Folk

The Day Fairport Convention’s Bus Crashed, Killing Martin Lamble

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May 12, 1969 bus crash killed Fairport Convention drummer Martin Lamble and severely injured other members of the group.

As the summer of 1969 approached, the future looked bright for Fairport Convention, as their second album, What We Did on Our Holidays, expanded the band’s audience with a more rock-inflected version of their folk sound. But an awful tragedy nearly destroyed the band just as all their hard work was starting to pay off.

In the early morning hours of May 12, as the group traveled back from a celebratory gig in Birmingham shortly after wrapping up work on their next album, their van veered off the road — and in the aftermath of the crash, Fairport Convention would never be the same. The wreck killed drummer Martin Lamble, who was just 19 at the time, as well as fashion designer and magazine columnist Jeannie Franklyn, who’d been dating guitarist Richard Thompson. Thompson suffered a broken shoulder and bassist Ashley Hutchings was sent to the hospital with assorted serious injuries, while guitarist Simon Nicol, who’d been sleeping on the floor of the vehicle when it went off the road, escaped with a concussion.

“Our road manager and sound guy, Harvey Bramham, did most of the driving although I’d do a bit to relieve him. On this particular gig, he’d been feeling peaky all day, quite unwell,” explained Nicol in a post on the Fairport Convention website. “I had a bad migraine so I wasn’t in a seat; I was stretched out on the floor with a blanket over my head trying to sleep off this terrible headache. When I woke up, the van was doing things which didn’t involve the wheels being in contact with the ground: when it stopped moving, I was the only one left. All the gear had gone out of the back and all the people had gone out through the windows and doors.”

With the release of their next album mere weeks away, the members of the group had to decide whether they could even carry on as a unit. “That was a big watershed, I think. In the aftermath, we thought a lot about what to do, whether to call it a day. It had been fun while it lasted but it took a definite effort of will to continue,” recalled Nicol. “It had given us a lot but now it had taken away a lot: was it worth it if it was going to cost people their lives?”

“We were totally fractured, in more ways than one,” Hutchings told the Guardian. “It seemed like I was in hospital for months. When I woke up at the side of the M1, I thought I’d lost my sight. As it was, it was just that both eyes were terribly cut and bruised, and eventually, that improved. But I had a broken nose, broken cheekbone, a lot of head injuries, a broken pelvis, a bad ankle injury. All of those things took a long time to heal. People were asking us about the future, but we couldn’t conceive of planning one.”

“We were very traumatized,” added Thompson. “And there was this feeling: ‘Should we carry on? Has the stuffing been knocked out of us?’ But eventually, we made a conscious effort. We got together and said, ‘Yes, we are carrying on.'” As Nicol put it, “We all felt psychologically traumatized as well as being damaged physically. But by the time Ashley’s face was back together and Richard’s bones were healing, we’d decided to rebuild the band and carry on.”

While Fairport Convention handled the last few bits of work to prepare their third LP, Unhalfbricking, for its July 1969 release, DJ John Peel hosted a benefit concert featuring Family, Pretty Things, and Soft Machine on May 25 to raise money for Lamble and Franklyn’s families. While they soldiered on, the pall of the accident continued to loom; as Hutchings later told the Guardian, he can’t even look at the cover of Unhalfbricking without thinking about the tragedy. “My memory of it is bound up with the terrible car crash. On the back cover we’re all eating around a table. The shirt and the leather waistcoat I’m wearing are what I had on when the crash happened. I can clearly remember them being bloodstained,” he explained. “You don’t forget things like that.”

In fact, although the group soon found a new drummer in Dave Mattacks and rebounded to create one of their most successful albums with Liege & Lief later that year, Hutchings was on his way out of the band. “I believe the crash hung over the band in unseen ways,” mused Nicol. “I think it was one of the unspoken reasons for the next big change, when Ashley decided to leave the band later that year after we had recorded Liege & Lief and relaunched the band to some fanfare and acclaim. Whatever the upfront reasons about musical differences and wanting to concentrate on traditional material, I think the accident was the underlying reason why Ashley felt he couldn’t continue with us.”

