Fairport Convention, The Cropredy Box

From The Green Man Review (www.greenmanreview.com)

Fairport Convention, The Cropredy Box (Woodworm, 1998)

A few days ago, the Green Man staff was discussing whether The Cropredy Box warranted a review. Someone opined that the three-CD set featuring Fairport Convention at its 30th anniversary concert in Cropredy, Oxfordshire, was only for the hardcore fans: the ones who fly into England from all over the world to commune with the band at Cropredy each year.

I'm one of those devotees, and even I said, "Naah, this collection is more than the average listener will want to hear." Of course, I bought it when it first came out. I was at the Cropredy festival in 1997, so I wanted a souvenir of my experience. Tonight, though, for the first time in months, I put on disc 2, on a whim.

I was rewarded with a sweet memory. In 1997, the usual festival compere (that's master of ceremonies for you Yankees), Danny Thompson, was recovering from surgery and unable to be at the festival. So the audience phoned him. Some 20,000 people, led by Martin Carthy, Norma Waterson, Heather Wood, Ralph McTell, and a host of other musicians, sang "Danny Boy" to Thompson over the phone.

The festival is studded with lovely occurrences like this one, and so is disc 2 of the Cropredy Box. I decided to write this review after hearing Richard Thompson's vocal on "Poor Will and the Jolly Hangman." It's a song he wrote in the early 1970s, while he was still with the band he helped found, and it surfaced on various recordings a decade after he left Fairport to become one of its most famous alumni. The hoarse, ominous voice in which Thompson, circa 1997, sang this song gave me goosebumps.

The disc also includes a reunion of the GPs, the one-off band featuring McTell, Richard Thompson, Dave Pegg, and Dave Mattacks. Cathy LeSurf drops in to sing Sandy Denny's "Solo." The goopily sentimental "Rosie" is trotted out. It's quite a mix of stuff, something for nearly everyone.

All that--plus Ashley Hutchings' narration of the history of the band. Let's go back to disc 1. Here we get Joe Boyd reminiscing about the band he "discovered" in the swinging Sixties, followed by a fiery set from most of the original Fairport lineup (minus Iain Matthews). Vikki Clayton fills in for the late Sandy Denny on this disc; it's a thankless task, but she tackles it with enthusiasm. Of course, when she sings "Matty Groves," she leaves out a few verses, but in doing so she spares the life of one of the characters, so what the heck.

So English folk-rock is born again on disc 1, and we follow its path through discs 2 and 3. The third disc is mostly the "new guys"--that is, people who've been in the band for the last 10 years or so. Here's where much of the instrumental brilliance comes to the forefront, with string workouts like "Dirty Linen" (with both Dave Swarbrick and Ric Sanders on fiddles) and "Woodworm Swing."

The concert ends with "Meet on the Ledge," the anthem Richard Thompson wrote before he married Linda Peters; when Martin Lamble, Sandy Denny, and Trevor Lucas were still alive; when we hadn't yet touched the moon or surfed the 'net. It's Simon Nicol, one of the original members, who now sings the line "And now I see I'm all alone." He's the only original member still in the band, but he's hardly alone; 25,000 people sang along with him that year.

There are two bonus tracks. The first is the traditional "Seventeen Come Sunday," which was recorded live for a Ken Russell special on folk music later broadcast by the BBC. (I missed this performance at the festival because I was stuck in a herd of fans sweltering in the souvenir tent.) The second is a recording of a very nasty little telephone prank played on Dave Swarbrick in 1979. This track leads to the CD warning: "Parental Guidance--Explicit Swarbrick."

I don't think The Cropredy Box is only for the hardcore. In fact, I'll assert that each of us in the "Fairport Cult" should buy a copy for a friend. To truly appreciate the album's ragged glory, though, the listener has to imagine the whole experience: the muddy hillside scattered with beer jugs, the multigenerational crowd with its multicolored hair, and the inward sense that something special will happen. It's not as good as being at Cropredy, but for most of us it's a lot cheaper, and it's a treat we can enjoy more than once a year.

--Pamela Murray Winters