As a founder member of Fairport Convention, and as the pre-eminent electric guitarist of the British Isles’ folk rock boom 50 years ago, Richard Thompson has been a tireless champion of our islands’ folk traditions. On reading his memoir Beeswing you wonder if he decided to embrace all things English after his youthful experiences in the US. For some reason this quiet and unassuming man appears to have been possessed with an ability to make Americans greet him with a mixture of suspicion, rage, even outright violence.
“Hey, girlie, git your hair cut!” shout a bunch of men dressed as cowboys in Detroit airport, which proves doubly upsetting when Thompson realisesthat the men lobbing the insults belong to one of his favourite country bands. In Los Angeles his girlfriend does an illegal U-turn and gets pulled over by the police but it is Thompson who riles them to such an extent that they dump him on the side of the road, stranded. “When the taxi came, the driver took one look at me and drove off again. Was I that scary? Me, a pacifist and a vegetarian?”
On another trip to Detroit Thompson walks into what he assumes to be safe territory — a British-style pub — only for the place to fall silent. “They kept staring. Hostile is the way I would describe that look,” he recalls. You can picture him, blinking furiously as Detroit factory workers circle in for the kill.
Throughout Beeswing Thompson comes across as an innocent, an open-toed sandals-wearing geography teacher type lost in the rock’n’roll circus. “I never wanted to be predictable enough to be part of a ‘scene’,” he sniffs about attending the 14 Hour Technicolour Dream, a psychedelic happening at Alexandra Palace in London in 1967 that he seems to have been fascinated and appalled by. “At the same time, I was keen not to stand out as a ‘square’.” Yet a square he was, albeit one with a curious, inquiring mind and a rare talent for deep, expressive musicianship.
Fairport Convention began life as a British alternative to the Band, the backing band for Bob Dylan, doing Dylan covers in a rootsy rock fashion, but everything changed on May 12, 1969. After a gig at a club called Mother’s in Birmingham they were driving back to London at dawn when their roadie fell asleep at the wheel of the van. Thompson’s description of the crash that killed his girlfriend, an American fashion designer called Jeannie Franklyn, and Fairport Convention’s 19-year-old drummer Martin Lamble gives the book its most powerful moment.
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“The van looked as though a thoughtless giant stepped on it,” he writes after painting a vision of amplifiers, instruments and human bodies scattered on the grass by the motorway. The dying Franklyn frowned as though “she was struggling to remember someone’s name but it was on the tip of her tongue”. When the surviving members reconvened they agreed that they couldn’t go back to playing songs made with Lamble. Fairport Convention’s 1969 masterpiece Liege & Lief, a reconfiguring of Britain’s folk traditions into the rock idiom that is completely mysterious and thrillingly direct, was the result.
Thompson’s unending fascination for the esoteric, combined with an essentially suburban mindset, drives his experience of the period. The band worked on Liege & Lief while living together in a former rectory in Hampshire called Farley House. One evening there, inspired by an ancient Scottish ballad about a malevolent fairy queen called Tam Lin, they did a ouija board session. “I always got the feeling that we were tapping into a world that was beyond our understanding,” he says ominously. “At one point we summoned the Fairy Queen from the song, and she did not seem to be a happy camper.” From Californian cops to supernatural beings, everyone is out to give Thompson a hard time.
He also has an Englishman’s innate understanding that things will invariably go wrong. In 1970 Fairport played the Yorkshire Folk, Jazz and Blues Festival, an attempt at a British Woodstock that ended up as a hippy Wuthering Heights, with howling gales and its forlorn promoter going mad and spending two weeks wandering the Yorkshire moors. Fairport Convention got through it by drinking vast amounts of beer, which was unfortunate because by the time they were due on, all the portable toilets had blown away. Noticing a hole in the plastic sheeting at the back of the stage, the band’s fiddle player Dave Swarbrick decided to relieve himself through it. As it turned out, he was urinating directly on to the press enclosure. “If we were expecting a great review,” Thompson accepts, “we weren’t going to get one now.”
All of this makes Beeswing a lively, straightforward telling of an exciting time, with some nice evocations of the charismatic women on the scene. Sandy Denny, Fairport’s lead singer during their golden period, comes across as tough but painfully sensitive, a British Janis Joplin. Anne Briggs, a pure-voiced folkie who inspired Thompson’s song Beeswing, is an untameable free spirit: “wild, impetuous, impossible to chain down”. And then there is his rather more worldly former wife Linda, dealing with the realities of her husband’s latest obsessions while also raising a family and keeping her own singing career alive. When he discovers Sufism she goes along with it for a while but you have to feel for her as he becomes all holier-than-thou, as the recently converted are wont to do.
“It would take me a year or two to realise that I was not part of a superior club,” he announces on dumping the old drinking mates for his new Sufi buddies. You wonder if he truly believes that to be the case, though, because in a chapter on finding God there is still a tone of spiritual superiority running just below the surface. And an appendix on dreams proves unnecessary. Nobody wants to hear about anyone’s dreams, ever.
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Apart from that, Beeswing is a concise, appealingly modest memoir on that brief, idealistic time when British folk collided with rock and audiences did not run screaming in the opposite direction.
Beeswing: Fairport, Folk Rock And Finding My Voice 1967-1975 by Richard Thompson, Faber, 272pp; £20
