June 5, 2025
Fairport Convention: It All Came Round Again
Once upon a time there were A2, The Boot, The Other Boot and The Third Leg, homemade cassette-tape releases of Fairport Convention’s Cropredy performances from 1982, 1983, 1986 and 1987, respectively. These were re-released in the early 2000s as CDs along with select tracks from 1982 and 1986 on the Cropredy Capers box before disappearing for twenty years or so. And now, they have reemerged on It All Came Round Again, a twelve-disc box set of eleven CDs and one DVD offering a sampling of the band’s 1980s live sound at Cropredy and elsewhere along with several brief revisits to some 1970s video material.
The reason for the new box, according to its back-cover notes, is that “the 1980s can now be seen as a second ‘golden age’ for Fairport Convention,” and there is no refuting that assessment. But the focal point of the box set is undeniably fiddler Dave Swarbrick, his presence and his absence. The statement is not a slight to any of the other members, it’s simply fact. Swarb came to define the group in the 1970s and his departure by the mid-1980s could only signal a change in sound and identity. And what shaped it all began with the band’s semi-retirement.
Two events are usually credited with Fairport’s hiatus and, in turn, the birth of the Cropredy Festival, following the “Farewell, Farewell” tour. The first was Vertigo, the label that had released Bonny Bunch of Roses and Tippler’s Tales, which paid the band a considerable sum to not record the remaining albums on their contract. The second was Swarbrick’s tinnitus, which was adversely affected by playing amplified music. The latter was certainly the more serious of the two since, as Fred Redwood and Martin Woodward note in The Woodworm Era: The Story of Today’s Fairport Convention, Swarb had “contributed an enormous musical intelligence to the band but, more than that, he stood like an icon for what Fairport meant to their followers…he symbolized Fairport Convention.”
The agreed-upon solution to Swarb’s limitations then was to abandon regular touring schedules, play sporadic concerts and hold an annual outdoor festival like the one which concluded the “Farewell, Farewell” tour, a concert that could gather together Fairport alumni to celebrate the band’s music with its fans.
Redwood and Woodward downplay Fairport’s non-Cropredy live appearances from 1980 to 1985, explaining them as invitations from European festivals that paid well enough to not be ignored. But the decade actually began with the occasional regrouping of the Full House lineup of Swarb, Dave Pegg, Dave Mattacks, Simon Nicol and Richard Thompson. In August 1981, the same month the reunited musicians played that year’s festival at Broughton Castle in Banbury, portions of which were released as Moat on the Ledge, they were seen on the Granada TV show Celebration, augmented by Richard’s wife Linda, running through a series of Fairport classics, Swarb traditional selections and recent Thompson songs. It was a productive period for the resurrected lineup in the studio as well, as the musicians gathered for sessions for Swarb’s Smiddyburn and Flittin’ albums.
Pegg, Mattacks and Nicol played on the Thompsons’ 1982 Shoot Out the Lights recording, with the latter two accompanying the couple on tour. That same year, as a promotion of Cropredy, a unique version of Fairport featuring a combination of the Angel Delight/Nine/Bonny Bunch lineup appeared on Six Fifty-Five, filmed in the garden at Pebble Mill One Studio, for a performance that can be found on the box set DVD. Like the set’s other live video of the band at Pebble Mill in the early 1980s as well as some 1970s television appearances, all of it is essential.
And there was enough to keep the touring Fairport lineup somewhat busy during the early 1980s. The FairPoint website indicates that scattered Fairport performances gradually increased to mini-tours as the decade progressed. But, as the Cropredy Capers booklet reveals, the 1983 festival program contained “a hint that the reunion might be more permanent” with a Christmas Tour of eight shows that year. By early 1985, Fairport was booking a month-long Winter Tour in the U.K. and a spring tour of the U.S., playing the same material from its late 1970s gigs. The routine of short bursts of road work, however, was about to change.
In 1982, discussing how Swarb’s tinnitus issue reduced the band’s touring, Nicol told the host of Six Fifty-Five, “We didn’t want to go acoustic and we didn’t really want to try and replace Dave because he’s totally irreplaceable.” He reminded the host that his current regular touring schedule was with Swarb in an acoustic duo playing largely traditional material, a healthy helping of which can be found on It All CameRound Again.
By 1985, Swarb’s irreplaceability was under reconsideration. That year’s recording of Gladys’s Leap by Nicol, Pegg and Mattacks was conspicuous by the non-appearance of Swarbrick, who had moved to Scotland and begun working with a new band, Whippersnapper. Filling in for him on the album as special guest was Ric Sanders, a former member of Soft Machine and the Albion Band. The album received positive reactions from critics, but not from Swarb, who, Redwood and Woodward say, “thought it was dreadful.” The Woodworm Era quotes Nicol as saying, “the main reason why Swarb disliked the album was that he wasn’t involved in it.”
