Fairport Convention’s third album, ‘Unhalfbricking,’ was a folk-rock game-changer. It was also touched by unspeakable tragedy.
On its July 1969 release, Unhalfbricking, the third album from British folk-rockers Fairport Convention, should have been a cause for celebration. It was the sound of a band approaching a creative peak while finding their identity; a daring set that drew upon traditional English folk and US rock to create something new. It represented a giant step forward for songwriters Sandy Denny and Richard Thompson and saw the band welcome folk violinist Dave Swarbrick into the \fold.
But two months before its release, tragedy struck. In the early hours of May 12, 1969, the band were driving back to London after a gig at Mothers in Birmingham when roadie Harvey Bramham fell asleep at the wheel. Thompson, who was sat next to the driver, noticed the van was careering towards a motorway pole and grabbed the wheel. “Harvey woke up and tried to correct the steering, but it was too late,” Thompson wrote in his 2022 memoir Beeswing, “We began to roll to the left, and as we spiralled into a long tunnel, all I could silently scream to myself was, NO, NO, NO – THIS IS NOT HAPPENING.’”
All of the passengers were thrown out of the vehicle, except for guitarist Simon Nicol, who had been suffering from a migraine and was stretched out on the floor. Martin Lamble, the 19-year-old drummer whose fluid, jazzy playing set Fairport apart from the folk crowd, and Jeannie Franklyn, a fashion designer whom Thompson had recently begun dating, suffered fatal injuries. Thompson, bassist Ashley Hutchings, Braham, and Nicol were all injured. Vocalist Sandy Denny was traveling in another van, but was understandably traumatized by the event. At a point where Fairport should have been on the verge of a great breakthrough, they seemed broken beyond repair.
Only a few months earlier, Fairport began recording Unhalfbricking with a sense of purpose, with Denny’s traditional folk background ever more influential. “Fairport now seemed to be on a path,” Thompson reflected in Beeswing. “Even if we could not truly articulate our destiny, the ingredients were there – playing some traditional British songs and writing our own material in a British style. All we lacked was a mission statement.”
Her struggles with spasmodic dysphonia has led her to write an album for a bevy of other stars to sing. She talks about trauma, ageing and stealing an audience member’s car
By Alexis Petridis
The photo on the front of Linda Thompson’s new album, Proxy Music, is nothing if not striking. It features Thompson posing in an identical outfit to that worn by the model Kari-Ann Moller on the cover of Roxy Music’s eponymous 1972 debut, although her expression is noticeably different: in place of Moller’s smouldering look to camera, Thompson offers a faintly disturbing grimace. She looks a bit nuts. “Yes,” she nods. “The photographer kept saying: ‘Do that thing that she does’ and I couldn’t. I’d had some banana cake, and I think I was having some kind of sugar rush. I think it’s hilarious. The original cover is so daft, I just thought I’d make it worse.”
It goes without saying that this all runs very contrary to the image of Thompson forged in the 1970s, when she made a string of incredible albums with her then-husband, Richard Thompson. There was something rather stern and austere about the Thompsons even before they gave away all their money and possessions and retreated to a Sufi commune. Their exquisite music was vastly potentiated by Thompson’s voice, a hugely affecting cocktail of fragility and toughness. On their most famous album, 1974’s I Want to See the Bright Lights Tonight, she sang like someone who had been horribly wounded by life but resolved to carry on anyway. Their releases were no one’s idea of a barrel of laughs.
Even their love songs were oddly sombre, while the sheer bleakness of Withered and Died or The End of the Rainbow can take your breath away. The most famous footage of them comes from The Old Grey Whistle Test in 1975, performing the impossibly beautiful A Heart Needs a Home. They sing with eyes closed and somehow look as if they’re freezing to death, him in a ratty woolly hat and her in a headscarf and polo neck: no fans of glittery postmodern glam they. “No, I didn’t listen to Roxy Music at the time,” Thompson confirms. “I was probably listening to Bulgarian folk music. We took ourselves very seriously. We’d read Blavatsky and Gurdjieff – all those terrible old charlatans, but we believed the whole thing. Oh my God, and the Tibetan Book of the Dead … it was Pseuds Corner all the way. And Richard wrote the songs and he had quite a bleak outlook, you know. He’s not a barrel of laughs today.” She chuckles. “I’m kidding. We took things a bit seriously and now I can’t take any of this seriously.”
