50 years? Surely they deserve some sort of award?
And before the folk rock legends take to the stage, Hands Up For Trad do just that, recognising the quintet’s long service to the folk community.
There’s also mention made of their producing two of the finest ever songs of that genre. One will be played later on, the other – presumably Sandy Denny’s ‘Who Knows Where The Time Goes’ – not, for obvious reasons.
Despite this, and the fact that there’s only one original member left – Simon Nicol – his bandmates still have over a century’s worth of traditional music behind them.
Nicol remarks on how the band started by bringing traditional tunes up-to-date, and how they moved on to “disguising new songs as centuries old” before introducing ‘Crazy Man Michael’, written by two departed members, Richard Thompson and Dave Swarbrick, who passed away last year.
However, there is new material aplenty – Myths and Heroes’ is four years old, but in a span of a 50-year back catalogue, that’s practically last week. What is obvious is the spirit and verve still possessed by the individual members, some of them well beyond pensionable age. The range of material, for a band that defines folk-rock, is wide-ranging – often resembling a jiggy version of Jethro Tull, they mix it up too with ‘Portmerrion’, a rather lovely fiddle-driven instrumental; ‘Devil’s Work’ a perhaps ill-advised tune about DIY (!); and the traditional anti-war ballad ‘John Condon’.
There’s a further delve into the back catalogue to end with ‘Matty Groves’ – “It was old when we started playing it so imagine how creaking it is now” – and then they’re done, save for an encore – a rousing ‘Meet Me On The Ledge’, presumably one of the two tunes referred to and one that cannot be ignored by band or fans. And for those supporters who have stuck with Fairport Convention throughout the decades, just reward.