For those who haven’t heard the announcement I posted, songs from this point on will sometimes be split among multiple episodes, so this is the second part of a two-episode look at the song “Who Knows Where The Time Goes?” by Fairport Convention, and the intertwining careers of Joe Boyd, Sandy Denny, and Richard Thompson. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode.
Patreon backers also have a forty-one-minute bonus episode available, on Judy Collins’ version of this song.
Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by editing, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt’s irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/
Errata
For about an hour this was uploaded with the wrong Elton John clip in place of “Saturday Sun”. This has now been fixed. I say “The Ballad of Evermore” at one point where of course I mean “The Battle of Evermore” (the script was correct and it’s right in the transcript, I just misspoke).
Resources
Because of the increasing problems with Mixcloud’s restrictions, I have decided to start sharing streaming playlists of the songs used in episodes instead of Mixcloud ones. This Tunemymusic link will let you listen to the playlist I created on your streaming platform of choice — however please note that not all the songs excerpted are currently available on streaming. The songs missing from the Tidal version are “Shanten Bells” by the Ian Campbell Folk Group, “Tom’s Gone to Hilo” by A.L. Lloyd, two by Paul McNeill and Linda Peters, three by Elton John & Linda Peters, “What Will I Do With Tomorrow” by Sandy Denny and “You Never Know” by Charlie Drake, but the other fifty-nine are there. Other songs may be missing from other services.
The main books I used on Fairport Convention as a whole were Patrick Humphries’ Meet On The Ledge, Clinton Heylin’s What We Did Instead of Holidays, and Kevan Furbank’s Fairport Convention on Track.
Rob Young’s Electric Eden is the most important book on the British folk-rock movement.
Information on Richard Thompson comes from Patrick Humphries’ Richard Thompson: Strange Affair and Thompson’s own autobiography Beeswing.
Information on Sandy Denny comes from Clinton Heylin’s No More Sad Refrains and Mick Houghton’s I’ve Always Kept a Unicorn.
I also used Joe Boyd’s autobiography White Bicycles and Chris Blackwell’s The Islander.
And this three-CD set is the best introduction to Fairport’s music currently in print.
Transcript
Before we begin, this episode contains reference to alcohol and cocaine abuse and medical neglect leading to death. It also starts with some discussion of the fatal car accident that ended last episode. There’s also some mention of child neglect and spousal violence. If that’s likely to upset you, you might want to skip this episode or read the transcript.
One of the inspirations for this podcast when I started it back in 2018 was a project by Richard Thompson, which appears (like many things in Thompson’s life) to have started out of sheer bloody-mindedness. In 1999 Playboy magazine asked various people to list their “songs of the Millennium”, and most of them, understanding the brief, chose a handful of songs from the latter half of the twentieth century. But Thompson determined that he was going to list his favourite songs *of the millennium*. He didn’t quite manage that, but he did cover seven hundred and forty years, and when Playboy chose not to publish it, he decided to turn it into a touring show, in which he covered all his favourite songs from “Sumer Is Icumen In” from 1260:
[Excerpt: Richard Thompson, “Sumer is Icumen In”]
Through numerous traditional folk songs, union songs like “Blackleg Miner”, pieces by early-modern composers, Victorian and Edwardian music hall songs, and songs by the Beatles, the Ink Spots, the Kinks, and the Who, all the way to “Oops! I Did It Again”:
[Excerpt: Richard Thompson, “Oops! I Did it Again”]
And to finish the show, and to show how all this music actually ties together, he would play what he described as a “medieval tune from Brittany”, “Marry, Ageyn Hic Hev Donne Yt”:
[Excerpt: Richard Thompson, “Marry, Ageyn Hic Hev Donne Yt”]
We have said many times in this podcast that there is no first anything, but there’s a reason that Liege and Lief, Fairport Convention’s third album of 1969, and the album other than Unhalfbricking on which their reputation largely rests, was advertised with the slogan “The first (literally) British folk rock album ever”.
Folk-rock, as the term had come to be known, and as it is still usually used today, had very little to do with traditional folk music. Rather, the records of bands like The Byrds or Simon and Garfunkel were essentially taking the sounds of British beat groups of the early sixties, particularly the Searchers, and applying those sounds to material by contemporary singer-songwriters. People like Paul Simon and Bob Dylan had come up through folk clubs, and their songs were called folk music because of that, but they weren’t what folk music had meant up to that point — songs that had been collected after being handed down through the folk process, changed by each individual singer, with no single identifiable author. They were authored songs by very idiosyncratic writers.
But over their last few albums, Fairport Convention had done one or two tracks per album that weren’t like that, that were instead recordings of traditional folk songs, but arranged with rock instrumentation. They were not necessarily the first band to try traditional folk music with electric instruments — around the same time that Fairport started experimenting with the idea, so did an Irish band named Sweeney’s Men, who brought in a young electric guitarist named Henry McCullough briefly. But they do seem to have been the first to have fully embraced the idea. They had done so to an extent with “A Sailor’s Life” on Unhalfbricking, but now they were going to go much further:
[Excerpt: Fairport Convention, “Matty Groves” (from about 4:30)]
There had been some doubt as to whether Fairport Convention would even continue to exist — by the time Unhalfbricking, their second album of the year, was released, they had been through the terrible car accident that had killed Martin Lamble, the band’s drummer, and Jeannie Franklyn, Richard Thompson’s girlfriend. Most of the rest of the band had been seriously injured, and they had made a conscious decision not to discuss the future of the band until they were all out of hospital.
Ashley Hutchings was hospitalised the longest, and Simon Nicol, Richard Thompson, and Sandy Denny, the other three surviving members of the band, flew over to LA with their producer and manager, Joe Boyd, to recuperate there and get to know the American music scene. When they came back, the group all met up in the flat belonging to Denny’s boyfriend Trevor Lucas, and decided that they were going to continue the band.
They made a few decisions then — they needed a new drummer, and as well as a drummer they wanted to get in Dave Swarbrick. Swarbrick had played violin on several tracks on Unhalfbricking as a session player, and they had all been thrilled to work with him. Swarbrick was one of the most experienced musicians on the British folk circuit. He had started out in the fifties playing guitar with Beryl Marriott’s Ceilidh Band before switching to fiddle, and in 1963, long before Fairport had formed, he had already appeared on TV with the Ian Campbell Folk Group, led by Ian Campbell, the father of Ali and Robin Campbell, later of UB40:
[Excerpt: The Ian Campbell Folk Group, “Shanten Bells (medley on Hullaballoo!)”]
He’d sung with Ewan MacColl and A.L. Lloyd:
[Excerpt: A.L. Lloyd, “Tom’s Gone to Hilo” ]
And he’d formed his hugely successful duo with Martin Carthy, releasing records like “Byker Hill” which are often considered among the best British folk music of all time:
[Excerpt: Martin Carthy and Dave Swarbrick, “Byker Hill”]
By the time Fairport had invited him to play on Unhalfbricking, Swarbrick had already performed on twenty albums as a core band member, plus dozens more EPs, singles, and odd tracks on compilations. They had no reason to think they could actually get him to join their band. But they had three advantages.
The first was that Swarbrick was sick of the traditional folk scene at the time, saying later “I didn’t like seven-eighths of the people involved in it, and it was extremely opportune to leave. I was suddenly presented with the possibilities of exploring the dramatic content of the songs to the full.”
The second was that he was hugely excited to be playing with Richard Thompson, who was one of the most innovative guitarists of his generation, and Martin Carthy remembers him raving about Thompson after their initial sessions. (Carthy himself was and is no slouch on the guitar of course, and there was even talk of getting him to join the band at this point, though they decided against it — much to the relief of rhythm guitarist Simon Nicol, who is a perfectly fine player himself but didn’t want to be outclassed by *two* of the best guitarists in Britain at the same time).
And the third was that Joe Boyd told him that Fairport were doing so well — they had a single just about to hit the charts with “Si Tu Dois Partir” — that he would only have to play a dozen gigs with Fairport in order to retire. As it turned out, Swarbrick would play with the group for a decade, and would never retire — I saw him on his last tour in 2015, only eight months before he died.
The drummer the group picked was also a far more experienced musician than any of the rest, though in a very different genre. Dave Mattacks had no knowledge at all of the kind of music they played, having previously been a player in dance bands. When asked by Hutchings if he wanted to join the band, Mattacks’ response was “I don’t know anything about the music. I don’t understand it… I can’t tell one tune from another, they all sound the same… but if you want me to join the group, fine, because I really like it. I’m enjoying myself musically.”
Mattacks brought a new level of professionalism to the band, thanks to his different background. Nicol said of him later “He was dilligent, clean, used to taking three white shirts to a gig… The application he could bring to his playing was amazing. With us, you only played well when you were feeling well.”
This distinction applied to his playing as well. Nicol would later describe the difference between Mattacks’ drumming and Lamble’s by saying “Martin’s strength was as an imaginative drummer. DM came in with a strongly developed sense of rhythm, through keeping a big band of drunken saxophone players in order. A great time-keeper.”
With this new line-up and a new sense of purpose, the group did as many of their contemporaries were doing and “got their heads together in the country”. Joe Boyd rented the group a mansion, Farley House, in Farley Chamberlayne, Hampshire, and they stayed there together for three months.
At the start, the group seem to have thought that they were going to make another record like Unhalfbricking, with some originals, some songs by American songwriters, and a few traditional songs. Even after their stay in Farley Chamberlayne, in fact, they recorded a few of the American songs they’d rehearsed at the start of the process, Richard Farina’s “Quiet Joys of Brotherhood” and Bob Dylan and Roger McGuinn’s “Ballad of Easy Rider”:
[Excerpt: Fairport Convention, “Ballad of Easy Rider”]
Indeed, the whole idea of “getting our heads together in the country” (as the cliche quickly became in the late sixties as half of the bands in Britain went through much the same kind of process as Fairport were doing — but usually for reasons more to do with drug burnout or trend following than recovering from serious life-changing trauma) seems to have been inspired by Bob Dylan and the Band getting together in Big Pink.
