Fairport, por favor

Sometimes, the omens gather with just the right density to persuade me that I should revisit a previously-overlooked artist. Just prior to last year's Glastonbury festival the Beeb screened "Glastonbury Fayre", the film record of the 1971 festival. This included footage of a very young Fairport Convention, playing something manic and rootsy. "Mmm...", I thought, "I must check them out someday". I'd been saying this to myself, on and off, since the very early 70s.

Does anyone remember those excellent sampler albums which companies like Island and CBS used to release? The Island samplers were particularly good, with an artist roster including Traffic, King Crimson, Jethro Tull and Free. Oh, and Fairport convention. Each successive Island sampler brought a new Fairports track ("Meet On The Ledge" on "You Can All Join In", "Cajun Woman" on "Nice Enough To Eat", "Lord Marlborough" on "El Pea"...), and every time I thought "Mmm... I really must check out their new album". It's funny when you get into that anti-groove where, somehow, you always intend to buy a band's albums, but somehow never do.

Anyway, after watching "Glastonbury Fayre", the pressure stepped up. First, BBC4 showed a couple of superb documentaries about Richard Thompson and Martin Carthy. Thompson was a member of Fairports through to their fifth album, "Full House", so there were plenty of Fairports clips. The Carthy documentary filled in a few gaps in my knowledge about the links between Fairport Convention, Steeleye Span, and the rest of the 60s/70s electric folk-rock mafia.

Finally, JeanGenie's blog references to this year's Cropredy Festival, combined with several stories in MOJO about various internal marital upheavals posing a threat to the future of Cropredy, and possibly to the seemingly-eternal Fairports, gave me the final push.

So I went eBaying, of course!

I have a simple rule for buying CDs on eBay: no more than a fiver per CD, including postage. But with about 50 auto-searches active at any time, I get about 3 or 4 "bites" each month. So I baited my lines with searches for the first five Fairports CDs, dropped 'em in the eBay waters, and waited...

(Why the first five? Because for me the key figure in the Fairports was Richard Thompson. Next most important was the voice of Sandy Denny. Finally, the most Golden era of the band came on Liege And Lief, when Dave Swarbrick joined the line-up. Swarb and Thompson were constantly pushing each other's virtuosity, sometimes reaching such speeds in live performance that the whole thing teetered thrillingly on the verge of chaotic collapse. After that album, Sandy Denny left. Then "Full House" was the last Thompson album. End of their peak period, where my tastes are concerned).

Anyway, for several months, I had little success, snaring only a copy of "What We Did On Our Holidays". Then suddenly, yesterday, I won an auction on "Unhalfbricking". Good news, but better was to come: today I won TWO auctions, on the first album, "Fairport Convention", and on the mighty "Liege And Lief". So all the PayPalling's done, and I'm sitting here writing this, to pass the time while I wait for those padded envelopes to thud onto the doormat!

Oh yes, Trivioids: "Fairport" was the name of the house where the embronic band first gathered...