FAIRPORT CONVENTION - Liege & Lief

 

(CG)

The fourth album Liege and Leaf by Fairport Convention in 1969 featuring Sandy Denny is perhaps the most successful of the fusions of rock music and British folk traditions. It directly transposed songs from an English folk tradition to a rock idiom to immediate acclaim. However in some ways its successful fusion perhaps highlighted some of the major difficulties of this British genre which made this a singular or one off phenomenon within rock music.

British folk music often invoked notions of middle class “Englishness” often based on the academic propensities of folk musicologists seeking to historicise its traditions while linking it to a selective range of historical cultural texts that had recorded its oral forms. In contrast contemporary Irish, and to a lesser extent Scottish, folk music were rooted in the politics of inequalities and marginalisation that gave it an immediacy that evoked contemporary experience whether the shipyards of Glasgow or the troubles of Northern Ireland. There were more radical traditions of music fostered by the unions and working mens’ halls in England that championed the experience of working people but their voices were muted or marginalised in the mass consumption of folk music as it developed as an industry in the 1950s. This was compounded by the ways in folk traditions were policed such that, for example, Bob Dylan’s move from acoustic to electric met with fierce opposition from the Newport festival fans in 1965. In England in 1966 there was a similar defining of musical boundaries at the Manchester Free trade Hall where Dylan was famously reviled as “Judas” by a disgruntled British folk music fan. 

Seminal to the development of rock music was the utilisation of the flexible 12 bar idiom derived from African American blues music, in its rural and urban forms, mediated by the forms of rock and roll of Little Richard and Chuck Berry that challenging the racialised distribution of music in the USA. Inspired by Dylan’s shift to rock and the impetus he contributed drawn from other musical genres such as the Oklahoma derived narratives of Woodie Guthrie that challenged establishment hierarchies, British musicians looked to their own folk traditions as a resource in the development of British rock. However many of these rock musicians shaped by their middle class nostalgia of a lost rural Britain rather than the impact of a hundred years of industrialisation were constricted by the fashioning of musical tropes of an archaic England that sat uneasily with the rebellion and the progressiveness of the nascent rock genre at that historical moment. It often resulted in a fey or arch idiom with antiquated musical forms that did not fit with the 12 bar blues structure, although these works were consumed by some middle class audiences.

And yet…… Fairport Convention took this route consulting with the archives of the British Folk Society by Regents Park but also harrowed by a car crash that killed their drummer and a girlfriend. The shared trauma lends an emotional edge of loss and poignancy that re-invigorated the lyrics while the musical transpositions simplified and ruthlessly struck out the musical archaisms to offer an emotional clarity that cut to the core. 

(PS)

Do I get to bang on about how amazing 1969 was again? Well if I must… Not content with releasing one great album that year, Fairport released three. THREE! 

What We Did on Our Holidays, the wonderful Unhalfbricking and the cornerstone of British folk rock that is Liege and Lief.  

 

Replacing original vocalist Judy Dyble, Sandy Denny gave Fairport power, a clear direction and a sense of identity that was previously lacking. With a stronger voice than Judy’s, she allowed the group to have a louder, rockier sound – and thus British Folk Rock was properly born.  

 

What We Did on Our Holidays still had the tinges of the West Coast sound played through an English filter… then The Band’s seminal Music from Big Pink was released and made Fairport reassess their American leanings, as they couldn't compete with that – they had to redefine themselves and record music that was truer to their roots. Country fan Ian Matthews left to form Matthews Southern Comfort and fiddle virtuoso Dave Swarbrick took more centre stage, particularly in the traditional A Sailor’s Tale on Unhalfbricking; the twin-pronged fiddle/guitar attack of Swarb and Richard Thomson had been forged. 

 

After the tragic loss of drummer Martin Lamble in the M1 crash in May 69, the survivors collectively mourned their losses and found that they needed the band as something to cling to, a way to deal with the situation. So they ‘got it together in the country’ (Hampshire, actually) and the result was the game-changing Liege and Lief, their first album totally dedicated to British folk songs. None of your cable-sweatered, finger-in-the-ear, beardy hey nonnying here though… this is the perfect mix of rock and folk music, with beautifully searing, clear-as-a-bell vocals from Denny and lovely interplay from Swarb and Thompson.

 

The LP’s opener Come All Ye sets the electrified folk stage perfectly, like a call to a sumptuous feast; but Reynardine is arguably the standout track here, as hauntingly beautiful as the previous LP’s Who Knows Where the Time Goes. Stunning. The traditional Matty Groves starts out like a fairly standard folk number, until the mad proggish noodling comes in and it’s an absolute blast after that. Farewell, Farewell closes the side in more reflective mood with Thompson lyrics to a traditional melody.

