Following their critically-acclaimed 2021 album, After Comes The Dark, which saw Green Diesel pick up a slew of enthusiastic reviews for what became their best-selling release to date, the Kent-based folk rock band are finally back with a brand-new album.
Onward The Sun! is the band’s long-awaited fifth album and is scheduled for release on 25 April. The nine-track album features six newly-composed songs inspired by themes such humanity’s connections with the natural world, ancient folklore, the persecution of witches and Shakespeare’s Henry IV, as well as fresh interpretations of much-loved Morris tunes, a modern take on a traditional murder ballad and a cover of a Paul Giovanni composition from the cinematic soundtrack to The Wickerman.
Showcasing Green Diesel’s masterful distillation of folk, rock and psychedelic influences, together with their usual exemplary musicianship and trademark vocals, the album was recorded at Squarehead Studios in Newington, Kent with producer Rob Wilks (Smoke Fairies, Lianne La Havas, Story Books) once again at the helm.
Guitarist, vocalist and multi-instrumentalist, Greg Ireland, comments:
“This is an album born out of playing together a lot! Most of the pieces were developed through a lot of sessions together and really stretching out the jams into some of those elongated pieces we play live. We then recorded the main tracks all live together in one room, no click tracks. It’s really a celebration of what this band is and the sound we make together.”
Green Diesel are:
Ellen Care – violin/vocals Matt Dear – lead guitar/vocals Ben Holliday – bass Greg Ireland – rhythm guitar/mandolin/dulcimer/vocals Ben Love – drums/percussion
About Green Diesel:
Hailing from Faversham in Kent, Green Diesel take their inspiration from the depths of English folk lore and legend, and the classic folk-rock sound of their predecessors: Fairport Convention and The Albion Band. Blending violin, mandolin and dulcimer with electric guitars and drums, Green Diesel’s sound is born from a love of traditional English music and a desire to bring it to a modern audience.
Green Diesel’s first three albums, Now Is the Time (2012), Wayfarers All (2014) and The Hangman’s Fee(2016) all won praise for the quality of song-writing and musicianship. A major turning-point, however, came with the band’s last album After Comes The Dark (2021). The album entered the UK Folk Top 40 on release and saw Green Diesel nominated for FATEA Music’s ‘Group/Duo of the Year’ award and also saw the band pushing their sound further, bringing in elements of psychedelia and progressive rock whilst remaining rooted in their folk upbringing.
Green Diesel – What They Say:
“A cornucopia of sounds that blends classic folk-rock, prog and elements of stately Early Music into their own distinctive style’” – R2 Magazine
“4/5 stars – ‘(Green Diesel bring) a psychedelic, progressive edge to their interpretations of both traditional and original material” – Shindig!
“Evocative of early Steeleye Span and veined with prog-rock and influences drawn from early Genesis and the 70s Canterbury scene’” – Folk Radio
“Green Diesel has skyrocketed into my top few bands” – FATEA
Onward The Sun! – Track-By-Track:
1. Venus Tree (Ireland): ‘Yarrow (the ‘pretty flower of Venus’ tree) is an interesting plant…! The song is perhaps a slightly twisted take on a love song, based around some of the ways in which yarrow can be used for what you might call ‘love divination’ whereby sprigs of yarrow would be placed under the pillow of a young woman who would then dream of her true love to be. One popular rhyme for instance reads:
‘Yarrow sweet yarrow, the first that I have found And in the name of sweet Jesus, I pluck it from the ground As Joseph loves sweet Mary and took her for his dear So in a dream this very night my true love will appear!’
Like all good folk stories there’s a twist in the tale of course. The yarrow plucked must be plucked from the grave of a young man dead before his time…’ Greg
2. Hotspur (Holliday): ‘Hotspur is the nickname given to Henry Percy, who was the 2nd Earl of Northumberland and led a rebellion against Henry IV. This rebellion culminated at the Battle of Shrewsbury, which is depicted in Shakespeare’s Henry IV. The night before the Battle, Hotspur is told that his various allies who agreed to fight alongside him aren’t turning up, but (in the play) he still delivers a fiery speech and declares they will go ahead and attack the ‘usurper’ Henry IV no matter what. The song tries to capture his mental state at night before the battle – he can’t sleep, he’s scared, but he knows he has to ‘front up’ and be the brave, fearless, fiery Hotspur that everyone knows.’ Ben
3. Huntress Moon (Dear): ‘This song is a spell of transformation. I’d been reading about Paracelsus, the history of alchemy, the occult, and the persecution of witches during the Reformation. I wanted to write something that drew on this symbolism, using the language of magick to craft a lament, an impossible dream, a transcendent fiction.’ Matt
4. Princess Royal/Dribbles of Brandy (trad arr Green Diesel): ‘Two English folk tunes learnt from our trusty companion Pete Cooper’s book of English Fiddle Tunes. I’ve played Princess Royal with my dad for years – there’s actually two different versions of this tune: one in a minor key and one in a major key. The minor one seemed to fit our style better! The second tune is called Dribbles of Brandy and was one we used to have on setlists during our wild misspent youth before it took a quiet retirement. It seemed time to resurrect! This one always puts me in mind of late night gigs at Broadstairs Folk Week fuelled by too many ciders…’ Ellen
5. Hymn For The Turning Year (Ireland): ‘Written in the depths of the Covid winter of 2020 when, amidst all the chaos in the human world, the Earth was just doing the same thing it does every year. The verses are individual snapshots of things I witnessed on my mandated solo walks and a reflection on ultimately how powerless we are against the natural world, a feeling which seemed to be mirrored on a human level by the situation in the world at the time.’ Greg
6. Maypole (Paul Giovanni): ‘A cover of one of Paul Giovanni’s compositions from the soundtrack to The Wickerman. The soundtrack has long been a favourite of mine, it was and remains a big influence on my songwriting. This song always struck a chord with me, and I’d always wanted to develop it into a longer song. It seemed to encapsulate my morbid attraction to the Summerisle cult, a return to a cyclical view of time, death and life entwined.’ Matt
7. Onward The Sun! (Ireland): ‘In some ways the sister song to Hymn… a frequent walking route of mine was up Golden Hill in Harbledown, just outside Canterbury. There’s a particular bench there where you can just sit and look across the hills. The sun is such a part of folklore and folk imagery and I suppose that was in my mind on some of these walks – musing on our temporary status in the world. We’ll all shuffle off sooner or later but the sun will go on and on. Hopefully…’ Greg
8. Ring The Hill (Ireland): ‘Based on the Cornish legend of the white hare. It is thought that the creature is the spirit of a broken-hearted lady determined to haunt her faithless lover to the grave. This also got me thinking about the historical connections between hares and witchcraft – the chorus lyrics are an adaptation of some of the words used by Isobel Gowdie at her trial (she was tried as a witch in Scotland in 1662 and her testimony survives). The song follows the progression of our heroine from broken-hearted to vengeful and it seemed appropriately prog to divide it into two parts. The tune for the second part is a variant of the traditional tune for Dives and Lazarus.’ Greg
9. Wild Wild Berry (trad arr. Green Diesel): ‘A traditional song that appears to share similarities with the Lord Randall ballad. Collected from the traditional singer Ray Driscoll who apparently learned it in Shropshire after being evacuated there during the war. My own introduction to the song came from the version by the Furrow Collective. I particularly liked the way that this version distils the essence of the long Lord Randall ballad into three powerful verses. And, of course, I love the poetic ending of the murderer being hanged with the deadly nightshade entwined in her hair! Musically I had been listening to a lot of drone-based composers like Alison Cotton and John Cale and wanted to try and extract the maximum mileage we could from one chord on this one’. Greg
Both at their summer Cropredy Festival and on many of their winter tours, Fairport Convention have long striven to provide a platform for newly-emerging artists. This current tour is no exception. Support, this time, is the Liverpool-based singer-songwriter and finger-style acoustic guitarist, Danny Bradley, whose debut album Small Talk Songs has just been released. With a fine voice, some mesmerising finger-work, a great set of songs and some wryly, self-effacing stage patter (“This is the first time I’ve been on the bill with anyone that my dad’s heard of”) and he opens proceedings very nicely indeed. As is traditional on their winter tours, the Fairport guys join Bradley on stage to act as his backing band for the final song of his set, before launching into their own.
