It’s the 1950’s.
Encouraged by his parents, young David, a Blitz-born
baby, has spent time learning the fiddle and has
even discovered folk music. But like most teens
of the time, he is ensnared by skiffle and the guitar
becomes his instrument of choice. How different
things would have been had he stuck with that choice.
The folk scene, however, was already drawing his
attention away from the flash in the pan that was
skiffle. Swarb’s interest extended well beyond
players in clubs and sometimes came from unexpected
sources….
At 16, he was a printer’s
apprentice. To this day, he recalls one job –
“I had to print a section of a book with a
particular slow Strathspey in it. The tune was Dean
Borough of Edinburgh. I did forty-seven and a half
thousand of them. I got to learn it.”
Another folk tune which
figured large in Swarb’s young life was Twanky
Dillo. He recorded it for a BBC TV schools series,
which featured music from the British Isles played
in a range of styles. In the end, Swarb’s
performance became the theme music for the entire
series. This was his first taste of fame and recognition.
He was still playing guitar at the time and it was
as a guitarist that he approached Beryl Marriott
with a view to playing with her Ceilidh Band. She
pointed out that “after the skiffle boom,
so-so guitarists were two a penny, but decent fiddle
players were hard to find.” Swarb swapped
back to the instrument we now associate with him.
Kate Graham was the regular
fiddle player with Beryl’s band. The two ladies
made ideal mentors. Kate encouraged Swarb to develop
technique and repertoire. Beryl, who has always
believed “music should make people dance with
a spring in their step”, was oblivious to
accusations of “jazzing up Playford”
and this clearly had a profound influence on Swarb’s
style. “Some have described my attitude as
Cavalier; but they had much more fun than the Roundheads
anyway.”
This is where that strange
saga of career-defining coincidences begins. Kate
Graham was one of the house musicians involved in
creating The Radio Ballads. When she moved to America,
Swarb naturally stepped into her shoes. Not only
did this place his playing before a much larger
national audience, it also led to his first released
recording – playing on the soundtrack album
to a film made for The Boston Whaling Museum.
The creative crucible of The
Radio Ballads also ensured Swarb ended up working
with the best Revival and Source singers from the
50’s. The reputation he established here made
him first choice as session folk fiddler. It was
as a session player that he went on to form two
crucial musical partnerships: the first of these
would come when he guested on Martin Carthy’s
debut solo album; the second took the form of working
with (horror of horrors) a rock group. But another
vital connection was to be made before both these.
He worked with Ian Campbell
on The Radio Ballads and the two were active in
the Birmingham folk scene of the very early sixties.
But it was neither of those obvious routes which
led to their first meeting, says Ian – “It
was late ’59 when we were invited to perform
in a concert organised by Ewan MacColl at the St
Pancras Hall. Boarding the London train we commandeered
a compartment, uncased our instruments and started
to rehearse our programme. This was usually an effective
discouragement to other passengers, but on this
occasion, after our first number the door slid open
to admit a teenager with an embarrassed half-smile
and a fiddle case. “Is this a private session,
or can anybody join in?” he asked.
It turned out (coincidences
again) that they were headed for the same concert
and plans for Swarb to join The Ian Campbell Folk
Group for one number rapidly expanded when the person
he was due to play with had a personal disagreement
with Swarb.
He eventually joined the group
in 1962 and through a series of albums, gigs and
TV appearances rapidly consolidated his reputation
as both accompanist and lead player. Whereas previously
UK folk had been definably instrumental (where virtuosity
was acceptable) or vocal (where instruments had
a subordinate and supporting role – and there
were those who claimed they had no rightful place
at all), Swarb now led the field in integrating
the two strands. Listening today to the Campbell’s
early albums, one can hear the development of arrangements
rather than mere performances. Folk songs are suddenly
allowed to have instrumental breaks, just like jazz
and rhythm and blues and (dare one suggest) pop
music.
That link with pop is important.