But very quickly they decided to follow the lead of Ashley Hutchings, who had had something of a Damascene conversion to the cause of traditional English folk music. They were listening mostly to Music From Big Pink by the Band, and to the first album by Sweeney’s Men:
[Excerpt: Sweeney’s Men, “The Handsome Cabin Boy”]
And they decided that they were going to make something that was as English as those records were North American and Irish (though in the event there were also a few Scottish songs included on the record). Hutchings in particular was becoming something of a scholar of traditional music, regularly visiting Cecil Sharp House and having long conversations with A.L. Lloyd, discovering versions of different traditional songs he’d never encountered before.
This was both amusing and bemusing Sandy Denny, who had joined a rock group in part to get away from traditional music; but she was comfortable singing the material, and knew a lot of it and could make a lot of suggestions herself. Swarbrick obviously knew the repertoire intimately, and Nicol was amenable, while Mattacks was utterly clueless about the folk tradition at this point but knew this was the music he wanted to make. Thompson knew very little about traditional music, and of all the band members except Denny he was the one who has shown the least interest in the genre in his subsequent career — but as we heard at the beginning, showing the least interest in the genre is a relative thing, and while Thompson was not hugely familiar with the genre, he *was* able to work with it, and was also more than capable of writing songs that fit in with the genre.
Of the eleven songs on the album, which was titled Liege and Lief (which means, roughly, Lord and Loyalty), there were no cover versions of singer-songwriters. Eight were traditional songs, and three were originals, all written in the style of traditional songs. The album opened with “Come All Ye”, an introduction written by Denny and Hutchings (the only time the two would ever write together):
[Excerpt: Fairport Convention, “Come All Ye”]
The other two originals were songs where Thompson had written new lyrics to traditional melodies. On “Crazy Man Michael”, Swarbrick had said to Thompson that the tune to which he had set his new words was weaker than the lyrics, to which Thompson had replied that if Swarbrick felt that way he should feel free to write a new melody. He did, and it became the first of the small number of Thompson/Swarbrick collaborations:
[Excerpt: Fairport Convention, “Crazy Man Michael”]
Thompson and Swarbrick would become a brief songwriting team, but as much as anything else it was down to proximity — the two respected each other as musicians, but never got on very well. In 1981 Swarbrick would say “Richard and I never got on in the early days of FC… we thought we did, but we never did. We composed some bloody good songs together, but it was purely on a basis of “you write that and I’ll write this, and we’ll put it together.” But we never sat down and had real good chats.”
The third original on the album, and by far the most affecting, is another song where Thompson put lyrics to a traditional tune. In this case he thought he was putting the lyrics to the tune of “Willie O’Winsbury”, but he was basing it on a recording by Sweeney’s Men. The problem was that Sweeney’s Men had accidentally sung the lyrics of “Willie O’Winsbury’” to the tune of a totally different song, “Fause Foodrage”:
[Excerpt: Sweeney’s Men, “Willie O’Winsbury”]
Thompson took that melody, and set to it lyrics about loss and separation. Thompson has never been one to discuss the meanings of his lyrics in any great detail, and in the case of this one has said “I really don’t know what it means. This song came out of a dream, and I pretty much wrote it as I dreamt it (it was the sixties), and didn’t spend very long analyzing it. So interpret as you wish – or replace with your own lines.”
But in the context of the traffic accident that had killed his tailor girlfriend and a bandmate, and injured most of his other bandmates, the lyrics about lonely travellers, the winding road, bruised and beaten sons, saying goodbye, and never cutting cloth, seem fairly self-explanatory:
[Excerpt: Fairport Convention, “Farewell, Farewell”]
The rest of the album, though, was taken up by traditional tunes. There was a long medley of four different fiddle reels; a version of “Reynardine” (a song about a seductive man — or is he a fox? Or perhaps both — which had been recorded by Swarbrick and Carthy on their most recent album); a 19th century song about a deserter saved from the firing squad by Prince Albert; and a long take on “Tam Lin”, one of the most famous pieces in the Scottish folk music canon, a song that has been adapted in different ways by everyone from the experimental noise band Current 93 to the dub poet Benjamin Zephaniah to the comics writer Grant Morrison:
[Excerpt: Fairport Convention, “Tam Lin”]
And “Matty Groves”, a song about a man killing his cheating wife and her lover, which actually has a surprisingly similar story to that of “1921” from another great concept album from that year, the Who’s Tommy. “Matty Groves” became an excuse for long solos and shows of instrumental virtuosity:
[Excerpt: Fairport Convention, “Matty Groves”]
The album was recorded in September 1969, after their return from their break in the country and a triumphal performance at the Royal Festival Hall, headlining over fellow Witchseason artists John and Beverly Martyn and Nick Drake. It became a classic of the traditional folk genre — arguably *the* classic of the traditional folk genre. In 2007 BBC Radio 2’s Folk Music Awards gave it an award for most influential folk album of all time, and while such things are hard to measure, I doubt there’s anyone with even the most cursory knowledge of British folk and folk-rock music who would not at least consider that a reasonable claim.
But once again, by the time the album came out in November, the band had changed lineups yet again.
There was a fundamental split in the band – on one side were Sandy Denny and Richard Thompson, whose stance was, roughly, that Liege and Lief was a great experiment and a fun thing to do once, but really the band had two first-rate songwriters in themselves, and that they should be concentrating on their own new material, not doing these old songs, good as they were. They wanted to take the form of the traditional songs and use that form for new material — they wanted to make British folk-rock, but with the emphasis on the rock side of things.
Hutchings, on the other hand, was equally sure that he wanted to make traditional music and go further down the rabbit hole of antiquity. With the zeal of the convert he had gone in a couple of years from being the leader of a band who were labelled “the British Jefferson Airplane” to becoming a serious scholar of traditional folk music.
Denny was tired of touring, as well — she wanted to spend more time at home with Trevor Lucas, who was sleeping with other women when she was away and making her insecure. When the time came for the group to go on a tour of Denmark, Denny decided she couldn’t make it, and Hutchings was jubilant — he decided he was going to get A.L. Lloyd into the band in her place and become a *real* folk group. Then Denny reconsidered, and Hutchings was crushed. He realised that while he had always been the leader, he wasn’t going to be able to lead the band any further in the traditionalist direction, and quit the group — but not before he was delegated by the other band members to fire Denny.
Until the publication of Richard Thompson’s autobiography in 2022, every book on the group or its members said that Denny quit the band again, which was presumably a polite fiction that the band agreed, but according to Thompson “Before we flew home, we decided to fire Sandy. I don’t remember who asked her to leave – it was probably Ashley, who usually did the dirty work. She was reportedly shocked that we would take that step. She may have been fragile beneath the confident facade, but she still knew her worth.”
Thompson goes on to explain that the reasons for kicking her out were that “I suppose we felt that in her mind she had already left” and that “We were probably suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder, though there wasn’t a name for it back then.”
They had considered inviting Trevor Lucas to join the band to make Denny more comfortable, but came to the (probably correct) conclusion that while he was someone they got on well with personally, he would be another big ego in a band that already had several, and that being around Denny and Lucas’ volatile relationship would, in Thompson’s phrasing, “have not always given one a feeling of peace and stability.”
Hutchings originally decided he was going to join Sweeney’s Men, but that group were falling apart, and their first rehearsal with Hutchings would also be their last as a group, with only Hutchings and guitarist and mandolin player Terry Woods left in the band. They added Woods’ wife Gay, and another couple, Tim Hart and Maddy Prior, and formed a group called Steeleye Span, a name given them by Martin Carthy. That group, like Fairport, went to “get their heads together in the country” for three months and recorded an album of electric versions of traditional songs, Hark the Village Wait, on which Mattacks and another drummer, Gerry Conway, guested as Steeleye Span didn’t at the time have their own drummer:
[Excerpt: Steeleye Span, “Blackleg Miner”]
Steeleye Span would go on to have a moderately successful chart career in the seventies, but by that time most of the original lineup, including Hutchings, had left — Hutchings stayed with them for a few albums, then went on to form the first of a series of bands, all called the Albion Band or variations on that name, which continue to this day.
And this is something that needs to be pointed out at this point — it is impossible to follow every single individual in this narrative as they move between bands. There is enough material in the history of the British folk-rock scene that someone could do a 500 Songs-style podcast just on that, and every time someone left Fairport, or Steeleye Span, or the Albion Band, or Matthews’ Southern Comfort, or any of the other bands we have mentioned or will mention, they would go off and form another band which would then fission, and some of its members would often join one of those other bands. There was a point in the mid-1970s where the Albion Band had two original members of Fairport Convention while Fairport Convention had none.
So just in order to keep the narrative anything like wieldy, I’m going to keep the narrative concentrated on the two figures from Fairport — Sandy Denny and Richard Thompson — whose work outside the group has had the most influence on the wider world of rock music more broadly, and only deal with the other members when, as they often did, their careers intersected with those two. That doesn’t mean the other members are not themselves hugely important musicians, just that their importance has been primarily to the folk side of the folk-rock genre, and so somewhat outside the scope of this podcast.
While Hutchings decided to form a band that would allow him to go deeper and deeper into traditional folk music, Sandy Denny’s next venture was rather different. For a long time she had been writing far more songs than she had ever played for her bandmates, like “Nothing More”, a song that many have suggested is about Thompson:
[Excerpt: Fotheringay, “Nothing More”]
When Joe Boyd heard that Denny was leaving Fairport Convention, he was at first elated. Fairport’s records were being distributed by A&M in the US at that point, but Island Records was in the process of opening up a new US subsidiary which would then release all future Fairport product — *but*, as far as A&M were concerned, Sandy Denny *was* Fairport Convention. They were only interested in her. Boyd, on the other hand, loved Denny’s work intensely, but from his point of view *Richard Thompson* was Fairport Convention.