 

The Deserter starts side 2 as a genteel waltz until the protagonist’s court martial briefly makes it a more regimented 3/4; then the Swarb tour de force that is Medley storms in, drinks all your grog and breaks up the furniture in the melee; Tam Lin has a nicely irregular 3, 3, 4, 3 time with Denny’s vocals flowing gracefully over the top; Crazy Man Michael is an original composition, but could easily be another traditional arrangement. 

The whole experience of the LP feels like an old painting in a modern frame. Inside the gatefold sleeve are pictures of long-lost folk figures such as Pace-Eggers, Morris Dancers and notable folk music historian Cecil Sharp, among others; clearly the message here is that your heritage should be remembered, even if you embrace that of others. 

 

Ashley Hutchings and Denny left soon after the album’s release (to form Steeleye Span and Fotheringay respectively) and Fairport never truly regained the magic they managed to capture; Full House from 1970 has its moments, but its predecessor is where it’s really at. Oft-copied, never equalled, Liege and Lief is majestic. And quintessentially British. 

 (JS)

This is an album of tensions, both positive and negative.On one hand the band present novelty in the form of amplified electronic music in a popular American rock style, on the other the album celebrates an interpretation of English traditional folk music, that in a sense has informed elements of the American tradition. The musicians also present a tension between individual musical virtuosity and the discipline of de-individualising their personal musical contributions to meld into the gestalt, fit for the purpose of being a commercial rock band. The third observable tension is the tension between embracing the popular as championed by the commercial charts, with the music the band enjoyed playing/ listening to. Liege and lief is often hailed as the definitive performance of the band in studio, but in reality it was a moment of individuals, suspending their individual creative egos momentarily to work together to produce a moment of beauty before rushing away from each other to try something else with lesser effect. In genre terms it is often described as the definitive English folk rock album, and can be identified to have spawned hundreds of imitators, even though there were many treading this ploughline before them and many, many after them. Whilst guest vocalist Sandy Denny gets much of the credit for the traditional folk dimension, she was supported by Hutching's academic research in Cecil Sharp House on one hand, and the raw folk that courses through the veins of Dave Swarbrick’s fiddle playing. Supported by Mattacks, Thompson and Nicol, it was an impossible alchemy not to transmute base metal into gold. The album made money but not enough to bind the band into a second album. As the band fragmented its members formed Fotheringay, The Albion band, and Steeleye Span, who continued to plough the same furrow, if in a diminished form.

 

Come all ye - A fantastic opening track, a loose rolling ramble into the possibilities of the new ensemble, the discipline to play a coherent song is barely held together, Thompson’s Nicol’s and Swabricks musical individualism is highly detectable, whilst Mattacks and Hutchings hold it all together. The overall sound as it is though is of the male musicians standing around Denny in the centre, queen of all she surveys, the lyric whilst simple, is well within her range which allows firm command. Original composition

 

Reynardine- A loose and rather over-ornamented version of the traditional Renardyne, this is an example of where the individual musicians should have been kept in check, its starts at 11 and climbs to thirteen in regards to wild improvisations, and it could do with a bit more pace in my opinion. Denny’s vocal here has become the standard interpretation, but the song would work better at say Matty groves pace, except in that it precedes Matty groves on the album. Personally it feels a tad indulgent, overly slowed down to make way for the stomper that follows. Denny voice is a bit too thin in timbre to carry this off.

 

Matty Groves- A traditional border ballad, which Denny’s vocal commands well, the band is disciplined here but the material demands a full eight minutes to spit it out. The tune is not good enough for eight minute, and the lyrical content illustrates that it is not a feminist dance classic in a traditional or a novel sense. Denny’s vocal works better here but Swarbrick is buried too deep in the mix until released by Thompson’.s mid song wig out.

Farewell, Farewell- A disciplined Thompson song, with a good focussed Denny vocal

 

The Deserter- A traditional song , which binds the band together into the classic folk band they are, Thompson, Nicols and Swarbrick in their proper place . Denny is just about perfect in this one, rising from an interesting vocalist to being an essential one.

 

"Medley"I. "The Lark in the Morning”, II. "Rakish Paddy”, III. "Foxhunter's Jig”, IV. "Toss the Feathers" -Swarbrick’s price for band membership, a proper folkie stomp that can be repeated and elongated to any length by musicians of this calibre, it's just a shame that Swarbrick is buried a bit deep in the mix.

 

Tam Linn- Another example of the traditional and rock elements bound together in perfect harmony by Denny whose vocal style works better in the staccato than in the legato style she adopted for Reynardine.  It goes on a bit and could accommodate a bit more pace towards the end. Swarbrick is subdued in the mix, and  an alternate mix could make the song much wilder and fairy like. 

 

Crazy Man Michael Orignal composition, great Denny vocal, the bands individual virtuosity is here contained and great song, despite the occasional olde English inflection. 