Fairport Convention’s lineup would continue to change quite a bit over the years, but aside from a hiatus between 1979-’85, they’ve continued to tour and record steadily — and although Nicol is the only original member left, he wouldn’t mind seeing the Fairport name continue after he’s gone. “I’d like Fairport to become the first band to be like a male voice choir, carrying on through changes of personnel but retaining its identity,” he wrote on the band’s site.

“After all, no one bats an eyelid about a brass band playing on long after all the original members are gone. Why shouldn’t there be a Fairport Convention in fifty or a hundred years?”

Source: The Day Fairport Convention’s Bus Crashed, Killing Martin Lamble

Beverley Martyn, spirited British folk singer, dies aged 79

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Singer-songwriter was known for collaborations with former husband John Martyn as well as star-studded 1960s singles and 2014 comeback album

By Ben Beaumont-Thomas

British folk singer Beverley Martyn, known for her collaborations with her former husband John Martyn as well as spirited, sublime solo work, has died aged 79.

A statement from the family of the late John Martyn announced the news, saying she died peacefully at home on Monday. “Beverley was a remarkable woman of great inner strength,” the statement continued. “She was beautiful, intelligent, warm and kind.”

Born Beverley Kutner near Coventry in 1947, she moved to London in her mid-teens to attend drama school and worked her way into the city’s folk music scene, which was flourishing in the early 1960s: she learned to play guitar from British folk legend Bert Jansch, an early boyfriend.

She released a single with her band, the Levee Breakers, the stridently jangling Babe I’m Leaving You, and also recorded solo songs including the enduring Happy New Year, a fuzz-guitar romp written by Randy Newman and featuring a pre-Led Zeppelin Jimmy Page and John Paul Jones among the session musicians. Page later said: “It was a remarkable session, at the time it was recorded I knew that she was a shining talent in the world of performance and songwriting.” Another single, Museum, was written by Donovan.

After becoming romantically involved with Paul Simon during his developmental years in London – “He had a Napoleon complex. Very intelligent. Moody, but witty,” was her assessment of him in a 2014 Guardian interview – she travelled with him to perform at the Monterey pop festival in 1967 (the culture-shifting event where Jimi Hendrix famously set his guitar on fire) and briefly appeared on the Simon & Garfunkel album Bookends, a US and UK No 1

She became a single mother to a son, Wesley, from another relationship, then met John Martyn in 1969, soon marrying him. Immersed in the folk-rock counterculture in the US, they recorded a duo album, Stormbringer!, in 1969 in Woodstock, with the Band’s Levon Helm on drums and Joe Boyd producing. It was released in 1970, and later that year they recorded and released another, The Road to Ruin (its opening track Primrose Hill would later be sampled by Fatboy Slim).

Beverley also came to know British folk star Nick Drake, who would babysit for her children; they wrote a song together, Reckless Jane, which Beverley completed in 2014.

She and John had two children of their own, but after he pursued his solo career, “my career was over”, she said in 2014. “I had my hands full. I did the odd gig with John, and the odd one on my own, but I had no future.”

Their marriage soured; John, who struggled with alcohol and drugs, became paranoid and threatening. “There was love there – it was the drink and the bad drugs, the very heavy ones, that changed his disposition, and they made life unbearable for anyone around him,” she later said. “I wouldn’t stay with a man who was killing himself.”

She escaped the marriage and moved to Brighton, fitfully making music including with Loudon Wainwright III and Wilko Johnson, but it wasn’t until her 2014 solo album, The Phoenix and the Turtle, that she made a more emphatic return. “It was a great relief to finally do something on my own terms. That was a dream I’d almost given up on,” she said of that project.

That would be her final collection of new material, though in 2018 she released a compilation of her 1960s songs, entitled Where the Good Times Are.

