Features

Cropredy – the friendly festival

Former Daily Mirror journalist Rod Chaytor first reviewed Fairport Convention when they appeared at Birmingham Town Hall to promote their seminal Liege and Lief album in 1969.  Fifty-five years later he’s looking forward to the band’s annual Cropredy Festival, which this year celebrates its 45th anniversary

“There are people conceived here who now return with their own children and their parents.” So says Dave Pegg (known to all as Peggy), former bassist with Jethro Tull but, for the last 55 years, half of the rhythm section of British folk-rock founders Fairport Convention.

He is talking about Cropredy, scene of a unique, family-friendly music festival held annually in a North Oxfordshire field (known, unsurprisingly, as The Field), which will celebrate its 45th gathering this August.

The festival began as both a village hall fundraiser and farewell gig for the band, which had formed in 1967 and was named after original teenage guitarist Simon Nicol’s North London home. Beset by debt and hopelessly out of fashion, the band had decided to call it a day. Thankfully, that break-up never quite happened.

At the time of the original 1979 festival both Peggy and the band’s fiddler, Dave Swarbrick, were living in Cropredy, so it made sense to hold the festival there. The following year a reunion festival was held, also in Cropredy, which soon became an annual event, and in 1985 the band reunited for the album Gladys Leap. They’ve been together ever since – touring regularly, releasing albums every couple of years or so and, of course, hosting the Cropredy Festival.

Cropredy has grown over the years from a small, intimate folk festival to an internationally-recognised event that hosts an eclectic mix of legends – The Beach Boys and Petula Clark are among those who have graced its stage – and some seemingly surprising choices given the festival’s folky origins.

In 2013, hellraiser rocker Alice Cooper posted before flying back to the States: “Best gig of the whole European tour, Cropredy Folk Festival. Who noo?”

Members of Fairport past and present regularly perform at Cropredy, joining the band for the marathon set that always closes the festival. Among them is legendary guitarist Richard Thompson who, as Simon Nicol relates, “left the band in 1971 and has been playing with us ever since.” (Nicol himself is still with Fairport 60 years after being one of its founder members, having, as he puts it, only had a couple of years out of the band “for good behaviour”, back in the early Seventies).

It says much for how Fairport and the festival are regarded among their contemporaries that surprise guests have also joined in that marathon festival set, ranging from Billy Connolly and the late Steve Harley to Jethro Tull’s Ian Anderson and Led Zeppelin’s Robert Plant. A ‘very special guest’ is also promised at this year’s festival.

Anyone who has attended Cropredy will attest to the wonderful atmosphere, as true today, when the festival attracts 20,000 happy punters, as back in its early years, when The Field was barely half full.

It’s that authentic Sixties vibe – Woodstock without the mud and dysentery (the loos at Cropredy are always immaculate). With strong echoes of peace and love, right down to the craft, clothes and food stalls that ring The Field, the mood is overwhelmingly one of friendliness and politeness.

There’s no backstage elitism, or even a backstage bar. Performers who fancy a beer have to go out into the arena field like everybody else, where they find themselves treated with courtesy and respect. A regular is Robert Plant. “It’s ok until he takes his hat off, and his hair comes down, and then it’s all over,” Peggy laughs.

And if some of the fans, once transported by Sex ‘n’ Drugs ’n’ Rock ‘n’ Roll, now get around the Field by mobility scooter, then so what? And yes, even the Blockheads, sadly without Ian, have played Cropredy

The festival’s welcoming vibe also extends to most of the village’s 700-plus inhabitants. Trade from the festival keeps the village shop going, doing six months of business on one weekend. Local clubs and institutions provide breakfasts, teas, showers and other amenities for visiting campers. The festival also helps keep viable the two pubs.

A national treasure

Cropredy opens with the bells of the 14th Century village church of St Mary The Virgin ringing out for an hour in welcome before the traditional 4pm Thursday start. To spine-tingling effect, the final cadence dies away to a compelling silence. Moments later, the sound stage up in the field goes boom and the festival springs into life.

