drinking folk club set for being a big drinker, and as Al Stewart said of her, she was a mixture of straight-laced school teacher and someone who made Jaius Joplin look like Mother Teresa, completely out of control, not within an hour, within the same sentence. She started to get more commercial gigs, performing on the radio with a group called the Johnny Silver Folk Four, who were mostly playing skiffle material a decade after the end of the skiffle fad. As a result of this, she ended up recording on two budget albums, one a Split album with tracks by Herman by Silver, and one a Hutanary style album featuring Sylvos band and Alex Campbell. Both these albums also featured Denny's versions of Jackson C. Frank's songs. Around this time, Denny's then-boyfriend Danny Thompson, who is no relation to Richard, though the two have collaborated frequently, along with two of her close friends Bert Janche and John Remborn, formed Pentangle, which was to become one of the most important groups on the folk scene, though their experimental nature made it debatable whether the group would even count as folk at all. Denny was apparently incredibly hurt not to be considered for the role of lead vocalist in the group, which instead went to Jackie McShee. Apparently the group's manager was at one point pushing for Denny to be the singer, but the fractious nature of her relationship with Thompson and the amount she drank regularly, dissuaded the group from going with her. Hurt, Denny started looking for another group to join instead. She ended up getting invited to join a trio, Dave Cousins, Tony Hooper and Mon Chesterman, who had started as a bluegrass band called the Strawberry Hillboys, but who had slowly switched to performing their own material in a more psychedelic folk style somewhat along the same lines as the incredible string band, and had shortened their name to The Straubes. Denny and The Straubes performed together for a brief while, including a performance on the BBC World Service, which once again saw Denny singing Blues Run the Game. That appearance led to an offer to make another budget label album, this time in Denmark. The album they recorded, eventually titled All Our Own Work, would not be released until 1973, at a time when The Straubes, after a few line-up changes, had become pop stars for a short while, with the number two hit the year before with the Certificate Song part of the Union. The album was recorded on the cheap. According to Cousins, there was no masking for sound, it was just straight down onto tape. I realised at that time we really needed a drummer. On that album we used a Danish drummer. The mastering machine was three track and sprocket driven, and as a result nobody was very happy with it. Denny sang lead on most tracks which were mostly written by Cousins. But the album did include one song written by Denny, the song that would eventually become by far her most well-known contribution to music. The song that Denny originally titled Ballad of Time was apparently started a while before the sessions, inspired initially by a falling out with Danny Thompson, but only completed in Denmark shortly before the recording. Indeed, who knows where the time goes might not be considered quite complete, that even in this recording, as she would later change the word purple in the opening line to Evening for later, more famous recordings. Joe Boyd first met Denny in June 1967 shortly after those sessions, and after seeing her live he later wrote, I still wasn't convinced. She insisted on performing songs by her American ex boyfriend Jackson C and other undistinguished singer songwriters. Her voice often seemed more big than expressive. She was entertaining company though, her laugh was the loudest thing in a room. But Denny had given him an advance copy of the Straub's album, and Boyd was astonished at how much better her voice sounded on record than it had when she was on stage at Les Cousins. Boyd soon became a champion of Denny as a vocalist, and he considered suggesting her for Fairport Convention, though he initially dismissed the idea. It may also have been Boyd who got that recording of Who Knows Where The Time Goes to David Anderle, Judy Collins' producer. I've never seen an explanation of exactly how he got hold of the recording, but Boyd had, in his Electra days, been responsible for promoting Collins' records in the UK, and Collins was also about to record a gender swapped version of the incredible string bands First Girl I Loved, which Boyd had produced and published, so it seems like a reasonable supposition that the connection came from him. Either way, Collins released a version of the song as a B-side to her hit version of Johnny Mitchell's Both Sides Now, and a different version as the title track of her 1968 album Who Knows Where The Time Goes. Who Knows Where The Time Goes Certainly Boyd was planning to record with Denny in some way, and would likely have suggested her as the singer for Fairport when they split from Diable, despite his misgivings, except that he was in America at the time, and by the time he came back they had already been told by a number of other people, including Carl Dallis and Heather Wood, who