Unbeknownst at the time, the album marked a move into a new chapter for the group, one that did not include Swarbrick for the first time since 1968’s Unhalfbricking. It would be at Cropredy two years later, when he returned to the celebration as a guest, that the fiddler would witness a performance by his former band, who by this time had added guitarist Martin Allcock to the lineup. When Fairport Fanatics asked him afterward about his impressions, he said, “I thought tonight was going to be a difficult evening because it was the first time that I’d come along and seen Fairport since I’d left. If I didn’t like it, because the band has members that I love, old friends, dear, dear old friends it would be very difficult for them not to see past me if I was saying it was good when I really felt it was bad…And my worries were…they drifted away. It was beautiful.”
Swarb also told the publication that he left Fairport because of “a difference of musical opinion,” and added that he “thought [Fairport’s] new material, that which I had absolutely nothing to do with, was, for me, more exciting.”
Seeing the Swarbless version of the group live on its first U.S. tour during 1986 made clear the new direction and why the fiddler had some reservations in hearing his former band – added was Alcock’s heavier guitar sound, Sanders’s more technique-derived fiddling, and more of Mattacks’s keyboard skills in addition to his drumming. The set list and sound would grow both heavier and more lilting over the next decade, accommodating the gradual addition of new songs to the repertoire that catered to the lineup’s Tull-like approach at times and Nicol’s preferred balladry. But the new lineup’s early sound, retaining a balance between familiar and new material, is well represented on It All Came Round Again on the final three CDs. The box is an effective chronicle of the transition between lineups through live audio, BBC performances and video footage from throughout the entire decade that supplements the 1980s Cropredy performances which, in the final analysis, are what the set is really about, with the bulk of the first eight CDs coming from the festival.
Thirteen songs from the August 14,1982 set, recorded by Dave Pegg on a Revox, are featured on the 1983 AT2 cassette release and is included on the new box. This is one-third of the tunes performed that night during a four-hour-plus performance. Guests were Mattacks, Jerry Donahue, Trevor Lucas, Linda Thompson, Judy Dyble, Dan Ar Bras and Brian Maxine. The night before, Fairport had played John Babbacombe Lee in its entirety for the first time in ten years, dusting off the spoken word recordings for inclusion as well. (The “Breakfast in Mayfair” on Cropredy Capers is labeled “1981,” but there are no performances of this or any other JBL material from that year, so it can probably be concluded it’s from the1982 set.)
The 1983 festival was well-represented on The Boot – all thirty-one songs from that night were released, as they are on the new box across three CDs. With Ashley Hutchings and Richard Thompson in attendance, the concert was able to reach back through Fairport’s catalog, adding selections from Unhalfbricking before traveling forward to Rosie, Rising for the Moon and even Rock On, the collection of early R&R covers by the band and extended family. In addition, the box boasts BBC broadcasts of selections from the 1984 Cropredy Festival.
The 1986 and 1987 Cropredy shows, represented across discs 6 through 8, offer buyers The Other Boot and The Third Leg, with additional 1987 performances (“Fiddlesticks” and “Who Knows Where the Time Goes?”) from the BBC included on disc 9.
Sixteen of the forty-six songs performed at the 1986 Cropredy, the first hosted by the new Fairport lineup, found their way on the The Other Boot and the new box set. The guests at this show, including Ian Matthews and Hutchings, widened the range even further than before, extending the retrospective to early Fairport covers as well as Matthews solo repertoire. With both Thompson and Donahue in tow, the guitar solos in songs like “Sloth” were even more of a treat, and the presence of Clive Gregson and Christine Collister added the familiar backing vocals that accompanied RT’s concerts at the time.
The 1987 festival featured mini-sets of Thompson tunes and Jethro Tull songs by Ian Anderson and Martin Barre, some of which are represented on the box. The massive 47-song set, according to the Cropredy Capers booklet, met with complaints from fans, who felt there wasn’t enough standard Fairport material. The truncated version on the new box mitigates that slight by offering mostly the band’s catalog.
It All Came Round Again serves as a bookend to the band’s performance of the Full House album at the 2022 Cropredy, officially released on CD the following year. The festival has become a long-standing tradition, one that reunites, celebrates and even eulogizes. The box set is a chronicle of its beginnings when it was still shaping itself into the persona we know today.
Sources
Fairport Convention. Cropredy Capers box set booklet. Free Reed Records and Music, Ltd., 2004.
Heylin, Clinton. What We Did Instead of Holidays: Fairport Convention and Its Extended Folk-Rock Family. Pontefract, England: Route, 2019.
Kornelussen, Frank. “Fairport Convention: 20 Years of Ups and Downs.” Goldmine, 8 May 1987, 8-9.
O’Malley, Brian. “An Interview with Dave Swarbrick.” Fairport Fanatics, Issue #21, Winter 1987, n.p.
Redwood, Fred and Martin Woodward. The Woodworm Era: The Story of Today’s Fairport Convention. Thatcham, England: Jeneva Publishing, 1995.
“Six Fifty-Five”performance, August 9, 1982 on It All Came‘Round Again DVD, Madfish Records, 2024.
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