.Source: Beverley Martyn, spirited British folk singer, dies aged 79 | Folk music | The Guardian

‘It was spooky’: folk singer Olivia Chaney on how a song reflecting her own Brontë-ish love triangle wound up in Wuthering Heights

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Offsetting Charli xcx, Chaney’s take on 19th-century ballad Dark Eyed Sailor accompanies Margot Robbie on the moors – but it’s just a tiny part of her culture-crossing, history-vaulting musical catalogue

An hour into Emerald Fennell’s Wuthering Heights, Margot Robbie is in a gauzy wedding dress, gliding forlornly across the moors towards the man her character feels she has to marry. A lone female English voice appears to accompany her, high and pure against the buzzing drone of a harmonium, singing about a woman roaming alone, and a man who, for “seven years, left the land”, before his eventual return.

Olivia Chaney: Dark Eyed Sailor – video

Long before Emerald Fennell found Olivia Chaney’s version of 19th-century ballad the Dark Eyed Sailor online, Chaney was preparing to sing it for a 2013 live session on Mark Radcliffe’s BBC Radio 2 folk show, in the midst of her own Brontë-esque love triangle. “I was at the beginning of my relationship with the man who is now my husband and the father of my two children – he nearly married someone else, and I nearly had kids with someone else.”

She recounts this from her Yorkshire living room, minutes after getting home from the nursery run. “So to see this song first pop up to support Cathy’s emotions around her being with the wrong man … it was very spooky.”

Fennell told Chaney she was choosing between three of her songs for the film. She settled on this one “because she connected with it”, says Chaney. “There’s something about the way she uses my voice, not surrounded by [an] orchestra at all, that shows how raw and emotional I felt.”

 

The song’s rescue from the vaults came at a serendipitous time for Chaney, a wide-ranging artist recently returning to folk. Her previous three albums, mainly of originals, include 2024’s Circus of Desire; its title track was remixed by Vessel, and Chaney’s dancing in the video recalled the two years she spent singing live with Zero 7. On 27 February, she plays her first gig with her new British folk-rock band, News From Nowhere, which has quite the lineup: Tom Skinner, the drummer from the Smile and Sons of Kemet (“one of my favourite musicians on earth”), Owen Spafford on violin and electronics, singer-songwriter Clara Mann, and composer/producer Leo Abrahams, with whom Chaney recorded her debut EP the same year as that fateful Mark Radcliffe session.

Chaney discovered folk music as a path for herself in her 20s. She knew some folk-rock and singer-songwriters from her parents’ record collection, but she sang Hildegard of Bingen’s music with the Oxford Girls’ Choir, and won a scholarship to Chetham’s School of Music at 14 to study voice and piano, going on to study jazz at the Royal Academy of Music in London in 2000.

Seven years later, after being stood up on a date – “a bit blue, really in my own world, and not knowing where to go with my singing” – she went to an afterparty with friends at London’s Southbank Centre. “And I saw this really shy busker playing this heavenly music. I ran over, begging, ‘What are you playing? Who are you like? Do you want to work together?’” The busker, Matthew Ord, now a lecturer in folk music at Newcastle university, was playing Planxty Irwin, a tune by the 17th-century Irish composer and blind harpist Turlough O’Carolan.

Ord taught Chaney many traditional songs, including Dark Eyed Sailor: “I really responded to the words and the emotions in it,” she says. Then, one day, he turned up at her house with a harmonium and asked if she wanted to play it. “And that was that.”

Chaney became one of Britain’s most exciting new folk performers, earning the respect of veteran folk artists. She supported Shirley Collins on her 2017 tour, sang with Richard Thompson at his 70th birthday concert at the Royal Albert Hall and performed at last year’s all-star tribute gig to Martin Carthy in Hackney. She also fronted folk-rock supergroup Offa Rex with the Decemberists; their brilliant 2017 album, Queen of Hearts, was nominated for a Grammy.

This summer, she’s also releasing an album of songs by composer Henry Purcell and performing them with a chamber ensemble at the London venue Kings Place, where she’s an artist in residence this year. “Purcell wrote for kings and queens, but he was also down the pub listening to the ballads and the broadsides,” says Chaney. “His ability to write a catchy tune, almost like a pop hook, made his songs go straight back into the street culture of the day. I’m so interested in those connections.”