sang with the young tradition, that Sandy Denny was the only possible choice for their female vocalist. They held an audition for her, but later admitted it was as much to impress her than persuade her to join the band, as it was to see if she was any good. According to Hutchings, she breezed in like only Sandy did, probably tripped over something, the whole place came alive with this big smile and this big personality, and the first thing she wanted to do was for us to play for her. So we played her a few things and she liked them, and then we asked her to play something and she started to sing. The song she chose to sing was Jackson C. Frank's You Never Wanted Me. She was in the group. But there was a problem while they were recording their second album, What We Did on Our Holidays. Confusingly issued in America later, just as Fairport Convention, as the group's first self-titled album hadn't been issued there. Boids deal with Polydor to distribute which season's recordings had been on a handshake basis, and Polydor had been advancing money for the future records before the contract had been properly drawn up. But then, as so often happens, there was a game of executive musical chairs at Polydor. The person who had actually wanted to work with Boid was moved. All the promises Boid had been made about how his recordings would be treated were not included in the contract Polydor eventually drew up. Boid was stuck owing Polydor a great deal of money for studio sessions they'd paid for, and he would have to sign the unpromising contract because of this. But then he bumped into an old acquaintance, Chris Blackwell, the head of Island Records, a label which had started out putting out ska and reggae tracks by Jamaican artists, but had recently started moving into rock music. Blackwell told Boid he'd been rather hurt that Boid had taken Fairport to Polydor rather than Island, and Boid quickly persuaded Blackwell to advance him the money that he owed Polydor, in return for which he'd moved which season's artists, other than the incredible string band who was signed to Electra, over to Island. This meant at the time primarily Fairport and a young singer-songwriter Boid had discovered named Nick Drake. What we did on our holidays was radically different from the group's first album. This time there were only two covers of songs by singer-songwriters, one each by Bob Dylan and Joni Mitchell. The group actually demoed a lot of cover versions of songs by people like Gene Clark, Tim Hardin and Tim Buckley, but now the group had two songwriters capable of creating great work, and the album was dominated by them. While Thompson's songwriting on the first album had been more promising than impressive, he came into his own with his first truly great song, the group's second single, Meet on the Ledge. That song was apparently inspired by an agreement among Thompson and some of his friends to meet up five years after leaving school, in 1972, at a tree with a large overhanging branch they'd used to climb. But as with many of Thompson's songs, an initially prosaic inspiration became something more affecting, a song whose ambiguity allowed people to find deep meanings in it. Thompson said later, it's a fairly vague song open to a lot of interpretations and proud people can find different things in it. I certainly don't know what I was thinking when I wrote it, a 19 year old trying to take on big subjects like transition, youth, old age, friendship, blah blah. Sometimes you just hit something, being young sometimes means you've experienced nothing, but in moments you see everything. But it's said later with Thompson, he was writing a lot more than anyone knew, but he wasn't showing it to people. But when he did come in with the song it was very good, he had a very good self editing mechanism. Denny meanwhile provided the album's opening track, Fotheringay, a song about Mary Queen of Scott who was imprisoned in Fotheringay Castle for conspiring to kill Elizabeth I, and eventually executed there. While the strongest songs on the album were by Thompson and Denny, the two band members who had gone to be highly regarded as songwriters, the other members did make contributions. Hutchings for example wrote Mr Lacey, a throwback to the band's older style. The Mr Lacey in question was Bruce Lacey, one of the great eccentrics of the British art and music world. Lacey had been a member of the Albutts, a comedy and musical group who had recorded with Spine Milligan. And it also recorded a few singles of their own produced by George Martin, including Morse code melody. The Albutts are a fascinating story all to themselves, and were a vital link between several disparate parts of the British art, comedy and musical worlds. Their eccentric comedy version of Tread Jazz was a huge influence on the Temperance 7 and the Bonzo Dog Duda band in particular, and they were also closely associated with the goons. Not only did they perform with Milligan, but Lacey also appeared in Milligan and Peter Seller's short film with Richard Lester, the running, jumping and standing still film, and made many of the props for former goon Michael Bentin's TV series It's a Square World. He also made