Listening to the radio earlier this week we heard producer Joe Boyd—a presence in so many of our books—talking about the recent release of a special, boxed vinyl edition of Nick Drake’s wonderful Bryter Layter album. Fairport Convention member Dave Pegg appears on pretty much every track, while co-member Dave Mattacks plays drums on both the “Hazy Jane” tracks and “Sunday”. The broadcast prompted the playing of the (vinyl) album in the office and gave us the opportunity to publish this extract from Gorm Henrik Rasmussen’s excellent Pink Moon, in which he imagines the creative process of Drake as he begins to form the sounds and words of the album:

London is grey and overcast, fog and drizzle from morning to night. Rain, day and night, on the city windows. Down the glass facades. Down the walls. Down onto greedy asphalt roads. And into gutters, down to sewers.

Taxis are passing, neon signs flashing, river barges tooting. And the hours are flowing.  Day slips into night and night slips into day, and the distinction between the two is slowly erased. Only the clocks tell time. And the clocks are ticking, the windscreen wipers clicking, and the city bells chiming in the damp air. Late November.

Nick is sitting in his flat on Haverstock Hill in Hampstead, his guitar on his lap, tuning the strings, half listening to the crackle of a transistor radio in the background. The storm warnings. The shipping news. Far away a voice declaring that the weather will be brighter later. Later he leaves his room. He goes out into the traffic, among the pigeons and the crowds of pedestrians teeming through the city, escaping down escalators, into tube stations, department stores, and office buildings. On stairs, in lifts in tall, slim buildings, and long underground corridors: businessmen, messengers, civil servants, and tourists going up and down and back and forth. Crioss-crossing, in all directions, on separate floors in the big city cubes.

Later, he turns his back on the crowds and disappears into Regent’s Park. With long, loping strides, his elbows held close to his body, he moves through the deserted gardens, making his way to Primrose Hill where the trees stand on the slope, leaning into winter, naked, crippled with age. When he gets to the top he turns around to gaze at the flickering cones of light down on Prince Albert Road. On the horizon, the endless city looms like a giant electrical relay. And everywhere between Primrose Hill and the southern night sky lies London, shrouded in fog and neon. London on a November night~: a pin cushion of lights, shimmering and flickering in the dusk. He lights a joint, bends down to tie his shoelaces, without quite being able to tell whether he is awake or in the middle of a dream, whether what he sees is a real city or a scenario from a science fiction film without a title, without a director.

Hours later Nick is standing on the side of one of the innumerable approach roads circling the city. Leaning back, dressed in black, with his elbows resting on a rail protruding from an underground stairway. Behind the road the moon comes up, round and yellow like an old brass coin, and between Nick and the moon hovers a car, bathed in the bluish lights of a row of neon lamps from above. A car in the city space, on its way, as in a flash it separates Nick from eternity behind the guard rail.

He is waiting for dawn, waiting for the rising sun to clear the sky of clouds, the city sky as well as his own inner northern sky. And all day long he is working his way around the streets and the squares, waiting for the night, just to stand there on the outskirts of an abandoned neighbourhood, looking for the moon. He is waiting for a diffuse, never realised “later.” A bright spell in the evening, the “brighter later” the meteorologist had promised. Nick steals those two words for a song about his own meteorology and that of the city in November, for a song that will,provide the title for his new album. He spells “brighter later” differently, in a more mysterious, more poetic way, much as one would imagine Shakespeare might have done, or a stoned person with a sense of humour. “Brighter Later” becomes the cryptic Bryter Layter, but it still refers to a form of weather report. Look up at the sky, get a fix on the clouds, and off you go. Out into the city squares and back home again.

And what will happen in the morning when the world it gets

So crowded that you can’t look out the window in the morning.

Nick opens the curtains and looks out in a daze at the world racing by outside his window. The world is waiting, the world demands that you take part in the ever-growing race back and forth, up and down the stairs, in and out the door. Ask no questions, lift your feet off the ground, weigh up your anchor, and for God’s sake never look back.

And what will happen when you come home? Turn around and come back again.