It ends at midnight on the Saturday when, after their marathon closing set, Fairport and friends gather on stage to sing Meet On The Ledge, Richard Thompson’s haunting anthem of loss and anticipated reunion. Then it’s over again for another year.

Just occasionally, as at those other national summer institutions Henley and Wimbledon, a certain amount of stoicism is called for when it comes to the weather.

When in 2010 Status Quo headlined the Friday of the festival, their tour bus arrived in the dead of night from the band’s previous gig and quietly parked up backstage. The rain pounded down all the next day.

Rick Parfitt, finally striding on stage to the familiar opening riff of Caroline, their standard set-starter, gazed down in amazement at the joyous, steaming mosh pit beneath his feet, and marvelled: “We’ve been watching you from the bus all day. You’re soaked!”.

What then for the future of Fairport and its festival? The band are non-committal, especially with so many other festivals struggling at the moment, but, for the moment, Cropredy endures and this year’s bill is as eclectic as ever,

Headlining the Thursday night is ex-Yes keys player Rick Wakeman, who will be performing his chart-topping opus Journey To The Centre of the Earth backed not only by Peggy’s bassist son, Matt, but his own son, Adam.

Super producer and ex-Buggle Trevor Horn headlines the Friday night slot with his band and Seventies prog-rock heroes Focus take to the stage on Saturday along with Eddi Reader and that special surprise guest. Also appearing over the three days are Tony Christie, folkie fiddler Kathryn Tickell and a number of bands and artists you may not have heard of but all of whom contribute to that unique Cropredy experience.

Fairport’s Cropredy Convention runs from August 8 to 10, 2024, near Banbury, Oxon. Tickets range from £85 to £190 and are available from (www.fairportconvention.com).

Fairport Convention

Born in the counter-cultural ferment of the late Sixties, Fairport formed in 1967 and were pioneers of what came to be known as British folk-rock.

Former members have included the tragic and angel-voiced Sandy Denny, whose premature death at the foot of a flight of stairs in 1978 remains unexplained, and Richard Thompson, who regularly features on all-time lists of Top 20 guitarists, and who famously was joined on stage more than once for a public jam session by Jimi Hendrix when Fairport gigged at London’s Speakeasy Club in 1969.

But it was legendary folkie fiddler Dave Swarbrick’s desire to match the amped-up power of Richard’s electric guitar in their musical duels which created the moment when British folk-rock was invented. In the Olympic Studios in West London, recording the 1969 album, Unhalfbricking, a sound engineer experimentally unscrewed the diaphragm from an early telephone and rubber-banded it under Swarb’s violin strings, feeding the output into an amp with the aid of crocodile clips. The rest is musical history. That same year Fairport recorded Liege and Lief, which has consistently been voted the most influential folk album of all time.

For the first ten years of its existence, however, the band’s line-up was rarely stable, changing with such bewildering frequency that the music press labelled them “Fairport Confusion”. Fairport also had a habit of touring to promote albums actually laid down by the previous iteration of the band.

Since reforming in the mid-Eighties the line-up has tended to be more settled. Until drummer Gerry Conway retired last year (sadly he passed away in March) the most recent line-up had been together for 25 years, comprising Gerry, Nicol, Pegg, ex Soft Machine violinist Ric Sanders, and multi-instrumentalist songwriter Chris Leslie.

Gerry has been replaced by Dave Mattacks, who has been with the band off and on for much of the past 55 years, flying in from the USA, where he now lives, to accompany the band on its big gigs, including Cropredy this year.

So what is the secret to the band’s longevity? Founding bassist Ashley ‘Tyger’ Hutchings, who went on to found Steeleye Span and the Albion Band, says: “It’s their musicianship and the fact that they are still coming up with new material and recording it, constantly refreshing the back catalogue. They are all supremely good at what they do.” 

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