A bit of a cheat this, because the album was released in December 1969, but a valid entry I think.  Imagine you are a young person with Christmas money in your pocket when the record shops open again in January, money that’s burning a hole in your pocket. What is there to buy if you’ve already bought Stone the Crows and have some cash left over?

Liege and Lief

Well you could have bought Taste : On the Boards, or, if you were hip to the West Coast scene, the new, eponymous album by Blue Cheer (named after a batch of Bear’s acid). But if you were really hip to the underground you would know Fairport Convention had just released, Liege and Lief.

Liege and Lief has, over 50 years, acquired a venerable status as a classic of folk music and/or folk-rock. This is deserved, although there were plenty of other things happening in folk music at the time, some of which will crop up here over the course of the year.

Melody Maker Review

The status now accorded to it was not so obvious at the time, as is touched on in this piece by John Harris in the Guardian. It is also apparent from this Melody Maker review (left; scan by Rob Chapman via Twitter) which praises the album without genuflecting before it.

‘Beautiful listening’ notwithstanding, MM didn’t even accord it the status of its 1970 folk album of the year, that honour going to Robin and Barry Dransfield’s Rout of the Blues, of which more later in the year.

Nor, notwithstanding the MM headline, is the album ‘tradional folk’, though it displays traditional elements in the song selection and arrangments. This is most apparent in Swarbrick’s fiddle style, which flows freely from trad, to hoedown to outbreaks of quasi-Hendrix stylings. Matty Groves, after around four and a half minutes of Sandy Denny sticking fairly closely to the trad source, breaks down into Swarbrick and Richard Thompson going off on one. Thomson’s playing on the first take is pretty wild (the third take was used on the album). The first take is on Spotify.

Richard Thompson is one of those Brit. guitar geniuses who (in the company of Robert Fripp and Steve Howe) did not come out of blues/R and B stylings and are the better for it. Thomson’s lead on Matty Groves was compared somewhere to Roger McGuin with The Byrds but, idiosyncratically perhaps, it reminds me more of what Jerry Garcia was doing early in his own journey  from folk/bluegrass to cosmic consciousness via John Coltrane.

Listening to the album again while drafting this, one of the overriding things that strikes me is how contemporary it still sounds, how little of it has dated (in fact The Deserter, the song singled out by Melody Maker is the one that sounds most disposable to me now). In part this may be because it is built on a solid foundation of Dave Mattacks’s drums and Ashley Hutchings’s bass. Also, although Hutchings was keen to say the album is rock’n’roll, it isn’t really–the arrangements are too subtle for that, too rooted in British sensibilities, as is Sandy Denny’s voice. There are no Blues roots on the album, nor jazz nor vaudeville; the roots are the modal melodies of the British traditions and the pre-modern weirdness of the lyrics. This is a world in which, not only has my baby done me wrong, but, as a consequence, my baby and her lover have each been run through with swords and tossed into a common grave.

Does Liege and Lief deserve its status? Yes, of course it does. It is one of those albums that takes what has gone before and restates the territory on which the future is built. This would be true even if the intervening years had been unkind. But they haven’t, and it remains majestic.

The album is on Spotify, here.