That is the opening of “Hazey Jane II”. Trumpets and electric guitar, up front. In the middle of the big city bustle. Nick is a stranger in the streets. He is watching the faces, in the mirrors, behind car windows, on the double-decker buses shuttling across the city; he is listening to the clanking of typewriters, hurried conversations across tables, on telephones and at ticket hatches, small talk streaming out from open doors and windows:

For the sound of a busy place

Is fine for a pretty face

Who knows what a face is for?

“Bryter Layter” is a song of the city, urban jazz, urban dance. An instrumental soundtrack for an unmade film, enraptured blue ballads reflecting the mental vacuum of the tobacconist after closing time. The band is augmented with a saxophone while drums and percussion feature prominently in the mix. On a couple of songs John Cale, the Welsh wizard who long ago left the avant-garde Velvet Underground, plays along. Cale bows his electric viola and coaxes a double timbre from the instrument. He also plays the celeste and the organ to deepen the dark side of Bryter Layter. It does have a dark side, for the album reflects shadow and light, the rhythm of day and night is mirrored in the changes between inner and outer worlds; between dark visions and open poetry, as clear as day. Big city poetry, the melody of the day, the quickstep of feet across a city square. A track that captures the pulse of London, “At the Chime of a City Clock” is inspired by the numerous bells of London’s many churches. Listen to the rhythm of the melody, fast syncopated pulses, underscored by Ray Warleigh’s fluttering trills on the sax, and listen to the lyrics, a little masterpiece of musical language:

Stay indoors beneath the floors

Talk with neighbours only

The games you play make people say

You’re either weird or lonely.

 

The opening of a ‘Punk’ exhibition at New York’s Metropolitan Museum has had a less than sparkling review from the New Yorker magazine, in which we spotted a quote from a book that we created with The Clash. The New Yorker review quotes the Met’s catalogue, who in turn quote Joe Strummer on the matter of why The Clash painted their clothes, and it having nothing to do with Jackson Pollock.

In The Clash by The Clash, (and in the accompanying film, From The Westway To The World), Joe says, ‘Bernie had made us paint the rehearsal rooms before a gig and we didn’t really have and clothes except the ones we were wearing, or what we got from thrift stores. So there was paint everywhere, which is what I think gave Paul the idea of flicking it on our shoes and trousers, to jazz them up. It gave us an identity, too. So we came out resplendent, covered in paint. Just up the road from Rehearsals Rehearsals were the people who Bernie used to spray his cars, so we went to them and they sprayed the guitars and amps, jackets, ties, shirts and shoes using spray guns.We must have looked fairly striking when we came on stage, if somewhat ridiculous’.

Mick Jones’ take on the matter was that, ‘Paul had made the connection between Jackson Pollock and our spritzing paint on ourselves’.

The above quote from Joe comes after Paul had revealed that, ‘I was aware of the look the Pistols had. Steve used to wear Malcolm and Vivienne’s stuff, though John seemed not to be into that, he had his own look, which was interesting. We didn’t have a shop to rely on though so we had to be self-sufficient, which helped us in the long run. `we had to be more involved in what we were going to wear. Whereas the Pistols had it sewn up for them. Literally. Joe pretty much fell in straight away and while I was Jackson Pollocking shirts, Joe was painting his trousers.’

As Paul goes on to say, he got the idea of splashing paint on his clothes after seeing another Rocket 88 author, Glen Matlock, walking down Denmark Street in London (the British Tin Pan Alley) wearing, ‘what I first thought were Laura Ashley print trousers, but when I looked closer they were more Jackson Pollock. I realised he’d splashed paint all over them. So thinking like Picasso, who’d pick up an idea and take it further, I went back to Rehearsals Rehearsals, got some gloss paint and splashed it on my shoes. It looked pretty good so I got a black shirt and did a bit on that with different paint and it was all about being aware of textures (laughs). Because ideas were always discussed openly I only needed to do a few things for Mick and Joe to see what was going on and do their own stuff. It led to getting our guitars sprayed and then I got some stencils, probably from Bernie, which would clip together and so I sprayed words on jackets and shirts.’