Fairport themselves then kick things off with a rousing rendition of ‘Come All Ye’ from their genre-defining 1969 folk-rock masterpiece Liege & Lief. “An opening song that’s had a few decades off” is how Simon Nicol put it. They then stick with the Sandy Denny era for a version of Denny’s ‘Fothingay’, with beautiful twin fiddles courtesy of Ric Sanders and Chris Leslie. In fact, with the band revisiting a couple of band-composed tracks from the post-85 Fairport, we are almost coming to the end of the first set before we hear anything that can be properly considered a folk song but an equally rousing ‘Claudy Banks’ finally inserts a bit of trad. arr. into the setlist.
That’s followed by Chris Leslie’s own ‘Banbury Fair’ before the band delve back into the early days once more and round off the first half with a magnificently sprawling, brooding version of ‘Sloth’ from the much-celebrated Full House album. As I was soaking up Dave Mattacks’ wonderfully-atmospheric drumming, such an integral part of that song’s epic status on the original album, I’m reminded that with the return of Mattacks (following the retirement and subsequent untimely death of long-time drummer Gerry Conway), we now have three of the five players from that classic 1970 album performing as part of the band’s regular touring line-up. There aren’t many bands who made an album fifty-five years ago who can still claim that sort of on-stage quota!
After a short interval, the second set kicks off with another trad. arr. offering in the form of ‘The Hexhamshire Lass’. When I interviewed Dave Pegg last month ahead of this tour, he told me that the band were prompted to include the song in the set-list for this tour as they would be playing Hexham on Valentine’s night – even though “it’s quite a complicated arrangement”! No matter, even without the legend that was Dave Swarbrick, they do have the incredible musical talents of Sanders and Leslie to draw on for a superb rendition.
Photo credit Kevin Smith
Indeed, as he shares with us when introducing the next tune, it’s now 40 years since Sanders played on his first Fairport album – Gladys’ Leap. Sanders tells the audience that he was phoned up by Pegg who had asked him if he was interested in contributing fiddle to three tracks but initially he had no idea he was being asked to contribute to a Fairport Convention album. Until he heard the tracks, and the distinctive drumming of Dave Mattacks, he assumed he was merely being asked to contribute to one of Pegg’s side projects. Sanders added his fiddle sounds, of course, and the rest is history. So to mark the anniversary of that significant moment in the Fairport chronicles, the band revisit the instrumental medley from Gladys’ Leap, along with a beautifully-evocative version of ‘Hiring Fair’ with some gorgeous keyboard flourishes from Mattacks. Written for them by Ralph McTell, it’s a song that has rightly become a fan favourite over the past four decades.
Back in 2011, the band revisited the whole of their 1971 concept album, Babbacombe Lee, the tale of the convicted murderer who was condemned to death but given a reprieve after the gallows failed three times in succession. Unlike other past albums it’s not usually one where odd tracks are performed live but here we get two, the contemplative ‘Cell Song’ and the exhilarating, death-defying ‘Wake Up John (Hanging Song)’. Just as he did back in 2011 when the band performed the full album live, Leslie does a fine job singing Swarbrick’s original lyrics.
The second set is beginning to draw to a close at this stage but there’s still time for a couple more numbers before the band finish proceedings with the inevitable show-closers. There’s a joyous rendition of ‘Rising For The Moon’, Sandy Denny’s celebration of the simple pleasures of touring and performing. And, after marking Sanders’ induction to the Fairport ranks earlier in the set, we are then reminded that it’s coming up to almost three decades since Chris Leslie joined. It was his second album with the band where he really started coming into his own as the band’s principal contemporary songwriter and they revisit the title track of that album, ‘The Wood and the Wire’, Leslie’s impassioned paean to coveting, cherishing and learning to play a stringed instrument.
As we come up to curfew time there’s normally three things that happen around this point. Firstly, a sales pitch from Simon Nicol about the band’s Cropredy festival in August, followed by two perennial crowd-pleasers ‘Matty Groves’ and ‘Meet On The Ledge’. This year, there’s less of a need for the sales pitch as the now reduced-capacity festival (a financial necessity in the current climate) is very close to selling out. So, after a brief exhortation to check the website in the coming days for the final few tickets, it’s banjo-at-the-ready and time for all nineteen verses of ‘Matty Groves’, some heartfelt applause from an appreciative audience and the inevitable ‘Meet On The Ledge’. Me and my group of camping friends got in nice and early with our Cropredy ticket purchases for this year so I’ll be looking forward to singing along to it once more, as midnight approaches on 9th August. It all comes round again.
Photo credit: Kevin Smith
Setlist:
First set:
Come All Ye Fotheringay I’m Already There The Rose Hip Claudy Banks Banbury Fair Sloth
Second set:
The Hexhamshire Lass Instrumental Medley ’85 The Hiring Fair Cell Song Wake Up John (Hanging Song) Rising for the Moon The Wood and the Wire Matty Groves Meet on the Ledge
Ahead of Fairport Convention’s Winter Tour, I catch up with Dave Pegg. We discuss the making of the Full House album, the crucial role that Jethro Tull played in Fairport’s resurrection, changes afoot at Cropredy this summer so that the festival survives the financial pressures facing the sector and the forthcoming tour, starting 31 January.
We’ll talk about the Winter Tour and about Cropredy later but first I want to start right at the very beginning – well the very beginning for you. I was re-reading the Fairport by Fairport book and it was Swarb who really pushed for you to be auditioned after Ashley left. It seems that the others were a bit sceptical at first?
Well, what happened Swarb used to be in the Ian Campbell Folk Group and he’d left a couple of years before I joined them to go off to play with Martin Carthy. He knew of me through the Campbells because he joined the Campbells for an album that they did. It was just a reunion kind of album and I played on it. He was aware that I wasn’t really a double bass player, which I played with the Campbells. I said, “This isn’t really my instrument, mate. I can get away with it but I’m a bass guitarist. I’m a rock musician really.” He remembered this and when I saw Fairport on my 22nd birthday at Mothers Club, it was the last time the Liege & Lief line-up played together and I was blown away. I thought it was fabulous. I thought I’d love to play with that band and literally the next day I got a call from Swarbrick saying Ashley was leaving and they were looking for a bass player. And that’s how I got the audition. The others were a bit scared because when he said I’d played with the Ian Campbell Folk Group, they thought I’d be like the Aran sweater and the beard, like a proper folkie, but I knew absolutely zilch about folk music at all – and still don’t!
And when you did join did it feel like you’d found your natural home or did it take a while to settle in?
No, I kind of settled in pretty quickly. I mean because the Fairports are great players and they were from the same background as myself. Richard was an astonishing guitarist, even at that age. And the rhythm section, Simon and DM, they were just fantastic to play with. And then there was the added bonus of Swarb who was re-inventing the way that he played the fiddle. Because now he was kind of getting into rock music and was using his Echoplex and he’d got a really crude pickup on his violin made from a telephone (laughs). But it was very early days in terms of electric violin. But the weirder thing about it, we were rehearsing stuff, we’d moved into this place, The Angel at Little Hadham and we were rehearsing songs but without a vocal, without anyone singing. Because, of course, Sandy had left the band as well and it meant the band didn’t have a vocalist so it was a case of drawing straws to see who got the short straw. It was Richard and Swarb who did most of the vocals. Simon, after a while – Simon’s a great singer – but in those days Richard and Swarb hadn’t really sung at all.