small appearances in some of Richard Lester's other films. He had a carrier in Lester's third feature, The Knack, and he can be seen miming the flute part to You've Got to Hide Your Love Away in Help. Lacey's performances often included robots he'd built himself, and for the instrumental break on Mr Lacey, the group got him to bring his robots into the studio and recorded them. The album also though saw the first signs of what would soon become yet another new direction for the group. As inspired by Denny, who had come up through the folk clubs, they included versions of the traditional songs Nottingham Town and She Moves Through the Fair. My mother and mine And my father won't slight you For your lack of kind And she laid her hand on me January 1969, when What We Did on Our Holidays was released. Actually saw what was almost another Fairport convention album released. Al Stewart, Denny's old acquaintance from the Folk Club days, released his album Love Chronicles. That album is now best known for its 18 minute title track, which was one of the first tracks on a major label release to contain a use of the F word, and which was also one of the last sessions played on by top session musicians Jimmy Page and John Paul Jones, who were in the early stages of forming their own band. But much of the rest of the album, rather than session players, features the instrumentalists from Fairport, though for contractual reasons only Hutchings was credited under his own name, with Thompson performing as Marvin Prestwick, choosing Marvin for his guitar hero Hank Marvin of the Shadows, Lambeau as Martin Francis, and Nicholl as Simon Breckenridge. But, as would become the pattern for Fairport convention, by the time What We Did on Our Holidays was released, the band's lineup had already changed. This time it was Ian Mathews who left the group. When Mathews had joined the band, there had been a rock band in the San Francisco style, and that was the kind of thing he wanted to be doing. But by the time they were recording What We Did on Our Holidays, when Thompson was asked about the San Francisco groups, he said, Mathews didn't want to do that. He said, That was my first disappointment when Meet on the Ledge didn't happen. But the breaking point came soon after sessions for the group's third album had started, before the second one had been released. They had only recorded one track for the album, a cover of Dylan's Percy's song. And Denny was, as she sometimes did, sat in the dressing room before a gig, playing a song she had learned off the second album by Martin Carty, imaginatively titled, Martin Carty's second album. They robbed young girls of their hearts delight, leaving them behind for to weep and mourning. They never know when they will return. All best for them, when they will return. As Denny played through the song, we other members of the group picked up their instruments and played along with her, and decided they were going to do the arrangement in the show that night. Mathews said a bit, The first time we did a sailor's life on stage, I remember they worked it up in the dressing room. And I had never worked up in the dressing room in my life. It had always been done at rehearsal. That was my first foray into it, and it didn't appeal to me at all. I think it became increasingly clear that there was really no place for me in a band playing that type of music. The final straw for him, though, came when the group went into the studio to record the track, without even telling Mathews they were doing so. They got Dave Swore Victor coming and playing violin on their new arrangement. Oddly, he had played on seven tracks on the Martin Carty album. So many it was later issued as a duro album, but not on a sailor's life. And it stretched out into an extended 11 minute jam. Soon after that session, Mathews was out of the band. Though it was an amicable enough departure that he remained living in the flat he shared with Thompson and Lambele. Indeed Thompson hutchings in Nickel, along with Drummer Jerry Conway, who would later go on to have a longer association with the various members of Fairport and their offshoot bands. Acted as the backing band on Mathews' first solo album, titled Mathews Southern Comfort, an album which wasn't a huge success but which did have one track, written for Mathews by his new management team, which was later covered by Elvis Presley. After that Mathews formed his own band, also called Mathews Southern Comfort, and had a number one hit with their version of Journey Mitchell's Woodstock. He went on after that to form the group Plainsong, who released a concept album about Amelia Earhart, and then to release a string of country rock albums, often in collaboration with Andy Roberts of the Liverpool scene. One of these, Valley High, was produced by Michael Nesbeth. That album saw Mathews once again providing someone else with a hit. The arrangement that Mathews and Nesbeth came up with for the Steve Young song Seven Bridges Road, was copied wholesale by the Eagles for their 1980 hit single version. Compare Mathews.