Glen’s memory is that he’d accidentally splashed paint on himself while painting the two rooms in Denmark Street that he shared for a while with Steve Jones and where the Sex Pistols rehearsed, and met Paul in the street, who was fairly taken with his ‘new look’.While various books and exhibitions like the one at the Met attempt to draw lines of connection between premeditated artistic statements, political ideologies and deliberate anti-establishment stances, the truth about seemingly important historical ‘events’ and ‘movements’ is always much more entertaining, accidental and faintly ridiculous in the telling.

In I Was A Teenage Sex Pistol Glen recalls one such faintly absurd meeting, not just of his introducing Mick Jones and Joe Strummer for the first time, but the bizarre moment that the introduction led them to. It’s not the same memory of their first meeting that either Mick or Joe would later recall, but there’s no doubting Glen’s belief in how the event unfolded. Here’s how it appears in his book:

It was while we were at Denmark Street that the punk scene—as it would later be called—began to develop. All of us would hang around together. Not just the Pistols but others, like Mick Jones—who formed The Clash—and Tony James, who started Generation X. On Fridays we’d often go to the Royal College of Art where they used to have these great shows which went on till three or four o’clock in the morning. I knew about them from being at art college and I took Steve and Paul down with me and introduced them to a scene they knew nothing about.

It was after one of those shows that I introduced Mick Jones to Joe Strummer for the first time. A whole crowd of us were walking back to Denmark Street—me and Rat Scabies and Brian James—two founders of The Damned and Mick Jones and some others. We bumped into Strummer on the corner of Old Compton Street and Frith Street, just down the road from Ronnie Scott’s. Which was where Joe was going. “What you doing?” he asked. “I went to see this bloke platy at Ronnie Scotts last night. he was fucking great. You should go. In fact, he said if I wanted to bring along some mates, he’d get us all in free.”

So we checked it out. This being the early days of punk, we looked like complete urchins. So everyone working on the doort at Ronnie’s had a good laugh at us while Strummer was hustling to get us in. “Tom said if I brought some mates, he’d get us in”.
“Tom who?” said the bloke on the door.
“Tom Waits”.
“Oh,” he said, but he did go of and fetch him.

And there was Tom Waits at the door, in this big Crombie coat. “Hey, Joe! What can I do for you?”
“Well, you said if I brought a couple of mates down, you’d get us in.”
“yeah, that should be OK, how many of you are there?”
We had a quick count-up. There were about ten of us. “Hey!” said Tom, “Hang on there a minute.” He leant back against the door, opened this big overcoat and there, in the inside pocket, was a pint of Guinness with a perfect head on it. H can’t have put it there for effect because he didn’t now who was going to be there. He just happened to have a pnt of Guinness with a perfect head on it in his pocket. Though how he managed it I don’t know. I’ve tried to do it endless times since but the drink just goes everywhere.

He stood there, reached into the coat, pulled out the pint, drank it all down in one go, and nodded to the doorman. “Hey! let the boys in!”
And he was great.

Cortez The Killer

First released: Zuma (Reprise) November 1975

Zuma appeared within four months of Tonight’s The Night and Johnny Rogan makes the point that the critical reaction, which was highly enthusiastic, may have been linked to the album’s combination of hard-edged rock with a more palatable, commercial, toned-down feel, producing perhaps almost a sense of relief. It was also a great display of the relationship between Young and Crazy Horse, notably with the arrival of Frank ‘Poncho’ Sampedro to replace the deceased Whitten on rhythm guitar. Billy Talbot had met him in Mexico and at the time, Sampedro told director Jim Jarmusch, he was ‘doing heroin and dope’ but was also a keen Young fan who had listened to Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere so many times that he could play both Whitten and Young’s guitar parts. ‘I guess that having a job helped me… in a way we lost one guy and saved another guy.’ Sampedro, says Young, brings enormous energy and strength to the band. Certainly, he’s an awesomely-built, formidable dude who over time learned to follow Young’s own energy source and float upon it: ‘It’s always best when I just open up my mind and follow him.’

