Post by maddogfagin on Dec 13, 2009 14:36:20 GMT
In 1989 I was working, in a voluntary basis, at a small cable radio station GCRM in Woolwich, south east London, on a folk and blues music programme. As part of the “brief” that the presenters had from the programme controller, I went to interview Dave Pegg at his Woodworm Studios in Barford St Michael and this provided the basis for the material for an hour long programme. Bear in mind that this was recorded in 1989, broadcast to a basically non-folk music audience and that some of the details are now obviously out of date. Cable radio didn’t really catch on in the UK and the listenership was very small - this was pre - DAB! This is the transcript of that programme: I’ve edited out the “errs” and “ums” and other waffle.
The broadcast date was 16 July 1989.
I began the interview by asking Dave about his thoughts regarding Fairport’s success over the previous years:
DP: We’re pleased with the way it’s going. Since we reformed the band in 1985 on a serious basis with Simon Nicol, who was an original member, Dave Mattacks and myself (we joined in 1969) the three of us were more or less involved with Fairport at one time or another through most of its career from then on, well I was because I didn’t leave the band, so I did from 1969 to 1979 and then we split up but we reformed in 1985 because the three of us older members, DM. myself and SN found that we had some time on our hands and we wanted to make some new music. So we made an album called “ Gladys’ Leap” and we involved Ric Sanders who later went on to join us in 1985 on a full time basis on the violin and also Martin Allcock who is a multi-instrumentalist. So since 1985 we have been working more or less non stop in order to re-establish the group. That’s why we’ve been doing so many tours and spending five and a half weeks in a bus travelling across America in order to show that the band is together again, well it’s not on a full time basis as such - it’s not a band that just gets together to have reunion festivals - we’re coming up with new music and new ideas, we hope, and it’s alive again.
Maddog: You mentioned 1969 and I can remember the hiatus when Ashley Hutchins left and you joined. What were you doing before you joined Fairport and how did you become a member of Fairport?
DP: Well before I was actually in Fairport, I’d been playing for a while - my background because I come from Birmingham and when I left work when I was like seventeen and decided to become a professional musician and I played lead guitar by then, very badly - in fact I still play lead guitar very badly - but I’d decided to become a professional musician and I’d played in r and b type bands really. The first group I was involved with which was a professional band was called Roy Everett’s Blue Hounds and then I swapped from playing guitar to playing the bass when I joined a Birmingham group called the Uglys which featured one Steve Gibbon who I’m pleased to say is still active today in music and is a great singer and a great writer and a great performer. So I didn’t have anything to do with folk music but then after I left the Uglys - you know I played in various groups some with Robert Plant and John Bonham from Led Zeppelin but I was always a rock musician and I was never a folkie as such but then I joined the Ian Campbell Folk Group and played double bass which I wasn’t partially keen to learn, I just fancied something different and I’d heard of the Campbells and I’d seen them on TV when I was young and always thought how good Dave Swarbrick was, who used to play violin with the Ian Campbell Folk Group and I found it quite exciting music and I couldn’t play double bass at all, and still can’t now, but it was a bit of a challenge and I also started playing mandolin but I developed an interest in folk music as such, not only playing with the Campbells but doing all the festivals and seeing other folkie type artists perform. I became very interested in it and then one year when it was my birthday, the night of my 20th birthday, we went along to Mother’s Club in Birmingham and we saw Fairport playing, and Swarbrick had joined the band about 6 months before this and I’d only met Swarbrick on a couple of occasions, and we thought the band was fantastic and it was exactly the kind of music I wanted to play at the time because they always had great taste in songs and they were playing a lot of traditional stuff which they’d adapted and a lot of Richard Thompson songs which had a very traditional feel to them. But it was a very good electric band - it was a rock band, definitely a rock band and I thought I’d love to join this band and literally a week later I got a phone call asking me to go for an audition. So it was just being in the right place at the right time I suppose but it was something I was very pleased about because I really liked that kind of music and it was a different thing for me to get out of Birmingham and I met a whole new circle of people and it was a good move on a musical level as well because if I’d stayed in Birmingham I would have joined Led Zeppelin or something. (Laughs).
MD: I was always a great fan of the Campbells - they were one of the first folk group I ever heard and digressing slightly, I remember seeing them on TV and thinking what a marvellous player John Dunkerly was.
DP: Oh he was a fabulous player - it was very tragic when John died because it was one of those diseases which literally - he had it, discovered he’d got it and a year later he was dead. It was just a dreadful thing to happen. And John was - you know the guitar is often used in folk music and he was a good guitarist and he was a fantastic five string banjo player and played with a technique called frayling which not many people do in England and still don’t. It’s not like a blue grass technique it’s the kind of technique Seeger would use - it’s a very American old timey way of playing the banjo and very few people do it well but John was just a superb accompanist and he would play and Ian (Campbell) would sing songs like “The Shoals Of Herring” and John would play a wonderfully sensitive accompaniment to it. He was, if you like, the group’s best musician you know.
Music: Ian Campbell Folk Group instrumental.
DP: Swarb was a star and a virtuoso performer and a lead instrumentalist - people would often ignore what John was doing but musicians, I mean Swarb would say the same himself, he had great sense of timing and was great to play with. It was a real inspiration to play with him.
MD: I always felt that Ian Campbell missed out slightly - he did to a certain extent what the Spinners did and presented folk music to the masses. They had a marvellous television series “Something To Sing About” which I’ve got on audio tape and they are marvellous to listen to but they never got themselves propelled forward so that they were in the eye of the public - they always stood slightly back which was a great shame.
DP: They never made it but the Spinners went on to become successful as all round family entertainers - that’s what the Spinners did right away from the start. I knock the Spinners for a joke when we play with Fairport, we always use the Spinners as a joke, but I actually have a lot of respect for what the Spinners did and they got some folk music across to a lot of people. They weren’t great musicians but they were great entertainers.
