Unhalfbricking

‘Unhalfbricking’: Fairport Convention covers Dylan with Percy’s Song

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By Tony Atwood

Ask anyone who has performed a song on stage which has multiple repeated lines: it is much harder to pull off than a song with ever changing words.  You have to do something to those endless repeats in order to take the audience with you, but it is so easy to go over the top when you sing the same line for the sixth time or more.

If you want a perfect example of how to carry it off, then the 1963 Carnegie Hall recording of Percy’s Song is it.  You never get tired of the repeated lines, you are utterly spellbound by the story, and its journey.

I think Dylan’s personal journey to this song is, for me (if for no one else) directly connected to Ballad for a Friend.  The recordings of Percy’s Song comes from 1963.  Ballad for a Friend which deals with an actual motor crash was recorded the year before.  A song that is reportedly related to the accident of Bob’s friend Larry Kegan accident which left him in a wheelchair.

If this is so, consciously or sub-consciously, then it is a remarkable journey for Dylan, for in Ballad for a Friend he is saying goodbye to a dear friend seriously injured in a car crash, (in the song the character actually dies) while in Percy’s Song he is pleading against the disproportionate sentence of man-slaughter for a man whose driving has killed four.

The song itself comes from the English ballad of the 17th century “The Twa Sisters” in which a girl drowned by her sister – a song which quickly became transmuted into “The Wind and Rain” and many other versions – which is where Dylan’s phrase comes from.

But it is not the question of how original this song is as a Dylan song that fascinates me, but the beauty of the rendition in the Carnegie Hall version.

It is all so astoundingly simple

Bad news, bad news
Come to me where I sleep
Turn, turn, turn again
Sayin’ one of your friends
Is in trouble deep
Turn, turn to the rain
And the wind

and yet verse after verse Dylan pulls it off.

As I say, it is all so simple, so low key, and that is what makes it work so well, for what is resting on the story is the life of a man – a man who is imprisoned for 99 years.

Listening to the song again today I suddenly thought also of the Drifter’s Escape, perhaps for no reason than that too is a dead simple song and it has a judge in it.  But there the judge is sympathetic to the accused – it is the jury who gets it all wrong.  One way or another though, Dylan is never a fan of the legal system.

I am not saying Dylan thought of one song as he composed another, rather it is probably just Dylan working out themes over time in different ways.  But even so somehow I find this connection between these simple songs delivered with such power and assuredness, each in a different form, each with the legal incidents being seen from three different angles with three different outcomes, to be completely fascinating.

Percy’s song revolves around the life imprisonment, in the Drifter’s Escape there is the walking out of the courtroom following the lightening strike, and in Ballad of a Friend the death of the man hit by the truck.

And so Percy’s Song ends

And I played my guitar
Through the night to the day
Turn, turn, turn again
And the only tune
My guitar could play
Was, “Oh the Cruel Rain
And the Wind”

One interesting point about the music – at the end of each verse it doesn’t get back to the key chord, the tonic, around which the song is focussed, but ends on the dominant at the end of each verse, preparing us for another verse and another and another as the story continues.

Which I guess is in keeping with the outcome of the tale – the man in imprisoned for the rest of his life.

However…

what disturbs me with this song is that the essence of the singer’s plea is that “he didn’t mean it.”  Is this a valid defence or not?

When I learned to drive a car (and of course I learned in England, not in the US) I was taught that part of the essence of driving was that one had to expect the unexpected.  You have to drive with caution.

Now of course most of us don’t much of the time, but that is what the basic law of the road in the UK requires.  You don’t have to be ready to avoid a sheep suddenly walking into your lane on a motorway while you drive at 70mph, but in an urban area with a pavement and shops next to the road one has to drive with the awareness that a pedestrian might do something silly and step out into the road.

We don’t do 99 year sentences for manslaughter in England, but I don’t think we let people off on the grounds that they didn’t mean it, either.

And so at this point, somehow the transmutation of the song from its early origins into the modern day breaks down for me.  To enjoy the song I must forget the meaning and listen to the music and the voice (without a focus on the words) it is awe-inspiring and other worldly.  With the meaning, I feel uncomfortable in a way that I never am with Ballad of a Friend – and yet knowing that Dylan wrote Ballad of a Friend from point of the victim’s friend, and then Percy’s Song from the point of the guilty man’s friend, just one year apart is, well, strange.

But no one else ever seems to have mentioned it, so I guess it is just me.

Source: Untold Dylan

‘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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‘Si Tu Dois Partir’: Fairport Convention In French, And On ‘Top Of The Pops’

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Fairport LP

A Bob Dylan cover landed the folk heroes on TV and in the UK singles chart.

By Paul Sexton

Hit singles were never the name of the game for Fairport Convention, who made (and have kept) their reputation on full-length albums and fine live performances. But there was just one exception to that rule, and it showed itself on the UK singles chart for July 23, 1969 — when Fairport translated Bob Dylan into French, with a song that landed them on Top Of The Pops.

“Si Tu Dois Partir,” their French version of Dylan’s “If You Gotta Go, Go Now,” entered the bestsellers that week, tickling the bottom of the Top 50 chart at No.47. The very sight of Fairport in the hit parade was incongruous, especially sandwiched between Smokey Robinson and the Miracles’ “Tracks Of My Tears” and Tom Jones’ “Love Me Tonight.” But they sensed the Island single had potential, and they were right.

‘A load of rubbish’

When the idea cropped up of covering the song in a Creole style, it was lead singer Sandy Denny that suggested they should also do it in French. She later disowned the entire idea, calling it “a load of rubbish” and adding venomously: “The people who bought that record were cheated. If they didn’t know us, they’d think we were some French group.”

Dylan wrote “If You Gotta Go, Go Now” in 1964, but didn’t release his own version in either the UK or the US until it appeared in his Bootleg Series of albums in 1991. A different version by Bob became a Dutch single in 1967, but by then it had been snapped up as rich cover fare.

British group the Liverpool Five won US airplay, but no chart honors, for their 1965 version, before the hit factory that was Manfred Mann took their rendition all the way to No.2 in the UK in 1966. French star Johnny Hallyday was among the other artists to record an interpretation.

Fairport translation

Fairport translated the lyric into French in their usual lighthearted way and released it as a single at the same time as their third album Unhalfbricking, on which it featured. The 45 climbed steadily, helped by the (inevitably lip-synched) appearance on TOTP, and spent two weeks at No.21.

That unlikely success helped Unhalfbricking climb to No.12 in the UK. “Si Tu Dois Partir” was the only visit to the singles chart that the band ever made, but it had been quite an adventure.

Source: ‘Si Tu Dois Partir’: Fairport Convention In French, And On ‘Top Of The Pops’

The Story Behind The Album: Unhalfbricking, by Fairport Convention

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1969 was a roller coaster year for Fairport Convention, full of triumphs and tragedies. One of its highlights was their brilliant third album. This is its story.

1969 was a roller-coaster year for Fairport Convention. In January of that year they released their second album What We Did On Our Holidays, the first one to feature singer Sandy Denny. In May they hit rock bottom with a tragedy that killed two people including one of its members. Miraculously they recovered and released the album that defines the British folk rock revival of that period, the iconic Liege and Lief. By December Sandy Denny and bass player Ashley Hutchings left the band to form Fotheringay and Steeleye Span and the classic Fairport Convention lineup was no more. And that was not all, for these events book-ended one more album that the band managed to record and release during that prolific period, one of my favorite records from that era, Unhalfbricking.

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