Zuma wasn’t a commercial success, reaching no higher than 44 in the UK album charts, but its reputation has grown, not just because Lou Reed thought the guitar playing on Danger Bird the best he’d ever heard, but because of Cortez The Killer, which remains one of Young’s finest accomplishments, not only as a performer but as a more formal, verse-bound lyricist.

The song, which comes in at seven and a half minutes, begins slowly and broodingly, a four minute guitar solo which mounts steadily in anticipation and has Young caressing the strings in a thoughtful, patient manner, weaving in and out of Sampedro’s accompaniment. It’s a good example of why Young prefers the immediacy of live recording to the gadgetry and coldness of overdub. Sampedro’s guitar is as a musical equivalent to the second opinion.

When the song starts it is with the deceptively playful and softly sung image of the explorer Cortez ‘dancing… with galleons and guns’. Only finally does Young echo the sentiments of the title, that this is Cortez The Killer, invader and plunderer of the ancient Aztec civilisation, which is described in tones that are so obviously idealized that the intentions of the song are clear. This is where memory becomes history and finally transmutes itself into myth. The lost civilization of the Aztecs, with its golden temples (gold yet again is Young’s imagistic obsession), is a utopia, an empty blackboard on which we can scrawl our own ideas of what life should be like, a life where the individual and the collective become harmonized, a world of angry gods placated by ‘clothes of many colours’ and where what was in reality a brutal system of mass human sacrifice which involved cutting out the hearts of living creatures is a formula for regeneration.

One is reminded of John Ford’s classic Western, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, where a newspaper man advises that where truth and legend diverge it is always wiser to ‘print the legend’. Ford’s film has one villain and two heroes, the desperado Liberty Valance, played by Lee Marvin, and John Wayne’s old-style lawman, the man who finally kills Valance but allows James Stewart’s new-style politician and civilizer to take the credit. Wayne is a glorious frontier anachronism, Stewart’s peaceful, quiet-spoken Easterner as much of the future as the railroad which clatters through the whole movie. Young is not interested in history or its ‘truth’ but in legend, in how we love to view the past from the perspective of our own disquiet with the present. And he makes a final, triumphant point of this when the song shifts finally from ancient Mexico to present day romantic frustration.

It’s a woman, of course, any woman, his, yours or mine, always there like Botticelli’s Venus rising from her shell, always lost inside that splendid harmonized world that never existed except in our unfulfilled dreams.

Students so often confuse Cortez and the Aztecs of Mexico with Pizarro and the more pacific Incas of Peru (Neil would also record the linked if less effective Like An Inca for Trans in 1982) that it’s worth recalling Peter Shaffer’s The Royal Hunt Of The Sun, a play with all the light and colours described in this song. It was first seen at the National Theatre in 1964, went to New York in 1965 and covers many of the same themes admittedly only hinted at in the text of Cortez The Killer and Like An Inca: the hypocrisy of martial religion, the nature of power and worship and the necessity to create a society in which a sense of otherworldliness is part of everyday life.

Shaffer also sees the dangers of idealizing ancient civilizations for their own sake: at one point, De Nizza, a subtle Franciscan friar, explains why love is dependent on freedom of choice to the Incas’ benevolent despot, Atahualpa: ‘Love is the only door from the prison of ourselves.’ The final stage direction, after Atahualpa is finally sacrificed to the pragmatism of Spanish conquest and gold worship, and the Western ‘god’ Pizarro sings over the corpse of the slain Atahualpa, is: ‘The sun glares at the audience.’ Fanciful or not, there is something despondent and defeated about Young’s final guitar flourish; and the surprisingly quick fade-out can seem almost like a hurried apology.