Yes, it great how everyone’s confidence as vocalists grew.
Yeah – we made the Full House album. We recorded most of it in London and we went to New York to overdub the vocals. It was made at Sound Techniques in London, engineered by John Wood who was a fantastic engineer and Joe Boyd [producer] allowed us to do whatever we wanted, musically. But Joe kind of trusted the band. What was great about his production for Fairport was the fact that he’d allow us to do whatever we wanted. And he also he knew lots of people in America and we went to New York and we overdubbed most of the vocals in New York, in a studio where Dylan had recently recorded.
Now when I interviewed Simon this time last year, he said this was like being asked to name your favourite child, but I’m going to ask it anyway. What’s your favourite Fairport album?
It’s a very hard one for me because I’ve been involved ever since Full House, which was the first one I played on in 1970. There’s been so many different Fairport line-ups and I find it hard to compare one album against another one. Well, for me, my favourite album before I joined was Unhalfbricking, which I think is a remarkable album. Things like ‘Percy’s Song’ – it’s just incredible that song. I know Dylan really rates that version. Unhalfbricking was my favourite pre-joining Fairport. And the albums that I’ve played on, where there’ve been different line-ups, things like Fairport Nine mean a lot to me because it was a re-establishment with some great players and some great tracks on it. Obviously, Rising for The Moon is another great one for me because it was Sandy coming back. And things like Gladys’s Leap which was again…
Another coming-back album!
Yeah, another coming-back album. And the last one, Shuffle and Go, that we did which I think stands up as good as anything Fairport’s ever recorded. I can’t pick one album. It’s impossible, Darren, for me in that sense!
The second half of the ‘70s looked like it was all going pear-shaped for the folk rock genre. Steeleye Span split up in ’78; Sandy was dead, tragically; Richard and Linda had gone off to a religious commune. Do you think the Cropredy Farewell concert in 1979 played a big part in turning things round again?
Well in terms of turning things around, it was a kind of the end of Fairport as it was because we had split up. Swarb was going to live up in Scotland. There was no longer a working band. I went off and joined Jethro Tull, which was a lucky break for me and I was with them for like fifteen years. And what happened was Cropredy Festival kind of evolved as a get-together, because we’re all mates in Fairport. When we split up there was never really any animosity when people came and then left the band. It was always because they had ideas about what they wanted to do personally. And people like Richard, his talent was too big for Fairport Convention if you like – his ideas about what he wanted to do musically. The group was a bit inhibitive for him. We couldn’t do all the things he wanted. Same with Sandy. We couldn’t do orchestral arrangements. And they were both great songwriters. Well, Richard still is, obviously. But when they left the band the rest of the guys didn’t feel bad about it. We would do everything we could to encourage it. Because we were all mates, it was nice for us to get together.
And, basically, because of Jethro Tull I was in a better situation, financially. My ex-wife, Christine, and myself – we thought it would be nice to keep the band going, even just for a reunion. So, we would plan these things at Cropredy. And we started a little label, Woodworm Records in order to put out our own product and to put out stuff by people who we thought were really good – like we put out an album with Steve Ashley called the Family Album, which is one of my favourite albums. And we made albums with Beryl Marriott and, later on, with Anna Ryder, and Bob Fox. And with Simon Nicol we did two of Simon’s. This was all due, thankfully, to Jethro Tull. Ian [Anderson] and Martin [Barre] kind of adopted me and invited me to join the band and looked after me, financially. So instead of buying a Rolls Royce, I converted a Methodist Chapel – an old chapel next to our cottage in Barford St Michael – into a studio in order that we could make our albums.
In the Fairport book I think you talk about it being a hobby that got out of hand.
Yeah, it did get a bit out of hand (laughs) but it paid off in terms of having a facility where we could all make albums and we could rehearse at. In fact, it’s still a great studio, Woodworm. We’re there in a couple of weeks rehearsing for our tour. And we do record there still. Stuart [Jones] who runs it, the investment that he’s put into it is something that I couldn’t have done. Everything got kind of out of hand in terms of the cost of doing stuff and a lot of studios closed down. Basically, because of the invention of the laptop! And things like Garageband [software app]. My laptop that I’m looking at now seeing your face on it, has more equipment on and is a better studio than my studio in Barford St Michael that was. If only I knew how to operate it!
Primitive though the technology was at that time, it clearly provided, along with the festival, the foundation for the rebirth of the band.
Exactly, yeah. It was brilliant and the album, Gladys’s Leap – we’re looking at a few tracks that we haven’t played for years on this upcoming tour. It’s great for us. And it’s great having Dave Mattacks back on the tour because he comes all the way from America and the Gladys’s Leap album was such an important step in the reformation of Fairport Convention.
And another question on Cropredy before we move on to this tour. To keep the festival viable, you’ve made some changes. It’s funny because there was a group of us sitting in the camping field at Cropredy last August discussing this very thing and we all agreed that to keep the festival financially viable you’d have to downsize so you weren’t tearing your hair out about whether you’d get the numbers each year. And that seems to be what you’ve done, pretty much.
Well, luckily, Gareth Williams our CEO came up with several formulas for trying to make it pay. It’s always been such a gamble, the last couple of years especially. Because when you don’t know how many tickets you are going to sell, you can’t budget. You’re guessing about the number of people who are going to turn up. Gareth’s idea – we’re only going to sell 6,500 tickets and we’re only selling three-day tickets. Because we know we’ve got that lump of income and we can budget accordingly without the risk of going bankrupt. What happens to a lot of festivals is they overspend. Stuff like building the site at Cropredy is the most expensive aspect of our festival because you’re building a town in the middle of nowhere. There’s no electricity, there’s no water, there’s nothing. You’re putting everything on that site and as the years go by, it gets more and more expensive. And we could no longer risk it. We didn’t want to go bankrupt and it happens so easily and it’s happened to so many other festivals. The price of just the actual infrastructure for all these events went up so much. It went up like 30% over the space of a year and that’s why a lot of these festivals went down. And also, the fact that to get kind of headline acts is an absolute fortune nowadays. Little festivals like Cropredy can’t attract huge names.
So, we won’t be seeing the Alice Coopers any more but you’ve still got a fantastic line-up within the budget constraints. Within the world that you operate, you’ve got a fantastic line-up.
It’s a fantastic line-up and it’s a line-up of people that want to play at Cropredy and people that we want to see at Cropredy… But we’ve been very lucky that we’ve had people like Brian Wilson, for example, at the end of a European bash. Alice, for example, said Cropredy was the best audience he’d played to in Europe. But looking at it from a pure economical point of view, we can’t run the risk of doing that. So, what we’ve done now is rationalised things. Only doing the three-day ticket, which some people will complain about because some people only want to go for one day. It’s a shame but we’ve designed the festival for the people who’ve been with us over all those years, who come for three days, who come for the fact that Cropredy means a lot more to them than having a huge act on that’s probably their only chance to see. And we’ve put acts on that we think are really good.
I think it’s reassuring because we’ve got happy memories of your flirtation with the big league, with acts like Alice Cooper or Chic or whatever. But at the same time, we’ve got that reassurance that we know the festival can go ahead and it’s not going to go bankrupt.
Yeah, that’s it. It’s the only way that we could carry on. It’s a kind of test year this year because if it works, we’ve got a formula that we can kind of stick to. It’s adaptable. We may be proved wrong. There might be such a swell of people wanting to come. Last year we sold something like 9,700 tickets which was 2,000 less than the year before. Cropredy, it’s like a mature kind of crowd you get there with all due respect. A lot of them are ageing. They don’t want to camp any more. They enjoy the glamping and a lot of them have got motor homes or caravans. That’s great. But there are very few hotels about available nowadays and a lot of people think twice before taking a bivouac out and roughing it in the field. Although as we all know, Darren, the weather’s always perfect at Cropredy!