MD: I don’t think that they ever admitted that they were great musicians.
DP: No they never meant to be. The Campbell’s if you like were the progressive folk band of the sixties and a very underrated group and Ian Campbell has written some wonderful songs - to this day he’s still coming up with some wonderful songs. I heard a song of Ian’s just the other week and I thought that’s just great - be worth having a go at that one. They’re a great musical family right from Ian’s parents David and Betty and himself and Lorna and the boys who are in UB 40.
MD: You seem to involve yourself with “Ians” don’t you!
DP: (Laughs) Yeah, Scottish “Ians”. I have a lot of respect for Ian Campbell both as a performer and as someone who kept that band going, never got into the limelight really like the Spinners did and spawned a lot of great musicians, I think, and wrote a lot of great songs and was a great raconteur and a great entertainer. It was certainly an experience for me to play in a group like that because it was obviously something completely different than playing with rock bands and the communication aspect of what Ian did with people was something to behold.
MD: He was good with stories and very good introducing songs. Coming back to Fairport - the band itself has had many line ups, I mean you’ve mentioned Richard Thompson, can talk of Sandy Denny, Dave Swarbrick, Jerry Donahue, Trevor Lucas, who has unfortunately just passed away, amongst others. I’ve seen you now three or four times with the new line up and you all seem very happy , very contented and you look as though you’re enjoying what you’re playing.
DP: Oh yeah definitely. I mean we wouldn’t do it if we didn’t enjoy it. We don’t exist as a band just to go out - it’s not a money making machine Fairport it never has been. It’s never been that kind of popular which is one of the reasons why it’s still going - it never got to be fashionable consequently we’ve never been out of fashion. If you don’t enjoy what you’re doing there’s no point going out on a forty date tour or a forty two date tour similar to the one we did earlier this year, forty of which were consecutive nights and it really is hard work doing that because we play for a couple of hours a night and we are meticulous about getting it to sound good so we always do a sound check. I mean most of the day is gone in travelling , doing the sound check and concert. It’s very satisfying band to be in with this current line up and we haven’t had too many squabbles although obviously the more time you spend in each other’s company - for example recently in America doing fifteen odd thousand miles living on a bus for five and a half weeks - tempers can get a bit frayed. You don’t have to do that when you work in a office because when you leave your office you go home and relax and forget about it. You can’t actually do that out on the road touring with a band because you’re in each others company all the time. But it’s the happiest line up that the band’s ever had that I’ve known since I’ve been involved with it from ‘69. It’s certainly the most content and I think it’s because we’re a lot older than we used to be and you have more time for people - you worry about what other people think rather than concerning yourself with your own little day in and day out requirements . You’re a lot more tolerant the older you get in some respects.
Music: Fairport Convention “ Dark Eyed Molly”
MD: How did Martin Allcock actually join the band because as you said earlier he can play almost anything - he’s magic fingers. How did he join - did you see him somewhere and think “we must get him for Fairport”?
DP: Well I’ve known Martin since he was at school you know learning to play the double bass up in Manchester. I used to see Martin when Fairport played in Manchester or the north and he was always a fan of the band and he played bass guitar, and still does very well - he’s a great fretless bass player - we always kept in touch and Martin would send me tapes of stuff. As he got older and he left school and became a professional musician - you know he’d send me stuff - so I was always aware that he played these other instruments like the guitar and the bouzouki. He didn’t play any keyboards until last year really (laughs). But I was aware of Martin and I knew that Martin would probably enjoy being a member of Fairport Convention and it would also be beneficial to us to have someone who could play lots of different instruments because we’d made “Gladys’ Leap” and we’d got things like keyboards on there and I played mandolin and we wanted to perform that stuff live and I just figured Martin would be a good member for Fairport and I was convinced he would enjoy being in the band so I phoned him up after we’d asked Ric (Sanders) to join. I just felt we needed someone else as well because Ric doesn’t sing for a start .
MD: He makes up for it in other ways.
DP: Oh yeah - obviously it’s advantageous if you’ve got three people, well a couple of people, who can do harmonies at least. And the thing came together very quickly because we only did about three day’s rehearsal with Ric and Martin and they knew all the old Fairport stuff that we’d been involved with because they’d learnt to play their instruments from listening to Fairport records so it was great and it was as if they’d been in the band and had been a part of it for a long time and knew stuff and they’ve come up with a lot ideas as well. They’re both prolific tunesmiths if you like, they write a lot of tunes, which is always useful although the hardest thing for Fairport is to find new songs because none of us write songs and that’s our biggest problem. We can go on for ever making albums or putting out records with lots of instrumentals on but it is not what the band should be doing - it’s more important I think for the band to find some strong songs.
MD: So obviously when you decide jointly to make another record do have in mind what you’re going to do or does that naturally come as you progress with the recording?
DP: No we always have in mind what we’re going to do. It’s not like - those days are gone unfortunately - very few bands make records like that where you start with absolutely nothing. I mean Fairport couldn’t do that - we wouldn’t have the time and we wouldn’t have the patience - I know I wouldn’t personally because when it comes to sitting around actually creating ideas we can’t do that with Fairport because we don’t have anyone that writes. It’s different with bands like Jethro Tull - there have been Jethro Tull albums that have all been written in the studio and they’ve started from nothing and the entire thing has developed over a nine month period in the studio like Under Wraps was a record that was done like that which is actually very exciting to do. The end result is not always as good as if it’s been approached from a different way where someone, in the case of Jethro Tull, Ian Anderson obviously who writes all of the lyrics. I mean the way Fairport work is very old fashioned because we like to have a song to start with and then we do an interpretation and work up an arrangement for a set of lyrics. That’s because we’ve all been bought up that way and its because of our experiences in music that’s the way Fairport always works. It’s always been the song that’s been the most important thing about Fairport’s music. And I still believe that’s true for most music that you hear - the most important thing is the song because if the song has no lyrical or musical content everything else to me is just bull$h1t. I like songs - I’m very old fashioned and most of my friends are the same.