This was folk’s first crossover period. Folk
was deemed popular enough to merit its own TV series,
including Hullabaloo where Swarb first became friends
with Martin Carthy. Folksingers were regular guests
on TV shows – various programmes fronted by
David Frost, Tonight with Cliff Mitchelmore, Blue
Peter and even Ready Steady Go. This was the time
of the Protest Boom and Bob (“What is a folk
singer?”) Dylan. The Campbells even had a
minor hit and became the first UK act to chart with
a Dylan song when they recorded The Times They
Are A-Changing, the start of a life-long love
affair with Dylan’s songs for Swarb.
This is not the place to discuss
Swarb’s romantic life, but in February 1965,
he quit the Campbells with the intention of going
to Denmark to get married and work. He had found
a wife but no job at that point. Nor was he aware
of the immigration restrictions. He got as far as
the Hook of Holland. Disappointed, frustrated and
penniless, he was put on the next boat back to Blighty.
Yet again, though, coincidence
dealt Swarb a winning hand. He had spent the night
before his ill-fated Danish expedition at Martin
Carthy’s house and Martin saw Swarb off at
the station next morning. He was not expecting a
rather sorry figure to turn up two days later, all
plans awry and thwarted.
As it happened, Martin was
due to set off on a tour of Northern folk clubs.
He asked whether Swarb would like to join him, offering
to split the fee. At the time Martin’s standard
club fee was £12, but most clubs passed the
hat and on more than one occasion their take home
pay more than doubled that amount. This gave Swarb
ideas: “What struck me was here I was tagging
along for what I could get and earning more than
I ever had with The Campbells”.
Out of this ad hoc arrangement
grew what is still regarded as the definitive folk
duo. No pair of musicians working together in the
context of British folk can avoid their influence:
one can trace a line through The Increds, The Dransfields,
Show of Hands and countless others – not to
mention Swarick and Nicol…and Hulett…and
Dempsey…and Carthy (again, in the 1990’s)
Magnificent as they are, the
early Carthy/Swarbrick albums are a pale shadow
of their on-stage brilliance (finally made available
on Both Ears And The Tail). Martin’s
albums suggest they were essentially a vocal duo
with fiddle accompaniment. Yet much of their live
set focused on instrumentals: some of these became
extended jams seguing as many as seven or eight
tunes over anything up to a dozen minutes. The effect
was breathtaking at the time (and remains so): it
also laid groundwork for the future. Even Swarb’s
debut album, Rags Reels and Airs,
fails to suggest just how inspired they were as
a duo. They were also intuitive players, often developing
arrangements on the hoof, on stage (an influence
many lesser musicians could well do without!)
The definitive set of Carthy
/ Swarbrick recordings is yet to be compiled (sly
hint to Tony Engle), but when it is, it will be
one of the truly essential folk albums.
Because they were so inventive
and always keen to push the envelope…because
they had such extensive repertoire which they always
sought to expand….because they were simply
the best of the best from a thriving folk scene….Carthy
/ Swarbrick could have continued for years….but
three years on from creating a permanent duo, coincidence
dealt Swarb a new hand (and after a couple of cards
had been changed he found himself holding a Full
House).
It was a phonecall from Joe Boyd (who produced Rags
Reels and Airs) that invited Swarb to add fiddle
to a couple of tracks by an underground band on
the Island label. Swarb had been Fairport’s
first choice when the notion of bringing in a session
player was discussed – never thinking he would
actually say yes.
The session ended up creating
A Sailor’s Life, the cornerstone
of a new music genre, Folk Rock. Swarb, who had
been less than enthusiastic about playing with a
rock group and whose fiddle had been electrified
by the use of a jerry-rigged telephone mouthpiece,
arrived back to tell Martin that he had been playing
with a guitarist with whom he would be happy to
play for the rest of his life. Richard Thompson
and the rest of Fairport had invited Swarb to join
he band in the pub after the session.
Martin, typically self-sacrificing,
encouraged Swarb to take the big step. Ironically,
fate again on Swarb’s side, since Swarb insisted
that current commitments for the duo be completed.
As result, he was not a passenger in Fairport’s
van on the fateful night of the crash which killed
Martin Lamble and seriously injured the rest of
the band. Swarb and Martin played at two of the
benefit gigs for Fairport – and these became
almost their last live performances together for
nearly two decades.
The creation of Liege
and Lief is material enough for a book
in itself, as Ashley Hutchings has pointed out.