That cross-cultural mindset is typical of Chaney’s outlook. The only other voice heard singing in Wuthering Heights is that of Charli xcx, who produced a companion album to the record. “I think her music’s great and very harmonious with my song – it all ties in really well together,” says Chaney. “Even though there are some bangers, harmonically they are in a similar world to Dark Eyed Sailor. There’s even synths and sounds that are in a similar sonic tonal world to my harmonium.”

For years, Chaney’s version of Dark Eyed Sailor only existed in live YouTube clips, but she finally released a recorded version last Friday, produced by Oli Deakin (mastermind of CMAT’s albums If My Wife New I’d Be Dead and Euro-Country). She’d recorded “many” versions of it before – three were even mastered for albums, but “never quite fit”. She finally heard it fit at the Wuthering Heights premiere in Leicester Square on 5 February.

What was the evening like? “Drinking champagne behind Richard E Grant?” She laughs. “Insane. I gripped my husband’s hand so tight when the song came in – hearing my voice all alone – that it reminded me of giving birth, gripping my doula’s hand so hard I nearly broke her knuckles!”

The song appears again when Heathcliff returns to Cathy, now rich and grown up, and in the film’s final, longing minutes. It’s always been Chaney’s husband’s favourite recording, she adds. “It’s a song I love very much. It comes back and haunts you.”

Source: ‘It was spooky’: folk singer Olivia Chaney on how a song reflecting her own Brontë-ish love triangle wound up in Wuthering Heights

‘I never wanted to sing into a vacuum’: Scottish folk pioneer Dick Gaughan’s fight for his lost music

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A skilled interpreter and social justice champion, Gaughan is a hero to the likes of Richard Hawley and Billy Bragg. Yet much of his work has been stuck in limbo for decades – until a determined fan stepped in

 

By Jude Rogers

‘It felt to me as if the world had forgotten about the Frank Sinatra or Elvis Presley of folk, or a singular figure in the mould of Willie Nelson, Johnny Cash or Richard Thompson.” So says Colin Harper, curator of a slew of new releases celebrating the stunning music of Scottish musician Dick Gaughan. Harper had recently reconnected with his music after several decades, “and I couldn’t believe the quality of it. His singing and guitar playing were astonishing – he performed traditional songs and championed social justice so powerfully.”

But if you haven’t heard of the 77-year-old Gaughan, it’s not surprising: much of his work has been unavailable for years, the rights to it having been claimed by the label Celtic Music, who have not made it available digitally. Gaughan doesn’t recall receiving a royalty statement from the company in 40 years. He is battling for ownership and, in turn, hopes to help other veteran folk artists regain control of their catalogues. “To find that the music I made, that I put a lot of work into, is just not available – it’s like your life isn’t available,” he says.

Born in Glasgow in 1948, and raised in Leith in an impoverished musical family, Gaughan became a jobbing musician at 22, later recording 12 solo albums and multiple collaborations. Capable of both stunning delicacy and fiery spirit in his performances, he recorded nine sessions for John Peel (solo and in groups), who said during one of his 1977 shows: “He’s a singer so good that prolonged exposure to him could drive you daft.”

Gaughan became a much-loved regular at folk clubs up and down the country. Later in his career, he brilliantly led Emmylou Harris, Kate and Anna McGarrigle and Kate’s 21-year-old son Rufus Wainwright on folk ballad Wild Mountain Thyme, on a 1995 episode of Scottish TV show Transatlantic Sessions. “I was so lucky to work with Dick Gaughan at an impressionable age,” says Wainwright. “His ability affected my singing for the duration.”

Richard Hawley also saw him in the 2000s at Greystones folk club in Sheffield. “It was very quickly apparent to me that this man was a force to be reckoned with,” he says. “It was a night of powerful song that I’ll never forget.”

 

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