Music: Jethro Tull “Under Wraps 2”
DP: What I like about most groups really is whether the songs are good or bad - I’ll only listen to bands that I think have good music. So for Fairport we’ve always got an idea of what we’re going to record - we have to be that way - and then we’ll go into the studio, arrangements can change but usually the lyric will stay the same. We tend not to experiment too much - individuals will experiment on their own parts and then the person who’s allocated as the producer’s role, which in the case of our last album “Red and Gold” was Simon Nicol, will oversee it and make sure in his opinion it’s in context with what everyone else is doing.
MD: I like “Red and Gold” and obviously that’s the one at the moment because it’s the latest one you’re focused on. I mean there are some other classic ones obviously and thinking back to Sandy Denny who you must have great memories of. I still listen to her music now and think what a fantastic and fabulous voice she had - it’s not the high pitched voice that you quite often hear on folk records but to me it’s typically English female folk singing.
DP: She was the best and I think everybody would agree, certainly most contemporary’s of Sandy - they would all admit to being heavily influenced by her when she was around. She was just a great singer but an even better songwriter - I mean no one wrote songs like Sandy used to - there are lots of female singers but there are not many who have that ability to write such beautiful songs.
MD: I’m thinking of “John The Gun” - it’s a marvellous song.
DP: Yeah “John The Gun” is great but there are so many of them. She never lost that ability to be able to come up with great songs and that proved to be increasingly difficult because of the musical climate around at the time when Sandy was still making music because the kind of punk thing happened and that destroyed a lot of people who were into writing songs at the time because they thought what’s the point you know - nobody wants to listen to this anymore. The lyrics actually make sense and its got a tune and this is not valid and a lot of people kind of went off writing material which was awfully sad really but Sandy always kept going. She still came up with some great songs and she was great to be in a band with because again Fairport had two great periods when Sandy was involved in the band both “Liege & Lief” which was done in ’69 - became a classic if you like or the first folk/rock album - and Sandy played a very big part in that and then she left the band and then she came back again and did a couple of albums with us later on, one of which “Rising for the Moon” I think is some of the best work that she’s ever done.
Music: Fairport Convention “Rising for the Moon”
DP: The problem is for Fairport we were all instrumentalists really and it was lovely having Sandy to accompany but we didn’t get much of a look in because she was such a great talent. Her stuff was much better than anything we wanted to play so usually when we were making albums it was always a bit of a fight but inevitably the songs, as I was saying earlier, were more important than anything else but it wasn’t a great outlet for some of the other people who were in the band at the time. That was where things started to go wrong - it’s always like that with bands when you get democratic groups because there’s always somebody who want to do something and the others don’t and then they’re going to come and go. That’s one of the reasons why Fairport - there were never really any bad cases of people falling out with each other in Fairport it was that people came and went to do other things and to do what they wanted to do musically, which was nice.
MD: Pete Frame’s family tree of Fairport Convention proves what you have just said. I forget now how many line ups it is - there were a fair few. People didn’t leave because there was any arguing so much as they just left and others filled their places. Right now onto your annual Cropredy Festival. Certainly a varied musical policy because you have rock musicians rubbing shoulders with die hard folkies but I have read that it did start with slightly different intentions.
DP: Well it started off many many years ago - it’s got to be around 1975 when myself and Dave Swarbrick used to live in the village and we used to rehearse in the village hall and Cropredy is a very small village - it’s got a population of around six hundred people and they asked us if we could do some fund raising in order for the village hall - which needed an extension at the time - and we said fine but we don’t want to play in the village hall as it’s too small so we had a barn dance which was very successful and well attended and the following year we were asked again by the village hall committee if we could do a fund raiser and we said let’s combine it with the village fete because you know that’s valid will be providing some music. It will be very low key and we’ll just play some music at the village fete and that was great success and that was held up at Anne Crossman’s house, in fact on her lawn out the back. It was a wonderful event and about seven hundred and fifty people attended and the next year we did the same thing except the crowd swelled to about twelve hundred and then the following year we got two thousand and it just became silly then. It was too many people in a very small area and after that which was 1979 then I think and we were splitting up anyway so we moved - we thought we’d have a farewell festival and we moved to Peewit Farm - actually we’d had a couple at Peewit farm before the Fairport farewell festival. In ’79 we finished up on August 4th - we played at the Led Zeppelin concert at Knebworth in the morning doing the breakfast spot!
MD: Yeah I read about that!
DP: And then we zoomed up and played at our farewell which was a really great way to finish up a career if you like because lots of people attended it and it was a really nice event and then a few months went by and Fairport remained friends and we all started doing different things. I’d gone off to play with Jethro Tull but we still played on each other’s records - Dave Swarbrick made a couple of solo albums, we all played on those. Richard Thompson was making records and some of us were playing on Richard’s records and we thought this is crazy we should get together once a year “just for the crack” of playing some music and the pleasure of meeting up again.
MD: You mustn’t forget your own record!
DP: I’ve been trying to forget it ever since I made it! Yeah that was something I made around 1982 because I had a couple of free months when nothing was happening and because I’d wanted to learn about recording and I’d managed to get my hand on an eight track tape recorder so it was a self eduducat6ion mainly. When you listen to it now (laughs) it really sounds like that now but it was great fun to do.