We’ve never had any rain! The sun’s never been too hot!
I think we’re going to have a fantastic year and I’m really pleased about the line-up. There isn’t a bad act on it and I’m so pleased that we’ve got Albert Lee because we’ve been trying to get Albert for years. And Martin Barre coming back – Martin is a great guitarist. And we’ve got Deborah Bonham – I love Deborah’s singing. The Churchfitters are coming back. And Trevor Horn’s coming back. We missed him last year because he was poorly and he had to cancel so it’s great having Trevor back.
I think that within the financial constraints that you’re operating in, it’s still a fantastically diverse line-up which has some of the folky elements and some of the classic rock elements and I’ve always liked that mix. You’ve still managed to maintain that.
Yeah, the diversity musically is one of the attractions of Cropredy, I think, because it’s not all folkie and it never has been because we’ve always had a real mix of music, like reggae, rock. We’ve never really had punk bands but we’ve had some very diverse kinds of music on there – and that will always be. The criterion is whether we think the acts that we book musically fit the bill. If the bands are all really good, the only people that suffer are us because we have to follow them all. It’s not funny. Two years running I’ve sat out in the field and I’ve watched and I’ve thought, “This is fantastic. The sound’s great, the screens, you can see everything, you don’t have to move, the bar’s only like a minute’s walk away and everybody’s so friendly and having a great time.” And then when it comes to Saturday night, I’m like, “Oh hang on, we’re on now. We’ve got to follow that lot!” It’s not easy. There’s a lot of nerves when we get up on that stage, because we play for about three hours.
In fact, this year’s going to be really fun for us because when we open on Thursday, we do our twenty-minute acoustic spot. We do Chris’s song the ‘Festival Bell’ and then we’re going to be joined by Joe Broughton’s Folk Ensemble. So, fifty students from Birmingham Conservatoire who are monster players and we’re going to do the biggest version of the ‘Lark in The Morning’ medley from Liege & Lief. Which should hopefully set the mood for the rest of the weekend.
Let’s move on to the tour then. What do you want to tell us about the Winter tour, starting 31 January?
I think we’ve got 27 dates altogether. We try and cover the whole country. We start off in Nottingham and we finish up in Tewkesbury. We’ve only got one Scottish date, although it’s great to be in Edinburgh. It’s nearly sold out. The tickets are going really well which is great. And we still enjoy touring enormously and treading the boards has always been what Fairport is good at. We’ve had more success playing live than we’ve had making albums.
Thinking back to when you first joined it must fill you with a certain sense of pride, knowing you’ve helped keep the show on the road all these years. In spite of all the problems in the festival industry, in spite of, sadly, former members no longer being with us, you’re still getting out there. It must give you a certain sense of satisfaction when you’re about to head out on tour again.
Absolutely. It’s great to get in the van. Getting in the van is easier than getting out of it. We’re banned from making pain noises now when we get out the van. But, Darren, I can assure you, I’m really ready to get in the van again and get ready to go out on the road. All I’ve got to do is learn two hours of music! Or re-learn. You think, “Oh I know all that stuff. I’ve played it hundreds of times.” And then you go, “Oh-oh”. We might be doing ‘The Lass from Hexhamshire’. We actually play in Hexham – on Valentine’s night – so it will be a great opportunity to get that song in the set – but, of course, we’ve got to learn it. And it’s quite a complicated arrangement from what I can remember. So that’s this afternoon’s work. I’ve lit the fire here because it’s really soggy and cold in Brittany so that’s my afternoon – learning the set.
Well good luck with the preparations and I look forward to seeing you at Union Chapel.
Tour dates:
January 31st Nottingham – Playhouse
February 1st Edinburgh – The Queen’s Hall, 2nd Alnwick – Alnwick Playhouse 4th Milton Keynes 5th Southend – Palace Theatre 6th Bury St Edmunds – The Apex 7th Canterbury – Colyer Fergusson Hall 8th Farnham – Farnham Maltings 9th Worthing – Connaught Theatre 11th Wakefield – Theatre Royal 12th Newcastle under Lyme – New Vic Theatre 13th Manchester – RNCM – Royal Northern College of Music 14th Hexham – Queen’s Hall Arts 15th Colne – The Muni Theatre 16th Lytham St Annes – The Lowther Pavilion 18th Lincoln – The Drill 19th Sunderland – The Fire Station 20th Leamington Spa – Royal Spa Centre 21st Harpenden – The Eric Morecambe Centre 22nd London – Union Chapel 23rd Corby – The Core Theatre 25th Swansea – Taliesin Arts Centre 26th Exeter – Corn Exchange 27th Southampton – Turner Sims 28th Bath – The Forum
March 1st Bridgnorth – Castle Hall 2nd Tewkesbury – Roses Theatre
A Happy New Year and thanks to everyone who has visited Darren’s music blog during 2024. As usual, we have a nice eclectic mix of musical genres featuring in this year’s top ten most viewed posts: folk-rock, prog rock, glam rock and much more besides. Here’s to 2025!
1. Live review: Saving Grace with Robert Plant & Suzi Dian, White Rock Theatre, Hastings 23/3/24
Of all the ‘70s rock gods, Robert Plant is perhaps the one who has most has steadfastly refused to be pigeon-holed in the superannuated, stadium heritage rock act persona. It’s meant he’s continued to surprise and delight with new musical ventures. And it’s meant I could stroll along up the road to see him and his band perform an intimate gig in my local theatre.
2. Interview with Fairport Convention’s Simon Nicol
Ahead of Fairport Convention’s 2024 Winter Tour, I caught up with Simon Nicol. We discuss Dave Mattacks’ return to the Fairport fold, the forthcoming tour, this Summer’s Cropredy and why he won’t be retiring any time soon.
3. Farewell Frank Torpey – the last surviving original member of The Sweet
Frank Torpey’s role in the history of The Sweet was a small one but, nevertheless, an important one. Moreover, as well as continuing to play and record, he was always happy to engage with fans about The Sweet’s very early days. My tribute to Frank, who died in March this year.
4. Live review: Fairport’s Cropredy Convention August 2024
As things drew to a close with the familiar rendition of ‘Matty Groves’ prior to ‘Meet On The Ledge’ Simon Nicol confirmed that he’d been given permission by the ‘powers that be’ to throw in his usual ‘same time next year?’ invite, in spite of the festival’s future looking extremely precarious earlier this year. Phew! It will be going ahead in 2025 then. I’ll be there…
6. Live review: Oysterband & June Tabor, De la Warr Pavilion, Bexhill 5/10/24
It was almost exactly ten years ago when I last saw June Tabor and Oysterband at the De La Warr Pavilion, my first time visiting this stunning piece of 1930s architecture. I wasn’t even living down here yet but a friend had a spare ticket going and I came down for the weekend. So, when Oysterband announced their ‘Long Long Goodbye’ farewell tour with June Tabor, once again, as their very special guest I booked a ticket straight away.
7. Beckenham, Bowie, the Spiders and glam: interview with Suzi Ronson
Suzi was a small-time hairdresser in Beckenham before being swept up in a world which saw her become stylist for David Bowie and the originator of the iconic Ziggy Stardust hairdo as well as falling in love with the late Spiders From Mars guitar icon, Mick Ronson, who she would go on to marry.
8. Live review: Tubular Bells – the 50th anniversary celebration at White Rock Theatre, Hastings 30/10/24
From the familiar opening bars of part one of Tubular Bells, through every second that followed the who thing was just a magical, mesmerising and utterly unforgettable experience. For something that was so clearly conceived as a studio project, to see it transformed into a live performance piece in this way will stay with me a long time. Hats off to Robin A. Smith for pulling together such a stunning interpretation of one of the all-time classic instrumental albums.
