Fairport Convention are commonly considered to be the first British folk-rock group, which is essentially true even if it doesn't really count for much. Releasing their self-titled debut in 1967, they drew heavily the Byrds, Joni Mitchell, Jefferson Airplane, and especially Bob Dylan, but they weren't merely aping an American trend. Instead, the band mingled those jangly Yankee innovations with British folk traditions, rearranging and exploding old ballads and jigs into crisp new rock songs. The results, as early as their second album, were fairly distinctive, although Fairport Convention (which was named after the house where the band held its first practices) were often mistaken for an American band. At the time, most of the members were in their late teens or early twenties, yet for all the spiritedness of their music, they sound today much older than their years: Vocalist Sandy Denny, who defected from the Strawbs to replace Judy Dyble, possesses a dramatic, soulful voice, while Richard Thompson is impossibly dexterous, tossing out curlicue riffs with a professional's casual precision.
Fairport Convention, of course, had better luck in their homeland than they did in the U.S., to the extent that many of their most popular albums are available only as imports. Righting two wrongs at once, Water Records has reissued the band's second and third albums, What We Did on Our Holidays and Unhalfbricking, both from 1969, and both previously unavailable in America. Legendary producer Joe Boyd oversaw both records, lending them a live sound that complements the musicians' youthful vigor. Generally, these two albums are considered somewhat transitional for the band, gradually tracking the decrease in American influences and the increase in British, all leading up to their biggest album, Liege & Lief. However, neither is a minor album in the Fairport Convention catalog. Heard back to back, they give the impression of a confident band growing even more confident-- almost cocky at times-- as they continue to fine-tune their already complex transatlantic sound.
What We Did on Our Holidays begins with Denny's "Fotheringay", which takes its name from the castle where Mary Queen of Scots was imprisoned and which sounds like it could be attributed to Traditional. Moreover, it's our introduction to Denny's robust, expressive voice, which gives the band new and considerable power, whether she's humming "The Lord Is in This Place, How Dreadful Is This Place", or exerting inhuman control on "She Moves Through the Fair". The album mixes new interpretations of traditional ballads like "Nottamun Town", here rendered almost as a raga, with much newer songs, such as their soulful take on Dylan's "I'll Keep It With Mine" and their ponderous version of Mitchell's "Eastern Rain". The best material on Holidays, though, may be their own-- the stomping blues-rock of "Mr. Lacey", the racing "No Man's Land", and the stirring afterlife anthem "Meet on the Ledge".
Instead of jettisoning their borrowed American traits on Unhalfbricking, Fairport Convention find new ways to upend them, as on their playful zydeco-flavored reading of Dylan's "Si Tu Dois Partir" (you may know it as "If You Gotta Go, Go Now") and their own "Cajun Woman", a bracing amalgam of Cajun rhythms, surf melodies, and Beach Boys orchestrations. On "Sailor's Life", they turn an old British lament into an eleven-minute jam, showing off the group's improvisational dynamic and Thompson's considerable soloing skills. In the liners for these new reissues, M.C. Taylor calls it "their own singular form of British country music." Their cover of Dylan's obscure "Percy's Song" takes that idea one step further: The tale of a wrongly imprisoned man, it's not dissimilar to those told by Johnny Cash or Merle Haggard at the same time, yet they make it sound distinctively British and distinctively Fairport Convention. The band build to an intense finale, as Denny sounds more bruised yet more steadfast with each repetition of the refrain "Turn, turn to the rain and the wind." More than anything else, Unhalfbricking-- and, to a lesser extent, Holidays-- conveys the band's simple excitement at making music, culminating in their giddy cover of "Million Dollar Bash". They trade off vocals and generally egg each other on, creating a joyful ending to the first chapter of their long career.