As Spring finally makes a kind of appearance in the UK, people are looking forward to attending a Festival or two with a hint of optimism. The thousands who have pre-booked their glamping spot at outdoor festivals in the forthcoming summer months will pack Wellington boots, rain ponchos and torches because experience has taught them to be ready for what might occur during June, July or August in Britain. However, back in 1970 when the idea of a Festival was relatively novel, they were far less glamorous, very loosely arranged and had few, if any, toilet facilities let alone ‘food franchise’ tents pitched in what turned out to be barely accessible spots. In this extract from Fairport By Fairport the band recall making an appearance at what has become one of the most infamous of the early rock festivals, Krumlin, which was held near Halifax in North Yorkshire and coincided with an almost perfect storm that hit the area that same weekend.

Date:  15th August, 1970
Location: The moors above Halifax, West Yorkshire

Krumlin Festival in the Yorkshire Pennines has passed into legend because the event was so badly planned, the site so remote and the resources so restricted that when bad weather arrived, the place became something of a disaster area. Fairport were one of the few bands to play before the gales and torrential rain stopped play. The event was one of the first professional ventures of the late Jeremy Beadle, who would come to be renowned for the TV programme Game For A Laugh (1981-85), on which he played practical jokes on the unsuspecting public. Among the people Fairport hooked up with at Krumlin was local songwriter Bob Pegg of the band Mr Fox who was inspired by the bizarre events of the Krumlin Festival to write a song titled ‘The Last Dance’.

Over fifty acts were booked to appear, but very few did. Friday evening was intended to provide entertainment for those arriving and setting up camp for the weekend. Backstage squabbles resulted in the event starting three hours late, by which time rain had set in, causing regular interruptions to performances and forcing what audience there was to find cover. Acts scheduled to appear included Elton John, The Humblebums, Groundhogs and The Pretty Things. A planned “all night folk and blues jam” failed to materialise.

Next day, those who emerged from their tents or arrived on foot (roads were at a standstill for miles around as no one had considered the logistics of so much traffic hitting the narrow lanes of the upper Pennines) faced a sea of mud. The covering of the stage, meanwhile, a large flat plastic sheet was already sagging under the weight of water. Fairport shared the bill with Pentangle, Fotheringay, Ralph McTell, bluesman Champion Jack Dupree, who was living locally at the time, Graham Bond with Alexis Korner, Alan Price, Manfred Mann Chapter III, and The Who. Sunday was totally written off, though one dreads to think how the small stage and limited access would have coped with The Mike Westbrook Orchestra, Quintessence, Steamhammer, Yes and Ginger Baker’s Airforce, not to mention Mungo Jerry and Taste.

SIMON: There was a lot of confusion and what can only be described as the spirit of the First World War trenches. You know, “we’re all in this together and somehow we’ll get through it, chaps.” A lot of friendships were forged—we got to know Ralph and Danny Thompson better.

The confusion was such that even today no one is certain which bands actually appeared. Photographic evidence suggests that Ralph, Pentangle, Fairport and some local acts made it to the stage. The weather broke part way through Saturday. Tents and marquees were flattened. The police declared it a disaster area and proceeded to start evacuation. Speculation abounded about the organisers and later wild rumours spread—supposedly, one organiser had run off with carrier bagfuls of money, another was found wandering on the moors days later, a victim of exposure, while one was helping police with their enquiries. One supposed organiser was found in the pub denying all involvement. It was whispered that the site was haunted. None of it was true.

RICHARD: They were carting the audience away suffering from exposure, everyone was dressed in those bin liner things. It was great fun. For some reason or other everyone was totally legless backstage. We all got very silly. We were playing ‘Bonny Bunch Of Roses’ but Simon was playing an Indian Raga in a different key. He was in his own world, sitting cross-legged in front of his amp. So we had to sort of kick him, and unplug him. But he carried on playing those ragas.

Simon opened Fairport’s set at 5.00 pm by telling the assembled crowds that they had been in the beer tent since two. The band cut short his rambling words of welcome by launching straight into ‘Walk Awhile’ at around 50% faster than normal speed, and running straight into a medley named at the time as ‘Tunes My Mother Taught Me’, but today better known as ‘Sir B McKenzie’. At the end, Swarb and Richard jointly addressing the jigging crowd: “You looked like you could do with a big of warming up”; “Bit of internal heat should help dry you out. Our next song, with no irony intended, is called ‘Now Be Thankful’.”