But to snapshot a moment from those heady days at
Farley Chamberlayne when folk rock was being forged,
one can see how kind fortune was favouring our featured
fiddler.
One of Fairport’s ideas
was to take old songs, and rework them so they appealed
to a modern audience. In some cases this involved
taking the tune of an existing ballad and making
a whole new set of words to suit it. Swarb was working
on a new lyric for Bonnie House Of Airlie
when Swarb suggested he had composed a perfect tune
for those words. Thus Crazy Man Michael,
the first Swarbrick/ Thompson compositon, was born.
Their songwriting partnership was shortlived and
produced only a handful of songs, but they remain
the most remarkable to emerge from folk rock.
That song, with its roots
in Ovid’s Metamorphoses and
The Shooting Of His Dear, is a suitable
foothold in as shape-shifting a band as Fairport
Convention. But if one charts every change that
the band went through over the next decade one can
see exactly how each transformation pushed Swarb
into new dimensions.
Ashley Hutchings quit and
it was Swarb who brought in Dave Pegg, the man who
had in a sense taken his place in The Campbells
(who shrewdly realised a different fiddler would
hardly have been a substitute for Swarb).
Sandy Denny quit and it was
Swarb who suddenly found himself called upon to
become a singer. This was due less to vocal abilities
than the toss of a coin and the fact he knew more
of the words than anyone else. He became one of
folk rock’s defining voices.
Richard Thompson left and
it was Swarb who found himself with all the lead
instrument duties and the task of writing songs.
It was a rapid graduation from tunesmith to fully-fledged
songwriter whose work includes the likes of Rosie,
White Dress and much of Babbacombe Lee.
The seventies were a period
of great ups and downs for the good ship Fairport
in which only Swarb and Dave Pegg stayed the whole
course. During that time, though, Swarb led a double
life – on the one hand the increasingly progressive
and effects-enhanced fiddler in the world’s
leading electric folk band; on the other, a back
to the roots traditional player joining Ceilidhs
with Beryl Marriott, touring Scotland with Savourna
Stevenson and creating “Fairport unplugged”
aka The Three Desperate Mortgages.
In this time he created six
solo albums. Attempts to make a Swarb solo album
for Island tended to get sidetracked and ended up
as Rosie and Gottle O’Geer.
So he turned to Transatlantic, recorded his solo
albums in pairs, and was therefore able to make
each an overview of a range of styles and musical
configurations. Rags Reels and Airs
was effectively a solo tour de force, demonstrating
the range of Swarb’s technique and repertoire:
it became a reference work for every aspiring fiddler,
as both Ric Sanders and Chris Leslie affirm from
their own experience.
Although Swarb’s six
albums were nominally solo, they reflected most
aspects of his career to date. Here were his original
tunes alongside traditional tunes from the whole
of the United Kingdom and beyond: here were solitary
airs and medleys of tunes. Here were tracks with
Beryl Marriott’s Ceilidh Band, tracks with
Martin Carthy, tracks with Savourna Stevenson, tracks
with Swarb playing totally solo and tracks with
various line-ups of Fairport Convention from the
five piece Full House version to the four piece
which was to be their “final” line up.
The six albums, unlike the two planned but sidelined
albums for Island, contained only one song over
their twelve sides – Swarb’s version
of Sandy’s It Suits Me Well.
Hearing problems meant that
in 1980 Swarb had to call it a day so far as rock
music was concerned. He continued to play with Fairport
at the annual Cropredy reunions and when a new version
of the band emerged he would occasionally join them
on tour, but he now turned his hand and his voice
to totally solo work, playing folk clubs and arts
centres with a set which combined tunes and songs.
Most of his Fairport repertoire was set aside and
instead he returned to songs he had played on sessions
with Bert Lloyd and instrumentals from his solo
albums.
He also began working in a
duo with Simon Nicol. There was also an occasional
“and friends” line up with the Marriotts,
Simon, Dave Pegg and Timi Donald. However, a move
to Smiddyburn in Aberdeenshire further severed his
links with his partners for the last decade in terms
of a regular working unit. Instead, Swarb set about
creating a band of which he had dreamed –
a fiddle-based acoustic four-piece. Whippersnapper
consisted of Swarb, two ex-members of Dando Shaft
(Martin Jenkins and Kevin Dempsey) and Chris Leslie,
whom Swarb knew mainly through his work with Beryl
Marriott.
