Fairport Convention are one of those bands that have been around for what seems like forever and still keep truckin' on. I discovered them while I was in university and saw them at Convocation Hall in Toronto in the mid-70s. Last year, they celebrated, slightly belatedly, the 50th anniversary of their album, Full House, by performing it in full at the Cropredy Folk Festival. Fortunately for us, the performance was recorded and has been released as the album Full House For Sale.
It was a treat that had been stuck in the pipeline for three years, blocked by the persistence of that wretched COVID thingy, but, at around 9:30pm on the evening of Saturday 13th August, Fairport’s 1970 lineup of Simon Nicol, Dave Pegg, Dave Mattacks and Richard Thompson, plus Chris Leslie who was standing in (wonderfully, as it turned out…) for the otherwise-occupied Dave Swarbrick reconvened on the Cropredy stage, and it was “Game On.” And WHAT a performance they delivered.
And, happily, Fairport have had the good sense to preserve that magnificent performance – not in aspic – but the on digital optical information storage format that we know as a Compact Disc. And, thank heavens they did, because Full House For Sale is destined to become a treasured memory of a landmark Fairport performance. Already, I have a suspicion that this new album may well be Fairport’s best and most enduring “Live” album ever.
This is not the first time a live version of Full House has been released. The excellent album, House Full, recorded live at The Troubador in 1970, has most of the songs from Full House, and captures that version of the group at their best.
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