The Covers Project
August 2007. Cropredy. I am standing in a field in the Cotswolds on a deliciously warm night. It is my first visit to Fairport's annual festival and Richard Thompson has just embarked upon the extended solo in ‘Hard On Me’. My friend gives me a knowing nudge as Thompson's fingers wrench angsty, at times discordant, howls from his guitar. Fingerknotting break follows fingerknotting break and I am as close to heaven as I am ever likely to get. And, I am reminded of a previous festival some 38 years earlier…………..
August 1970 Crumlin. It’s raining and has been raining on and off for two days in this godforsaken outpost somewhere near Halifax, My tent is soaked and my sleeping bag is gradually absorbing the rain that has settled on the ground sheet. It will probably be warmer and drier out in the rain and at least there will be some music to distract me from the cold and damp. Squelching across the festival field I can hear a band just beginning their set. Fairport Convention and a warmly heroic ‘Walk Awhile’ I have a Fairport album, ‘Unhalfbricking’. I didn’t, I hasten to add, buy it for the music. I had never heard them. I bought it for the cover, a somewhat surreal juxstaposition of someone's parents (Sandy Denny's I later found out) and the band frolicking in the garden behind. No band name. No album title. The height of cool in 1969. Psychologically of course, when you have spent what seems like a small fortune (about £1.50 now) on an album, you want to like it. I had grown to like it mainly because of a track called ‘A Sailor’s Life’ and mainly because of an extended guitar solo that reminded me of the licence granted to the guitarist in America’s Fairport – Jefferson Airplane - to extend a solo until all but the true believers had given up. And here, on this grim festival field somewhere in Yorkshire, I am watching the young man who had created that solo. I am here because I have started a low circulation (about 20!) ‘underground’ magazine and the festival organisers have sent me press tickets. I have already sat in the backstage bar where members of Pentangle and various Fairporters leaned back in their chairs and tipped pint after pint down their necks, spilling half of it on the absorbant coconut matting that is the floor. I can barely speak to my girlfriend. I am the kid let loose in the sweet shop. Earlier I stood at the back of the stage (check out the cover of ‘Split’ that’s me at the back) whilst The Groundhogs coaxed the sun out for a brief appearance. But now the rain is forgotten, and a hunched figure with a mop of wavy hair is teasing unfeasibly magical sounds from his stratocaster with fingers that should be numbed by the cold. And so the journey began.
Welcome to The Covers Project.
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