Folk Rock

‘Unhalfbricking’: Fairport Convention Change Folk Music Forever

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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.”

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The original, pre-crash, pre-Sandy lineup of Fairport Convention was brilliant

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Fairport Convention 1967

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.

Rediscovering the mystic beauty of UK psych-folk outfit Trees

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Contemporaries of Pentangle and Fairport Convention, the group is now the subject of a lovingly curated box set reissue.

David Costa’s home sits almost equidistant between Stonehenge and Glastonbury in England’s Somerset county. For the 73-year-old graphic designer, who helped create the cover art for Elton John’s Goodbye Yellow Brick Road and Queen’s A Night at the Opera, it’s the perfect location to wait out the pandemic, and to contemplate retirement. His home’s locale is also, as he says with a knowing laugh, “pretty apt” when it comes time to field a Skype call about his days as guitarist in Trees, the acid-folk quintet that bloomed for a brief four years in the late ’60s and early ’70s.

The group was one of many British artists in that era who were fusing the traditional folk music of their home country with the psychedelic rock that was being baked to perfection on the West Coast of the United States. Like Costa’s home, the music of Trees stood at the musical midway point between England’s mystical, pagan past and the electric sounds celebrated at Glastonbury.

Though Trees were part of a scene that included luminaries like Fairport Convention, Pentangle, and the Incredible String Band, their two lush, incandescent albums—1970’s The Garden of Jane Delawney and 1971’s On The Shore—never achieved widespread acclaim. In the five decades since their inception, the group’s legacy has been kept alive through the efforts of dedicated fans like Danger Mouse, who built the title track for Gnarls Barkley’s St. Elsewhere on a sample of Trees’ version of the traditional ballad “Geordie.” Other artists, like modern folk musician Sally Anne Morgan stumbled upon the band after a night spent going down a YouTube wormhole.

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Meet the folkers: the improbable story of British folk rock

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The HOBBLEDEHOY recently came upon this excellent overview of the history of British Folk Rock written by Hugh Fielder.

Folk’s music’s not all “hey nonny nonny” y’know. In the 70s, it sneaked its way into the heaviest of rock’s repertoire. We look at the groups that spearheaded the genre

Led Zeppelin’s folk-rock credentials may not be uppermost in any assessment of the heavy metal behemoths, but the haunting presence of Fairport Convention singer Sandy Denny on Battle Of Evermore from Led Zeppelin IV as she echoes Robert Plant’s vocals is perhaps the starkest example of folk rock’s impact on British rock music in the 70s.

Indeed, beneath the metal bombast, Zeppelin had flirted with folk from the start. Jimmy Page has acknowledged the influence of 60s folkie Bert Jansch and you only have to compare the instrumental Black Mountain Side from Led Zeppelin 1 with Jansch’s Black Water Side to hear precisely what he means. And Gallows Pole from Led Zeppelin III is a rock’n’roll version of a traditional folk song. Er, folk rock in fact.

And Led Zeppelin weren’t the only big name to dabble in folk rock. When Traffic regrouped in 1970 after Steve Winwood’s Blind Faith adventure, they cut a version of the traditional ballad John Barleycorn and called the resulting album John Barleycorn Must Die.

Folk was a fertile field for aspiring rock musicians of the late 60s to graze in because the whole scene had been revitalised at the start of that decade by a bunch of young turks – chief among them Martin Carthy, Bert Jansch, John Renbourn and Davey Graham – who brought their own distinctive guitar styles to traditional folk songs and added their own flavours.

This revival created a thriving folk club circuit around the country and something of a scene in London where clubs such as the Troubadour and Cousins became fashionable haunts. The reputation of the British folk scene even spread to America and lured up-and-coming American folkies such as Bob Dylan and Paul Simon over to check it out. Which is how Bob Dylan came to appropriate Martin Carthy’s arrangement of Lord Franklin for Bob Dylan’s Dream and Paul Simon nicked his arrangement of Scarborough Fair (for which Carthy only formally forgave him recently).

Simon also learnt Davey Graham’s innovative modal guitar tuning that conveyed more than a tinge of Eastern promise. It was that tinge that Bert Jansch picked up on for Black Water Side. Which Jimmy Page… you get the picture.

The first young folk singer to break cover and cross over to the pop charts was Donovan, who landed a series of spots on ITV’s ground-breaking Ready Steady Go programme early in 1965, despite the fact he wasn’t even signed to a record label.

Indeed he wasn’t even in the front line of folk singers and his demos were more pop than folk. This would explain why his first single, Catch The Wind (muddily ‘enhanced’ by the London Philharmonic string section) did better in the pop charts, reaching No. 4, than the folk clubs where the hip young things looked down their noses.

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