Fairport Convention

The reverberations from The Byrds' first two albums could be felt as far away as the Muswell Hill house where Simon Nicol and his teenage school chums convened to make their own music.

Fresh from an apprenticeship with Elektra in New York, young producer Joe Boyd, then running the now-mythic UFO Club in London's Covent Garden, saw Fairport Convention play and was transfixed, especially by Richard Thompson's unique guitar work. But Boyd couldn't work out why the band weren't bastardizing their own traditional music.

In asking themselves the same question, Fairport Convention commenced a voyage whose co-ordinates defined British folk rock; the rattling climax of A Sailor's Life; the eerie worldliness of Richard Thompson's Meet On The Ledge and Sandy Denny's Who Knows Where The Time Goes (first recorded by Denny when she was with The Strawbs); and of course, the entirety of their 1969 masterpiece Liege & Lief.

The band were involved in a motorway accident in June 1969 in which drummer Martin Lamble died. The group re-formed later that year with singer/violinist Dave Swarbrick coming in as the focal point, writing much of the music and making his jiggy violin as essential part of their sound. Sandy Denny left the band in the same year to form Fotehringay, and later to work with her own band and on solo gigs.

Guitarist Richard Thompson left in January 1971 and Fairport Convention became very much Dave Swarbrick's band and reached the revered status of an 'institution' on the British rock scene. 

TRIVIA NOTE
Dave Swarbrick read his own obituary in the Daily Telegraph while in hospital in 1999. He later sold signed copies of the obit at his gigs before the newspaper complained that he was infringing their copyright!