9. Live review: Martin Turner ex Wishbone Ash – White Rock Theatre, Hastings 6/9/24
Performing two hour-long sets with a short half-hour interval in the middle, it’s a superb night packed full of Wishbone classics. I won’t say I haven’t enjoyed Andy Powell’s ‘official’ version of the band when I’ve seen them live but, for me, what gives Turner’s outfit the edge is being able to hear the original voice behind many of Wishbone Ash’s most famous songs live on stage. And his bass-playing is as majestic as ever.
10. Live review: Justin Hayward at De La Warr Pavilion, Bexhill 16/10/24
With the death of Mike Pinder earlier this year, none of the original ‘Go Now’ line-up of the Moody Blues are still with us. And only Justin Hayward and John Lodge now remain from the classic ‘prog-era’ post-1967 line-up. But the music they leave remains with us and Justin Hayward does a hugely impressive job in celebrating the band’s legacy with affection, panache and good humour, along with some incredible musicianship on stage beside him.
It was almost exactly ten years ago when I last saw June Tabor and Oysterbandat the De La Warr Pavilion, my first time visiting this stunning piece of 1930s architecture. I wasn’t even living down here yet but a friend had a spare ticket going and I came down for the weekend. So, when Oysterband announced their ‘Long Long Goodbye’ farewell tour with June Tabor, once again, as their very special guest I booked a ticket straight away.
For a band that’s been going almost five decades, it would be unthinkable for them not to include June Tabor as they begin playing their final gigs. From the moment they made their first album together it was a match made in heaven. When Freedom and Rain came out in 1990 Oysterband’s rebooting of the folk-rock genre for the ‘80s and ‘90s combined with Tabor’s darkly elegant vocals to create an unforgettable slice of pseudo-gothic cool. Two more hugely popular collaboration albums have followed.
With two hour-long sets and a short interval, I wasn’t completely clear how they were going to approach things and hadn’t read any other reviews. Would they play the first set as Oysterband and the second with June Tabor? Or would they mix and match? To warm applause Oysterband sans Tabor took to the stage for the first song, then Tabor joined them to launch into their unforgettable cover of Velvet Underground’s ‘All Tomorrow’s Parties’, a shared love of Velvet Underground as well as traditional songs being something that helped cement the foundations for the two joining forces, recalled Tabor.
The remainder of the evening proceeds in that same vein with a superb mix of songs that Tabor and Oysterband had collaborated on for their previous albums (including an utterly spellbinding ‘Bonny Bunch of Roses’ and their unique interpretation of Joy Division’s ‘Love Will Tear Us Apart which is just perfection) alongside regular Oysterband classics, like ‘A River Runs’ and ‘Dancing As Fast As I Can’. For a couple of songs the rest of the band vacate the stage and Tabor sings alone with acoustic accompaniment from Oysterband guitarist, Alan Prosser, including a cover of Les Barker’s humorous rewrite of Roseville Fair, as her warmly-felt tribute to the comic poet who died last year.
At one point Tabor tells us how much she loves what she calls ‘cinematic songs’, songs where the lyrics are so vivid in painting a picture and telling a story. There are few singers, however, who make an audience hang on to every word in the way that Tabor does. I’m so glad I got to see this most perfect of musical collaborations one final time. And an encore of Jefferson Airplane’s ‘White Rabbit’ and an emotional crowd sing-along of Oysterband’s ‘Put Out The Lights’ made the evening even more special. An unforgettable evening – catch them while you can!
I’ve been responsible for herding a fluid and evolving group of friends, family members and friends of friends to attend Fairport’s Cropredy Convention for some fourteen years now. Looking for somewhere to rendezvous that very first time back in 2010 (in order that we could all drive in together and camp next to one another) we happened across a layby in Banbury. Now, every year without fail in the days leading up to Cropredy I start getting text messages from various people in various parts of the country asking me where the layby is. I can never remember so every year without fail I end up visiting a dogging website to get the name, postcode and exact location so people can programme it into their satnavs.
So it was that this year (after numerous texts and checking out the dogging website once again) three cars, a caravan and a campervan all assembled punctually in said layby ready to enjoy another Cropredy weekend of fun, friendship and fantastic music.
Our Cropredy camping group this year – Photo credit: a friendly Cropredy punter
Day one: Thursday
As is now traditional, Fairport Convention opened proceedings with a short acoustic set. It still seems slightly unreal not seeing Gerry Conway’s beaming face alongside the rest of the band. Even though he’s been succeeded by long-time Fairport legend, Dave Mattacks, my years of following the band live had all been in the Gerry era so his retirement in 2022 and tragic death in March this year came as a real shock. He will be greatly missed.
Feast of Fiddles followed, always a great festival folk band and always a delight. Much as I wanted to see Kathryn Tickell and the Darkening, however, a combination of rain, cider and lack of sleep sent me back to the campsite for a snooze so I could be match-fit ready for Rick Wakeman’s set. What turned out to be an extended snooze meant I missed all of Tony Christe’s set, too, but I’m told he went down really well.
Rick Wakeman, on the other hand, I certainly did not want to miss. Performing the whole of his 1974 concept album, Journey to the Centre of the Earth, based on Jules Verne’s 1864 science fiction novel, it’s a masterclass in showing that while prog can be bombastic, over the top and full of itself, with Rick Wakeman at the helm it need ever, ever, ever be boring. It was brilliantly entertaining and something of a family affair for retro rock, with Wakeman’s own son, Adam, on keyboards, the son of Fairport’s Dave Pegg, Matt Pegg, on bass, and the daughter of Humble Pie’s Steve Marriott, Mollie Marriott, as one of the two female lead vocalists. Wonderful stuff and one of the real highlights of the weekend for me.
Rick Wakeman and son Adam. Photo Credit: Simon Putman
Day two: Friday
As the sun shone down for the start of a very hot afternoon, things kicked off on the Friday with folk punk outfit Black Water County. Not a band I had seen before but I’m pretty familiar with the genre, having seen the likes of Ferocious Dog and legendary local band here in Hastings, Matilda’s Scoundrels, who they very much reminded me of. Highly entertaining, I’ll definitely be up for seeing them again if they ever play down my way.
Cropredy village – Photo Credit: Simon Putman
The rest of the afternoon’s line-up looked very tempting indeed for a fan of folk rock and classic rock like myself. But I’d already agreed to have a wander around the village with one of our party and then check out Cream of the Crop, the boutique festival in the field next door which these days runs parallel to the main Cropredy event every August. We arrived just in time to catch the last part of the set from my old friends, Parkbridge, including a storming cover of Neil Young’s ‘Rockin’ In The Free World’.
Parkbridge at Cream of the Crop. Photo Credit: Simon Putman
It was then back to the main stage in time for Swedish banjo trio, Baskery and bluesy Americana singer-songwriter, Elles Bailey, both of whom went down well. Then it was back to the campsite for pot noodles, some chill time and putting on some warmer clothes ready for a late night with Richard Thompson. We arrived back at the main stage just in time to see Spooky Men’s Chorale, a sprawling choral ensemble I’d heard lots of people speak very favourably of but who I knew next to nothing about. I’m not sure I’d sit at home listening to one of their albums (they are now on to their sixth apparently) but they make for a superb festival act with a mix of deadpan humour, melancholy ballads and anthemic covers.
Elles Bailey up on the big screen. Photo Credit: Simon Putman
Richard Thompson, on the other hand, I knew exactly what to expect and he didn’t disappoint. Launching straight into a plethora of RT classics, just him and his acoustic guitar and some mind-blowingly stupendous finger-work, it was precisely what I’d been looking forward to all day. Around two-thirds of the way through his slot, sundry Fairporters joined him on stage for an electric set and he dazzled us all over again.