Music: Dave Pegg “Pipe Major Jock Laidlaws Fancy”
DP: Our reunion festival - that’s how it came about and every year when we got together to hold these reunions more and more people stared coming so in the end my wife Chris - we’d started a little label called Woodworm Records actually to put out a record when Fairport split because none of the major labels were interested. And we said we can’t just go out without having a farewell album although the farewell album was pretty rubbish what we actually recorded a lot of stuff live and it wasn’t the greatest thing we’d ever done but never the less it was something we felt we should do. So we formed this little label called Woodworm Records and as a result of that we began to organise these reunion festivals which was still fairly low key and since 1980/81 they’ve just got bigger and bigger every year and in ’87 we had a 20th anniversary festival where we had about fifteen thousand people turning up to it and that was the biggest one we’ve ever had and we expect the same number of people there this year. It’s become a bigger event in England than the Cambridge Folk Festival which really pleases me as it happens as I’ve been going there - I’ve missed one Cambridge Folk Festival and I’ll be missing this years - but I’ve been to about eighteen of them but they’ve never booked Fairport and now they can’t!
MD: And of course you’ve also got Steeleye Span who also have an anniversary this year.
DP: That’s right. Well Steeleye have always been mates of ours and again Maddy Prior is one of the great English female singers and Steeleye have played at Cropredy before but they’re the other band that have probably done more for folk music in England or certainly as much as Fairport have although they had hits and Fairport had just one minor hit. I like Steeleye a lot myself and I know that our audience will enjoy them as well.
MD: They did play a series of concerts recently and by all reports they were good.
DP: I think they’ve had some personnel changes of late but I think they’ll be very good.
MD: Your other playing commitments are, as you’ve already mentioned, with Tull. I do remember a Melody maker interview at the time you joined reporting that Ian Anderson invited you to join the band because (quote) you had a beard and the start of a receding hairline which matched his and Martin Barre’s. I’m sure there’s more to it than that. I’m sure that when John Glasscock left because of medical problems they must have spotted you somewhere. Was that playing with Fairport?
DP: Well it was actually Barrie Barlow who was Jethro Tull’s drummer at the time - you know it was one of those great strokes of luck really for me because Fairport was coming to an end and I didn’t know exactly what I was going to do. I was interested in recording you see at the time and I was keen to set up a recording studio - that was when we lived in Cropredy although we didn’t have any room there. It would have meant we would have had to move house anyway but Barrie Barlow had seen Fairport on a TV show - one of those bazaar like half hour things done in Scotland which actually sounded very good and we played well on that particular occasion. The band had been looking for a bass player because John Glasscock couldn’t go on tour because he was poorly and Barrie said we should find out who this guy is as he sounds good on the TV and he could cope with the stuff we’re doing. And so luckily Fairport’s manager, or ex manager, was also looking after Jethro Tull or doing some work for them on a PR level so my name actually was mentioned by them as well so then I was invited to go for an audition but I only just about got to play with Jethro Tull because I’d had messages when I’d come in from gigs and stuff that Ian Anderson had been calling and I thought it was the other Ian Anderson i.e. Ian A. Anderson who’s a wimp kind of folk/blues player who write and edits the magazine Folk Roots. He’s probably not a wimp now but at the time he was fairly, but I thought it was him phoning up to do some recording sessions you see and I just kept on saying “well say I’m out I don’t want to do it” (laughs) but then eventually I found out - one day Ian Anderson did actually call up and I thought crikey that’s ridiculous as he must have phoned about half a dozen times and must have been fairly serious about it . So that’s how that came about and I went out on tour - it was a lot to learn as there was only about ten days rehearsal and it was quite scary as I hadn’t been used to playing in these big venues, it was a completely different ball game from what it was like playing with Fairport. But it was most enjoyable and then I got to play with the band because unfortunately John passed away during the last night of this particular tour, which was the Stormwatch tour,
MD: Finally Dave, we’re sitting in your vastly equipped recording studio with a mixing desk which is about five times the size of the one we have at GCRM, now that Fairport have a steady line up and you’re obviously all friends and all committed to make good music do you see this carrying on?
DP: Well definitely over the next few years yeah. I mean we’ve never predicted how long it’s going to last because, well a band only exists if it wants to carry on making music and making records and going out and playing dates. If we stopped making records there’d be no point in going out and doing tours and stuff or if people became disinterested in playing in the band for other reasons. I still get a lot of satisfaction from playing with Fairport although I’m very busy because of having to play with both bands means I don’t have much time off from it you know and when one stops doing something the other starts up.
Music: Fairport Convention “The Battle”
DP: But Fairport of late, certainly the last two tours that we’ve done in England, our audience has widened excessively and we’re getting a lot of young people coming out to see us like seventeen/eighteen year olds which is very satisfying. And they’ll also enjoying the music - they’re not just coming because they thing it’s Fairground Attraction like a spelling mistake or something. When they come along to the concert they actually go away thinking well that’s a great band we’ll buy their record and we’ll come and see them again which is very satisfying when you’ve been doing music for as long as we have. And again our festival has got bigger and bigger - we don’t particularly want it to get any bigger than it is at this time but it’s a wonderfully satisfying thing because it’s only us - really we’re the headline act if you like. We never book anybody that’s like more well known than we are so it’s very satisfying that fifteen thousand will turn up most years. And generally the band I think is in a very strong position - our enforced lay offs because of other peoples commitments only make it better when we actually get together to play some music. It’s much better than when the band was what everyone did all the time because it does get laborious doing that.
MD: You also get to play for a fair few hours at the festival as well.
DP: Well we usually do about four, well we’ve been known to play for five and a half hours, but we always have a lot of guest musicians and singers along which is nice for us because it’s also nice for the audience. I mean we always have some guest female singers which allows us to do some of Sandy Denny’s songs which we can never do obviously with our all male line up because they don’t translate. And we have lots of guest musicians as well. It’s good - we enjoy it. It’s a hard one for us the festival because you know the set’s going to be lengthy and you’ve got to try and keep people’s attention for like a long time, for four hours or so and you’ve got lots of different kinds of music being represented. It’s a very difficult test putting a set list together but it’s a great relief when it’s all over.
