Tales from the ‘60s: Fairport’s breakout year and John Martyn’s ‘terrible’ rhythm section
February 21, 2024
Andrew Curry with Part Two of his series on the interview with producer Joe Boyd and engineer/producer John Wood on the early days of folk-rock. In which Fairport Convention hit their stride in 1969 and invent folk-rock. It all comes from the recent Magpie Arc festival at Cecil Sharp House in London and Part One is here.
Joe Boyd was in New York when he heard that Sandy Denny had joined Fairport Convention as its lead singer. It wasn’t his idea. Although he wasn’t a big fan of Judy Dyble, and he’d wondered if Sandy should be encouraged to join the band, he’d told himself it wouldn’t work out.
'I thought that Sandy would eat them alive. She drank, she swore. And they were all polite Muswell Hill schoolboys.’
Of course, it worked out fine, partly because Denny was in awe of the quality of Richard Thompson’s guitar playing.
Fairport got quite a lot of airtime in the conversation between Joe Boyd, John Wood, and Folk on Foot’s Matthew Bannister, partly because of the crash that ended the first iteration of the band, and partly because John Wood had engineered all three of the Fairport records that came out in their breakout year of 1969.
Some of the reason for this was down to record company schedules, which delayed What We Did On Our Holidays from the second half of 1968 to January 1969. Unhalfbricking, recorded before the crash, came out after it, in July, and Liege and Lief in December.
The cover of What We Did On Our Holidays was a bit of an accident. It was drawn on a blackboard at a college in York, according to my notes (although Richard Thompson says in Beeswing that this was Essex—ed) by Sandy Denny and the drummer, Martin Lamble, and the band remembered it several weeks later when they were wondering about a cover. It was the holidays; the blackboard hadn’t been cleaned; and a photographer was despatched.
The studio sessions for the record had been marked by disagreements between Sandy Denny and Ian Matthews, and Matthews left as they started to record Unhalfbricking.
The standout track on the record, the 10-minute long Sailor’s Life, was recorded in a single take. It was the first time that Dave Swarbrick, who guested on it, had used an electric pick-up on his fiddle.
And although much of the material in the record was self-written or versions of Dylan songs, Joe Boyd suggested that Unhalfbricking was the reason we were sitting in Cecil Sharp House in 2024 talking about “folk-rock”. It’s still Wood’s favourite Fairport record.
The fatal car crash, in May 1969 on the way back from a gig, killed Martin Lamble and Richard Thompson’s girlfriend, Jeannie Franklyn.
As they picked up the pieces, Dave Swarbrick joined as a full member of the group, and Dave Mattacks became the band’s drummer. Mattacks’s background was in jazz and dancebands, and Wood said this was an important part of the Fairport sound:
‘He didn’t have that rock impulse. It was rhythmically so unusual.’
When Ashley Hutchings and Sandy Denny left the band after Liege and Lief, Dave Swarbrick recommended Dave Pegg as the new bass player. The rest of the band was sceptical. Pegg was playing with Swarbrick’s previous group, the Ian Campbell Folk Group, and they thought he’d be too folkie. But even though Pegg had brought an electric bass with him, they decided to make his audition short and sweet.
The band launched into Tam Lin “at double speed”, but Pegg matched them note for note. He was more or less hired on the spot.
John Wood’s first job as a producer was on John Martyn’s LP Bless The Weather, and he also produced Solid Air. Bless The Weather was more straightforward, although John Martyn wasn’t very confident in the studio.
By the time he got to Solid Air, Martyn had been hanging out with Paul Kossoff, and he had decided that he was more of a jazz player than a folk musician. He turned up with a rhythm section that, said Wood, “I thought were terrible”.
Terrible enough that as they started up Wood came rushing down the stairs from the control room to the studio. He came down them so fast that he slipped and sprained his ankle, and the session had to be abandoned.
By the time it was re-booked, the original rhythm section was no longer available, so Dave Mattacks and Danny Thompson were booked for the record instead.
(John Martyn and Danny Thompson play Solid Air together on Transatlantic Sessions, 1998)
Since Joe Boyd’s memoir of the 1960s, White Bicycles, was published in 2006, he has been working on a second book about his involvement in the development of what was then called “world music”. Boyd had a ringside seat for that as the founder and managing director of Hannibal Records during the 1980s.
When he started the book, he thought it would take him three to four years to finish it. Fifteen years later, and it is due out in June as And The Roots of Rhythm Remain: A Journey Through Global Music.
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Read more:
Tales from the 1960s: Joe Boyd, John Wood, and listening to Sgt. Pepper in a cloakroom with Sandy Denny
The drummer was Martin Lamble (not Lambie) and according to the info on the cover of 'What We Did on Our Holidays' it was from "...a blackboard assaulted by Fairport Convention". The image/drawing itself references 'Essex University' so Richard's probably right.
Posted by: Nige Bamford | February 21, 2024 at 04:43 PM
Thanks Nige and apologies for the error, now fixed
Posted by: Colin Randall | February 21, 2024 at 05:35 PM