Unfair Fairport Report?

When the university's Turner Sims concert venue circulated the list of upcoming events in 2023, I was interested to notice that the band Fairport Convention were scheduled to play on the weekend before my birthday. I hesitated, but booked us a couple of tickets anyway.

Why the interest, and why the hesitation? Well, where to start? I'm presuming you know who Fairport Convention are, but that's a big presumption and, besides, knowing who they are now – or perhaps, who they are not, and what they have become – was a large part of my hesitation.

For a period in my youth, between about 1969 and 1971 (an eternity in teen-years), Fairport Convention were pretty much my favourite musical act. I had developed an interest in folk music and folk traditions, and this group – who started out as interpreters of what we would now call Americana – had begun to break new ground in the electrification of traditional British folk music, hitherto an exclusively acoustic (and often unaccompanied) enterprise that took place in small rooms, often above pubs, like the Red Lion in Stevenage where my folkie education began (not to mention my career as an underage drinker). This all culminated in the album Liege and Lief, which established a way of bringing folksong to the big stage with electric instruments and drums and created a whole new genre of music, "folk rock", which brought in a whole new audience of youngsters prepared to stand, sit, and dance in muddy fields and cavernous music venues.

At its creative peak the group featured the stellar talents of guitarist Richard Thompson, vocalist Sandy Denny, and fiddler Dave Swarbrick. Rarely does such a constellation come together, and when it does, magic happens: album tracks like "A Sailor's Life", "Who Knows Where the Time Goes", or "Matty Groves" are surely imprinted on the soul of anyone lucky enough to have discovered them at the time. But nothing lasts forever. First Sandy Denny and then Richard Thompson left to launch solo careers; having failed to love the first post-Denny release, Full House, for the remainder of my folkie phase I transferred my loyalty to Steeleye Span, the new venture of yet another Fairport deserter, bass player Ashley Hutchings. But the band limped on with an everchanging line-up, with folkie stalwarts and original members constantly coming and going right up to the present day, creating a certain myth of indestructible longevity, and along the way acquiring a loyal fanbase, and even establishing their own annual festival at Cropredy in Oxfordshire.

So, the actual music both I and my partner had loved so deeply as teenagers is now over fifty years old, and none of the lead musicians who gave it its original character are in the band (both Sandy Denny and Dave Swarbrick died some while ago). More to the point, I have not listened to a single new album of theirs since Full House – there have been twenty-five studio albums alone – and I'm very aware that the core audience attracted to their Cropredy festival is not really my "crowd". As one strapline on the band's own website declares: "Fairport did for real ale what the Grateful Dead did for LSD". Enough said. Mind you, I don't much like the Dead or their fanbase of "deadheads", either. Look, I can't help being burdened by good taste.

So we went along on Saturday night armed with a degree of apprehension, not sure what sort of evening to expect. It started well enough. The support was from Hanna Sanders and Ben Savage, a talented young pair, with great acoustic guitar work and vocal harmonies. Hanna's voice in particular is pure and powerful, quite reminiscent of Maddie Prior or at times Jacqui McShee in their heyday. However, it also has to be said that they did rather remind me of similar folk-couplings I often saw in folk-clubs in the late-60s and early-70s – Bob and Carole Pegg [1], or Maddie Prior and Tim Hart, anybody? – and their repertoire also seemed surprisingly dated ("Let No Man Steal Your Thyme", "Trouble In Mind", and "I Gave My Love a Cherry"... Seriously? [2]), so it did feel a bit like falling into a time-warp. But it was all very nicely done, and I relaxed into expecting an evening of nostalgic pleasure.

Then on came Fairport, who promptly proceeded to butcher a cut-down version of "Reynardine" by rocking it up and playing MUCH TOO LOUD. I mean REALLY FUCKING LOUD. It was awful. The Turner Sims is a specialised music venue in which chamber music can be heard all the way to the back of the auditorium, but they were amped up for a windy day at Glastonbury. Even the drums were miked up, and every time Dave Mattacks whacked his snare it made my ears wince. The mix was also so muddy that all you could hear was this barrage of undifferentiated blare. I thought the sound guy would surely adjust things after that disastrous first number, but no, and it just became unbearably unpleasant. At least it did for me, suffering as I do from partial deafness and tinnitus (brought on, I'm sure, by many similar experiences of loud volume in small spaces in my youth). I was tempted to yell, "You're too LOUD, guys!" but despite the preponderance of white-haired elderly types in the audience I didn't detect much by way of discomfort or dissent – perhaps they had all literally been stunned into silence – so I kept quiet and resolved to leave if things didn't improve.

