The “most important folk-rockband ever”, according to Ian Anderson
The explosion of folk-rock is often forgotten when tracing the history of music. The merging of traditional songwriting with a new, chunkier sound is such a crucial part of the journey for rock music; it feels strange that the sub-genre is so often left behind. But you can count Bob Dylan, Neil Young and The Band as the architects. Ian Anderson saw them all.
Anderson’s position as one of Britain’s longest-serving frontmen means he can also stake a claim to be one of folk-rock’s earliest appreciators. Likewise, it means that his view on who might be the most important group in the genre’s history is well worth listening to.
For any rock band, embracing the world of folk is where artists can either make or break their songs. It might be all good fun when you have the amp cranked as loud as it can go, but unless the song isn’t good enough to be played on an acoustic guitar and nothing else, it’s time to go back to the drawing board and start again. Although that kind of subtle sound was never a big thing to Jethro Tull, Ian Anderson thought that Fairport Convention was the best British band to ever embrace their folksy side.
When talking about the greatest folk artists of the modern age, though, chances are everything goes back to American artists. That’s not to say that British artists haven’t had a great reputation for making stellar acoustic folksy tracks over the years, but when the history of rock and roll is written, people will normally talk about the moment when Bob Dylan arrived that everything changed.
It’s not like that’s necessarily wrong, either. Dylan may have been the reference point for all the folk-rock that came afterwards, but acts like The Beatles were acutely aware of how to make their own version of that music. John Lennon may have done it by turning up his amplifier on songs like ‘Revolution’, but Fairport Convention always had a more delicate approach.
There was still some grit in their delivery (it is rock after all), but their approach was to bring a delicate touch than what the other revolutionaries of the time were talking about. This was straight-ahead folk tunes, and if they happened to have hits out of the deal, then so be it.
Since everyone else was trying to be Woody Guthrie at the time, Anderson considered Fairport Convention the epitome of what folk music should be, telling MusicRadar, “Fairport Convention generally have the tag of being ‘the all-time folk-rock band of Britain’ and deservedly so. They do, in a very worthy sense, have the right to be crowned the most important folk-rock band ever”.
Anderson may have taken things in a bit of a different direction with Jethro Tull, but that didn’t mean that he forgot about the traditional side of his roots. Much like Fairport Convention, albums like Aqualung show him working to his strengths as a writer by making tunes that were based on traditionalist instruments, like the acoustic breakdown of the title track or the endless amount of flute solos that he had at his disposal.
If anything, the idea of calling back to the traditional songs that came before you was just a small taste of what Fairport Convention could do. When she wasn’t working in her main outfit, hearing Sandy Denny serve as the town crier in the Led Zeppelin song ‘The Battle of Evermore’ is still one of the most heart-wrenching moments in rock history.
Rock and roll may have always been about subverting the status quo in whatever way you can, but maybe Fairport Convention was here to remind us that it didn’t always have to be about the sweeping solos and nasty riffs. As long as it sounds good, it was good, and if you could lend your own interpretation to a folk classic, why not try it and see where things go?
