Bumper Cropredy (The Sequel)

And so we resume...

Back from England's green and pleasant land, my head buzzing with folk-rock and my wallet rendered ultra-light by the pound-versus-dollar fiasco. Fifteen or so current and ex- Fairporters showed up, as did some 23,000 friends, the first-ever sellout for the ever-more-popular, three-day festival held near Banbury at Cropredy (officially declared "Fairport's Cropredy Convention" these days).

Simon Nicol was gracious and jovial, as ever. Dave Swarbrick seemed smaller but healthier, and playing with more pizazz than he has for years. And Richard Thompson?... songmeister and guitar god, and the secret passion of males and females alike, it would seem, from the number of swooning and swanning fans clamoring after him everywhere.

We enjoyed two rehearsal-night sessions of Fairport (with guests); a major, over-two-hours club concert by RT and his Band touring to support the powerful Sweet Warrior album (anchored by "'Dad's Gonna Kill Me," his anti-Iraq ditty); Richard again for a shorter but still-potent set hard on the heels of the much-bruited, on-stage play-through of Liege and Lief by the original band (minus one); and a final-night FOUR-hour set by the variant Fairports.

Plus supporting-act oldsters Jools Holland, Richard Digance, Wishbone Ash, and The Strawbs; folk stalwarts Billy Mitchell and Bob Fox, Show of Hands, and The Bucket Boys; and young-turk hopefuls like Kerfuffle, Seth Lakeman, Last Orders, Give Way, and my personal fave, The Demon Barbers Roadshow. A grand time was had by all.

But I do want to pay special tribute to the woman who filled in for long-deceased Sandy Denny, singing all the Liege and Lief female vocals... Chris While, known to me only as a sometime associate of Ashley Hutching's current bands. Ms. While was pure and clear and powerful and--dare I whisper it--maybe even better that night than were Sandy Denny's own beautiful and slightly wistful vocals recorded nearly 40 years ago. Chris soared head and shoulders over previous Sandy fill-ins like Vicky Clayton and Cathy LeSurf (fine vocalists not quite suited to the part).

The weather was amazing. After weeks of will-it-rain-and-flood-still-more anxiety, instead we sweltered through 10 days of eighty-degree sun, allowing us to bake and fry on the fields of Cropredy. Side jaunts when not musicking included zipping around London, strolling around Stratford-upon-Avon, scouring both Banbury town and Cropredy village for any CDs or beers left unclaimed, and touristing through Cambridge and its aged but undreaming spires. Historically major colleges and brilliant bookstores were the order of that last day.

So to wrap up this Festive report, I think I'll tack on one of my life-of-tourist poems from earlier times in Merrie Olde E...

Country Ways

So on we go jigging her country ways,
Lightly skimming the groins of the braes,
The post-roads humping vales and downs,
Past tangled weirs into gnarly towns,
Mulch and Dreath hamlets, where iron-wrought
Villagers stare and spare no thought
For why, or who is come—hurdling the dells,
Dashing from Mousehole, splash into Wells,
Up Mendip Hills, out across Dartmoor,
Staggered by Glastonbury’s misty Tor,
The Abbey stones reiterating loss
Near a thorn-tree rimed with blossom-frost.

“Running well late,” this sodden spring;
Or so the folk say, blithely imagining
The sun out bright in this steel-wool grey
Drenching gorse and heath, coil-wound hay;
Daydreaming sunlight chipping chalk and flint,
Heat baking Bog Queen and Green Man skin
To ceramic perfection—hedgerows forming,
Starlings exploding, mayflies swarming,
Rife with the old heart-lurching ease
Of Albion’s seasonal epiphanies,
That sap of being, from loin to part,
Never gleaned in the sum of Descartes.

Loosed like the land’s replenishment,
This streaking commotion shields no pent-
Up magic, no ceremonious mystery,
No legends of Arthur, no lords of history,
Neither kingfisher lore nor Fisher King,
No, not Christ cup, not Saxon hoarding…
Merely a bug-flecked French sedan’s
Quarrel of blear-eyed Americans—
Cramped and gawking, time-lost tourists
Pummeled by each day’s ticking lists,
Routed by dale and glen and this late-spring
Gameboard arrayed for castling and mating.

Fair Port, Crop Ready (The Prequel)

The flood waters in England are receding, and the proper British getting on with it, shoveling out the damaged homes and inns. The sun has reappeared, however reluctantly, over weirs and moors. And the show will go on! Fairport and its thousands of friends will soon occupy the drying-out grounds of Cropredy once more...

