How Did I Get Hear? #16 - Matthew Bannister on Fairport Convention's "What We Did On Our Holidays"

As a teenage Beatle freak, there was no place for folk music in my life. Folk was seventeen verses and Joan Baez's flutey warbling. Just give me some "ooh baby baby" and a groove and I was happy. Or so I thought. In those distant Dunedin days, it was possible to take a blank cassette to Roy Colbert at Records Records and obtain obscure albums I’d read about in the Rolling Stone Record Guide. I knew nothing about Fairport Convention but Greil Marcus said they were the British version of The Band.

Maybe it was watching Brideshead Revisited on TV, but I was missing Olde England, despite never having lived there (my birthplace, Scotland, just wasn’t the same). My sentiments would not have been shared by Mary Queen of Scots, subject of album opener “Fotheringay” - named for the castle where she was exiled until the day of her decapitation. Queen of folk, singer/composer Sandy Denny (christened Alexandra Elene MacLean Denny) understood Scottish exiles. Like the UK's other greatest woman singer, Dusty Springfield, both make a little go a long way, which makes their occasional shifts into vocal overdrive all the more thrilling. Fotheringay is sung as light as thistledown, which chimes in with the observational perspective of the song, which is, in turn, about watching. "How often she has gazed from castle windows o'er, and watched the daylight passing within her captive wall." Yet that neutral gaze belies a whirlwind within, backed with a filigree of fingerpicked acoustics, signing minor chords and wordless Gregorian chant.

The collaboration of engineer John Wood at London's Sound Techniques, and US producer/manager Joe Boyd was a string of late 60s recordings with artists (Fairport, Incredible String Band, Nick Drake, John Martyn, Vashti Bunyan) who remade folk-rock, basically an American idea, as British - like the Band, Fairport make music that sounds both contemporary and ancient.

The album's specialness relates to the personnel unique to it (Fairport had more line-ups than The Chills): Denny's singing, Richard Thompson's guitar, Ian Matthews' backing vocals - his harmonising with Denny, like Mama Cass with another Denny (Doherty), or Grace Slick and Marty Balin, gave folk-rock a uniquely unisex, richly textured vocal blend. The fluid rhythms of Martin Lamble (drums), Ashley Hutchings (bass) and Simon Nicol (rhythm guitar) create the Fairport shuffle, a syncopated mid tempo 4/4 groove, on tracks like "Tale In Hard Time", the Dylan cover "I'll Keep It With Mine", and anthemic closer "Meet On The Ledge" (a feel evident on Sneaky Feelings tracks like "Not To Take Sides" and "Husband House").

The songs are a mix of originals, covers of US folk-rock (Dylan, Joni Mitchell's "Eastern Rain") and a couple of trad. arrs. Thus the album doesn't really get the credit it deserves, being neither folk enough for the purists, nor original enough for the rock canonists. But a bit like The Beatles, Fairport covers are an education in themselves - you can see the rock and the folk elements in their raw state, and get a sense of how they're going to fit together to create a new genre.

Matthew Bannister has released his new album, "The Dark Backward", which we will have for sale instore on CD, or from Bandcamp here.
He and his band play at Newtown's Moon bar on Saturday, March 1st - FB event here.