(MS)

    “Think about stories with reason and rhyme

    Circling through your brain

    And think about people in their season and time

    Returning again and again” (Nick Drake)

 

“Liege and Lief” is not an obscure album. In fact it may be considered the “Citizen Kane” of UK folk-rock recordings; the shining pinnacle, the benchmark for all other entries to be compared against. Curiously this in itself has made it and the band that recorded it slip into the realms of the neglected and unheard.

 

Perhaps it’s a little bit too revered to be listened to? Easy prey for Norma Waterstone’s fiddle playing daughter to once remark that there was more to the UK folk movement than “Liege & Lief”. To be fair there is more, or at least there was back then when the movement consisted of a broad coalition of emerging and overlapping styles. This album and those of the other heavyweight act Pentangle, influenced a multitude of folk-rock bands. Special mention should be made of The Trees two brilliant LP’s, the first few by Steeleye Span, Forest, Fresh Maggots and the one-off Fairport offshoot Fotheringay. But there were copious singer songwriters too, covering similar territory like John Martyn, Steve Ashley, Roy Harper, Mick Softley, Nick Drake, Al Stewart and Bridget St John. Traditionalists, Martin Carthy, The Waterstons, Anne Briggs, Shirley Collins upped their sound to a lesser or greater extent to meet the changes. Then there was the hippy end of the spectrum with the (Scottish) Incredible String Band, (Irish) Dr Strangely Strange and the poppier cross-over musings of Donovan. And of course a number of the rock bands such as Family, Jethro Tull, Traffic and Led Zepellin were also playing songs within the genre.(Sandy Denny of Fairport guests on Led Zep IV) And…there’s Comus, Dando Shaft, Heron, Mellow Candle and great stand-out songs…Shelagh McDonald’s “Dowie Den of Yarrow”, Keith Christmas’ “Forest and The Shore” and future West End chanteuse Julie Covington’s “My Silks and Fine Array” etc, etc…the list is long.

 

But the fact is the folk-rock movement never really advanced beyond this album. There were many attempts to follow the template but very few single albums so perfectly captured such an evocative and cohesive sense of mood over a 40 minute sitting. So many things coalesce around it, around the people who created it and around the time it was made.

 

The opening song “Come All Ye” with its fiddles and drums is like the triumphal march of Heralds leading an army into battle. It’s the Fairport’s “Sgt Pepper”, introducing the listener to an experience aiming “To rouse the spirit of the earth and move the rolling sky”. It’s the song to kick-off any compilation of folk music from this period. The rock element is most evident when the LP reaches Appalachian tune “Shady Grove” appended to a 17C murder ballad, re-titled “Matty Groves”. Halfway through it transforms into an instrumental jam showcase for the locked groove of fiddler Dave Swarbrick and guitarist Richard Thompson; the latter taking his improvisations into Jerry Garcia/ Jorma Kaukonen territory. In fact the riff of this tune brings to mind a touch of Jefferson Airplane’s chorus to the contemporaneous “’Volunteers”. (The summit of Thompson’s guitar ramblings would be his spell-binding “Sloth” on Fairport’s next LP)

This was the fourth release by The Fairport Convention and the culmination of an ever progressing sequence of recordings. They’d formed in a house called “Fairport” at the opposite end of the same Fortis Green Road in Muswell Hill to that of The Kinks. By 1968 the latter were creating their own somewhat more proletarian take on pastoral idyll’s with their “Village Green” album. (The pub that overlooks the still-standing house with its “Fairport” sign, has recently been renamed “The Village Green”). Fairport’s early goodtime jug-band songs and covers of contemporary Americana was a tad too respectful but once Sandy Denny joined, the band found a vocalist who was more than a match for their maturing musicianship. And they started to write quality originals. The anthemic “Meet on the Ledge”, the sweet sitar-tinged “Book Song”, brooding “Genesis Hall” and the wonderfully ominous “Autopsy”. Denny also brought a soon to be folk standard in “Who Knows Where the Time Goes” as well as broadening the palate with an encouragement to bandmates to explore traditional arrangements like “She Moved Through the Fair” and the sea-shanty psych-out of “A Sailor’s Life”.

 

On an earlier LP the magical madrigal-like “Fotheringay” always brings me back to those shivery Saturday mornings on the sofa watching those short histories about castles with jarring zoom lenses to the battlements, swelling war noises and soothing Patrick Allen-types recounting the fate of doomed kings and queens. My face pressed against the cool window panes, eyes staring out into damp northern mornings, torrential afternoons and whole weekends lost to heavy moor-mist. From the back room drifted the Clancy Brothers and Tom Paxton and on TV Toni Arthur was always chirping away with a song about a bloody frog. There was a lot of folk in the background in the early 1970’s. I would have first picked up “Liege & Lief” the only way you could back then via trips to the library on Saturday mornings, finger-tips nicked by the too tightly packed plastic sleeves in the cramped record dept. Like rose thorns hiding their sharp secret, we bled to discover unheard Beatles songs left off the bodged tape recordings fed to us by our busy father. When I finally heard the full ”White Album” it was like gaining access to a secret room in my bedroom that had always been there but one that had been hidden from me. A childhood measured in TDK C90’s.

