Fairport Convention
They’re the progenitors of British folk rock, which draws much more heavily on traditional music than its American cousin. In fact, Fairport’s repertoire and the traditions associated with it define the band more than any specific personnel: they’ve gone through more than 20 musicians over the years, and the lineups that recorded, for instance, 1969’s What We Did on Our Holidays and 1973’s Nine have exactly zero members in common. Fairport Unconventional–which contains several pounds of documentation in addition to more than five hours of music–includes a Fairport family tree by longtime fan Pete Frame, who wraps it up with this note to the band: “If you bastards change your line-up one more time, you can find yourselves another fucking genealogist!”
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Cults demand rituals that have to be performed just so, and for the last 22 years the central ritual of Fairport’s existence has been Cropredy, an annual weekend-long folk and folk-rock festival at which they always headline, recapitulating their entire career with whichever of their alumni turn up. For the first few years of the 80s, Cropredy was billed as a Fairport reunion gig; by the middle of the decade the group had settled into recording and touring again. Like the festival, the new box set (which includes a voucher for a fifth CD of Cropredy highlights) is bursting with nostalgia–more so even than most box sets. The implication of the Fairport repertoire is that the golden age to long for is the pre-pop era of folk music, when songs were about lords and battles and nobody knew who’d written them.
What they did have in common with the Byrds was that they adored Bob Dylan. Early Fairport played a generous assortment of Dylan covers, including their one and only hit (it got to number 21 on the British charts): a version of “If You Gotta Go, Go Now,” improbably performed Cajun-style as “Si Tu Dois Partir.” They couldn’t always tell good Dylan from bad–“Dear Landlord,” a 1969 outtake, qualifies as very bad Dylan–but they’ve continued to add his songs to their bag ever since. A casual, sped-up romp through “I Don’t Believe You,” recorded in 1973 by the bastard Nine lineup, is one of the box’s unexpected highlights.
After Thompson left, they continued to milk both the repertoire and some of the stylistic tics of the very different group of players they had once been. That’s much more acceptable in traditional music than in rock, which may have helped to determine their course. But ever since then, through more than a dozen changes in personnel, the band’s been trying to move backward and forward simultaneously: forward to a repertoire that includes new material and doesn’t rely entirely on their great work (and therefore turn them into an oldies act), backward to an imaginary ideal of folk rock whose only point of reference besides British folk is, well, the good Fairport Convention records, and which therefore leans heavily on anachronism. It’s sent them into a slow and terrible decline.
