Back to the Future

Music Row
By Brian Rademaekers

The 40-year history of the Fairport Convention is a long and complicated one, and filled with shifts in sound, major reconfigurations, even death. And so they find themselves in Philadelphia tonight (May 24), not with the robust half-dozen members they were in 1967, but as a graying trio.
In many ways, the show will see the legendary group coming full circle here in the City of Brotherly Love.
When the musicians who eventually became the Fairport Convention first set out, it was their goal to create a harmony-rich folk-rock band in the line of American West Coast bands like The Byrds. Their earliest works, such as 1969’s Unhalfbricking, capture that desire and consist of electrified and amped-up folk songs.
But according to Joe Boyd, the group’s longtime producer, an on-tour car accident that killed a band member played a part in Fairport’s shift toward the sound they are famous for today.
In Boyd’s new book, White Bicycles: Making Music in the 1960s, he recalls a band devastated by the loss. As they recuperated from the accident, Yankee rockers The Band released their now-classic album Big Pink. Boyd writes that the work had a deep impact on Fairport, both impressing the members and causing them to abandon their hopes of making the ultimate rock tribute to the American folk sound.
Somehow, in the midst of this despair, the group found the inspiration to take that same love of rock and apply it to the traditional music of the British Isles. The result was 1969’s Liege and Leif — an album that featured traditional British folk songs magnified into heart-pounding rock anthems. Electric guitars played by Simon Nicol and Richard Thompson blended with furious fiddle-playing to back the harrowing vocals of Sandy Denny. It was the birth of a style that had many turning their eyes from the burgeoning American music scene to re-examine what had been left behind in the Old World.
That unique sound not only launched Fairport to international fame, but it reinvigorated interest in Britain’s lost musical gems. The album, featuring only one original, proved to be a watershed moment for the band. From then on, they made a career of digging through dusty songs and putting a new shine on them. In 2006, the British public named Liege and Leif "the most influential folk-rock album of all time" in balloting done by the BBC.
Almost immediately after its release, the group went through a seismic shake-up, with Denny and Ashley "Tyger" Hutchings leaving to do solo gigs. For Nicol, the group’s founding member, the loss was significant, but the band has persisted and, more the 30 years later, is still putting out albums and holding an annual festival in Cropredy, England.
Tonight the band will consist of three members: Ric Sanders joined Fairport in 1985 and plays the violin; Chris Leslie was recruited in 1996 and will offer fiddle, mandolin and lead vocals; founding member Nicol will be strumming his famous guitar.
Having hit the states in early May, the band, known as the Fairport Acoustic trio, made its way eastward before arriving here in Philly. Besides appearing in this scaled-down format, Fairport has also made some changes in style. A large portion of tonight’s set will likely be drawn from their 2007 album, Sense of Occasion, a critically acclaimed work that shows the band returning to its roots in songwriting and presenting their work in a more traditional acoustic format.
That’s quite a flip from the days when they made their name giving an electric edge to ancient English folk songs, but even four decades later, Fairport possesses an almost magical ability to mine the best in music and create captivating songs.
The album also features a new rendition of Liege and Leif’s "Tam Lin" and a surprisingly good, mandolin-heavy version of the ’70s New Wave band XTC’s Love on a Farm Boy’s Wages.
What you will see tonight won’t be the Fairport Convention of the 1960s. But it will be part of them, and it will be the spirit of a band that introduced a new and important vein in modern popular music. And they’ll also be playing songs that hark back to the tradition that made them famous. ••

See them play ...
Who: The Fairport Convention
What: A modern and scaled-down incarnation of the band that pioneered the rebirth of British folk in the 1960s.
When: Thursday, May 24, at 8 p.m.
Where: The Tin Angel, 20 S. Second St. Tickets are $25.