If he could get Denny signed directly to A&M as a solo artist before Island started its US operations, Witchseason could get a huge advance on her first solo record, while Fairport could continue making records for Island — he’d have two lucrative acts, on different labels. Boyd went over and spoke to A&M and got an agreement in principle that they would give Denny a forty-thousand-dollar advance on her first solo album — twice what they were paying for Fairport albums.
The problem was that Denny didn’t want to be a solo act. She wanted to be the lead singer of a band.
She gave many reasons for this — the one she gave to many journalists was that she had seen a Judy Collins show and been impressed, but noticed that Collins’ band were definitely a “backing group”, and as she put it “But that’s all they were – a backing group. I suddenly thought, If you’re playing together on a stage you might as well be TOGETHER.”
Most other people in her life, though, say that the main reason for her wanting to be in a band was her desire to be with her boyfriend, Trevor Lucas. Partly this was due to a genuine desire to spend more time with someone with whom she was very much in love, partly it was a fear that he would cheat on her if she was away from him for long periods of time, and part of it seems to have been Lucas’ dislike of being *too* overshadowed by his talented girlfriend — he didn’t mind acknowledging that she was a major talent, but he wanted to be thought of as at least a minor one.
So instead of going solo, Denny formed Fotheringay, named after the song she had written for Fairport. This new band consisted at first of Denny on vocals and occasional piano, Lucas on vocals and rhythm guitar, and Lucas’ old Eclection bandmate Gerry Conway on drums. For a lead guitarist, they asked Richard Thompson who the best guitarist in Britain was, and he told them Albert Lee. Lee in turn brought in bass player Pat Donaldson, but this lineup of the band barely survived a fortnight. Lee *was* arguably the best guitarist in Britain, certainly a reasonable candidate if you could ever have a singular best (as indeed was Thompson himself), but he was the best *country* guitarist in Britain, and his style simply didn’t fit with Fotheringay’s folk-influenced songs.
He was replaced by American guitarist Jerry Donahue, who was not anything like as proficient as Lee, but who was still very good, and fit the band’s style much better. The new group rehearsed together for a few weeks, did a quick tour, and then went into the recording studio to record their debut, self-titled, album.
Joe Boyd produced the album, but admitted himself that he only paid attention to those songs he considered worthwhile — the album contained one song by Lucas, “The Ballad of Ned Kelly”, and two cover versions of American singer-songwriter material with Lucas singing lead.
But everyone knew that the songs that actually *mattered* were Sandy Denny’s, and Boyd was far more interested in them, particularly the songs “The Sea” and “The Pond and the Stream”:
[Excerpt: Fotheringay, “The Pond and the Stream”]
Fotheringay almost immediately hit financial problems, though. While other Witchseason acts were used to touring on the cheap, all packed together in the back of a Transit van with inexpensive equipment, Trevor Lucas had ambitions of being a rock star and wanted to put together a touring production to match, with expensive transport and equipment, including a speaker system that got nicknamed “Stonehenge” — but at the same time, Denny was unhappy being on the road, and didn’t play many gigs.
As well as the band itself, the Fotheringay album also featured backing vocals from a couple of other people, including Denny’s friend Linda Peters. Peters was another singer from the folk clubs, and a good one, though less well-known than Denny — at this point she had only released a couple of singles, and those singles seemed to have been as much as anything else released as a novelty. The first of those, a version of Dylan’s “You Ain’t Goin’ Nowhere” had been released as by “Paul McNeill and Linda Peters”:
[Excerpt: Paul McNeill and Linda Peters, “You Ain’t Goin’ Nowhere”]
But their second single, a version of John D. Loudermilk’s “You’re Taking My Bag”, was released on the tiny Page One label, owned by Larry Page, and was released under the name “Paul and Linda”, clearly with the intent of confusing particularly gullible members of the record-buying public into thinking this was the McCartneys:
[Excerpt: Paul and Linda, “You’re Taking My Bag”]
Peters was though more financially successful than almost anyone else in this story, as she was making a great deal of money as a session singer. She actually did another session involving most of Fotheringay around this time. Witchseason had a number of excellent songwriters on its roster, and had had some success getting covers by people like Judy Collins, but Joe Boyd thought that they might possibly do better at getting cover versions if they were performed in less idiosyncratic arrangements. Donahue, Donaldson, and Conway went into the studio to record backing tracks, and vocals were added by Peters and another session singer, who according to some sources also provided piano.
They cut songs by Mike Heron of the Incredible String Band:
[Excerpt: Linda Peters, “You Get Brighter”]
Ed Carter, formerly of The New Nadir but by this time firmly ensconced in the Beach Boys’ touring band where he would remain for the next quarter-century:
[Excerpt: Linda Peters, “I Don’t Mind”]
John and Beverly Martyn, and Nick Drake:
[Excerpt: Elton John, “Saturday Sun”]
There are different lineups of musicians credited for those sessions in different sources, but I tend to believe that it’s mostly Fotheringay for the simple reason that Donahue says it was him, Donaldson and Conway who talked Lucas and Denny into the mistake that destroyed Fotheringay because of these sessions.
Fotheringay were in financial trouble already, spending far more money than they were bringing in, but their album made the top twenty and they were getting respect both from critics and from the public — in September, Sandy Denny was voted best British female singer by the readers of Melody Maker in their annual poll, which led to shocked headlines in the tabloids about how this “unknown” could have beaten such big names as Dusty Springfield and Cilla Black.
Only a couple of weeks after that, they were due to headline at the Albert Hall. It should have been a triumph. But Donahue, Donaldson, and Conway had asked that singing pianist to be their support act. As Donahue said later “That was a terrible miscast. It was our fault. He asked if [he] could do it. Actually Pat, Gerry and I had to talk Sandy and Trevor into [it]… We’d done these demos and the way he was playing – he was a wonderful piano player – he was sensitive enough. We knew very little about his stage-show. We thought he’d be a really good opener for us.”
Unfortunately, Elton John was rather *too* good. As Donahue continued “we had no idea what he had in mind, that he was going to do the most incredible rock & roll show ever. He pretty much blew us off the stage before we even got on the stage.”
To make matters worse, Fotheringay’s set, which was mostly comprised of new material, was underrehearsed and sloppy, and from that point on no matter what they did people were counting the hours until the band split up.
They struggled along for a while though, and started working on a second record, with Boyd again producing, though as Boyd later said “I probably shouldn’t have been producing the record. My lack of respect for the group was clear, and couldn’t have helped the atmosphere. We’d put out a record that had sold disappointingly, A&M was unhappy. Sandy’s tracks on the first record are among the best things she ever did – the rest of it, who cares? And the artwork, Trevor’s sister, was terrible. It would have been one thing if I’d been unhappy with it and it sold, and the group was working all the time, making money, but that wasn’t the case … I knew what Sandy was capable of, and it was very upsetting to me.”
The record would not be released for thirty-eight years:
[Excerpt: Fotheringay, “Wild Mountain Thyme”]
Witchseason was going badly into debt. Given all the fissioning of bands that we’ve already been talking about, Boyd had been stretched thin — he produced sixteen albums in 1970, and almost all of them lost money for the company. And he was getting more and more disillusioned with the people he was producing.
He loved Beverly Martyn’s work, but had little time for her abusive husband John, who was dominating her recording and life more and more and would soon become a solo artist while making her stay at home (and stealing her ideas without giving her songwriting credit). The Incredible String Band were great, but they had recently converted to Scientology, which Boyd found annoying, and while he was working with all sorts of exciting artists like Vashti Bunyan and Nico, he was finding himself less and less important to the artists he mentored.
Fairport Convention were a good example of this. After Denny and Hutchings had left the group, they’d decided to carry on as an electric folk group, performing an equal mix of originals by the Swarbrick and Thompson songwriting team and arrangements of traditional songs. The group were now far enough away from the “British Jefferson Airplane” label that they decided they didn’t need a female vocalist — and more realistically, while they’d been able to replace Judy Dyble, nobody was going to replace Sandy Denny. Though it’s rather surprising when one considers Thompson’s subsequent career that nobody seems to have thought of bringing in Denny’s friend Linda Peters, who was dating Joe Boyd at the time (as Denny had been before she met Lucas) as Denny’s replacement.
Instead, they decided that Swarbrick and Thompson were going to share the vocals between them.
They did, though, need a bass player to replace Hutchings. Swarbrick wanted to bring in Dave Pegg, with whom he had played in the Ian Campbell Folk Group, but the other band members initially thought the idea was a bad one. At the time, while they respected Swarbrick as a musician, they didn’t think he fully understood rock and roll yet, and they thought the idea of getting in a folkie who had played double bass rather than an electric rock bassist ridiculous. But they auditioned him to mollify Swarbrick, and found that he was exactly what they needed.
As Joe Boyd later said “All those bass lines were great, Ashley invented them all, but he never could play them that well. He thought of them, but he was technically not a terrific bass player. He was a very inventive, melodic, bass player, but not a very powerful one technically. But having had the part explained to him once, Pegg was playing it better than Ashley had ever played it… In some rock bands, I think, ultimately, the bands that sound great, you can generally trace it to the bass player… it was at that point they became a great band, when they had Pegg.”
The new lineup of Fairport decided to move in together, and found a former pub called the Angel, into which all the band members moved, along with their partners and children (Thompson was the only one who was single at this point) and their roadies.
The group lived together quite happily, and one gets the impression that this was the period when they were most comfortable with each other, even though by this point they were a disparate group with disparate tastes, in music as in everything else. Several people have said that the only music all the band members could agree they liked at this point was the first two albums by The Band.
