Apologies for some dropouts on the audio on this show – we think you’ll agree though Sughosh provides a wonderful and touching introduction to the dramatic story of this band. This week on Musical Musings: Five of the Best, Sughosh joins me to make the case for a band who can fairly claim to have invented something: Fairport Convention. They formed in London in 1967 and took their name from the house in Muswell Hill where they rehearsed — a group of English kids besotted with the American West Coast who, within a couple of years, had turned around entirely and started plugging centuries-old English ballads into an electric band. The engine of it was Sandy Denny, one of the great voices this country has produced, alongside a teenage Richard Thompson on guitar. In 1969 alone they released three albums, lost their nineteen-year-old drummer in a motorway crash, and made Liege & Lief, which BBC Radio 2 listeners would later vote the most influential folk album of all time. They officially broke up in 1979, promptly held a reunion, and have been reconvening every August in an Oxfordshire field ever since — the Cropredy festival that wrapped up only last weekend. Sughosh’s five run from 1968 to 1988, and there’s a lovely thread through all of them: every one is, in some way, about people meeting again. He opens with “Meet on the Ledge,” written by Richard Thompson at nineteen and named after a tree branch on Hampstead Heath — not a hit, but now the song Fairport’s audience sings back to them every year. Then Sandy Denny’s “Who Knows Where the Time Goes,” from 1969’s Unhalfbricking, which was somehow only the second song she ever finished writing, and which Judy Collins released before Fairport got round to it. “Matty Groves,” eight glorious minutes of murder ballad from Liege & Lief, is the sound of a band rebuilding itself after catastrophe. “One More Chance” is Sandy’s epic closer to 1975’s Rising for the Moon, the last studio album she made with them — a title a good few fans have read as a plea. And Sughosh finishes with “Red & Gold,” Ralph McTell’s song about the Battle of Cropredy Bridge in 1644, fought in the very fields where the band now hold their festival. This episode carries a little extra history along the way, because with this band the story and the songs are inseparable. Join us and let Sughosh walk you through it. Broadcast 19 August 2026

Songs in this episode:

0:00 NZ Net Radio – Musical Musings: Five of the Best - Fairport Convention
1:04 Fairport Convention – Meet On The Ledge
2:28 NZ Net Radio – Musical Musings: Five of the Best - Fairport Convention
3:32 Fairport Convention – Who Knows Where The Time Goes?
4:52 NZ Net Radio – Musical Musings: Five of the Best - Fairport Convention
5:56 Fairport Convention – Matty Groves
7:22 NZ Net Radio – Musical Musings: Five of the Best - Fairport Convention
8:26 Fairport Convention – One More Chance
9:45 NZ Net Radio – Musical Musings: Five of the Best - Fairport Convention
10:49 Fairport Convention – Red and Gold
12:09 NZ Net Radio – Musical Musings: Five of the Best - Fairport Convention