MD: Thanks Dave, thank you very much for the interview.
DP: That’s alright - thanks for having us!
The broadcast date was 16 July 1989.
I began the interview by asking Dave about his thoughts regarding Fairport’s success over the previous years:
DP: We’re pleased with the way it’s going. Since we reformed the band in 1985 on a serious basis with Simon Nicol, who was an original member, Dave Mattacks and myself (we joined in 1969) the three of us were more or less involved with Fairport at one time or another through most of its career from then on, well I was because I didn’t leave the band, so I did from 1969 to 1979 and then we split up but we reformed in 1985 because the three of us older members, DM. myself and SN found that we had some time on our hands and we wanted to make some new music. So we made an album called “ Gladys’ Leap” and we involved Ric Sanders who later went on to join us in 1985 on a full time basis on the violin and also Martin Allcock who is a multi-instrumentalist. So since 1985 we have been working more or less non stop in order to re-establish the group. That’s why we’ve been doing so many tours and spending five and a half weeks in a bus travelling across America in order to show that the band is together again, well it’s not on a full time basis as such - it’s not a band that just gets together to have reunion festivals - we’re coming up with new music and new ideas, we hope, and it’s alive again.
Maddog: You mentioned 1969 and I can remember the hiatus when Ashley Hutchins left and you joined. What were you doing before you joined Fairport and how did you become a member of Fairport?
DP: Well before I was actually in Fairport, I’d been playing for a while - my background because I come from Birmingham and when I left work when I was like seventeen and decided to become a professional musician and I played lead guitar by then, very badly - in fact I still play lead guitar very badly - but I’d decided to become a professional musician and I’d played in r and b type bands really. The first group I was involved with which was a professional band was called Roy Everett’s Blue Hounds and then I swapped from playing guitar to playing the bass when I joined a Birmingham group called the Uglys which featured one Steve Gibbon who I’m pleased to say is still active today in music and is a great singer and a great writer and a great performer. So I didn’t have anything to do with folk music but then after I left the Uglys - you know I played in various groups some with Robert Plant and John Bonham from Led Zeppelin but I was always a rock musician and I was never a folkie as such but then I joined the Ian Campbell Folk Group and played double bass which I wasn’t partially keen to learn, I just fancied something different and I’d heard of the Campbells and I’d seen them on TV when I was young and always thought how good Dave Swarbrick was, who used to play violin with the Ian Campbell Folk Group and I found it quite exciting music and I couldn’t play double bass at all, and still can’t now, but it was a bit of a challenge and I also started playing mandolin but I developed an interest in folk music as such, not only playing with the Campbells but doing all the festivals and seeing other folkie type artists perform. I became very interested in it and then one year when it was my birthday, the night of my 20th birthday, we went along to Mother’s Club in Birmingham and we saw Fairport playing, and Swarbrick had joined the band about 6 months before this and I’d only met Swarbrick on a couple of occasions, and we thought the band was fantastic and it was exactly the kind of music I wanted to play at the time because they always had great taste in songs and they were playing a lot of traditional stuff which they’d adapted and a lot of Richard Thompson songs which had a very traditional feel to them. But it was a very good electric band - it was a rock band, definitely a rock band and I thought I’d love to join this band and literally a week later I got a phone call asking me to go for an audition. So it was just being in the right place at the right time I suppose but it was something I was very pleased about because I really liked that kind of music and it was a different thing for me to get out of Birmingham and I met a whole new circle of people and it was a good move on a musical level as well because if I’d stayed in Birmingham I would have joined Led Zeppelin or something. (Laughs).
MD: I was always a great fan of the Campbells - they were one of the first folk group I ever heard and digressing slightly, I remember seeing them on TV and thinking what a marvellous player John Dunkerly was.
DP: Oh he was a fabulous player - it was very tragic when John died because it was one of those diseases which literally - he had it, discovered he’d got it and a year later he was dead. It was just a dreadful thing to happen. And John was - you know the guitar is often used in folk music and he was a good guitarist and he was a fantastic five string banjo player and played with a technique called frayling which not many people do in England and still don’t. It’s not like a blue grass technique it’s the kind of technique Seeger would use - it’s a very American old timey way of playing the banjo and very few people do it well but John was just a superb accompanist and he would play and Ian (Campbell) would sing songs like “The Shoals Of Herring” and John would play a wonderfully sensitive accompaniment to it. He was, if you like, the group’s best musician you know.
Music: Ian Campbell Folk Group instrumental.
DP: Swarb was a star and a virtuoso performer and a lead instrumentalist - people would often ignore what John was doing but musicians, I mean Swarb would say the same himself, he had great sense of timing and was great to play with. It was a real inspiration to play with him.
MD: I always felt that Ian Campbell missed out slightly - he did to a certain extent what the Spinners did and presented folk music to the masses. They had a marvellous television series “Something To Sing About” which I’ve got on audio tape and they are marvellous to listen to but they never got themselves propelled forward so that they were in the eye of the public - they always stood slightly back which was a great shame.
DP: They never made it but the Spinners went on to become successful as all round family entertainers - that’s what the Spinners did right away from the start. I knock the Spinners for a joke when we play with Fairport, we always use the Spinners as a joke, but I actually have a lot of respect for what the Spinners did and they got some folk music across to a lot of people. They weren’t great musicians but they were great entertainers.
MD: I don’t think that they ever admitted that they were great musicians.