But the firm connection to listening to folk-music for pleasure only truly emerged from my subconscious during my cathartic mid-teens. One late-night I caught a TV viewing of “The Wicker Man” introduced by a sinister looking carnival barker frothing at the mouth about the secrets he was about to unfold upon us. When the song “Corn Rigs” played over the opening credits of that old horror film it seemed to suddenly awaken all sorts of ancient thoughts lying dormant in me. Pagan horror then connected back to that musty old volume of British Folk Mythology in the glass book cabinet in the front room that I’d spend years idly poring over. I reflected on the spectacular mountains and pine forests I’d seen on those dark Scottish summers spent holidaying with the family. I even discovered that Toni Arthur had been on the fringe of the occult herself, recording a 1971 album called “Hearken to the Witches Rune”. 

 

“Liege & Lief’s” second song “Reynadine” take us deep into those sinister woods with the unsettling electric violin of Swarbrick taking us off the mossy path straight into horror. Adapted from an ancient morality tale the story shape shifted itself at the turn of the 20^th Century to tell the tale of a maiden’s seduction by a werefox. Swarbrick gives a similarly creepy performance on the Martin Carthy version of the song recorded the previous year (“Prince Heathen” LP). On the inside of the gatefold sleeve there were photos of olden ceremonies or were they in fact drawings…or were they doctored photos? It was hard to make out. And I studied that back sleeve and long considered the significance of the curious wooden head and the final line from “Tam Lin”

 

       "Oh, had I known, Tam Lin,"she said, 

"what this night I did  see

       I'd have looked him in the eyes 

and turned him to a tree"

 

“Tam Lin” is an elephantine epic that twists and turns it’s dark fairytale text between passages of West-coast influenced guitar rock jamming. It’s a very dramatic reading and one given space to unravel its mysterious story. See more of this on my post below which considers Ian McShane’s unlikely contribution to folk horror http://frombetweenthecracks.blogspot.com/2011/11/film-ballad-of-tam-lin-director-roddy.html

But the purple and cream cover of this 1969 classic shows a group compartmentalised in neat boxes, a symbolic message that their togetherness as a band was all but over. In the spring of that year a car crash had killed both the drummer and the girlfriend of Richard Thompson leaving the rest of the band deeply traumatized. Thompson’s two songs that close each side are inspired by those events one about her and one seemingly about himself. They were barely out of their teens when all this happened. The heartbreaking “Farewell Farewell” acts as a sweet counterpoint to the closing sinister neo-folk of “Crazy Man Michael” with its disconcerting - and seemingly unresolved - dying fiddle fade. It reminds me of the way Van Morrison abruptly ended his own folk-cycle “Astral Weeks”. (this LP incidentally being something of a unique mix of soul and jazz within Celtic and American folk traditions)

 

After this the band splintered with Sandy Denny going on to record a clutch of epics such as “Banks of the Nile”, “Next Time Around” and the quite spectacular multi-tracked “Quiet Joys of Brotherhood” (a version of this Richard Farina song had been attempted by Fairport for the “Liege and Lief” sessions and was probably only rejected as it shares the same eerie ambiance as “Reynardine”). Not many years later Sandy Denny fell down-stairs and died. She now shares a Putney graveyard with Howard Carter, Jakob Epstein and Kerensky, a couple of miles away from the house of her parents, immortalised on the “Unhalfbricking” sleeve. Her brief career is largely unknown even to this day.

 

Like traditional arrangements, mis-transcribed, re-interpreted and then forgotten so we cultural historians wander over these overgrown paths again and again. We pore over meaning from brief magical moments of music capturing the thoughts of men and women before they’d even reached the age of 30. Music captured in old brick studios long lost to developers’ profits. ”Liege & Lief” was recorded off the Kings Road in a very different Chelsea to the one we find today. If you keep walking down Old Church Street you’ll find the former site of Sound Techniques set back from the road in an old 19C dairy. This was the creative hub of Joe Boyd’s Witchseason productions, most of the acts I’ve mentioned recorded their work here using the same pool of musicians. But like the old stories say, be careful not to stray too far from the path. When you get to the Thames your way may well be blocked by the private security guards protecting Michael Caine’s view of Battersea.  

 

“Farewell, farewell to you who would hear

You lonely travelers all”