I fly out on August 3rd, so I get to send this bloggin' stuff on leave too for a couple of weeks, lazy sod that I am. But first here's just one more bit of old Fusion writing, since it relates to some of the music that lies ahead in England:

By 1970 or so, the great Fairport Convention line-up including Sandy Denny, Ashley Hutchings, and Richard Thompson had splintered, and the other, and newer, guys had rallied behind fancy folk fiddler Dave Swarbrick. So, from June 1972, my review of A&M 4333, Fairport's then-new album "Babbacombe" Lee (and my opinion of the discs cited here would still hold today, except that Angel Delight yielded many Fairport old favorites as the years went on)...

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Hard on the heels of Fairport's recent Angel Delight--a somewhat lackluster jumble of jigs and clogs rumored to have been released without the group's consent (and certainly advertised in a slipshod manner with even the song titles confused)--comes this odd accumulation of programmatic folky-rock called "Babbacombe" Lee. (Arriving almost to the day with the announcement of Simon Nicol's departure from the group, the drafty jacket even has a drawing of the boys with Simon standing apart--shades of Last Time Around!) I say "programmatic" because the songs all concern one John Lee, evidently a real man who was arrested for a murder he didn't commit. Convicted posthaste on circumstantial evidence and condemned to death, Lee was later unexpectedly reprieved when, on the morning of his execution, the gallows failed three times to function. Lee then lived on behind bars for twenty-odd years more (consignment to a worse tomb, he commented afterwards) until his final parole.

A bizarre tale indeed, and a curious choice for a "concept" album. Or is it? An 1880's setting, existential angst, a "terrible ordeal" (as the notes proclaim), an implicit message calling for prison and juridical reform--"Babbacombe" Lee has them all and more. The "more" fortunately being a disc-load of good, varied, invigorating music--plenty of mandolin and fiddle, vocals from all four Fairporters (for a welcome change), a multitude of intriguing and melodic, if untitled, songs.

The guys have clearly put in many long hours shaping these story-songs, polishing the lyric content to a glossy, yet feeling and intelligent gleam, especially the second side's Death Row ballads ("Dying's very easy, waiting's very hard"). I was prepared at first to be bored, since concept albums have become such a goddamned glut and drag. But now I'm most glad I listened and really heard. A distinguished, and enjoyable, piece of work from a group still to be reckoned with, split or no. So don't let the bland packaging put you off--don't pass "Babbacombe" Lee carelessly by.

(And if you can find it, get the English import called No Roses, by Shirley Collins and the Albion Country Band--which is Miss Collins and, mostly, the old Fairport crew reunited for a folk-rocking good time that harkens back to watershed albums like Unhalfbricking and Liege and Lief.)

*********

Back to the present. As fans of Fairport know, Sandy died after a fall, Richard built a great career as songwriter and guitarist extraordinaire, restless Ashley became a one-man force for preserving English music of all eras, and Swarb led a version of Fairport for several more years, until the band sort of petered out... except that it didn't.

A new/old Fairport reconstituted itself with Simon back, and Dave Pegg, and Dave Mattacks, and various front men on guitar or fiddle or whatever, and the boys gathered for a nice Weekend in the Country, which became a yearly event, which grew to be three days of Fairporters old and new and their many musical friends and friendly rivals, and new albums appeared every year or so, and the band rolled on!

Forty years young this May, and up to nearly 30 years of Festivals, mostly called Cropredy. And all survivors are back this year for a special on-stage playthrough of Liege and Lief (the single most influential English rocking folk album of all time), as well as the usual all-hands-on-deck Saturday night with Fairport.

And I'll be there.

It All Comes 'Round Again

In early August, I fly over the waves to London, to join the latest Yank tour gang--sponsored by Festival Tours actually, based in Southern Collie-for-neeya--bound for Banbury and Cropredy, and the 40th Anniversary Reunion of Fairport Convention, with the early Liege and Lief-era group (minus Sandy Denny) gathered once again to celebrate folk music and the musicians' own survival!

Those coming back to Cropredy 2007 to play that great classic, the single most important English folk-rock album complete, would be: complex guitarist and genius songwriter Richard Thompson; Albion Band master, the ever-restless dancing-bassman Ashley Hutchings; genial stalwart and welcome rhythm guitar Simon Nicol (the only one to hang with Fairport for most years since the original days); Brit session-drummer extraordinaire Dave Mattacks; and ailing-but-game fiddler Dave Swarbrick, better known as "Swarb."