PEGGY It has gone down as one of the worst gigs of all time: badly organised, battered by some of the worst weather ever, illegal ticket sales, no one got paid. If Little Hadham was what we wanted Cropredy to be done small scale, Krumlin was what we wanted to avoid writ large.

For more on the festival, visit the excellent

http://www.ukrockfestivals.com/Krumlin-festival-1970.html

There are only a few remaining copies of the limited edition of Fairport By Fairport available, and this outtake from the original manuscript should whet your appetite for more. It’s a partial singles history of the most unlikely looking band ever to have performed on Top of the Pops.

On the day Fairport Convention formally came into being (May 27, 1967), The Tremeloes were number one in the chart with ‘Silence is Golden’ – a backing band who had split from their lead singer (and who incidentally had been signed by Decca instead of The Beatles, because they were London-based and therefore local to the label) – with a cover version of an old Four Seasons song. Procol Harum had released ‘A Whiter Shade Of Pale’ the previous week. Other new releases included ‘The Wind Cries Mary’, ’59^th St Bridge Song’, ‘Waterloo Sunset’, ‘Paper Sun’, ‘I Can Hear The Grass Grow’, ‘The Look Of Love’, ‘The Happening’, ‘Carrie Ann’, ‘Pictures of Lily’ and Jefferson Airplane’s debut single ‘Somebody To Love’.

The 7” single – the 45 – was still king and while we naturally think of Fairport as an album band, they were ahead of their time. Sgt Pepper – so commonly seen as the watershed moment when the LP took over from the single – was still four days from release: its original concept had been sabotaged when the first tracks recorded for it were co-opted by EMI for single release. Pink Floyd were playing the same venues and often on the same bill as Fairport. Their debut album was three months from release; their first single ‘Arnold Layne’ had come out in March. Like The Floyd, Fairport were naturally steered by their record company towards releasing 45rpm singles.

Their first release was ‘If I had a Ribbon Bow’ [Track 604 020] coupled with the Thompson/ McDonald original ‘If (STOMP)’ on February 23, 1968. While the b-side, featuring co-composer Iain McDonald / Matthews on vocals, was included on the group’s debut album in June, the A side became a sought-after Fairport obscurity as the band’s fame grew. [It has subsequently appeared on a number of CDs including the extended reissue of the debut album.] The song was first recorded in 1936 by Maxine Sullivan and became popular with female singers of the US folk revival after Odetta revived it twenty years later: by the time Fairport recorded it, they could have referred to recordings by Karen Dalton, Caroline Hester or Mimi Farina. The NME praised its “fine gossamer-like texture” and with notable perspicacity remarked on its “very noticeable folksy quality.” In a month that saw the release of ‘Lady Madonna’, ‘Fire Brigade’, ‘Scarborough Fair’, ‘Pictures of Matchstick Men’ and ‘The Mighty Quinn’, Fairport’s debut sank without trace.

In June, Melody Maker announced that the band had recorded ‘Some Sweet Day’, featuring newly joined Sandy Denny as their next single. It was never released. Both critics and fans agreed that their actual follow up had a much stronger chance. Released in October 1968, ‘Meet On The Ledge’ [Island WIP 6047], was to become Fairport’s anthem. Clearly aware of its sing-a-long potential, the band recruited friends and fans to swell the backing vocals – aside from the group’s six members the chorus was enhanced by the voices of Marc Ellington, Paul Ghosh and Andy Horvitch (co-authors of several early RT songs) and early band chronicler Kingsley Abbott. NME called it, “a folk flavoured track…brimful of youthful awareness and expression.” Reviews in both NME and Melody Maker speculated that the single could be “a surprise Christmas hit”, although it faced strong competition: that Christmas from, among other singles, Fleetwood Mac’s ‘Albatross’, ‘Build Me Up Buttercup’, ‘Harper Valley PTA’, ‘Private Number’, ‘Those Were The Days’, ‘All Along The Watchtower’, ‘With A Little Help From My Friends’ by Joe Cocker, Dusty Springfield’s ‘Son of a Preacher Man’ and Simon & Garfunkel’s songs from The Graduate.