With the departure of Hutchings from the band, Swarbrick and Thompson, as the strongest personalities and soloists, became in effect the joint leaders of the group, and they became collaborators as songwriters, trying to write new songs that were inspired by traditional music. Thompson described the process as “let’s take one line of this reel and slow it down and move it up a minor third and see what that does to it; let’s take one line of this ballad and make a whole song out of it. Chopping up the tradition to find new things to do… like a collage.”
Generally speaking, Swarbrick and Thompson would sit by the fire and Swarbrick would play a melody he’d been working on, the two would work on it for a while, and Thompson would then go away and write the lyrics. This is how the two came up with songs like the nine-minute “Sloth”, a highlight of the next album, Full House, and one that would remain in Fairport’s live set for much of their career:
[Excerpt: Fairport Convention, “Sloth”]
“Sloth” was titled that way because Thompson and Swarbrick were working on two tunes, a slow one and a fast one, and they jokingly named them “Sloth” and “Fasth”, but the latter got renamed to “Walk Awhile”, while “Sloth” kept its working title.
But by this point, Boyd and Thompson were having a lot of conflict in the studio. Boyd was never the most technical of producers — he was one of those producers whose job is to gently guide the artists in the studio and create a space for the music to flourish, rather than the Joe Meek type with an intimate technical knowledge of the studio — and as the artists he was working with gained confidence in their own work they felt they had less and less need of him. During the making of the Full House album, Thompson and Boyd, according to Boyd, clashed on everything — every time Boyd thought Thompson had done a good solo, Thompson would say to erase it and let him have another go, while every time Boyd thought Thompson could do better, Thompson would say that was the take to keep.
One of their biggest clashes was over Thompson’s song “Poor Will and the Jolly Hangman”, which was originally intended for release on the album, and is included in current reissues of it:
[Excerpt: Fairport Convention, “Poor Will and the Jolly Hangman”]
Thompson had written that song inspired by what he thought was the unjust treatment of Alex Bramham, the driver in Fairport’s fatal car crash, by the courts — Bramham had been given a prison sentence of a few months for dangerous driving, while the group members thought he had not been at fault.
Boyd thought it was one of the best things recorded for the album, but Thompson wasn’t happy with his vocal — there was one note at the top of the melody that he couldn’t quite hit — and insisted it be kept off the record, even though that meant it would be a shorter album than normal. He did this at such a late stage that early copies of the album actually had the title printed on the sleeve, but then blacked out.
He now says in his autobiography “I could have persevered, double-tracked the voice, warmed up for longer – anything. It was a good track, and the record was lacking without it. When the album was re-released, the track was restored with a more confident vocal, and it has stayed there ever since.”
During the sessions for Full House the group also recorded one non-album single, Thompson and Swarbrick’s “Now Be Thankful”:
[Excerpt, Fairport Convention, “Now Be Thankful”]
The B-side to that was a medley of two traditional tunes plus a Swarbrick original, but was given the deliberately ridiculous title “Sir B. McKenzie’s Daughter’s Lament For The 77th Mounted Lancers Retreat From The Straits Of Loch Knombe, In The Year Of Our Lord 1727, On The Occasion Of The Announcement Of Her Marriage To The Laird Of Kinleakie”:
[Excerpt: Fairport Convention, “Sir B. McKenzie’s Daughter’s Lament For The 77th Mounted Lancers Retreat From The Straits Of Loch Knombe, In The Year Of Our Lord 1727, On The Occasion Of The Announcement Of Her Marriage To The Laird Of Kinleakie”]
The B. McKenzie in the title was a reference to the comic-strip character Barry McKenzie, a stereotype drunk Australian created for Private Eye magazine by the comedian Barry Humphries (later to become better known for his Dame Edna Everage character) but the title was chosen for one reason only — to get into the Guinness Book of Records for the song with the longest title. Which they did, though they were later displaced by the industrial band Test Dept, and their song “Long Live British Democracy Which Flourishes and Is Constantly Perfected Under the Immaculate Guidance of the Great, Honourable, Generous and Correct Margaret Hilda Thatcher. She Is the Blue Sky in the Hearts of All Nations. Our People Pay Homage and Bow in Deep Respect and Gratitude to Her. The Milk of Human Kindness”.
Full House got excellent reviews in the music press, with Rolling Stone saying “The music shows that England has finally gotten her own equivalent to The Band… By calling Fairport an English equivalent of the Band, I meant that they have soaked up enough of the tradition of their countryfolk that it begins to show all over, while they maintain their roots in rock.”
Off the back of this, the group went on their first US tour, culminating in a series of shows at the Troubadour in LA, on the same bill as Rick Nelson, which were recorded and later released as a live album:
[Excerpt: Fairport Convention, “Sloth (live)”]
The Troubadour was one of the hippest venues at the time, and over their residency there the group got seen by many celebrities, some of whom joined them on stage. The first was Linda Ronstadt, who initially demurred, saying she didn’t know any of their songs. On being told they knew all of hers, she joined in with a rendition of “Silver Threads and Golden Needles”.
Thompson was later asked to join Ronstadt’s backing band, who would go on to become the Eagles, but he said later of this offer “I would have hated it. I’d have hated being on the road with four or five miserable Americans — they always seem miserable. And if you see them now, they still look miserable on stage — like they don’t want to be there and they don’t like each other.”
The group were also joined on stage at the Troubadour on one memorable night by some former bandmates of Pegg’s. Before joining the Ian Campbell Folk Group, Pegg had played around the Birmingham beat scene, and had been in bands with John Bonham and Robert Plant, who turned up to the Troubadour with their Led Zeppelin bandmate Jimmy Page (reports differ on whether the fourth member of Zeppelin, John Paul Jones, also came along). They all got up on stage together and jammed on songs like “Hey Joe”, “Louie Louie”, and various old Elvis tunes. The show was recorded, and the tapes are apparently still in the possession of Joe Boyd, who has said he refuses to release them in case he is murdered by the ghost of Peter Grant.
According to Thompson, that night ended in a three-way drinking contest between Pegg, Bonham, and Janis Joplin, and it’s testament to how strong the drinking culture is around Fairport and the British folk scene in general that Pegg outdrank both of them. According to Thompson, Bonham was found naked by a swimming pool two days later, having missed two gigs.
For all their hard rock image, Led Zeppelin were admirers of a lot of the British folk and folk-rock scene, and a few months later Sandy Denny would become the only outside vocalist ever to appear on a Led Zeppelin record when she duetted with Plant on “The Battle of Evermore” on the group’s fourth album:
[Excerpt: Led Zeppelin, “The Battle of Evermore”]
Denny would never actually get paid for her appearance on one of the best-selling albums of all time.
That was, incidentally, not the only session that Denny was involved in around this time — she also sang on the soundtrack to a soft porn film titled Swedish Fly Girls, whose soundtrack was produced by Manfred Mann:
[Excerpt: Sandy Denny, “What Will I Do With Tomorrow?”]
Shortly after Fairport’s trip to America, Joe Boyd decided he was giving up on Witchseason. The company was now losing money, and he was finding himself having to produce work for more and more acts as the various bands fissioned. The only ones he really cared about were Richard Thompson, who he was finding it more and more difficult to work with, Nick Drake, who wanted to do his next album with just an acoustic guitar anyway, Sandy Denny, who he felt was wasting her talents in Fotheringay, and Mike Heron of the Incredible String Band, who was more distant since his conversion to Scientology.
Boyd did make some attempts to keep the company going. On a trip to Sweden, he negotiated an agreement with the manager and publisher of a Swedish band whose songs he’d found intriguing, the Hep Stars. Boyd was going to publish their songs in the UK, and in return that publisher, Stig Anderson, would get the rights to Witchseason’s catalogue in Scandinavia — a straight swap, with no money changing hands.
But before Boyd could get round to signing the paperwork, he got a better offer from Mo Ostin of Warners — Ostin wanted Boyd to come over to LA and head up Warners’ new film music department. Boyd sold Witchseason to Island Records and moved to LA with his fiancee Linda Peters, spending the next few years working on music for films like Deliverance and A Clockwork Orange, as well as making his own documentary about Jimi Hendrix, and thus missed out on getting the UK publishing rights for ABBA, and all the income that would have brought him, for no money.
And it was that decision that led to the breakup of Fotheringay. Just before Christmas 1970, Fotheringay were having a difficult session, recording the track “John the Gun”:
[Excerpt: Fotheringay, “John the Gun”]
Boyd got frustrated and kicked everyone out of the session, and went for a meal and several drinks with Denny. He kept insisting that she should dump the band and just go solo, and then something happened that the two of them would always describe differently. She asked him if he would continue to produce her records if she went solo, and he said he would. According to Boyd’s recollection of the events, he meant that he would fly back from California at some point to produce her records. According to Denny, he told her that if she went solo he would stay in Britain and not take the job in LA.
This miscommunication was only discovered after Denny told the rest of Fotheringay after the Christmas break that she was splitting the band. Jerry Donahue has described that as the worst moment of his life, and Denny felt very guilty about breaking up a band with some of her closest friends in — and then when Boyd went over to the US anyway she felt a profound betrayal.
Two days before Fotheringay’s final concert, in January 1971, Sandy Denny signed a solo deal with Island records, but her first solo album would not end up produced by Joe Boyd. Instead, The North Star Grassman and the Ravens was co-produced by Denny, John Wood — the engineer who had worked with Boyd on pretty much everything he’d produced, and Richard Thompson, who had just quit Fairport Convention, though he continued living with them at the Angel, at least until a truck crashed into the building in February 1971, destroying its entire front wall and forcing them to relocate.
