The Pleasure and Pain of 1969

1001 Albums To Hear Before Your iPod's Battery Dies, Part 15
Fairport Convention, Unhalfbricking and Liege & Lief

In the middle 1960s, American musicians like Bob Dylan and Roger McGuinn had a pioneering idea: why not play traditional folk singer-songwriter tunes with a pronounced rock backbeat? This made American folk-rockers into international superstars, but for some reason, British musicians hesitated to follow suit. Fairport Convention, founded in 1967 and named for the house where they first rehearsed, jumped into the resulting void. But in 1969, their sound suddenly changed.

At the beginning of the year, they basically played Americana. Their Greenwich Village sound attracted a small but loyal audience to London folk clubs, but their albums and 45s didn’t chart. New female vocalist Sandy Denny, already semi-legendary on the British folk circuit, sang in Judy Collins’ vocal range. However, she wanted to record music more distinctly British than American. And the band, somewhat adrift, was (mostly) willing to accommodate her.

Fairport Convention cranked out a remarkable three full LPs in 1969. Their first with Denny, What We Did On Our Holidays, is mostly of historical interest. But with their second, Unhalfbricking, they took British music by storm. It’s somewhat silly to call their sound “mature,” as most band members were only nineteen and twenty years old; bassist Ashley Hutchings was downright elderly, at twenty-four. Yet they sported a weathered, old-soul sound.

This album includes three Bob Dylan compositions, taken from his Basement Tapes. Dylan overtly influenced Fairport, who included multiple Dylan covers in their live sets. However, Dylan’s reciprocal openness means that he unlocked his demo vault to them, allowing them to record three songs that hadn’t had mainstream releases yet: “Percy’s Song,” “Million Dollar Bash,” and “If You Gotta Go, Go Now” (recorded in French, as an in-joke).

Unhalfbricking opens with guitarist Richard Thompson’s first songwriting credit, “Genesis Hall.” Now a living legend among folkies, Thompson, twenty years old, was just coming into his own as both a songwriter and multi-instrumentalist; on this track, he plays dulcimer, then as now an unusual instrument in mainstream music. Swinging straight into a Dylan song, then Sandy Denny’s “Autopsy,” then the traditional “A Sailor’s Life,” Side A was deeply melancholy.

Side B includes Denny’s “Who Knows Where the Time Goes,” which she’d already recorded as a solo singer-songwriter single, and would later re-record as a bluegrass with the Strawbs. It’s now a recognized classic, and this is probably her most famous version. Another Thompson composition, and two Dylans, finishes the set. This album straddles the divide between American folk-rock, which was already established, and British folk-rock, which they were just creating.

Before the album dropped, however, Fairport’s touring bus suffered a catastrophic road accident, killing drummer Martin Lamble, aged only nineteen, and injuring every other member. The band went into a months-long hiatus; before its release, Unhalfbricking already memorialized a band which no longer existed. The late-1960s milieu, however, demanded immediate action. Rather than breaking up, Fairport reconvened with Liege & Lief.

Fairport Convention in late 1969

Partway through Unhalfbricking, Fairport’s most staunchly American member, London-born Ian Matthews, quit to record Americanized folk-rock. (His covers of Steve White and Jackson Browne are legendary.) Liege & Lief thus reflects Sandy Denny’s aggressively British inspirations. Unlike Unhalfbricking, which includes only one “Trad. Arr.” song, this album has five, with only three new compositions. Traditional stemwinders like “The Deserter” and “Tam Lin” reflect this album’s backbone.

However, the track which most thoroughly reflects Liege & Lief is the traditional “Matty Groves,” a Northern English murder ballad from the 1600s. Anybody who says metal is the darkest music, has clearly never heard a British murder ballad. This song’s grim, fatalistic lyric, in which pleasure always contains karmic payback, suggests a band blaming itself for Martin Lamble’s death. Played in a traditional style, this song includes a long, self-flagellating hard-rock tail.

Liege & Lief is much darker and more pessimistic than Unhalfbricking. Songs like “The Deserter,” in which the title character receives a pardon on condition that he returns to service, suggest that every respite carries its resulting doom. But it’s also a musically ambitious album. Fiddler Dave Swarbrick, a guest contributor on Unhalfbricking, becomes a full member, and his love of minor keys gives every track an almost epoch-making orchestral depth.

After recording Liege & Lief, Sandy Denny quit, and the band never reclaimed this level of success. Their best songwriters eventually drifted away, and a vestigial group now tours the nostalgia circuit. But these two albums, which bookend the ways 1969 began with unprecedented optimism, and ended in bleak resignation, are a memorial to a classic band, and a year like no other.