DP: No they never meant to be. The Campbell’s if you like were the progressive folk band of the sixties and a very underrated group and Ian Campbell has written some wonderful songs - to this day he’s still coming up with some wonderful songs. I heard a song of Ian’s just the other week and I thought that’s just great - be worth having a go at that one. They’re a great musical family right from Ian’s parents David and Betty and himself and Lorna and the boys who are in UB 40.
MD: You seem to involve yourself with “Ians” don’t you!
DP: (Laughs) Yeah, Scottish “Ians”. I have a lot of respect for Ian Campbell both as a performer and as someone who kept that band going, never got into the limelight really like the Spinners did and spawned a lot of great musicians, I think, and wrote a lot of great songs and was a great raconteur and a great entertainer. It was certainly an experience for me to play in a group like that because it was obviously something completely different than playing with rock bands and the communication aspect of what Ian did with people was something to behold.
MD: He was good with stories and very good introducing songs. Coming back to Fairport - the band itself has had many line ups, I mean you’ve mentioned Richard Thompson, can talk of Sandy Denny, Dave Swarbrick, Jerry Donahue, Trevor Lucas, who has unfortunately just passed away, amongst others. I’ve seen you now three or four times with the new line up and you all seem very happy , very contented and you look as though you’re enjoying what you’re playing.
DP: Oh yeah definitely. I mean we wouldn’t do it if we didn’t enjoy it. We don’t exist as a band just to go out - it’s not a money making machine Fairport it never has been. It’s never been that kind of popular which is one of the reasons why it’s still going - it never got to be fashionable consequently we’ve never been out of fashion. If you don’t enjoy what you’re doing there’s no point going out on a forty date tour or a forty two date tour similar to the one we did earlier this year, forty of which were consecutive nights and it really is hard work doing that because we play for a couple of hours a night and we are meticulous about getting it to sound good so we always do a sound check. I mean most of the day is gone in travelling , doing the sound check and concert. It’s very satisfying band to be in with this current line up and we haven’t had too many squabbles although obviously the more time you spend in each other’s company - for example recently in America doing fifteen odd thousand miles living on a bus for five and a half weeks - tempers can get a bit frayed. You don’t have to do that when you work in a office because when you leave your office you go home and relax and forget about it. You can’t actually do that out on the road touring with a band because you’re in each others company all the time. But it’s the happiest line up that the band’s ever had that I’ve known since I’ve been involved with it from ‘69. It’s certainly the most content and I think it’s because we’re a lot older than we used to be and you have more time for people - you worry about what other people think rather than concerning yourself with your own little day in and day out requirements . You’re a lot more tolerant the older you get in some respects.
Music: Fairport Convention “ Dark Eyed Molly”
MD: How did Martin Allcock actually join the band because as you said earlier he can play almost anything - he’s magic fingers. How did he join - did you see him somewhere and think “we must get him for Fairport”?
DP: Well I’ve known Martin since he was at school you know learning to play the double bass up in Manchester. I used to see Martin when Fairport played in Manchester or the north and he was always a fan of the band and he played bass guitar, and still does very well - he’s a great fretless bass player - we always kept in touch and Martin would send me tapes of stuff. As he got older and he left school and became a professional musician - you know he’d send me stuff - so I was always aware that he played these other instruments like the guitar and the bouzouki. He didn’t play any keyboards until last year really (laughs). But I was aware of Martin and I knew that Martin would probably enjoy being a member of Fairport Convention and it would also be beneficial to us to have someone who could play lots of different instruments because we’d made “Gladys’ Leap” and we’d got things like keyboards on there and I played mandolin and we wanted to perform that stuff live and I just figured Martin would be a good member for Fairport and I was convinced he would enjoy being in the band so I phoned him up after we’d asked Ric (Sanders) to join. I just felt we needed someone else as well because Ric doesn’t sing for a start .
MD: He makes up for it in other ways.
DP: Oh yeah - obviously it’s advantageous if you’ve got three people, well a couple of people, who can do harmonies at least. And the thing came together very quickly because we only did about three day’s rehearsal with Ric and Martin and they knew all the old Fairport stuff that we’d been involved with because they’d learnt to play their instruments from listening to Fairport records so it was great and it was as if they’d been in the band and had been a part of it for a long time and knew stuff and they’ve come up with a lot ideas as well. They’re both prolific tunesmiths if you like, they write a lot of tunes, which is always useful although the hardest thing for Fairport is to find new songs because none of us write songs and that’s our biggest problem. We can go on for ever making albums or putting out records with lots of instrumentals on but it is not what the band should be doing - it’s more important I think for the band to find some strong songs.
MD: So obviously when you decide jointly to make another record do have in mind what you’re going to do or does that naturally come as you progress with the recording?
DP: No we always have in mind what we’re going to do. It’s not like - those days are gone unfortunately - very few bands make records like that where you start with absolutely nothing. I mean Fairport couldn’t do that - we wouldn’t have the time and we wouldn’t have the patience - I know I wouldn’t personally because when it comes to sitting around actually creating ideas we can’t do that with Fairport because we don’t have anyone that writes. It’s different with bands like Jethro Tull - there have been Jethro Tull albums that have all been written in the studio and they’ve started from nothing and the entire thing has developed over a nine month period in the studio like Under Wraps was a record that was done like that which is actually very exciting to do. The end result is not always as good as if it’s been approached from a different way where someone, in the case of Jethro Tull, Ian Anderson obviously who writes all of the lyrics. I mean the way Fairport work is very old fashioned because we like to have a song to start with and then we do an interpretation and work up an arrangement for a set of lyrics. That’s because we’ve all been bought up that way and its because of our experiences in music that’s the way Fairport always works. It’s always been the song that’s been the most important thing about Fairport’s music. And I still believe that’s true for most music that you hear - the most important thing is the song because if the song has no lyrical or musical content everything else to me is just bull$h1t. I like songs - I’m very old fashioned and most of my friends are the same.