The songs chosen for The North Star Grassman and the Ravens reflected the kind of choices Denny would make on her future albums, and her eclectic taste in music. There was, of course, the obligatory Dylan cover, and the traditional folk ballad “Blackwaterside”, but there was also a cover version of Brenda Lee’s “Let’s Jump the Broomstick”:
[Excerpt: Sandy Denny, “Let’s Jump the Broomstick”]
Most of the album, though, was made up of originals about various people in Denny’s life, like “Next Time Around”, about her ex-boyfriend Jackson C Frank:
[Excerpt: Sandy Denny, “Next Time Around”]
The album made the top forty in the UK — Denny’s only solo album to do so — and led to her once again winning the “best female singer” award in Melody Maker’s readers’ poll that year — the male singer award was won by Rod Stewart. Both Stewart and Denny appeared the next year on the London Symphony Orchestra’s all-star version of The Who’s Tommy, which had originally been intended as a vehicle for Stewart before Roger Daltrey got involved. Stewart’s role was reduced to a single song, “Pinball Wizard”, while Denny sang on “It’s a Boy”:
[Excerpt: Sandy Denny, “It’s a Boy”]
While Fotheringay had split up, all the band members play on The North Star Grassman and the Ravens. Guitarists Donahue and Lucas only play on a couple of the tracks, with Richard Thompson playing most of the guitar on the record. But Fotheringay’s rhythm section of Pat Donaldson and Gerry Conway play on almost every track.
Another musician on the album, Ian Whiteman, would possibly have a profound effect on the future direction of Richard Thompson’s career and life. Whiteman was the former keyboard player for the mod band The Action, having joined them just before they became the blues-rock band Mighty Baby. But Mighty Baby had split up when all of the band except the lead singer had converted to Islam.
Richard Thompson was on his own spiritual journey at this point, and became a Sufi – the same branch of Islam as Whiteman – soon after the session, though Thompson has said that his conversion was independent of Whiteman’s. The two did become very close and work together a lot in the mid-seventies though.
Thompson had supposedly left Fairport because he was writing material that wasn’t suited to the band, but he spent more than a year after quitting the group working on sessions rather than doing anything with his own material, and these sessions tended to involve the same core group of musicians. One of the more unusual was a folk-rock supergroup called The Bunch, put together by Trevor Lucas.
Richard Branson had recently bought a recording studio, and wanted a band to test it out before opening it up for commercial customers, so with this free studio time Lucas decided to record a set of fifties rock and roll covers. He gathered together Thompson, Denny, Whiteman, Ashley Hutchings, Dave Mattacks, Pat Donaldson, Gerry Conway, pianist Tony Cox, the horn section that would later form the core of the Average White Band, and Linda Peters, who had now split up with Joe Boyd and returned to the UK, and who had started dating Thompson. They recorded an album of covers of songs by Jerry Lee Lewis, the Everly Brothers, Johnny Otis and others:
[Excerpt: The Bunch, “Willie and the Hand Jive”]
The early seventies was a hugely productive time for this group of musicians, as they all continued playing on each other’s projects. One notable album was No Roses by Shirley Collins, which featured Thompson, Mattacks, Whiteman, Simon Nicol, Lal and Mike Waterson, and Ashley Hutchings, who was at that point married to Collins, as well as some more unusual musicians like the free jazz saxophonist Lol Coxhill:
[Excerpt: Shirley Collins and the Albion Country Band, “Claudy Banks”]
Collins was at the time the most respected female singer in British traditional music, and already had a substantial career including a series of important records made with her sister Dolly, work with guitarists like Davey Graham, and time spent in the 1950s collecting folk songs in the Southern US with her then partner Alan Lomax – according to Collins she did much of the actual work, but Lomax only mentioned her in a single sentence in his book on this work.
Some of the same group of musicians went on to work on an album of traditional Morris dancing tunes, titled Morris On, credited to “Ashley Hutchings, Richard Thompson, Dave Mattacks, John Kirkpatrick and Barry Dransfield”, with Collins singing lead on two tracks:
[Excerpt: Ashley Hutchings, Richard Thompson, Dave Mattacks, John Kirkpatrick and Barry Dransfield with Shirley Collins, “The Willow Tree”]
Thompson thought that that album was the best of the various side projects he was involved in at the time, comparing it favourably to Rock On, which he thought was rather slight, saying later “Conceptually, Fairport, Ashley and myself and Sandy were developing a more fragile style of music that nobody else was particularly interested in, a British Folk Rock idea that had a logical development to it, although we all presented it our own way. Morris On was rather more true to what we were doing. Rock On was rather a retro step. I’m not sure it was lasting enough as a record but Sandy did sing really well on the Buddy Holly songs.”
Hutchings used the musicians on No Roses and Morris On as the basis for his band the Albion Band, which continues to this day. Simon Nicol and Dave Mattacks both quit Fairport to join the Albion Band, though Mattacks soon returned. Nicol would not return to Fairport for several years, though, and for a long period in the mid-seventies Fairport Convention had no original members.
Unfortunately, while Collins was involved in the Albion Band early on, she and Hutchings ended up divorcing, and the stress from the divorce led to Collins developing spasmodic dysphonia, a stress-related illness which makes it impossible for the sufferer to sing. She did eventually regain her vocal ability, but between 1978 and 2016 she was unable to perform at all, and lost decades of her career.
Richard Thompson occasionally performed with the Albion Band early on, but he was getting stretched a little thin with all these sessions. Linda Peters said later of him “When I came back from America, he was working in Sandy’s band, and doing sessions by the score. Always with Pat Donaldson and Dave Mattacks. Richard would turn up with his guitar, one day he went along to do a session with one of those folkie lady singers — and there were Pat and DM. They all cracked. Richard smashed his amp and said “Right! No more sessions!”
In 1972 he got round to releasing his first solo album, Henry the Human Fly, which featured guest appearances by Linda Peters and Sandy Denny among others:
[Excerpt: Richard Thompson, “The Angels Took My Racehorse Away”]
Unfortunately, while that album has later become regarded as one of the classics of its genre, at the time it was absolutely slated by the music press. The review in Melody Maker, for example, read in part “Some of Richard Thompson’s ideas sound great – which is really the saving grace of this album, because most of the music doesn’t. The tragedy is that Thompson’s “British rock music” is such an unconvincing concoction… Even the songs that do integrate rock and traditional styles of electric guitar rhythms and accordion and fiddle decoration – and also include explicit, meaningful lyrics are marred by bottle-up vocals, uninspiring guitar phrases and a general lack of conviction in performance.”
Henry the Human Fly was released in the US by Warners, who had a reciprocal licensing deal with Island (and for whom Joe Boyd was working at the time, which may have had something to do with that) but according to Thompson it became the lowest-selling record that Warners ever put out (though I’ve also seen that claim made about Van Dyke Parks’ Song Cycle, another album that has later been rediscovered).
Thompson was hugely depressed by this reaction, and blamed his own singing. Happily, though, by this point he and Linda had become a couple — they would marry in 1972 — and they started playing folk clubs as a duo, or sometimes in a trio with Simon Nicol.
Thompson was also playing with Sandy Denny’s backing band at this point, and played on every track on her second solo album, Sandy. This album was meant to be her big commercial breakthrough, with a glamorous cover photo by David Bailey, and with a more American sound, including steel guitar by Sneaky Pete Kleinow of the Flying Burrito Brothers (whose overdubs were supervised in LA by Joe Boyd):
[Excerpt: Sandy Denny, “Tomorrow is a Long Time”]
The album was given a big marketing push by Island, and “Listen, Listen” was made single of the week on the Radio 1 Breakfast show:
[Excerpt: Sandy Denny, “Listen, Listen”]
But it did even worse than the previous album, sending her into something of a depression. Linda Thompson (as the former Linda Peters now was) said of this period “After the Sandy album, it got her down that her popularity didn’t suddenly increase in leaps and bounds, and that was the start of her really fretting about the way her career was going. Things only escalated after that. People like me or Martin Carthy or Norma Waterson would think, ‘What are you on about? This is folk music.'”
After Sandy’s release, Denny realised she could no longer afford to tour with a band, and so went back to performing just acoustically or on piano.
The only new music to be released by either of these ex-members of Fairport Convention in 1973 was, oddly, on an album by the band they were no longer members of. After Thompson had left Fairport, the group had managed to release two whole albums with the same lineup — Swarbrick, Nicol, Pegg, and Mattacks. But then Nicol and Mattacks had both quit the band to join the Albion Band with their former bandmate Ashley Hutchings, leading to a situation where the Albion Band had two original members of Fairport plus their longtime drummer while Fairport Convention itself had no original members and was down to just Swarbrick and Pegg.
Needing to fulfil their contracts, they then recruited three former members of Fotheringay — Lucas on vocals and rhythm guitar, Donahue on lead guitar, and Conway on drums. Conway was only a session player at the time, and Mattacks soon returned to the band, but Lucas and Donahue became full-time members.
This new lineup of Fairport Convention released two albums in 1973, widely regarded as the group’s most inconsistent records, and on the title track of the first, “Rosie”, Richard Thompson guested on guitar, with Sandy Denny and Linda Thompson on backing vocals:
[Excerpt: Fairport Convention, “Rosie”]
Neither Sandy Denny nor Richard Thompson released a record themselves in 1973, but in neither case was this through the artists’ choice. The record industry was changing in the early 1970s, as we’ll see in later episodes, and was less inclined to throw good money after bad in the pursuit of art. Island Records prided itself on being a home for great artists, but it was still a business, and needed to make money.
We’ll talk about the OPEC oil crisis and its effect on the music industry much more when the podcast gets to 1973, but in brief, the production of oil by the US peaked in 1970 and started to decrease, leading to them importing more and more oil from the Middle East. As a result of this, oil prices rose slowly between 1971 and 1973, then very quickly towards the end of 1973 as a result of the Arab-Israeli conflict that year. As vinyl is made of oil, suddenly producing records became much more expensive, and in this period a lot of labels decided not to release already-completed albums, until what they hoped would be a brief period of shortages passed.
