Web admin note: Long-time
Tull bassist and fan favorite Dave Pegg's first love has always
been his original and current band "Fairport
Convention," one of the most influential and best folk-rock bands
in rock history. "Peggy" just hit 40 years since his Fairport
beginnings and took a few moments to record his thoughts and reflections.
Peggy’s
Conventional Story
Sunday, November 2, 1969, was Dave Pegg’s 22nd birthday.
To celebrate, he took a night off from a seemingly perpetual stream
of gigs with the Ian Campbell Folk Group. Instead he went along
to Mother’s Night Club in Birmingham, a venue he knew from
several years spent playing in rock, blues, jazz and folk bands
on the Birmingham scene. Playing that night, with a band he had
just joined, was the fiddle player who had left The Campbells around
the time Peggy joined. Not only was he keen to see what his former
band-mate was up to, Peggy was also interested to hear what they
band had to offer with their innovative fusion of rock and folk.
For just under an hour, they played a totally new genre that sat
squarely between the two forms of music that Peggy had spent most
of his working life to date playing.
The last time Fairport Convention had played there was on the night
of the fateful road accident which nearly destroyed the band, but
out of which this hugely influential musical experiment had grown.
The songs Peggy heard that night would be released a month later
under the title Liege & Lief. It was the last time that this
band would play all the songs from that album on stage. It was
the first time Peggy had seen them.
By the end of the year, he would have accepted an invitation to
join the band he was watching as their bass player, replacing the
band’s founder member Ashley Hutchings. Ashley decided to
quit, as Sandy Denny had already, within a couple of days of the
Birmingham gig. Peggy’s first rehearsal with Fairport was
on December 7, 1969. He joined the band at the start of the next
month, a life-changing ringing out of the old to mark the new decade.
It was a worthwhile career move: it saw him moving away from acoustic
folk and back into an experimental form of rock music. To celebrate,
egged on by a mischievous ex-band-member and a rather large intake
of intoxicant, he publicly trashed his double bass at his final
Campbells gig by jumping on it on stage. Only when he left the
stage did someone point out that the performance had reached only
the interval and he would somehow have to go back and perform the
second half. That was on December 31, 1969 at the Jug O’Punch,
where the Ian Campbell Folk Group saw in the new decade sharing
the stage with Diz Disley and Harvey Andrews.
--*--
It’s 9.15pm on Friday, August 10, 2007, Dave Pegg has been
celebrating Fairport’s 40th birthday at the annual festival
which he co-created and co-curated for 25 years. Normally, in demand
non-stop on stage or off, this year he can enjoy an hour’s
respite. Although Fairport are on stage for the next hour, his
presence is not required: with the exception of the late Sandy
Denny, the band he is watching is the same one as saw 38 years
earlier, before he ever thought of being a member of Fairport.
For the first time since he first saw them, Fairport are about
to play all the songs from their classic album Liege & Lief – “And
I am the luckiest Fairport of all, because I get to watch them
do it”, he had told me earlier.
Between those two performances of that great album, the one continuous
thread in the Fairport story is Dave Pegg. Friends may come and
friends may go, but Peggy-on-the-bass goes on forever!. Next day
at Cropredy in 2007, I’d join him at a signing session for
the box-set which celebrates his long career in music – from
the proto-rock bands of Brumbeat through countless sessions, The
Ian Campbell Folk Group, The GPs, The Dylan Project, Peggy & PJ
and Jethro Tull. But, despite everything else he has achieved,
Peggy remains, “the bass player with Fairport Convention.” On
January 1, 2010, he celebrates the fortieth anniversary of occupying
the enviable position.
The story begins simply: a journey to a London audition in a car
that steadfastly refused to turn right; a choice between two Fs – The
Foundations or Fairport Convention -, the discovery that two of
Fairport’s key players (founder Ashley Hutchings and lead
vocalist Sandy Denny) had both left since he saw the band, and
then the audition itself. “Peggy’s audition”,
says Richard Thompson, “was accompanied by the sound of collective
jaws dropping.” “We thought Ashley had been impressively
inventive with his folk-rock bass parts”, said Simon Nicol, “Peggy
came along and could not only play them, but played them better.”
Through the seventies, it was Peggy and Dave Swarbrick who held
the band together as line-ups changed around them. Aside from playing
bass and mandolin, Peggy also contributed the occasional vocal
and began writing songs; he remains rightly proud of the tune he
created for Polly On The Shore, for example. “The mandolin
was Swarb’s idea,” says Peggy, “He knew I played
it in The Campbells, so suggested we build it in to Fairport material
like Flatback Capers. When pay day came around, I was paid more
because I was officially a multi-instrumentalist!”