Music: Jethro Tull “Under Wraps 2”
DP: What I like about most groups really is whether the songs are good or bad - I’ll only listen to bands that I think have good music. So for Fairport we’ve always got an idea of what we’re going to record - we have to be that way - and then we’ll go into the studio, arrangements can change but usually the lyric will stay the same. We tend not to experiment too much - individuals will experiment on their own parts and then the person who’s allocated as the producer’s role, which in the case of our last album “Red and Gold” was Simon Nicol, will oversee it and make sure in his opinion it’s in context with what everyone else is doing.
MD: I like “Red and Gold” and obviously that’s the one at the moment because it’s the latest one you’re focused on. I mean there are some other classic ones obviously and thinking back to Sandy Denny who you must have great memories of. I still listen to her music now and think what a fantastic and fabulous voice she had - it’s not the high pitched voice that you quite often hear on folk records but to me it’s typically English female folk singing.
DP: She was the best and I think everybody would agree, certainly most contemporary’s of Sandy - they would all admit to being heavily influenced by her when she was around. She was just a great singer but an even better songwriter - I mean no one wrote songs like Sandy used to - there are lots of female singers but there are not many who have that ability to write such beautiful songs.
MD: I’m thinking of “John The Gun” - it’s a marvellous song.
DP: Yeah “John The Gun” is great but there are so many of them. She never lost that ability to be able to come up with great songs and that proved to be increasingly difficult because of the musical climate around at the time when Sandy was still making music because the kind of punk thing happened and that destroyed a lot of people who were into writing songs at the time because they thought what’s the point you know - nobody wants to listen to this anymore. The lyrics actually make sense and its got a tune and this is not valid and a lot of people kind of went off writing material which was awfully sad really but Sandy always kept going. She still came up with some great songs and she was great to be in a band with because again Fairport had two great periods when Sandy was involved in the band both “Liege & Lief” which was done in ’69 - became a classic if you like or the first folk/rock album - and Sandy played a very big part in that and then she left the band and then she came back again and did a couple of albums with us later on, one of which “Rising for the Moon” I think is some of the best work that she’s ever done.
Music: Fairport Convention “Rising for the Moon”
DP: The problem is for Fairport we were all instrumentalists really and it was lovely having Sandy to accompany but we didn’t get much of a look in because she was such a great talent. Her stuff was much better than anything we wanted to play so usually when we were making albums it was always a bit of a fight but inevitably the songs, as I was saying earlier, were more important than anything else but it wasn’t a great outlet for some of the other people who were in the band at the time. That was where things started to go wrong - it’s always like that with bands when you get democratic groups because there’s always somebody who want to do something and the others don’t and then they’re going to come and go. That’s one of the reasons why Fairport - there were never really any bad cases of people falling out with each other in Fairport it was that people came and went to do other things and to do what they wanted to do musically, which was nice.
MD: Pete Frame’s family tree of Fairport Convention proves what you have just said. I forget now how many line ups it is - there were a fair few. People didn’t leave because there was any arguing so much as they just left and others filled their places. Right now onto your annual Cropredy Festival. Certainly a varied musical policy because you have rock musicians rubbing shoulders with die hard folkies but I have read that it did start with slightly different intentions.
DP: Well it started off many many years ago - it’s got to be around 1975 when myself and Dave Swarbrick used to live in the village and we used to rehearse in the village hall and Cropredy is a very small village - it’s got a population of around six hundred people and they asked us if we could do some fund raising in order for the village hall - which needed an extension at the time - and we said fine but we don’t want to play in the village hall as it’s too small so we had a barn dance which was very successful and well attended and the following year we were asked again by the village hall committee if we could do a fund raiser and we said let’s combine it with the village fete because you know that’s valid will be providing some music. It will be very low key and we’ll just play some music at the village fete and that was great success and that was held up at Anne Crossman’s house, in fact on her lawn out the back. It was a wonderful event and about seven hundred and fifty people attended and the next year we did the same thing except the crowd swelled to about twelve hundred and then the following year we got two thousand and it just became silly then. It was too many people in a very small area and after that which was 1979 then I think and we were splitting up anyway so we moved - we thought we’d have a farewell festival and we moved to Peewit Farm - actually we’d had a couple at Peewit farm before the Fairport farewell festival. In ’79 we finished up on August 4th - we played at the Led Zeppelin concert at Knebworth in the morning doing the breakfast spot!
MD: Yeah I read about that!
DP: And then we zoomed up and played at our farewell which was a really great way to finish up a career if you like because lots of people attended it and it was a really nice event and then a few months went by and Fairport remained friends and we all started doing different things. I’d gone off to play with Jethro Tull but we still played on each other’s records - Dave Swarbrick made a couple of solo albums, we all played on those. Richard Thompson was making records and some of us were playing on Richard’s records and we thought this is crazy we should get together once a year “just for the crack” of playing some music and the pleasure of meeting up again.
MD: You mustn’t forget your own record!
DP: I’ve been trying to forget it ever since I made it! Yeah that was something I made around 1982 because I had a couple of free months when nothing was happening and because I’d wanted to learn about recording and I’d managed to get my hand on an eight track tape recorder so it was a self eduducat6ion mainly. When you listen to it now (laughs) it really sounds like that now but it was great fun to do.