Both Denny and Thompson recorded albums at this point that got put to one side by Island. In the case of Thompson, it was the first album by Richard and Linda as a duo, I Want to See the Bright Lights Tonight:
[Excerpt: Richard and Linda Thompson, “I Want to See the Bright Lights Tonight”]
Today, I Want to See the Bright Lights Tonight is widely regarded as one of the greatest albums of all time, and as one of the two masterpieces that bookended Richard and Linda’s career as a duo and their marriage. But when they recorded the album, full of Richard’s dark songs, it was the opposite of commercial. Even a song that’s more or less a boy-girl song, like “Has He Got a Friend for Me?” has lyrics like “He wouldn’t notice me passing by/I could be in the gutter, or dangling down from a tree”
[Excerpt: Richard and Linda Thompson, “Has He got a Friend For Me?”]
While something like “The Calvary Cross” is oblique and haunted, and seems to cast a pall over the entire album:
[Excerpt: Richard and Linda Thompson, “The Calvary Cross”]
The album itself had been cheap to make — it had been recorded in only a week, with Thompson bringing in musicians he knew well and had worked with a lot previously to cut the tracks as-live in only a handful of takes — but Island didn’t think it was worth releasing.
The record stayed on the shelf for nearly a year after recording, until Island got a new head of A&R, Richard Williams. Williams said of the album’s release “Muff Winwood had been doing A&R, but he was more interested in production… I had a conversation with Muff as soon as I got there, and he said there are a few hangovers, some outstanding problems. And one of them was Richard Thompson. He said there’s this album we gave him the money to make — which was I Want to See the Bright Lights Tonight — and nobody’s very interested in it. Henry the Human Fly had been a bit of a commercial disappointment, and although Island was altruistic and independent and known for only recording good stuff, success was important… Either a record had to do well or somebody had to believe in it a lot. And it seemed as if neither of those things were true at that point of Richard.”
Williams, though, was hugely impressed when he listened to the album. He compared Richard Thompson’s guitar playing to John Coltrane’s sax, and called Thompson “the folk poet of the rainy streets”, but also said “Linda brightened it, made it more commercial. and I thought that “Bright Lights” itself seemed a really commercial song.”
The rest of the management at Island got caught up in Williams’ enthusiasm, and even decided to release the title track as a single:
[Excerpt: Richard and Linda Thompson, “I Want to See the Bright Lights Tonight”]
Neither single nor album charted — indeed it would not be until 1991 that Richard Thompson would make a record that made the top forty in the UK — but the album got enough critical respect that Richard and Linda released two albums the year after. The first of these, Hokey Pokey, is a much more upbeat record than their previous one — Richard Thompson has called it “quite a music-hall influenced record” and cited the influence of George Formby and Harry Lauder.
For once, the claim of music hall influence is audible in the music. Usually when a British musician is claimed to have a music hall influence, what is meant is that they have made a record with some staccato piano chords, but the melody of “Smiffy’s Glass Eye”, for example, sounds authentically like something that would have been heard in the Edwardian music halls, though the lyrics, about a boy who loses his eye and looks forward to the day of judgement when the world will end and he’ll be able to gloat over the eternal fate of all the bullies who mocked him, are not really in the idiom:
[Excerpt: Richard and Linda Thompson, “Smiffy’s Glass Eye”]
On the other hand, the lyrics for the title track, “Hokey Pokey”, very much *are* in the idiom of George Formby and similar double-entendre comedians:
[Excerpt: Richard and Linda Thompson, “Hokey Pokey”]
It’s a song about an ice cream. I don’t know how you could possibly think otherwise. Such dirty minds you have.
It was during the recording of Hokey Pokey that both Richard and Linda fully converted to Sufi Islam, though as Richard later said he didn’t really think of it as a conversion, as much as discovering who he had always been inside.
The two of them soon moved into a commune run by the religious leader Sheikh Abdul Q’Adir, and Richard at least had the zeal of the newly-converted. While Dave Pegg said of touring with him shortly after his conversion experience “You would hardly have known that Richard had become a Muslim, apart from the fact that on the tour we had twelve curries in eleven days… it just meant he didn’t drink and was more choosy about what he was eating. He didn’t suddenly go strange and try to convince everybody they should join him, he was just very much the same down-to-earth normal person that he always seemed to be.” others have described Richard and Linda rolling out their prayer mats in the recording studio between takes to pray very publicly, with the musicians not knowing what to do while their friends were praying. Accordion player John Kirkpatrick has described Simon Nicol crying into his beer, not knowing what had happened to his friend.
This period of new-found religious enthusiasm seems to have been damaging to Richard and Linda’s relationship. Richard Thompson is, these days, still a Muslim, but he says of himself that he’s a liberal Muslim and just one of a couple of billion normal people who believe in Islam.
But at this point, as many converts to a new religion do, the two dove head first into changing their entire lifestyles to fit their new faith. The commune they moved into had separate rules for men and women, and women were supposed to be subservient to the men at all times. At first, Linda thought that this would actually be good for her, and for their relationship, because Richard was a very ineffectual, shy, retiring type of person while she was a very domineering, take-charge, type, and didn’t particularly like that about herself, and she believed that it would help both of them to go against their own natures a little bit.
However, she later realised that this level of oppression had in fact caused her some serious emotional disturbance, and there were points during the several years they lived in the commune that Linda left because she simply couldn’t cope any more.
As well as the personal stress, there was also a professional issue.
Now, I am not myself Muslim, and I hope I’m not massively misrepresenting anything here, but there are differences of opinion among Muslims as to whether the Quran prohibits music or not — there are verses about “idle talk” which some, particularly fundamentalist sects like the Wahabi, believe to be prohibitions against all sounds meant for entertainment, including music. Other Muslims think that only music of certain types is prohibited — that some sayings about the prophet Muhammad can be interpreted as saying that string and horn instruments are banned, but that percussion and singing are OK, so long as the music is to praise God. And yet others think that music is only prohibited when it’s used as an excuse for sexual immorality or drunkenness.
The community to which the Thompsons belonged seemingly changed its mind about what was and wasn’t allowed. Sheikh Abdul Q’Adir initially allowed them to make music so long as Richard only played acoustic guitar, no electric, and so long as the music was appropriately worshipful towards God. He later relaxed the restriction on electric guitar, so the duo’s next album, Pour Down Like Silver, which featured photos of the two of them in turbans, was made up of devotional songs, but played with rock instrumentation, though as with a lot of this kind of music, several of the songs are ambiguous about whether they’re about God or a secular lover:
[Excerpt: Richard and Linda Thompson, “Dimming of the Day”]
For the next three years, though, the Thompsons were almost completely out of the music business and scene, devoting themselves to Islam and their children.
Meanwhile, Sandy Denny was committed to touring America to promote the Sandy album, which even though it did nothing commercially in the UK was still being given a push in the US, off the back of reviews like one in Rolling Stone which called it “the year’s finest album by an English singer”. She had hoped initially to tour with her own band — she wanted to reform Fotheringay, and Gerry Conway and Pat Donaldson were also on board. But Jerry Donahue was excited to be working with Dave Swarbrick in Fairport Convention, and so Lucas and Donahue stayed with that band, meaning that Denny was now committed to doing a solo tour on her own while her partner was touring away.
Denny and Lucas had an open relationship, but at the same time Denny was also incredibly jealous of Lucas, and of the other women he was sleeping with. She was convinced that the only way to keep him with her was for the two of them to tour together, and when they were apart she would get obsessed about what he was doing with other women. She got very depressed on her US tour, where she was supporting acts like the Steve Miller Band and Loggins and Messina, whose audiences were not very interested in her. At one point she walked off the stage after having only played one song, irritated at the way the audience was not interested in her performance.
This was reflected in some of the songs she wrote for her next album, which Lucas co-produced for her with John Wood. The lyrics to “Solo” are fairly self-explanatory:
[Excerpt: Sandy Denny, “Solo”]
But this album was another attempt to chase commercial success, this time trying for a classic pop sound. The direction of the album was largely set early on when she brought in a couple of cover versions she wanted to perform — the old standard “Until the Real Thing Comes Along”, which had been a hit in the thirties for Fats Waller and for the Ink Spots; and another Ink Spots song, “Whispering Grass”, which became the first (and it turned out only) single from the album:
[Excerpt: Sandy Denny, “Whispering Grass”]
That choice was actually nowhere near as uncommercial as it might sound in the context of the mid-seventies — two years after that single was released, the sitcom actors Don Estelle and Windsor Davies released their own version of the song, which went to number one in the UK — but Denny’s single did nothing.
But the choice of 1930s songs for covers ended up shaping the style of Denny’s own originals on the album. The album’s title track, for example, is “Like an Old-Fashioned Waltz”:
[Excerpt: Sandy Denny, “Like an Old-Fashioned Waltz”]
Denny and Lucas got married shortly after the sessions for the album, but the relationship between the two had become strained and part of the reason for the wedding was to try to patch things up after a period of separation.
Not only that, they were now in direct competition for the limited amount of release slots that Island had. Island had originally scheduled both Fairport’s latest album, Nine (generally considered their weakest), and Denny’s Like an Old-Fashioned Waltz to be released in October 1973 — the very month that the OPEC crisis reached its peak and vinyl shortages came into effect. Faced with the commercial failure of the “Whispering Grass” single and the general lack of interest in the Witchseason acts at Island at that point, the album was pulled from the schedule, and was eventually released nearly a year later, in June 1974.