A few decades on, of course the five players have their own other bands and projects, but the Cropredy call goes out and, every few years, back each one comes again for the annual do, to play for hours and maybe still get choked up (like every fan in the huge crowd) when it comes time to end the night, and the latest festival, with "Meet on the Ledge."

The year I went, way back around 1983, was the first such trip organized by Nancy Covey's tour business, and I can't remember how I heard about it happening. But damn I'm glad I got on board--the group was a small manageable size, the music went on night after night, culminating at Cropredy, and then we all traveled on to Scotland for several days at the bustling and senses-boggling Edinburgh Festival. What a great two weeks!

And then there was the behind-the-scenes intrigue... Ex-Fairporter Richard Thompson had just split from his wife and singing partner Linda Thompson as a result of his having fallen head-over-heels for Ms.Covey, so we sort of caught glimpses of RT hanging around our tour even when he wasn't actually playing! We fans tried to be cool about it, but the gossip and ga-ga amazement ran rampant. Still, it was Richard and his band performing his own rocking new album, Hand of Kindness, plus Fairport's many hours of music at the Festival (captured on a two-cassette pseudo-bootleg called The Boot) that sold us all. Fairport forever!

I have no good excuse for never having gone back in the quarter century since... only the changing aspects of one's life. I met a new woman who became my wife the year after we'd traveled the world during 1986 and '87, I struggled to find enough freelance work, I wound up owning a bookstore for over a decade, the money was never there, my kids and ailing parents needed attention, etc. But, really, I could have made it happen.

I think I just felt that I'd been there and done that, and it had been so special, why risk trying to do it again? Yet this year, with Liege and Lief to be played complete for the first time ever, with the main original band reforming for this 40th year, with me being 64 almost 25 years later... when if not this year?

I'll likely have more to write come mid-August, but for now, here's the poem I wrote after the splendid visit to Edinburgh that first tour so long ago...

From Arthur’s Seat

From this high hill, Auld Reekie falls away
In spreading arcs of sooty stone
Like Stella-painted parallels in grey,
The Gaelic heritage pared down
To cobbled streets and buildings streaked to black
By centuries of soft-coal smoke.

Below the castle walls of history
Edinburgh hides its cultured light
Under a bushel, smudged by this low sky
Leaking light dabs of liquid slate.
No misty spray can scrub its stone, nor yet
Dampen the spirit of its fete.

Whirling in chambers of the singing line,
Through halls of grand dramatic gestures,
Young scholars put off hard Knox for a time
To dance a mad reel with their masters;
And tourists prowl dank cellars of the Fringe
Transformed to something rich and strange:

Shakespeare of course, both mime and costume play;
Ossian, Fisher-folk, and lieder;
Symphonies, comedies, corps de ballet;
Ibsen, Blood Wedding, and Aida;
Noir films and color, Old Jazz versus Newer…
Festival cups run, aye, well o’er!

Over-enlightened, culturally shocked,
I’m up to here in Burns and Scotch,
Jugglers and cabaret, music and Brecht
And Mackintosh… It’s just too much,
Too many good things all at once; and thus
My steep retreat to this still place,

To silence well befitting a high seat
Of wisdom, so withdrawn yet near.
No purple heather holds the hill this late.
Thistle is missing. No Scots burr
Pricks at my thumb, or ear. And here no quaint
Kilt-wearing sort will curb my rant.

King Arthur might have fought here; my namesake,
Northumbria’s ruler, may have lent
The town his name; but I could sooner break
Salisbury Crags as comprehend
How canny Scots combine their “enterprise”
With Socialist priorities.

But stuff that lot: let politicians glut
Their sense on culture like the rest
Of us this August month, and forget that,
Below the Border, worlds exist…
Now from down Holyrood, tunes of some folk
Drift up the air like whisps of smoke,

The spirit of Auld Reekie rising still,
Putting an end to my complaining.
A sudden spear of sunlight splits the pall
Of cloud, magicks the mist to gloaming,
And sparks the wet rooftops to blazing gold.
Edinburgh sheds its cloak of cold

As skirling pipes announce the night’s Tattoo.
I’ll tak’ ma heels doon frae these hielands,
Fling ma’sel’ into festive ballyhoo,
And find some bonny lass whose slogan’s
Scotland’s advice to hearts lost here on tour:
“Noo grief’s awa’, dinna be sa dour!”