A Year of Music

Stuck in head this morning, not for the first time: Fairport Convention's version of "The Deserter", a song so solid, so muscularly present that it permanently changed how I look at "folk-rock". 1969 was an absolutely horrific year for Fairport Convention as a band of musicians, because of a tour van crash that took the life of Richard Thompson's girlfriend Jeannie Franklin and drummer Martin Lamble and put Thompson himself and Simon Hutchings in the hospital. Despite that tragic setback, the band still managed to release 3 of the strongest albums of their career, which would have been a remarkable achievement for any band, at any time: the dense, glancingly prog What We Did On Our Holidays, the effortlessly sophisticated and jazzy Unhalfbricking, and the revolutionary Lief & Liege, their response to The Band's Songs from Big Pink and the album that put electrified English folk on the map.