Music: Dave Pegg “Pipe Major Jock Laidlaws Fancy”
DP: Our reunion festival - that’s how it came about and every year when we got together to hold these reunions more and more people stared coming so in the end my wife Chris - we’d started a little label called Woodworm Records actually to put out a record when Fairport split because none of the major labels were interested. And we said we can’t just go out without having a farewell album although the farewell album was pretty rubbish what we actually recorded a lot of stuff live and it wasn’t the greatest thing we’d ever done but never the less it was something we felt we should do. So we formed this little label called Woodworm Records and as a result of that we began to organise these reunion festivals which was still fairly low key and since 1980/81 they’ve just got bigger and bigger every year and in ’87 we had a 20th anniversary festival where we had about fifteen thousand people turning up to it and that was the biggest one we’ve ever had and we expect the same number of people there this year. It’s become a bigger event in England than the Cambridge Folk Festival which really pleases me as it happens as I’ve been going there - I’ve missed one Cambridge Folk Festival and I’ll be missing this years - but I’ve been to about eighteen of them but they’ve never booked Fairport and now they can’t!
MD: And of course you’ve also got Steeleye Span who also have an anniversary this year.
DP: That’s right. Well Steeleye have always been mates of ours and again Maddy Prior is one of the great English female singers and Steeleye have played at Cropredy before but they’re the other band that have probably done more for folk music in England or certainly as much as Fairport have although they had hits and Fairport had just one minor hit. I like Steeleye a lot myself and I know that our audience will enjoy them as well.
MD: They did play a series of concerts recently and by all reports they were good.
DP: I think they’ve had some personnel changes of late but I think they’ll be very good.
MD: Your other playing commitments are, as you’ve already mentioned, with Tull. I do remember a Melody maker interview at the time you joined reporting that Ian Anderson invited you to join the band because (quote) you had a beard and the start of a receding hairline which matched his and Martin Barre’s. I’m sure there’s more to it than that. I’m sure that when John Glasscock left because of medical problems they must have spotted you somewhere. Was that playing with Fairport?
DP: Well it was actually Barrie Barlow who was Jethro Tull’s drummer at the time - you know it was one of those great strokes of luck really for me because Fairport was coming to an end and I didn’t know exactly what I was going to do. I was interested in recording you see at the time and I was keen to set up a recording studio - that was when we lived in Cropredy although we didn’t have any room there. It would have meant we would have had to move house anyway but Barrie Barlow had seen Fairport on a TV show - one of those bazaar like half hour things done in Scotland which actually sounded very good and we played well on that particular occasion. The band had been looking for a bass player because John Glasscock couldn’t go on tour because he was poorly and Barrie said we should find out who this guy is as he sounds good on the TV and he could cope with the stuff we’re doing. And so luckily Fairport’s manager, or ex manager, was also looking after Jethro Tull or doing some work for them on a PR level so my name actually was mentioned by them as well so then I was invited to go for an audition but I only just about got to play with Jethro Tull because I’d had messages when I’d come in from gigs and stuff that Ian Anderson had been calling and I thought it was the other Ian Anderson i.e. Ian A. Anderson who’s a wimp kind of folk/blues player who write and edits the magazine Folk Roots. He’s probably not a wimp now but at the time he was fairly, but I thought it was him phoning up to do some recording sessions you see and I just kept on saying “well say I’m out I don’t want to do it” (laughs) but then eventually I found out - one day Ian Anderson did actually call up and I thought crikey that’s ridiculous as he must have phoned about half a dozen times and must have been fairly serious about it . So that’s how that came about and I went out on tour - it was a lot to learn as there was only about ten days rehearsal and it was quite scary as I hadn’t been used to playing in these big venues, it was a completely different ball game from what it was like playing with Fairport. But it was most enjoyable and then I got to play with the band because unfortunately John passed away during the last night of this particular tour, which was the Stormwatch tour,
MD: Finally Dave, we’re sitting in your vastly equipped recording studio with a mixing desk which is about five times the size of the one we have at GCRM, now that Fairport have a steady line up and you’re obviously all friends and all committed to make good music do you see this carrying on?
DP: Well definitely over the next few years yeah. I mean we’ve never predicted how long it’s going to last because, well a band only exists if it wants to carry on making music and making records and going out and playing dates. If we stopped making records there’d be no point in going out and doing tours and stuff or if people became disinterested in playing in the band for other reasons. I still get a lot of satisfaction from playing with Fairport although I’m very busy because of having to play with both bands means I don’t have much time off from it you know and when one stops doing something the other starts up.
Music: Fairport Convention “The Battle”
DP: But Fairport of late, certainly the last two tours that we’ve done in England, our audience has widened excessively and we’re getting a lot of young people coming out to see us like seventeen/eighteen year olds which is very satisfying. And they’ll also enjoying the music - they’re not just coming because they thing it’s Fairground Attraction like a spelling mistake or something. When they come along to the concert they actually go away thinking well that’s a great band we’ll buy their record and we’ll come and see them again which is very satisfying when you’ve been doing music for as long as we have. And again our festival has got bigger and bigger - we don’t particularly want it to get any bigger than it is at this time but it’s a wonderfully satisfying thing because it’s only us - really we’re the headline act if you like. We never book anybody that’s like more well known than we are so it’s very satisfying that fifteen thousand will turn up most years. And generally the band I think is in a very strong position - our enforced lay offs because of other peoples commitments only make it better when we actually get together to play some music. It’s much better than when the band was what everyone did all the time because it does get laborious doing that.
MD: You also get to play for a fair few hours at the festival as well.
DP: Well we usually do about four, well we’ve been known to play for five and a half hours, but we always have a lot of guest musicians and singers along which is nice for us because it’s also nice for the audience. I mean we always have some guest female singers which allows us to do some of Sandy Denny’s songs which we can never do obviously with our all male line up because they don’t translate. And we have lots of guest musicians as well. It’s good - we enjoy it. It’s a hard one for us the festival because you know the set’s going to be lengthy and you’ve got to try and keep people’s attention for like a long time, for four hours or so and you’ve got lots of different kinds of music being represented. It’s a very difficult test putting a set list together but it’s a great relief when it’s all over.
MD: Thanks Dave, thank you very much for the interview.
DP: That’s alright - thanks for having us!