The b-side of ‘Ledge’ was a Richard Thompson song, ‘Throwaway Street Puzzle’. The original vinyl version is another collectible rarity. The song has, naturally, resurfaced as a CD bonus track and (with his parts re-recorded) Richard Thompson included it on guitar/vocal, his first career-retrospective compilation. An early RT walk on the wild side, it’s presented as a monologue by the barker at a cheap peep show, in many ways anticipating the fairground imagery of his early solo work.

Despite airplay and live performances on the newly launched Radio 1, ‘Ledge’ was simply lost in the Christmas rush. It was, however, still in the record boxes of club DJs in May 1968 when tragedy struck Fairport. ‘Meet On The Ledge’ was the track that everybody played. It was there by default, awaiting replacement by the next Fairport single, but in every sense it was perfect. Richard Thompson’s visionary lyrics (though today he admits to finding them immature) took on a new resonance: “when my time is up, I’m going to see all my friends”. Though the band had been playing the song at gigs and on the radio, like everything else in their pre-May ’68 repertoire, it vanished from the setlist when the band returned to playing live. Today it is strange to think that such a classic song – for many the Fairport song – remained unplayed by the band for a decade: it was revived for the Farewell Tour. Even then, on tour and at early Cropredy Festivals, it had not yet achieved its iconic final song status. Various other singers, most notably Noel Murphey, kept the song alive in the meantime. Today, those who know about such things will tell you it was the first example of the current psych-folk explosion.  As Chris Welch wrote at the time, “this single is definitely one for the discerning.”

Fairport’s American record company, however, did not see the potential of ‘Ledge’ and instead released an edited version of ‘I’ll Keep It With Mine’ as the radio promo tool. A single of ‘Fotheringay’, coupled with ‘I’ll Keep It With Mine’, was scheduled for release as the UK follow up to ‘Ledge’ but was understandably withheld from release because of the circumstances. In any case, Fairport had a new album recorded. Island, their record company, naturally had to pick a single from it. Both NME and Melody Maker reviewed ‘Si Tu Dois Partir’ [Island WIP 6064] in the light of Martin’s death: “I hope everyone will rush out and buy this single even though it wouldn’t normally be considered commercial.”

For many years, Fairport’s visits to UK radio stations (whose playlists were almost exclusively singles-based) would prompt the record librarian to pull out a copy of their only hit, often taken from one of the many compilation albums on which it had been included. Yet ‘Si Tu Dois Partir’ was a musical joke that could hardly have been less representative of the band in any of its many incarnations. It didn’t even sound like Fairport: in addition to their usual instruments, Simon played electric dulcimer, Richard played piano accordion, and Martin Lamble, lacking a washboard, ran his sticks over the back of a stack of plastic chairs, which proceeded to fall over mid-solo, though astoundingly perfectly on the beat. They also recruited a couple of guest players for the recording. Trevor Lucas, in hot pursuit of Sandy, was invited to play triangle – though he would play a more significant role on later Fairport 45s. Deciding that the song needed some “Cajun fiddle” (perhaps so it became a companion piece to Richard’s ‘Cajun Woman’) the band asked Joe Boyd to recruit superstar folk fiddler Dave Swarbrick for the session: he ended up playing on four tracks and returned to tell his musical partner Martin Carthy that he had just finished recording with a “guitarist that I could play alongside for the rest of my life”.

‘Si Tu Dois Partir’ began life as a playful translation of Dylan’s ‘If You Gotta Go, Go Now’, reputedly the result of on stage banter between Sandy Denny and the audience. The song was already well-known, having been made into a hit by Manfred Mann (Dylan’s own recording had not yet seen the light of day beyond a very limited-release single in Holland). Richard Thompson recalls the occasion as a gig at Middle Earth, after which three or four fans offered their services to create the translation: “So, between them and the band, it was very much a case of writing by committee: it ended up not being very Cajun, French or Dylan.” Given that a French version had already been released (by Johnny Halliday) and this had itself been covered (by The Beefeaters) for release in Belgium, Fairport’s cod-French version was less than original. It was, however, a useful novelty item for inclusion on an album whose title derived from a mutating-word game. 

