263: Unhalfbricking, by Fairport Convention

Fairport Convention (United Kingdom)
Unhalfbricking (1969)
8 tracks, 38 minutes
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Fairport Convention are the monarchs of English folk rock. Having started out in 1967 and going strong today (after a five year blip in the middle), and having gone through an orchestra’s worth of band members in the process, they didn’t just change the face of the scene, they became it.

Nowadays, Fairport are basically known as a continuation of the English folk tradition, with their repertoire either composed of ‘Trad. Arr.’ songs or pieces written in those styles, but they actually came together inspired by the US folk revival, figured-headed by Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, Simon and Garfunkel and the like. It was around the period of this album that their tone started to shift, so the flavours at play give Unhalfbricking an interesting range of styles.

There is definitely a UK lean to a lot of the music – with ‘Genesis Hall’ and the traditional ‘A Sailor’s Life’ very much rooted there – but the American influence is still very much there, not least in the form of three Dylan covers. What made them so exciting, though, was how they reinterpreted the music of these scenes. These are obviously folkies through-and-through, but the other styles they work within are what makes their sounds stand out even today: it’s the opener ‘Genesis Hall’ with its slight-but-just-enough psychedelic twinge, which is followed up by ‘Si Tu Dois Partir’, the group’s own translation of Dylan’s ‘If You Gotta Go, Go Now’ rendered in a unique sort of morris/zydeco hybrid; later on, it’s the Louisiana blues of ‘Cajun Woman’ followed by the soft-rock of ‘Who Knows Where the Time Goes’. What I especially like is that they can flip it around the other way, too: Dylan’s ‘Percy’s Song’ is a ballad that in Fairport’s hands sounds as English as a pork pie and ale – save for one or two geographical references in the lyrics.

Although still very early in their career, it is Unhalfbricking (together with its follow-up Liege and Lief) that has pretty much ‘the classic’ line-up, including Sandy Denny on vocals, Richard Thompson and Simon Nicol on guitars and Dave Swarbrick on fiddle and mandolin (although Swarbrick technically wasn’t a member of the band yet, he plays on four of the eight tracks as a guest). You can hear why it’s the classic as well – they all bring something else to the table a little different from the rest, whether it’s a musical approach or a particular way of playing or songwriting.

And the most impressive of all for me is that this was their second album of 1969…and they went on to release Liege and Lief in the same year too. Not only did they manage to release three albums in one year – which is insane on its own – but to do it with a catastrophe in the middle (in which the band were involved in a road accident that killed drummer Martin Lamble and another passenger) and still produce three albums of which two are still seen as genre-defining fifty years later is just unthinkable. With all the amazing things happening in folk music both sides of the Atlantic at that time, Unhalfbricking holds up as probably the most successful album to blend UK and US traditions so thoroughly.