Indeed, if the image on the cover of Proxy Music is a little hard to square with the Linda Thompson of old, so is the 76-year-old currently plying me with tea, cakes, pastries and sandwiches – she really has laid on quite a spread – in her west London apartment. She is tiny, clad in a Louis Vuitton jumper (“a fake, from China, 15 bucks”) and very funny. Her voice is thin and husky and her grandson Zack is on hand in case it gives out altogether. She rarely gives interviews as a result of the spasmodic dysphonia that has plagued her since the early 70s, gradually robbing her of her singing voice. “I was 25,” she says. “I’d go for my mouth and nothing would come out. It started when I was pregnant with my eldest daughter, and I just put it down to the pregnancy, but it wasn’t a happy time in my life. I think my then-husband wasn’t that keen on having a baby, blah blah blah, it was a difficult time, which we got through, but I think it impacted on me a bit.”
Dysphonia can be a trauma response, she explains, but “once that trauma’s happened you can’t mediate it away. At first it was more in my speech, then my singing. Onstage, people would go: ‘You’re off-mic!’, but I wasn’t – nothing was coming out. It’s like a switch just goes off in your brain: you know you’re doing it, but you can’t stop. If I’m alone, I can speak OK, but if anybody’s in the room, I can’t. And it’s a progressive condition, there’s no cure. I could lose my voice entirely, but the progression is very slow and” – she laughs again – “I doubt I’ll live that long anyway.”
In the past, Botox injections in Thompson’s vocal cords have enabled her to sing long enough to complete albums – her last was 2013’s Won’t Be Long Now – and, very occasionally, perform live. On Proxy Music, however, Thompson commissioned other artists to work on her new songs: the Proclaimers, the Unthanks, Rufus Wainwright. John Grant finds himself singing a track called John Grant about Thompson’s love of his work. It works wonderfully, heavily underlining Thompson’s skill as a sharp, witty and occasionally heartbreaking lyricist, as on I Used to Be So Pretty, which takes a very dim view indeed of ageing. “Oh, it’s just scary, being this age – it’s the age you die, when all your friends are dying,” she nods. “I mean, you don’t give a fuck what people think about you any more, and that’s good, but the wisdom-of-age thing is fallacious. You just get stupider, you can’t remember anybody’s name. So that’s a complete crock.”
Meanwhile, Those Damn Roches ruminates on musical families, including the one of which Thompson is the matriarch: Proxy Music features contributions from her ex-husband, her son, daughter, son-in-law and grandson, but the song avers that the Thompsons “can’t get along unless they’re apart”.
Thompson with her grandson Zack. Photograph: Alecsandra Raluca Drăgoi/The Guardian
“That’s what families are like, isn’t it?” she says. “We don’t spend hours and hours together at Christmas, we have a meal and everyone goes: ‘Bye!’ Nobody likes to hang around. I toured with the family once,” she shudders. “Never again. Too fraught. You can’t tell your kids and your grandkids they’re playing the wrong chord. But there are funny times as well, and I do like what they do.
Fairport Convention are an English folk rock band, formed in 1967 by guitarists Richard Thompson and Simon Nicol, bassist Ashley Hutchings and drummer Shaun Frater (with Frater replaced by Martin Lamble after their first gig). They started out influenced by American folk rock, with a set list dominated by Bob Dylan and Joni Mitchell songs and a sound that earned them the nickname “the British Jefferson Airplane”.
Vocalists Judy Dyble and Iain Matthews joined them before the recording of their self-titled debut in 1968; afterwards, Dyble was replaced by Sandy Denny, with Matthews later leaving during the recording of their third album.
Denny began steering the group towards traditional British music for their next two albums, What We Did on Our Holidays and Unhalfbricking (both 1969); the latter featured fiddler Dave “Swarb” Swarbrick, most notably on the song “A Sailor’s Life”, which laid the groundwork for British folk rock by being the first time a traditional British song was combined with a rock beat.
Shortly before the album’s release, a crash on the M1 motorway killed Lamble and Jeannie Franklyn, Thompson’s girlfriend; this resulted in the group retiring most of their prior material and turning entirely towards British folk music for their seminal album Liege & Lief, released the same year. This style has been the band’s focus ever since. For this album Swarbrick joined full-time, alongside drummer Dave Mattacks. Both Denny and Hutchings left before the year’s end; the latter replaced by Dave Pegg, who has remained the group’s sole consistent member to this day; Thompson left after the recording of 1970’s Full House.