I did, however, start to see a lot of people leaving during Richard Thompson’s set. I don’t think this was any reflection on the performance whatsoever. Indeed, I suspect many of those leaving were actually long-term Richard Thompson fans. I believe it’s got far more to do with the timing. Given an aging demographic among long-term Fairport devotees, and given even second and third generation attendees may have young kids or grandkids to put to bed, it may be time for the organisers to think about putting the headliners in the penultimate slot, when they can be guaranteed maximum attendance, and having an inexpensive late-night party band in the final slot for the remaining revellers to party the night away. I’ve seen other festivals do this and it works a treat.
Richard Thompson. Photo Credit: Darren Johnson
Day three: Saturday
Following a fascinating talk by legendary 60s producer and the man who discovered Fairport, Joe Boyd, folk-singer-cum-funnyman and inciter of mass outbreaks of Morris dancing, Richard Digance once again formally opened proceedings on the Saturday. Sometimes I find his songs a little bit twee and sentimental and the nostalgia is certainly laid on with a trowel – but I wouldn’t miss the now-infamous communal hanky-waving routine for the world.
Richard Digance and a mass Morris Dance. Photo credit: Simon Putman
Hannah Sanders & Ben Savage, Zac Schulz Gang and Ranagri all put in sterling performances. Focus was one of the bands I’d been really looking forward to seeing on the Cropredy stage, however. I’d seen them before at classic rock festivals and will admit to approaching them slightly tongue-in-cheek, gleefully dancing around like an idiot to ‘Hocus Pocus’, channeling my inner Neil from the Young Ones persona and not taking them entirely seriously. Here, the atmosphere was markedly different and the audience really seemed to get Focus and really absorb the band’s extended prog masterpieces. As keyboardist, vocalist, flautist and founder member, Thijs van Leer, said at the end, the band felt “truly at home here in this beautiful field.” Perfect.
An appreciative Cropredy crowd for Focus. Photo Credit: Darren Johnson
I can’t do a full twelve-hour shift in the main field without some chill-time back at the tent before returning for the evening headliners. Normally, it’s fairly easy. I find someone I’m not too bothered about (or ideally someone I really can’t stand at all) who’s on the bill around teatime and time my break for then. This year it was an impossible choice. I wanted to see everyone. Unfortunately, Eddie Reader got the short straw. I love her music and have seen her live several times but I really didn’t want to miss Focus and I didn’t want to miss the special guest slot just in case I missed someone really… special.
There had been quite a bit of speculation within our camping group about the identity of the ‘Special Surprise Guest’. It would have to be someone who was mates with the band and was willing to perform for free, it would have to be someone who was reasonably well-known and it would have to be someone who was still alive. That narrowed it down quite a bit and we were left with a potential shortlist of Robert Plant, Jasper Carrott or Ralph McTell.
After our little break back at the campsite we headed back to the main arena. I was hoping for Robert Plant but expecting Jasper Carrot. I wasn’t wrong. I have huge admiration for him performing gratis as a way of helping ensure Cropredy’s financial viability at an increasingly fraught time for the festival sector. But his humour seemed very dated and his routine was not exactly up to the minute: jokes about Covid and the US presidential election which would have hit the spot when Biden was still in the race but made little sense now Kamala Harris is running. I should have trusted my instincts and stayed for Eddie Reader and given Carrott a miss.
Fairport’s Chris Leslie. Photo Credit: Simon Putman
It was wonderful to see Fairport Convention take the stage to round off another successful Cropredy though. My one niggle is that there did seem rather a lot of Chris Leslie-penned songs in the set-list and not nearly enough by Richard Thompson, Dave Swarbrick or Sandy Denny songs. We did get some wonderful Ralph McTell material though, including stunning renditions of ‘The Hiring Fair’ and ‘Red and Gold’, the latter performed by the man himself with some wonderful accompaniment from Anna Ryder, Hannah Sanders, Michelle Plum and Ed Whitcombe. As things drew to a close with the familiar rendition of ‘Matty Groves’ prior to ‘Meet On The Ledge’ Simon Nicol confirmed that he’d been given permission by the ‘powers that be’ to throw in his usual ‘same time next year?’ invite, in spite of the festival’s future looking extremely precarious earlier this year.
Phew! It will be going ahead in 2025 then. I’ll be there…
Fairport Convention at Cropredy. Photo Credit: Simon Putman
I first came across the Julie July Band in the band’s early days when they were performing their lovingly-collated and extremely well-received tribute to Sandy Denny. Time has flown by and the band have been together a decade now and are about to release their fourth studio album.
While the first one stuck to material that had been written or performed by Sandy Denny herself, subsequent albums have been composed of original material. The last album, the post-lockdown Wonderland, saw the band draw on a more eclectic range of influences. With Flight Of Fancy they continue on that journey still further.
The band themselves characterise it as “music inspired by the folk, rock and blues movements of the ‘60s and ’70;s with a 21st Century twist.”
The title track picks up that laid-back, sun-kissed, US country rock -meets- English folk rock vibe which Sandy Denny’s post-Fairport outfit Fotheringay delved into so wonderfully but there’s many, many more influences here beyond Denny, Fairport and Fotheringay. From the psychedelia-tinged ‘All In Our Minds’, to the funky reggae party of ‘Boho Woman’, to the wistful minor-key singer-songwriter vibe of ‘Lost In A Crowd’ to the sparse, delicate beauty of piano-and-vocal closing track, ‘Simply Yours’, it’s like a magical mystery tour through a fifty-year-old, recently-rediscovered record collection for the discerning buyer.
Holding it all together is Julie July’s crisp, clear vocals; great five-part harmonies, thoughtful but accessible songwriting, and a superbly versatile band – now with an established line up of Steve Rezillo (Lead guitar), Caley Groves (acoustic guitar) Dik Cadbury (bass), Mick Candler (drums) and Carol Lee Sampson (keyboards).
Flight Of Fancy is a really enjoyable album and it’s not at all fanciful to conclude that the Julie July Band continue to soar and continue to deliver great music.
Ahead of Fairport Convention’s 2024 Winter Tour, starting in February, I catch up with Simon Nicol. We discuss Dave Mattacks’ return to the Fairport fold, the forthcoming tour, this Summer’s Cropredy and why he won’t be retiring any time soon.
So you’re obviously looking forward to the Winter Tour then which starts early next month. What can fans expect this time?
Well, for those who didn’t catch DM (Dave Mattacks) with us last year, you’re in for a different kind of musical experience than the last twenty-five years with Gerry. That’s one thing. But the other thing that’s happened with DM, it’s not just the style of playing, it’s the way it’s easily opened up a lot of the repertoire that Peggy and I, and Ric, and DM kind of all know. Because that line-up from ‘85 to ’98, when DM moved over to America, created a lot of its own material. But, of course, Ric was easily able to adapt to much earlier material so it’s really only a case of Ric and Chris now having to learn old stuff if we want to go back to the early days of when Peggy joined. It’s suddenly opened up a huge tranche of the back catalogue which, I’m happy to say, we’re having a look at this year. We’ve been dusting off the old LPs and we’ve found some things that have never really been in the repertoire at all. So it’s going to be an adventure for us and a real voyage of discovery for some of the older – well the more mature members of our audience who perhaps remember us from college days and are now in retirement. They’ll be hearing some stuff that they haven’t heard for decades. And a lot of that will be brand-spanking-new for newbies.
Excellent. So there’s going to be quite a few surprises, then?
Yeah! I hope so! All good ones. You say it’s quite soon but I’ve got a daunting number of things to do before we all actually get together and start practicing under the one roof. Because we all live miles apart. Peggy’s in France when he’s not in this country, he’s over there. DM, obviously, he only comes over a few days before from Boston. I live down in East Kent. So we don’t actually see each other very much considering we’re kind of based in north Oxfordshire.