With no new album of her own to tour behind, Denny, who didn’t particularly like to perform solo anyway, and was desperate to be around her husband, decided to go along on Fairport’s tour of Australia. What started out as her guesting with her old band on a handful of songs per show eventually turned into her taking her old place as lead singer in what fans were now jokingly calling “Fotheringport Confusion”, taking all her old leads and showing new aspects of her vocal style. On the version of Dylan’s “Down in the Flood” from the live album of that tour, one could almost think Denny was channelling Janis Joplin, a singer with whom she always felt she had more in common than either woman’s fans would admit:
[Excerpt: Fairport Convention, “Down in the Flood”]
But that tour nearly destroyed Fairport forever. Their equipment for this world tour was sent, not as freight, but as excess baggage. The group were twenty-five thousand pounds in debt, and Chris Blackwell agreed to absorb the debt and treat it as an advance — which in turn meant that their next album *had* to be a hit.
Rising For The Moon saw the group working with an outside producer for the first time since Joe Boyd had left for America. Everything had been produced by the band and John Wood, the engineer they’d worked with since the beginning. But now they brought in the legendary producer Glyn Johns, who had worked as a producer or engineer with the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, Led Zeppelin, the Kinks, the Eagles, and others. For the first time they were going to do an album with no traditional songs, no instrumentals, and no cover versions. It was going to be an album entirely made up of original songs written by the band members.
Which in effect meant written by Sandy Denny. Of the eleven tracks on the album, Denny wrote five by herself and co-wrote two more with other band members, and the songs written by others are generally considered the weak links on the album. Johns later said of the album “There are a couple of tracks on there that aren’t very good at all. That’s normally the case. Trevor’s song “Iron Lion” and Peggy and Swarb’s “Night Time Girl”, a country hoedown, are awful. It’s political, it’s normal in any band where there are two or three other writers that you try and involve them all and give them at least one each.”
On the other hand, Johns *would* later cite Swarbrick’s “White Dress” as a favourite:
[Excerpt: Fairport Convention, “White Dress”]
The album’s recording was so stressful that Mattacks left the group in the middle of recording — depending on who you ask he either just couldn’t cope with Johns’ perfectionism, or he was sick of the poor money the group were making. He was replaced by Bruce Rowland and the band continued on.
But the album did little better commercially than any of Fairport’s other records, and the change in style alienated the group’s old fans without winning them the new ones they wanted.
It was followed by a disastrous North American tour. The group had got a new manager, Jo Lustig, who had managed to take many other groups in Fairport’s orbit, like Steeleye Span and Jethro Tull, into the realms of major commercial success. But in this case, he ended up making some errors in booking the tour, resulting in the group turning up to find that gigs were cancelled.
On top of that there was an undeclared battle between Swarbrick, who had been undisputed leader of Fairport since Thompson had left several years earlier, and Denny, who was now a new focal point on stage. And this wasn’t helped by Denny’s substance abuse problems. She had always been a big drinker, but on this trip to America for the first time she and Lucas started taking large amounts of cocaine. She started occasionally falling off stage in the middle of performances, and the alcohol and cocaine were starting to destroy her once-pure voice.
Pegg later recalled that after the full American tour and the British tour that followed it — two months’ work — he made only three hundred pounds. Which is better than the previous world tour where they’d lost money, but still not enough to make it worthwhile to continue as a band.
The group split up. Donahue was the first to leave — he went back to America to become a session player, playing on records like Mike Love’s unreleased solo album First Love:
[Excerpt: Mike Love, “Brian’s Back”]
Denny had also been doing some outside work — in between recording Rising For The Moon and the tour for its release, she had guested on one of the oddest things she was ever involved in — an almost Queen-styled glam-prog single by the comedian Charlie Drake, which featured a backing band including Peter Gabriel (who produced and co-wrote it), Robert Fripp, Brian Eno, and Phil Collins:
[Excerpt: Charlie Drake, “You Never Know”]
Soon Denny and Lucas had left Fairport, reducing the group to a lineup of Swarbrick, Pegg, and Rowland, who turned in what was originally intended as a Swarbrick solo album instead as Fairport’s swan song at Island.
But Denny was slowly going out of control. The absence of a regular band for her to tour with led to her staying at home, ruminating, and drinking more. Partly in an attempt to control her drink and substance issues, and partly — apparently — because she was attracted to a recruiter for the cult, she briefly became a Scientologist, but when Lucas found out how much money the Church of Scientology was taking from them he went and smashed up their offices.
She worked on another album, with Lucas again producing, titled Rendezvous, but her voice was starting to deteriorate badly, and they were increasingly trying for a crossover to a mainstream rock audience that just wasn’t interested. Rendezvous is clearly trying to be a record in the style of bands like Fleetwood Mac, and Lucas brings in musicians like Steve Winwood and the super-session keyboard player John “Rabbit” Bundrick.
The album did have its highlights, like Denny’s version of the Richard and Linda Thompson song “For Shame of Doing Wrong”, retitled “I Wish I Was a Fool For You” the only time she would ever record a song by her ex-bandmate:
[Excerpt: Sandy Denny, “I Wish I Was a Fool For You”]
But her vocals were starting to be noticeably degraded between the cocaine and alcohol, and once again the record label decided to put the album on the shelf.
The album was left unreleased for nearly a year, and then some more tracks were recorded, at the behest of the record company, to try to make it more commercial and maybe give Denny the hit she needed. Richard Thompson picked up his electric guitar again to guest on what would be the single, Denny’s version of Elton John’s “Candle in the Wind”, recorded under protest at the record company’s insistence:
[Excerpt: Sandy Denny, “Candle in the Wind”]
That was to be Sandy Denny’s final single. It, and the album it came from, did nothing.
After an almost three-year absence from music, Richard and Linda Thompson were starting back into making records and touring again. At first, they toured backed by the members of Mighty Baby, the blues-rock group that Ian Whiteman was in, who were made up entirely of Sufi Muslims like Richard and Linda. Around the same time, they finally decided to move out of the commune and start living a somewhat more normal life, at least by the standards of musicians, though they retained their faith.
Linda Thompson later said of this time “I don’t know what the catalyst was, but Richard suddenly seemed to be open to leaving, not to stop being a Muslim. He said “But we have nowhere to live” and I said “Yes we have, because I held on to the flat without your knowledge,” so we came back down to London. It was tough, he didn’t really have a life, then when he got out into the world again, I think he’d really just wasted his twenties and thought, I’m going to do something in my thirties.”
Meanwhile, Joe Boyd had gone back into record production, and was producing records for Julie Covington, the musical theatre star who had had the hit with “Don’t Cry For Me Argentina”. To start with, he got Richard Thompson, Pegg, Nicol, and Mattacks to reunite to back Covington on a non-album single of Alice Cooper’s “Only Women Bleed”:
[Excerpt: Julie Covington, “Only Women Bleed”]
Boyd said of that session “I got Simon and Mattacks and Pegg, and we went to Olympic, and supposedly this was the first time Richard had played electric guitar for X number of years. Simon was almost in tears, so moved by the experience of hearing Richard play — because he was playing brilliantly. I remember Simon saying “I just can’t believe that this guy is going to give this up”.
But Thompson didn’t give it up — rather the opposite. Boyd then asked Thompson to return as the guitarist on the full album Covington was making, with an all-star cast of guest musicians including John Cale and Steve Winwood playing on songs including covers of Kate Bush, John Lennon, Sandy Denny, and Thompson himself, with the single being Covington’s cover version of “I Want to See the Bright Lights Tonight”:
[Excerpt: Julie Covington, “I Want to See the Bright Lights Tonight”]
Thompson was the lead guitarist on the whole album, and the American session musicians that Boyd had brought in to be the rhythm section, Andy Newmark, Willie Weeks, and Neil Larson, were all astonished at how good he was. Boyd quickly called Jo Lustig, who was the Thompsons’ manager, and told him that these session players were eager to work with Thompson, and that there were a few studio days available in the middle of the schedule for the Covington album — if he wanted a new Richard and Linda record, he wasn’t going to get a better chance.
The duo did record a new album, First Light, with the same backing musicians, produced by Richard Thompson and John Wood, but the album is generally considered to be much weaker than the duo’s pre-Islam recordings, overproduced and underinspired, though it has its defenders:
[Excerpt: Richard and Linda Thompson, “Don’t Let a Thief Steal Into Your Heart”]
Richard Thompson later said “Probably the record I like least is First Light, I really don’t like it… They were all great musicians, but it was probably just stylistically a wrong call… To me the record sounds kind of wrong and I’m not mad about the songs. It’s a half-baked record. I really didn’t think enough about the material.”
The album that followed, Sunnyvista, was if anything even worse — Thompson had discovered the joys of the guitar synthesiser, in ways that did not improve the sound of the record, and Chrysalis Records, their new label, dropped them. But it did have the merit of having guest backing vocals from Gerry Rafferty, who had recently had a hit with “Baker Street” and was at the height of his fame. Rafferty got Richard and Linda to guest on several tracks on his next album, and hired them to be his support act.
Rafferty also offered to finance and produce an album by the duo, who had no record deal at the time. The sessions he produced included several new songs, but also a couple of odd remakes — they redid “For Shame of Doing Wrong”, the song Sandy Denny had covered on Rendezvous:
[Excerpt: Richard and Linda Thompson “For Shame of Doing Wrong (Gerry Rafferty version)”]
And also Sandy’s “I’m a Dreamer”, the song which had initially been intended to be the second single from Rendezvous before Island cut its losses:
[Excerpt: Richard and Linda Thompson, “I’m a Dreamer”]
The reason for these cover versions was simple – they were tributes to a now-dead friend.
Shortly after recording the Rendezvous album, but before its much-delayed release, Sandy Denny had got pregnant — she had desperately wanted a child for a long time — but she had not been able to bring herself to stop drinking and taking cocaine, and the baby, Georgia, ended up being born two months premature and having to go through detox in the hospital.