By the time Unhalfbricking and its companion single came out in July, Fairport Convention’s existence was a matter of uncertainty and then they had a hit single. The novelty of its sound, the fact that it was a very unusual version of a familiar Dylan song and the fact that newspaper headlines had given Fairport’s name a sudden unexpected familiarity brought airplay and even minor chart success – so much so that on August 14, they appeared on Top of the Pops. Defying all odds, Fairport achieved the almost unique feat of having a record drop down the charts the week after they appeared on the show to plug it. Despite not making the top twenty, it remains their biggest single hit.

The next Fairport LP, Liege & Lief yielded no singles and Fairport’s next 7” release was another non-album track. Released in September 1970, ‘Now Be Thankful’ [Island WIP 6089] sounded like a folk hymn. It was of its time: other quasi-religious songs to make the early 70s charts included ‘My Sweet Lord’, ‘Morning Has Broken’ and The Strawbs’ rewrite of the 23^rd Psalm, ’Lay Down’. Zigzag magazine used a line from ‘Thankful’ as the title of an article about the genre they were calling God Rock. The song was not included on Full House, however it was included on the first Fairport compilation, A History of Fairport Convention. Co-opting lines from traditional songs, RT & Swarb had written the song on June 7 in Boston while on tour in America. Melody Maker mistakewnly reviewed the b side (Burbling about the title, they pointed out that Lancers in Scotland in 1727 was an anachronism.) However, that b-side, ‘Sir B. McKenzie’ (etc), remained unavailable anywhere else until Full House was issued on CD.

It is important to remember that Island Records, for all its reputation for signing underground acts, still had an eye on the charts and was generally successful at turning its major acts into hit-makers – see Cat Stevens, Free, Jethro Tull, Spencer Davis, Traffic et al. The label continued to schedule possible singles from Fairport but then not release them, including ‘Walk Awhile’ and ‘Journeyman’s Grace’ (backed with a version of ‘Breakfast in Mayfair’ that would have predated Babbacombe Lee by months). Generally these mimicked a US single release policy which was well beyond the control of either Island Records or the band. Fairport then decided to approach their next album (Angel Delight) as a search for a potential single.

SWARB: Island were looking for a single. We gave them an album with ten of them.

Unfortunately the record company did not deem any of its tracks appropriate for single release in the UK. Perversely, while their next album, Babbacombe Lee, was seen as a contiguous whole (even to the point of being un-banded on vinyl), a single from it, ‘John Lee’ [Island WIP 6128] was released worldwide in March, 1972. It was the first time anyone had any indication of the titles or composers of individual tracks on the LP.

The title track from Rosie was an obvious choice as a single release [Island WIP 6155] in May 1973. Melodic and romantic, it had the makings of a chart record – though what the average single buyer made of “rosin up the bow” we can only speculate. In the UK, its b-side was ‘Knights of The Road’, a track originally recorded for Fotheringay’s aborted second LP.  In Australia, Island changed the B side for an instrumental called ‘Fiddlestix’ which included a banjo part played by a session player: they then made that into the a-side, but not before an orchestral string section and a new banjo overdub had been added. Again, it was a departure from the band’s actual sound; one reviewer’s description (“lush and manic”) summed it up. One began to wonder how much input the band had into its single releases.

In July 1975, Dave Swarbrick’s ‘White Dress’ [Island WIP 6241], featuring Sandy Denny on vocals, was selected as the single from Rising For The Moon. Its b-side, a Trevor Lucas song called ‘Tears’ was otherwise unavailable. These seven-inch discs might not have sold at the time, but they racked up pixie points for future collectability. Lack of singles success wasn’t the only reason for the parting of the ways between Island and Fairport, but it certainly contributed. Their next label wasn’t to have much more success with releasing 7-inch singles by Fairport either, though.