From: dsc@sys.uea.ac.uk (Dave Cartwright)
Newsgroups: rec.music.folk
Subject: Re: Cropredy
Date: 19 Aug 92 10:42:39 GMT
Followup-To: rec.music.folk
Organization: SYS, UEA, Norwich, UK

In article <fv0nbg25@cck.coventry.ac.uk>, cmg996@cck.coventry.ac.uk
(Martin-Martin Nike) wrote: (killing two birds with one stone here)

> >Saturday night, but this time they did an extra set for the Friday, with
> >a rather larger amount of work from the solo albums. Chris Leslie of
> >Whippersnapper substituted for Ric Sanders, who put in some appearances
> >playing tambourine and (one-handed) piano. 

	... and did loads of the introductory stuff, you know, the burble between
 songs, introducing people, etc.

	Standard Sanders Mega-Quotation (introducing Chris) :

			"... the man who does almost all of my stunts for me, except falling
                through windows"

>                                             Leslie was a good choice: in
> >my opinion he's a far better fiddler than Sanders, whose style I
> >increasingly find unimaginative. There were two guests for the evening:
> >Julianne Regan, and then near the end Robert Plant. Apparently, he's
> >often at Cropredy, but usually won't come up on stage. His voice is as
> >sensual and electrifying as ever, and he has tremendous presence. You
> >could almost hear the crowd swoon as he came on.
> Well, I agree with you about the Wright Brothers, they were quite boring.
> But I find the new fiddle player quite boring and pretty dull. I much
> prefer Ric Sanders.

	Each to their own; in some ways I far prefer Swarb, and his presence was
 absolutely suitable for the older stuff; after all, he was there when they
 first did a lot of it, and it would sound odd having Ric or Chris's 
 interpretation attached to it. After all, can you imagine the fiddle parts
 in Rosie being plyed by any other than Swarb ? To me, Ric is the "mad
 violinist" type, and Chris seems to have this attitude but with a certain
 amount of restraint ... he concentrates on playing the fiddle rather than
 "leaping pianos and waving [his] legs" [from Hungarian Rhapsody, on
'Rosie'"

 The bottom line is they're all bloddy good fiddlers in their own right,
 they just go about it in different ways.

> I also disagree with you about Robert Plant. His voice was
> bloody awful. The first song, an accoustic one, was so bad that
> the two people who I went with went back to the car! I stayed, and
> totally enjoyed the rest of his set, but his voice is shot on 
> drugs, booze and anything else that he's taken. 

 The problem with Robert Plant was that not everyone is into that sort of
 music, and hence may people knew who he was [who doesn't ??] but didn't
 know the ditties he sang. I am part of this camp, but found it a
refreshing
 change to see Fairport playing in "someone else's band" in effect [see
 below about Julianne]. Okay, his voice isn't exactly brilliant but nor is
 Peggy's or Maart's but people pay for them in large amounts so there's got
 to be something good about them. In Robert's case it's largely image and
 reputation ... people don't mind a slightly rusty performance cos they're
 seeing their idol and all that sort of stuff.

> Juliane Regan was brilliant, absolutely brilliant.

 ... and gorgeous, absolutely gorgeous ...

 Another nice surprise was Julianne doing some of her own (okay, Tim
 Bricheno's) songs, namely "Flowers ..." and "More Than the Blues". Again,
it
 put Fairport in a different light. I was somehow disappointed that she
didn't
 do any Sandy songs other than "Who Knows ...", as her voice would, I
think,
 suit something like "Farewell, Farewell" or "The Deserter". That said,
Vicki
 did a good job on the latter. But hopefully soon, from what I've heard,
Jules
 may be recording a reasonable amount of stuff with Fairport. Going back to
 the Robert Plant argument though - if you don't know All About Eve, you
 probably didn't enjoy the Julianne bits (except that she's so gorgeous you

 could stand and drool in time with the music ... :-)

> >Swarbrick, and on into the four hour Fairport set. It was roughly
> >chronological, with the line-up changing as they brought on their
> >guests: Jerry Donahue, Swarb, Richard Thompson, Vicki Clayton, and many
> >more. There was a lot of good stuff in this, such as Swarb and Thompson
> >together, but somehow the set was a disappointment. In past Cropredys,
> >I've found the Saturday night to be just wonderful - by the end there's
> >that intense and elusive feeling of the crowd being a single entity.
> >This year, it didn't quite seem to work, and I'm not sure why. The
> >chronological ordering meant that they couldn't warm the crowd up and
> >then floor them with one of the big set pieces as they usually do.
> >Somehow the whole thing just didn't cohere.

 Okay, but how can it cohere ? You just try listening to the albums in the
 same order ... it doesn't work, cos there are so many changes of
songwriter
 and line-up. I agree that the format you suggest is a very good way of 
 getting people going, and I personally would prefer that as it makes the
 atmosphere absolutely electric. But I spose they thought they'd have a 
 change on the 25th anniversary ...

> I thought the whole thing DID cohere. It was excellent to see
> them try to re-create the old line-ups. Most of the people in
> the crowd around me were commenting on how wonderful it was
> all the way through the set.

	... so let's face it - we had original lineups as far as possible, we had
 some songs that don't usually get sung, and we had the entire history of
 Fairport in one four-hour set. What more can one ask for ? Okay, so people
 tend to like different bits of the FC era (I'm into Liege, etc and then I
 do quite a leap to the recentish stuff) and hence there was the risk of
 being bored silly for a while as the bits that you didn't like all
happened
 in succession. But at least you then got a bloody great chunk of the bits
 you thought were brilliant. 

> >So I came away from Cropredy this year with a bit of a feeling of "So
> >what?" It was good, but it didn't leave me feeling "wow"ed and changed
> >into a different person, as last year's Cropredy did. Of course it was
> >right to celebrate 25 years of the band, but I'm not sure this was the
> >way to do it.

 It's very difficult trying to think of some novel way to celebrate; okay,
 so this one wasn't quite as electric as many of us would like, but it was
 novel and interesting.

> I came away thinking "If I don't go to another concert again I don't
> care".

 I came home thinking "My car is covered in mud". My housemate came home
 thinking "My motorbike and leather jacket are covered in mud". A friend
 who followed me home did so thinking "Is there a car under all this mud ?"

> It was amazing.

	Yes it was ... I completely covered the drive in gunge when I jet-washed
 the wheel-arches :-)

	Dave

 Dave Cartwright, Network Admin,   | dsc@uk.ac.uea.sys or dsc@sys.uea.ac.uk
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       Disclaimer : My views are my own. Not UEA's, or anyones. So there.
Newsgroups: rec.music.folk