Their set was a varied mix.
The band included three songwriters; three members
of the band had extensive repertoires of traditional
song; instrumentally they played everything from
jazz to classical, from folk to acoustic rock. They
had celebrity status instantly and proved a major
success at the 1984 Cambridge Folk Festival. They
even achieved a curious first by making their first
release a video rather than an LP.
Whippersnapper saw Swarb through
to the end of the nineties. He left the band but
continued to work in a duo with Kevin Dempsey: the
two continue to perform together regularly but have
never released an album as a duo. He also teamed
up once more with martin Carthy. Their two albums
and extensive live work in the early nineties showed
how far they had developed in their time apart.
Much of their repertoire was material they had played
in the late 60’s but it was now tackled in
a much freer and experimental style: for example,
Byker Hill became the vehicle for extensive instrumental
improvisation.
The mid-nineties saw what
at first seemed a surprising decision for someone
so connected to his English roots. Swarb’s
move to New South Wales was prompted in part by
his health (the eucalyptus infused atmosphere being
particularly salubrious) and partly by friendships
with people who had specific Australian connections
(Bert Lloyd, Trevor Lucas and Peter Bellamy). Again,
Swarb maintained a multi-stranded career. He played
much anticipated solo gigs; he teamed up with fellow
ex-pat Alistair Hulett; he worked with Eureka, one
of many bands from the Australian folk-rock scene
which he had inspired as a member of Fairport. Alistair
recalls that his teaming up with Swarb was another
of those serendipitous coincidences: “I was
thinking of calling up Dave Swarbrick to ask whether
he would be prepared to play on [my next album].
Then I had second thoughts – he might feel
awkward about saying no. So I just left it. I more
or less put the idea out of my mind.
Then just a few days later
I got a phone call from a good friend in South Australia.
Swarb had been on tour and had stayed at his house
after the show in Adelaide. Rob, my friend, put
on my first album. When it finished, Swarb made
reference to a particular song and said ‘I’d
like to work with that guy’. Rob rang me up
and as you can imagine I was on the phone within
half an hour.”
With failing health, Swarb
returned to the UK at the end of 90’s. Martin
Carthy delights in telling the tale of how, on his
first day back, having avoided all the poisonous
wildlife that Australia could throw at him (which
is quite a lot), he put his foot in his slipper
and was promptly stung by a wasp.
Possibly the most celebrated
Swarb moment from the turn of the century was his
premature obituary published in The Daily Telegraph.
Swarb took it in typically good part, making light
of the blunder (“It isn’t the first
time I died in Coventry”) and even selling
signed copies of his obit at gigs.
Despite intensive care and
major surgery, he still harbours hopes of one day
both singing and playing on stage: “I live
in the hopes that I may get my voice back. It could
happen. I was talking to Noel Murphy the other day:
he had his vocal chords cut and it was five years
before he got his voice back. Now I had my vocal
chords cut twice, with twelve months separation
between. I had a tracheotomy in 1999 and another
one in 2000. Exactly the same operation –
both times – the chords slashed. So that’s
going to take longer to heal; even so it should
take me to 2005 before my voice would be back.”
He continues to work regularly with Martin, Simon,
Kevin and Alistair. Just last year he formed a new
band Orchard with Kevin, Beryl and Martin Allcock.
Atrax Records was set up in
1999 by Alex Lyons to provide a label to release
and make available Swarb’s music. The name,
which Swarb also uses for his studio, is part of
the Latin term for the Sydney Funnel Web Spider
– ask Swarb: he can talk to you for hours
about it.
New technology has meant that Swarb could develop
a self-contained recording studio in his Coventry
home. Here he is able to work on his extensive archive
recordings and also make new recordings such as
tracks for the latest Julie Felix album and a new
album of his own original compositions.
It’s a long and involved
route from Twanky Dillo to the forthcoming
Swarbrick plays Swarbrick. There
can be few performers who have such quite so many
bases in the worlds of both folk and rock as Swarb.
There are probably even fewer whose influence has
been so extensive.