They didn't. Not least because the band's main repertoire now seems to be self-penned items in that jolly let's-all-have-a-good-time style that owes nothing much to either traditional song, dance music, or the folk-rock of the 1970s. If I wanted to be cruel (and why not? say my ears), I'd say their style owes more to Chas & Dave than to Cecil Sharp. Practically every number was accompanied by Mattacks's over-emphatic drumming that went "ba-dump diddle THWACK, ba-dump diddle THWACK", with every amplified THWACK driving a sonic nail into my head. Worst of all, they have no lead guitarist or vocalist of any stature, and a fiddler (Ric Sanders) who fancies himself as a live-wire and comedian, both while playing and doing cringeworthy patter in between numbers. Now, Dave Swarbrick was an impish little guy with a taste for mischief, but was also a seriously sympathetic and innovative master musician when it came to playing together with that other master musician, Richard Thompson. It was that combination, plus Sandy Denny's peerless vocals, that made Fairport worth listening to. Without it, or something very like it, this "Fairport" line-up just seems like the backing band for some absent lead talent.

The final straw came for me when, leading up to the interval, they did an excruciatingly lame rendering of the number "Sloth", one of the more interesting tracks on the Full House album, in which Simon Nicol attempted to play Richard Thompson's electric solo on an acoustic guitar, like some guy noodling in his front room, while Ric Sanders slathered effects-driven fiddle drivel over everything, in a vague mimicry of Dave Swarbrick's colourings, all the while sliding about as if polishing the stage with his feet. It just lacked the necessary drama and conviction, and was still FAR TOO LOUD. We left at the interval.

Now, not everybody hates being brutally assaulted by music, and I may be being unfair. Fairport have a reputation for being a great live band, after all. This gig is apparently one of the first, if not the first outing of their 2023 "Wintour" tour – coming soon to a venue near you – so things may improve. In a bigger, less intimate hall (or a very large field), it could work. If you're a Fairport fan of long standing, a serial Cropredy veteran anticipating a beer-fuelled knees-up, then you'll know what to expect and will probably love it, right down to Ric Sanders' comedy routines and physical clowning. You should certainly enjoy Hanna Sanders and Ben Savage, who are supporting them at every gig. But, if I had anything to do with it, I'd retire some of this pension-plan crew (all bar one of them well into their seventies), make Hanna an offer she couldn't refuse to join the Fairport line-up (what a difference that would make!), find a more nimble drummer and add in a proper lead guitarist. Oh, and a sound man who knows how to adapt to different acoustic environments. But I don't, and they won't, so I will certainly not be buying any tickets for Fairport Convention concerts again.

Instead, I may just go and put on "A Sailor's Life" this evening, just to remind myself why once, a long time ago, I used to love their music so much. Or perhaps it should be the live recording of Richard and Linda Thompson's "Calvary Cross", made at Oxford Polytechnic in November 1975 – I was there! – to remember what a thrill live music can be, especially when you're young and your ears are still working properly. [3]

1. AFAIK Bob Pegg is not related to Dave Pegg, bassist, sometime of Jethro Tull and the longest serving member of Fairport, who was playing bass on Saturday. However, I now realise that he and Carole were based in my home town of Stevenage 1969-72, which explains why I saw them so often!

2. It may seem a little strange to complain about songs being "dated" when you're expecting an evening of traditional folk... What I really mean is that these songs were already done to death half a century ago – they're practically camp-fire favourites – and require something more than pretty harmonies to warrant their revival. Although, as someone long absent from that scene, maybe, like Fairport Convention, they just never went away.

3. The folk-rock scene is nothing if not incestuous. Dave Pegg, bassist, sometime of Jethro Tull etc., was also the bassist in Thompson's band on that night in 1975. And if you listen to the track then there it is, unmistakable: the metronomic Mattacks WHACK... Not one of the more subtle drummers IMHO.