6) Fairport Convention (United Kingdom title: What We Did On Our Holidays) (10 Rock Albums That Made My Sense of Music What It Is)

10 (Rock) Albums That Made My Sense of Music What It Is


6) Fairport Convention (United Kingdom title: What We Did On Our Holidays), Fairport Convention

It’s hard to overestimate how much I love this album. I don’t really have a favorite album in the history of rock and roll, but if I did, this album might be it.

Freshman year of college, I read in a magazine somewhere (maybe Rolling Stone, or maybe in an early Rolling Stone record guide?) that Fairport Convention was the “British version of Jefferson Airplane.” With my combination of love for British literature and for Jefferson Airplane, finding out about this band became a must. And I wasn’t disappointed.

The comparison to Jefferson Airplane isn’t bad at all. Fairport Convention is a rock band with a close connection to folk music. Multiple singers and songwriters. A fantastic lead guitarist (Richard Thompson). A daring and varied sound held down by a solid rhythm section that, as the band develops, learns to really stretch out. And a woman singer, Sandy Denny, of overwhelming power--but who, unlike Grace Slick, is also a singer of incredible precision and ethereal beauty.

Curiously, and partly because Jefferson Airplane was meant to be futuristic, Jefferson Airplane’s sound now feels more dated to a particular time and place. As innovative as they were, early Fairport Convention stayed connected to its folk roots and to its relationship to British history. That gave their music a sense of rootedness in long repeated human experiences that creates the sensation that people usually misrecognize as “timeless.”

The other difference: part of what was brilliant about Jefferson Airplane was that they never entirely let go of the experimental amateurishness that helped them resist the music professionalism that would dominate Jefferson Starship. But although the first Fairport Convention record shows a very good band still searching for what its sound is going to be, by the time of this, their second record, there’s nothing amateur about their music. What We Did On Our Holidays is filled with precise and occasionally virtuoistic music which takes British Isles folk influences and creates a new kind of rock and roll, one that would lead to generations of music to follow, both from the band itself and from all the other British bands that developed or became more prominent in its wake.

The records that followed this one, Unhalfbricking, Liege and Lief, and Full House (the first record without Sandy Denny) show the band becoming ever tighter, better players. But to my mind, What We Did On Our Holidays has the biggest range of textures, the widest variety of songs, and a broader array of surprises than any of the later, more tightly controlled records.

Sandy Denny’s singing on “Fotheringay” and Bob Dylan’s “I’ll Keep It With Mine” is impossible to match. “Eastern Rain” (a Joni Mitchell song) and the non-traditional version of the folk traditional “Nottamun Town” are filled in with unique sonic textures. The two Richard Thompson tunes, “No Man’s Land” and “Tale in a Hard Time” mark his brilliance as a songwriter and guitarist while foreshadowing his coming expansion of abilities. Ian Matthews’ “Book Song” is wistful and fragile, and his singing elsewhere on the record provides a brilliant counterpoint to the singing of Denny and Thompson. “Meet on the Ledge” is a beautiful song, with great ensemble singing. It’s a little funny that these musicians are performing a song about the best years being behind them when they were just emerging as a band of genius, although the song also takes on a powerfully poignant feeling when one considers that the band’s then drummer Martin Lamble would soon die in a car crash. The closing bit of precisely toned guitar melancholy, “End of a Holiday,” played by Simon Nicol, seems nearly a perfect ending.

If the album has a weakness, it’s that two of the numbers sung by Denny, “The Lord Is In This Place” and “She Moves Through The Fair” are maybe a little too monotonous, yet her voice is so stunning that the lingering tone of these numbers remains quite haunting.

In the years that followed, I explored a lot of the electric folk and then folk music produced in England and Ireland and discovered a lot of great bands, Steeleye Span and Planxty being two of my favorites. And I’m a big fan also of the solo careers of Sandy Denny and Richard Thompson and of course also his work with Linda Thompson.

This is the record that started me down that path, and it remains one that I play very often. The powerful dream-like mood it creates is really unlike any other record I can think of, even others by the same band. The music on it feels both in this world and beyond it and has the power to heal.