Has it all slotted in place, in terms of working together. Does it feel very comfortable having Dave Mattacks back?
Yes. We’re used to planning a repertoire in this way. There’s a lot of to-ing and fro-ing and discussions on the phone and WhatsApp groups, where we chew the fat. And then people go off and listen to the songs in question and we end up with a big rag-bag, a bucket of songs if you will. And Chris is the clever one. He sits down and tries to work it out – “Let’s put this one here. Let’s put that one there.” And then there aren’t too many instrument changes and not too many things in the same key and a bit of a rise and fall to the shape of the two sets.
Yeah, we’re very much looking forward to it and we’re used to working that way so when the time comes and we get together in the studio for the rehearsals – two days of that – everybody’s on the same page and there’s not much to be worked out. Just – “Does this still work in this key?” That’s one of the big questions (laughs) because obviously voices and so forth change.
Voices change over the decades! And talking of Dave Mattacks coming back, you never seem to have suffered the sort of rancour with former members that have often bedevilled other bands. That seems to suggest that Fairport Convention has always been a relatively happy working environment. Is that true?
Well, it’s many things. It’s a band. It’s an environment. It’s a family in many ways. I’m closer to the guys I’ve been working with for fifty years than I am to my own immediate family really – I spend more time with them! Been through more adventures! It’s been said before but no-one gets out of Fairport alive. You may stop coming to the gigs but, you know, underneath it all, if you scratch deeply enough do they not bleed Fairport?
So you’ve never really had any of those Noel and Liam Gallagher moments?
Oh.. well. Obviously there are hearty and firm disagreements occasionally and there have been moments when you haven’t spoken to people but there’s a parallel there going back to the family thing or in any small office. Occasionally there’ll be frictions but basically, if you’re a band and a band-member kind of person, I don’t get it. If you’re at daggers drawn and you don’t cut each other slack all the time then you’re probably in the wrong band. You’re probably working with the wrong collection of people because you’re just making life unpleasant for yourself.
Yes, it seems an incredibly sensible philosophy but it seems to evade quite a few bands.
Well I think there’s the famous difficulties which brothers always have when they form groups. There never seems to be a seamless happy bunch of brothers. I mean the Finn Brothers seem to do ok but what do we know about their.. they just make wonderful records. But the Kinks were at it when they were kids. And the Gallaghers dear oh dear. And even the Everlys used to travel to gigs separately and have their own managers and their own lawyers. They would talk to each other through their lawyers and they’d come on to the stage. One time I saw them they came on from different sides and when they went off they didn’t look at each other and they walked off separately…
So Fairport’s a largely happy family rather than a dysfunctional one then..
I don’t want to be all Pollyanna-ish about it but, you know, I think we’re all cutting each other slack all the time and happy to do so.
And moving on, from Fairport Convention’s vast back-catalogue, what album are you most proud of?
Oh God, I don’t know. It’s that favourite child question again isn’t it? I think it’s more of a repertoire to me. A performance on one album enshrines a particular place and a time and a collection of people at that point in their lives. But, you know, we’ve had ‘Crazy Man Michael’ in the repertoire, along with ‘Matty Groves’, since they first surfaced on Liege & Lief in 1969 and I don’t think there’s a definitive version of either of those songs. Certainly, there isn’t in my head when I go to sing that song. If I see it on the list and it’s coming up, I’m not thinking, “Oh, the definitive version of this was recorded on this particular album. This is what I’m going to try and emulate now and try and make it as close to that as possible.” You now, I’m not a human juke-box and the band doesn’t feel like that. We’ve got this song. We all know where it starts and finishes, what key it’s in, what tempo it is. And on the count of four, we’ll start playing it and what comes out that night will be tonight’s performance. It’ll have the same structure as last night’s performance but it’s not the same song. Because my mind will be somewhere else in this song. The person standing next to me playing will be on their own little passage from note one ‘til the end. And I’m sure it’s the same with actors. They perform the same play every night but every night is a first night for that play and that song because it’s a performance.
Fairport Convention’s second album where ‘Meet On The Ledge’ first appeared
Even ‘Meet On The Ledge’ – probably your most well-known song from the live repertoire – that’s evolved massively over the years from the quite gentle and understated song when it first appeared to the rousing anthem for live performance now.
That’s right. It was just a ‘no-big-deal’ song on the second album. It was tucked away on Side Two, Track 4 which is a bit of a graveyard slot for most songs. It wasn’t what you heard when you dropped the needle but it has grown in the telling. It’s a song that’s grown in the telling and it’s acquired more reasons to perform it every year. And I know it means the world to people at Cropredy when we come to it – and not just because we can all go home soon! But because of what it’s come to mean to all the people who are there.
Yeah, it’s gathered extra meaning along the way for the audience and gathered more and more meaning over the years.
You also recently announced the final line-up for Cropredy this year. What are you most looking forward to? (apart from your own set of course!)
That’s another bit of a favourite child isn’t it! I’m looking forward to seeing the reactions of the audience who, implicitly, trust our judgement in selecting the bill and you always get the positive feedback and you always get… it’s a bit like TripAdvisor. You hear the best reviews and you hear the worst ones, you know? And you have to disregard the complete outliers because those aren’t a good ship to follow. And some acts you just know are nailed-on. They’re going to be an absolute banker in terms of the reaction. People’s response to them is just.. that’s why you book them. They’re a certainty. But the funnest acts or the ones that create the most warm feelings at my time of life are the ones that are largely unknown or perhaps under-exposed to the audience. And they go on and they’ve got this huge stage, this wonderful setting to perform to and an audience which is trusting and agog and waiting to be entertained. And you put somebody that’s not had a go before or maybe only has a hundred-and-fifty friends in the audience and then ten minutes later they’ve got the whole audience. Ten thousand new best friends! And that’s a wonderful feeling. And I can think of the Travelling Band having that experience happening to them and, of course, the Pierce Brothers
The Pierce Brothers, they were incredible.
If you weren’t there, I feel sorry for you!
I’d actually seen them, I think a week or so before at Womad and they were just on a small stage with maybe a hundred or so people and I thought, “There are going to go down pretty well at Cropredy.” But yeah it was just incredible.
They went down so well we booked them the next year which is, you know, an absolutely unique experience. Buy yeah, that’s like if you go back to last year for instance, we knew that Chic would be an absolutely 24-carrat performance. But what surprised me was the act before them. Because Toyah and Robert (Fripp) were a little bit of an unknown quantity. You had no idea what their repertoire would be derived from and then they came on and they just tore the place up. It started with ‘Paranoid’ I think, just the set-list from heaven and the performance was just… everything was turned up to the right level and it just absolutely cooked. So I had that same experience. I knew it was going to be ok. It might be great but it was better than both.
This year though, we’ve got some unexpected people, unknowns. And I can tell that you know the Spooky Men’s Chorale. I think that they are going to surprise a lot of people who wouldn’t have come upon them. And they’re so different. What they do is just absolutely heart-stoppingly beautiful and so funny and so moving and you can get all of that in the space of about ten seconds. He’s a brilliant showman, Steve, and I’m really pleased we managed to get them.
Photo credit: Simon Putman
Other bands have run their own festivals over the years. The Levellers have been doing Beautiful Days for about 20 years I think, but I can’t think of a single one that’s lasted anywhere near as long as Cropredy. What do you think the secret is?
I don’t know but if I could put it in a bottle I could sell it. No, it’s great and all festivals have to confront the same logistical situations. The same questions have to be answered in many different ways. But there are more questions that set Cropredy apart really than make easy parallels with other festivals. It’s just the way it’s grown out of something that was in the village. It wasn’t started as a commercial thing. It literally was the village hall committee asking us if we’d perform for them after the village fete. So it got it’s roots down deep into the heart of the village at the very beginning rather than being something that was imposed on the village. So it’s always been welcomed and enabled by everybody in that postcode. And the fact it’s just grown little by little, almost just incrementally.
