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 bastardising 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 on 11 May 1969 in
which drummer Martin Lamble died. The band were returning in their
van from a gig in Birmingham (UK) when, on the outskirts of
London, their roadie fell asleep at the wheel and the van went
cartwheeling across the M1. Richard Thompson's girlfriend, Jeannie
"the Tailor" Franklin also died in the crash.
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 Fotheringay,
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.
In recent years the band have toured the UK each spring and
appear annually at their own Cropredy festival (in Cropredy,
Oxfordshire).
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!
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