�� Now I have loved you like a baby. Nesmith later said of the Eagles cover. Son of a gun, if Don or somebody in the Eagles didn't lift our arrangement absolutely note for note for vocal harmony. If they can't think it up themselves they've got to steal it from somebody else, better they should steal it from me I guess. Oddly while Matthews left the group over the way they were turning to traditional material. And even though the group wrote in Dave Swarbrick as a guest musician on several tracks on the album, A Sailor's Life was the only traditional song on unhalf-bricking the group's third album. Indeed in some ways it was closer to the American singer-songwriter style that Matthews liked than the previous record had been. It was mostly made up of songs by Thompson or Denny, but it also featured three Dylan One was Percy's song, the one track to feature Matthews recorded before his departure. And another was C'est tout d'où a partier, a jokey reworking of Dylan's If You Got To Go Now into French, which became the group's one and only hit single. But it was the third Dylan cover that confirmed the group's decision to turn away from American music styles. They had been given access to the tape of demos that became known as the Basement Tapes, as one of the group's approach to record songs from it, and a chosen billion dollar bash. But listening to the Basement Tapes and to music from Big Pink had convinced them that they needed to do something similar but something English. There was no point in them trying to make music like North Americans because they weren't North Americans. They needed to do something that was as close to their own roots as Dylan and the band were to theirs. Thompson's songs on the album were clearly modelled on traditional English folk songs and by no stylistic resemblance at all to the work of the Americans they've been covering, many have suggested that the opening of his Genesis Hall is an attempt at finding common ground with his policeman father. Similarly, the cover of the album was taken outside Denny's childhood home and featured her parents. Apparently because she was afraid that they would try to stop her from continuing with the band if she didn't make that gesture. Oddly, while Denny was the member of the group who at the time had the most knowledge of traditional English folk song, the arrangements on her songs are much closer to the American bands they were wanting to move away from, with the arrangements on Fairport's version of Who Knows Where the Time Goes being pure love of Canyon and Owing a Great Deal to Judy Collins's version. Unhalf-bricking was as big a step forward from what we did on our holidays as that had been from the first album, but once again the lineup of the group that recorded the album wasn't the same as the lineup that existed at the time of its release, but this time for the most awful reason possible. On May 11th 1969 the group were playing at a club named Mothers in Birmingham. The support act for the show was a group called E Collection. The guitarist in a collection was Trevor Lucas, an Australian who Denny had recently started dating. He offered Denny a lift back with him and she took it. But the rest of the band travelled together in their van, along with Jeannie Franklin, Thompson's new girlfriend. Franklin had only recently come over to the UK. She had been an LA seamstress, having design clothes for Paul Revere and the Raiders, the Monkeys, Cass Elliott, David Crosby and others, and there has been some suggestion that the Elton John song Tiny Dancer, with its lines about an LA lady seamstress for the band, might have been inspired by her. Whether it was or not, we know that Jack Nitchie later wrote a song about her, and that Jack Bruce's first solo album Songs for a Tailor was titled For Her. But all of those were tributes, because that night the group's roadie, Harvey Bramham, who was driving the van, was not feeling well and fell asleep at the wheel on the motorway. Richard Thompson, who was sat next to him, grabbed the wheel but overcorrected, and the van crashed. Nickel, who was asleep in the back, was unharmed. But Bramham, Thompson and Hutchings were all hospitalised, and Franklin and Lamble were both killed. Franklin was 26, Lamble was only 19. Fairport Convention would continue, but they would be forever changed. And in a couple of weeks time we'll look at the repercussions of that change. A history of rock music, and 500 songs, is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Each week Patreon backers will get a 10 minute bonus podcast. This week's is on Baby It's You by Smith. Visit Patreon.com slash Andrew Hickey to sign up for as little as a dollar a month. A book based on the first 50 episodes of the podcast, from Savoy Swingers to Clock Rockers, is now available. Search Andrew Hickey 500 songs on your favourite online bookstore, or visit the links in the show notes. This podcast is written and narrated by me, Andrew Hickey, and produced by me and Tilt Arise. Visit 500songs.com, that's 500 the numbers songs.com. To read transcripts and liner notes, and get links to hear the full versions of songs accepted here. If you've enjoyed the show, and feel it's worth reviewing, please do leave a review wherever you get your podcasts. 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