Denny was dropped by Island two months after the baby was born, just after getting out of the hospital. She went on a tour to promote Rendezvous nonetheless, but her voice was a shadow of its former self. She was suffering from post-natal depression, and abusing drink and drugs even more to dull the pain of being dropped by the label. Trevor Lucas would apparently often come home from playing a session to find Denny passed out with the baby screaming.
They were also running out of money — the cheques they presented to the musicians for Denny’s final tour all bounced.
There were signs of hope, still — she had friends in LA, and Bruce Johnston, who was currently very influential in the music business after having won a Grammy for “I Write the Songs”, and who was working with everyone from Elton John to Pink Floyd during his break from the Beach Boys, was putting out feelers about producing a record for her. Perhaps they could get a deal to make a record in California with some of her many famous fans there?
But it was not to be. In April 1978, Sandy visited her parents, to perform a charity concert at the local village hall. Drunk, she fell downstairs, landing head first on the stone floor. She was feeling very unwell, but her mother, who had a strong sense of propriety, refused to be seen with a drunk daughter at the local hospital.
She started having headaches, and took painkillers — painkillers which, if her brain was bleeding, would make the bleeding worse, as would her alcohol intake. She fell downstairs again in her own home, and this seems to have sealed things for Lucas. He had desperately loved his wife, despite not being the perfect husband, but he was afraid for his daughter’s life — if Sandy was carrying her and had a fall like that, she could kill the baby, and it was only a matter of time before that happened. On the thirteenth of April, 1978, he took the baby and, without telling Sandy where he was going, flew to Australia to be with his parents.
Sandy went to stay with a friend that evening and for the long weekend after, and made plans that on the Monday she was going to go to the doctor, get something done about those headaches, and also talk about getting some treatment for her drinking.
But that same Monday, the 17th of April, she collapsed in her friend’s house at the foot of the stairs. Her friend was out for the day, but later got another friend to call round to check on Sandy. He found her nonresponsive, and she was rushed to hospital. Trevor Lucas quickly returned from Australia, but Sandy was brain dead, and life support was turned off on the twenty-first of April. She was only thirty-one:
[Excerpt: Sandy Denny, “Who Knows Where the Time Goes? (Live 1977)”]
Fairport Convention themselves weren’t to last much longer, though they did continue for a while. After Gottle O’Geer, the Swarbrick solo album released as a Fairport record, they were dropped by Island. They persuaded Nicol to rejoin the band, and released two more albums on Vertigo Records, but Fairport split up in 1979 — but with a promise to reunite every year at what later became Cropredy Festival.
A version of the band later reformed full-time in 1985 consisting of Pegg, Nicol, Mattacks, Ric Sanders (who replaced Swarbrick, who had been suffering from hearing problems for several years — though Swarbrick continued performing acoustic shows until shortly before his death in 2016) and Maartin Alcock. There have been more comings and goings in the band since then, including a twenty-two-year period where Gerry Conway replaced Mattacks on drums, but as of now, forty years after they reformed, Pegg, Nicol, Mattacks, and Sanders are performing as Fairport Convention, along with Chris Leslie, who joined the group in 1997.
Their Cropredy Festival has become an institution on the British musical calendar, and frequently features former members of the group — at one time or another every living ex-member of the band has played with them at Cropredy, even if not elsewhere, and sometimes they’ve had particular old lineups reform to perform their albums. The group has in total released nineteen proper albums since Rising For The Moon, but while each album has had its fans, their time as a vital creative force effectively ended with the second departure of Sandy Denny, and since their return they’ve been a much loved institution rather than people making eagerly awaited new art.
Nicol also continues to perform with Ashley Hutchings in the various Albion Band lineups. The Albion Band has two original members of Fairport Convention, while Fairport Convention has only one, but nobody seems to mind. That’s just how Fairport is.
But of all the ex-Fairports, it was Richard Thompson, first with Linda and then alone, who would remain important in music.
The album that Gerry Rafferty produced for the Thompsons was not a happy one to make, and was never released, though tracks from it have since turned up on compilation albums. Richard Thompson later said
“He wanted to finance a record and it seemed like a good idea at the time, but I found Gerry very hard to work with, I must say. Painstaking and fanatical on certain small details, which is irritating for other people. As a producer he wasn’t a good communicator and he really wanted to do everything himself. I think that was the main problem as a producer, that he was more like the artist. He really wanted control over absolutely everything. When he got to the mixing, I just didn’t bother turning up for the mix because if I said something it was totally ignored and I thought “Hey, whose record is this anyway?” and that was the last time I spoke to Gerry Rafferty.
“He wasn’t able to place it anywhere — it wasn’t a great record, it just sounded like our record with layers of Gerry Rafferty over the top. It sounded really kind of muddy, like a lot of his records did, but without the sort of panache of “Baker Street”, which is a great record.”
The record languished, unreleased, for a year or so, and then Joe Boyd stepped in with an offer. He was starting a new label, Hannibal Records, and would the Thompsons like to make a quick album the way they used to? Get Simon Nicol, Dave Mattacks, and a bass player (it would be Dave Pegg and Pete Zorn, depending on the tracks) and cut an album in a few days, more or less as live? Do it cheap, and use the money that would have been spent on expensive session players and overdubs to finance a US tour? They agreed, and the result was their second masterpiece, Shoot Out The Lights:
[Excerpt: Richard and Linda Thompson, “Wall of Death”]
Shoot Out the Lights is a tremendously bleak album, and it has in later years been portrayed as a breakup album, but most of the songs on the album were written years earlier — most of them were cut during the Rafferty sessions originally. But there’s a heavy pall hanging over the whole record. In particular, many have taken the song “Did She Jump or Was She Pushed?” to have been inspired by Denny’s death:
[Excerpt: Richard and Linda Thompson, “Did She Jump or Was She Pushed?”]
During the sessions Linda was heavily pregnant — some of the songs which in Rafferty’s production had Linda leads now had Richard leads because she was finding breathing difficult — and so after the sessions Richard went off alone to do a brief solo club tour of the US, to try to build up anticipation for a longer full-band tour to promote the album.
And while he was there, he met and fell in love with the woman who would become his second wife, who was the booker for McCabe’s in Santa Monica, and started an affair with her. He came clean to Linda a few days after the birth, and told her he wanted a divorce.
And then they went on that longer full-band tour of North America, with Nicol, Zorn, and Mattacks, performing together every night while in the middle of divorce proceedings.
It was not an amicable divorce, and Linda would sometimes physically attack Richard on stage, deliberately tripping him, kicking him, or punching him. The other band members, all of whom were longtime friends of both of the couple, were trying to remain neutral while the marriage disintegrated. Linda by all accounts did some of the best singing of her career, but she was also trashing the dressing rooms — one promoter told her she was worse than the Sex Pistols had been — and at one point she actually stole a car. Everyone involved now refers to it as “The Tour From Hell”.
After the LA show, Linda Ronstadt insisted on taking Linda Thompson away for a couple of days and looking after her, making her skip one gig, and after that she coped better for the one day left of the tour.
She released one solo album in 1985. That album really *was* a breakup album, and included the song “Telling Me Lies”, which she wrote with Betsy Cook, who she had met when they were both doing backing vocals for Gerry Rafferty. That song was covered by the trio of Dolly Parton, Emmylou Harris, and Linda Ronstadt, and their version went top ten country and got Linda nominated for a Grammy award:
[Excerpt: Dolly Parton, Emmylou Harris, and Linda Ronstadt, “Telling Me Lies”]
But the stress had taken its toll. Like Shirley Collins after *her* divorce, Linda Thompson developed spasmodic dysphonia which made it impossible for her to sing. After that album she retired from music for seventeen years.
The same isn’t true of her ex-husband though. In many ways, Richard Thompson’s career began at the same time Linda’s ended. He started recording a string of solo albums which continue to this day. While they’ve not all been successful, he’s had eleven top forty albums in the UK in the last thirty-four years — more chart success than anyone else involved in Fairport — and he is widely regarded as one of the finest songwriters of his generation. His song “1952 Vincent Black Lightning”, in particular, is now something of a country and folk standard:
[Excerpt: Richard Thompson, “1952 Vincent Black Lightning”]
Richard and Linda eventually reconciled as friends, and for a few years starting around 2001, Linda made an attempt at a comeback — botox injections helped her regain her voice for a while — and Richard appeared on most of the albums she released in this period, as did their son Teddy, a successful songwriter and guitarist in his own right.
Their daughter Kami is also a musician, in the folk-rock duo The Rails with her husband. They’ve said that their ambition is eventually to make the perfect divorce album. In 2014 Richard, Linda, Teddy, The Rails, and various other extended family members recorded an album, Family, under the band name Thompson:
[Excerpt: Thompson, “Perhaps We Can Sleep”]
More recently, though, Linda’s dysphonia has got worse. But she’s no longer letting that stop her making music. Last year she released an album, titled Proxy Music, with other people singing her songs. All those family members appear again, as do Rufus and Martha Wainwright, the Unthanks, and Eliza Carthy, all members of folk music families. The closing track on the album, “Those Damn Roches”, sung by Teddy, is a tribute to such infighting musical families, with verses about the Roches, the Copper Family, the Wainwright-McGarrigle family, the Waterson-Carthy family, and finally the Thompsons themselves:
[Excerpt: Linda Thompson, “Those Damn Roches”]
The story of Fairport Convention and their wider sphere of musical associates in the sixties and seventies was one of horrible, tragic, loss, with the deaths of Martin Lamble and Sandy Denny at ridiculously young ages, and the destruction of Linda Thompson and Shirley Collins’ voices. But those who survived and got through it all have all, in their different ways, flourished, and built a musical legacy that will outlast them all, a link in a musical chain between the past and the future:
[Excerpt: Richard Thompson, “Marry, Ageyn Hic Hev Donne Yt” into theme]