Peggy joined a band which had just invented folk-rock….and
continued to mould and redefine the genre. Through the seventies,
various musical genres rose and fell, as Fairport’s folk
rock resolutely resurrected itself, a veritable John Barleycorn
of music. It rode the tide of prog and glam, disco and glitter,
new wave and New Romantic. Then, as the seventies drew to a close
and the band’s label Island finally ‘had to let them
go’, it became obvious that Fairport should call it a day.
Peggy had already started a small recording studio in Cropredy.
As soon as word got around that Fairport might be breaking up,
Ian Anderson was asking if Peggy would like to join Tull on bass.
Led Zeppelin invited Fairport to end their Farewell Tour by playing
support at Knebworth and then it was back onto home turf to play
what was to be their final gig on August 4, at Cropredy.
That was 1980 and it would have been the end of Fairport but for
Peggy. Instead of holing himself away in the studio, where plenty
of work was already coming in and relying on the sinecure of his
Tull job, he set about selling by mail order the souvenir album
recorded on the final Fairport tour. That was the first release
on Woodworm Records, Fairport’s record label for years to
come. The buyers of the mail-order album and subsequent releases
became the basis of the mailing list by which the first and subsequent
Fairport Annual Reunions and later Cropredy Festivals were sold.
The Festival grew from very small beginnings (literally a local
fete in the manor house garden) to be a major international event
and one of the summer festival season’s “hot tickets”.
Thirty years on, it continues to go from strength to strength.
The planning and vision of the Festival, from what acts to book
to how to expand and develop all centred on the Pegg household,
now decamped to Barford St Michael, where the Peggs’ home
incorporated a company office, state-of –the-art recording
studio and accommodation for any musicians recording there. Eventually,
after a fistful of annual reunions, gradually lengthening Winter
Tours and ‘official bootleg’ releases of live performances,
it was decided that the time had come for Fairport to exist once
more as a full-time entity. Peggy, Simon and DM set about recording
a proper studio album (Gladys’ Leap) from which Dave Swarbrick
chose to exclude himself. “At that point,” explains
Simon, “Peggy became de facto leader of the group: everything
was being organised through his home and all the money to do with
the band was going through the office there. Fairport has to be
very grateful for the careful stewardship of the Peggs who made
it possible for the band not just to continue but to become increasingly
successful in its own terms.”
Before the age when Indy was trendy, Dave Pegg created a cottage
industry for Fairport where almost everything to do with the band
could be handled literally in-house – even recording albums
and the running of a major festival. Just as he had when the band
struggled in the early seventies, Peggy was able to turn to his
address book to find suitable musicians. Ric Sanders had worked
with both Simon and DM; he had attended the Farewell Cropredy and
even written a tune in its honour; but he was actually recruited
because Peggy’s dad knew his dad through work! Peggy knew
Martin Allcock (when he still spelled it like that) because Maart
used to turn up at gigs and offer to help out lugging gear or replacing
strings. Peggy’s social skills are a unique and unusual talent.
As it always had, Fairport evolved and mutated, but seismic shifts
had given way to more subtle changes, a little erosion here, a
new landmass there. Ahead of the fad for working unplugged, Fairport
created an acoustic line up which allowed them to play small venues.
The band became the house band for the expansive French Excalibur
projects – again a Pegg connection through his second home
in Brittany.
Eventually, Chris Leslie joined the band: one can trace another
Pegg-related sequence of events – Peggy recorded Chris and
his brother John at one of Woodworm’s earliest sessions;
they had played together in a number of projects (with Steve Ashley,
Beryl Marriott, and Captain Coco); Chris was called on to step
in when an accident took Ric out of the frame for a while; when
Maart left, Peggy knew who to call.
So influential has his presence been, that fans allocate “Pegg
Numbers” to other musicians, based on the degrees of separation
from performing on stage or on record with him.
--*--
In 2004, for personal reasons, Peggy took some time out from Fairport.
He never actually left the band, but missed part of a US tour and
sat out that year’s Acoustic tour. His absence was felt – one
missed his stage presence and his role as master of camaraderie:
he has often overlooked skills in PR and business negotiation which
are deceptively understated but highly effective.
Never one to waste time, he used his brief sabbatical to form a
hugely admired duo with P J Wright.
So this year, wherever you see Fairport – at a concert in
a large hall, at an acoustic gig in a smaller venue, with 20,000
others at Cropredy – take time to celebrate four decades
in the world’s greatest folk-rock band with the big guy with
the bass guitar.
It was forty years ago today, Sgt Peggy brought his bass to play,
He’s played along in countless styles and he’s guaranteed
to raise a smile
So may I introduce to you, the chap you’ve know for forty
years
Sgt. Peggy and Fairport’s folk-rock band.
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