Photo credit: Simon Putman
A big change was going from the one day, the Saturday thing, to incorporate the Friday. And that happened after quite a while and it was just such an obvious thing to do. It didn’t feel that weird because people were camping anyway in advance of it. Similarly, we moved again, changed it into a three-day festival but instead of incorporating a Sunday, we thought we’d go back again and bring people to the village a little early and everyone gets a relaxing free day to go home on the Sunday. Most festivals end on the Sunday night and there’s definitely a different feeling from ending a festival on a Sunday morning. That’s one thing that makes it stand out. And the fact that we’ve always tried to look at it as a punter would. You know, your experience from arriving. You see some festivals where people have to go and park half a mile west from the village and then they have to carry everything to a campsite a mile-and-a-half the other side of the village. Whereas at Cropredy we’ve got enough land to play with and the right size, with the smaller number of people attending. It means people can actually camp next to their car. But it’s just a practical thing like that. And because we wouldn’t want to stumble around on an unlit road, we light the village. We put our own lighting in because it’s safer and it’s practical. And road closures and things like that, we try to make it as good an all-round experience as we can.
Indeed, I’ve been going for years but I went with a friend who had not only never been to Cropredy but had never been to a festival before. I think this was two years ago, the first one after Covid. And he’d done loads and loads of camping so he knew campsites inside out and the drill with that but he’d never been to a festival before and he was like, “Oh, it’s really well-organised. It’s not what I was expecting at all. It’s like proper camping!”
Well, you can always improve things so every time you try and tweak things. The glamping has really taken off. So every year we expand that and it still sells out immediately, however many tents we put up. Because I suppose the demographic is not getting any younger, same as the band. So yeah, we try and make things comfortable but, you know, if you change anything in a way that’s noticeable there’ll be uproar! It’s like tinkering with the broadcast time of The Archers. You can’t do it quietly!
Fairport Convention’s Dave Pegg up on the big screen (Photo: Simon Putman)
Wonderful. Is there anything else you want to tell us, ahead of the tour and ahead of Cropredy?
You can just take it from me that I appreciate every tour more as I get older. And I look forward to every Cropredy more and more. But after the two lockdown years, the two missed Cropredies, that period of enforced retirement made me value all the more what this band and this lifestyle and this business, this fellowship of people, has given me. And if I was ever thinking of retiring, making a choice to step away, that thought was sent to the bottom of Davey Jones’ locker big time. Because I would just miss it so much. And I love what I do and I love the people I work with and I’m so grateful for the opportunity when I wake up every morning and I can wriggle my toes and fingers and look forward to the van pulling up then it’s alright with me.
Fairport Convention’s Winter Tour begins on 6th February 2024
Hot on the heels of his stunning 2023 studio album, Glass Knight, released back in August, genre-fluid glam-prog-folk singer-songwriter, Joshua Burnell, follows it up with a new live album in time for Christmas.
Glass Knight, which Burnell launched when he performed on the main stage at Fairport’s Cropredy festival, picked up tons of good reviews – including from Darren’s Music Blog where I described it as “Hunky Dory-era Bowie meets folk rock meets prog” and hailed it as a bona fide twenty-first century masterpiece. Rather than giving us ‘stadium-ready’ renditions of the songs from Glass Knight, however, Live At The Crescent (recorded in the intimate setting of a gig in York in October 2022) takes us back to before Glass Knight was recorded, when many of the songs were still being worked up in readiness for the studio.
Opening with the then un-released ‘Where Planets Collide’, Burnell goes on to share with the audience a number of embryonic versions of songs that would later appear on Glass Knight, as well as some older material, including three songs from its excellent, albeit more folk-leaning predecessor, Flowers Where The Horses Sleep.
In addition to live versions of other classic tracks from Burnell’s back catalogue, there are also songs like ‘Some Things Aren’t Eroded’ and ‘Slow-Burning Cigarette’ that are yet to appear on any studio albums, giving us a tantalising glimpse of what might be coming next.
Joined by his regular band of Nathan Greaves on electric guitar, Oliver Whitehouse on bass, Ed Simpson on drums, Frankie Archer on violin and Frances Sladen on vocals; the album is a complete, unabridged recording of his concert at The Crescent that captures the immersive atmosphere of a Burnell gig.
One of the really nice things about seeing Steeleye Span live (and there are many) is that on each new tour there are always a few surprises to look forward to. It’s never just a ‘greatest hits’ set of the most obvious crowd-pleasers plus a few songs thrown in to plug whatever happens to be the latest album. Obscure songs from the band’s bulging back catalogue are dusted down and given a new lease of life. New arrangements are tried out by what is often a very different line-up from the one that originally recorded it. Or sometimes an entire album is revisited and performed in full. Meanwhile, to make way for a constantly-evolving setlist, old stage favourites are often gently retired and given a rest for a few years.
This current tour sees Steeleye Span promoting a new album The Green Man Collection. Here, the band revisit some of their past material with a mixture of songs written by members of the band at the time and some traditional numbers. The new album also includes a newly-composed song from Maddy Prior, a couple of well-chosen covers and something that was written for the band by Bob Johnson back in the ‘80s, committed to tape and then completely forgotten about for the next four decades.
The latter song, ‘Green Man’, is the one that opens the show. The symbolism of the Green Man has obviously been a mainstay of English folk traditions for centuries but here the lyrics address ecological concerns – then very current in the 1980s when it was first written and, alarmingly, even more current now. Dark, brooding and slightly mysterious, it’s a classic slice of Steeleye Span and a superb opener. Indeed, it’s a complete mystery how the band managed to forget about such a magnificent track. Both the original version and the newly-revisited version appear on the new album.
Alongside familiar numbers like ‘The Dark Morris Song’, ‘New York Girls’ and ‘Tam Lin’, the first half of the set also sees the band take on two songs written by former bass-player, Rick Kemp, ‘Low Flying’ and ‘Genocide’. The former featured on the 1990 Rick Kemp & Maddy Prior album Happy Families whilst the latter appeared on Kemp’s solo album Escape.
The second set opens with a surprising but hugely poignant cover of Elvis Costello’s ‘Shipbuilding’. This is then followed by a newly-written song from Maddy Prior – the excellent ‘Hey Nonny Violence’, which very much follows in the Steeleye Span tradition of seemingly jolly songs tackling much darker themes. Another new song (well new for Steeleye Span, anyway) is the band’s interpretation of the traditional ‘The Sound of Drums’.
That’s not to say there aren’t a few more familiar favourites as well. One song I would have been disappointed to see dropped was ‘Hard Times of Old England’ and, as Prior points out in introducing it, it’s sadly as relevant today as it ever was. For those familiar with the Mike Batt-produced version on the All Around My Hat album, this new interpretation is even more of a rocked-up boogie-fest than the original recording. This is no surprise as none other than Status Quo’s Francis Rossi makes an appearance on the new album guesting on this track, and the band bring some of the spirit of the mighty Quo to their stage performance tonight. There’s also some equally lively fiddle from newcomer, Athena Octavia, who slots in alongside the old hands beautifully.
All the band are on fine form, Prior’s voice is in top-notch shape and Steeleye Span continue to surprise and delight. When the band exit the stage to huge applause towards the end of their second set all that is left is for them to come back on for a riotous, sing-along version of ‘All Around My Hat’ and we can all leave with a spring in our step.
Setlist – first set: Green Man The Dark Morris Song Sir James the Rose When All The World The Gardener New York Girls Low Flying Genocide Tam Lin
Setlist – second set:
Shipbuilding Hey Nonny Violence Black Jack Davy The Sound of Drums The Weaver and the Factory Maid Jack Hall Hard Times of Old England Bonny Black Hare Dodgy Bastards All Around My Hat
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