The Strange Brew - artist stories behind the greatest music ever recorded
Oct 16, 2026 · 36 min · 12 segments
Fairport Convention made a £5 profit from their first gig, at St Michael’s Church Hall in Golders Green on 27 May 1967. About 30 or 40 people turned up, and the band had printed the tickets and hired…
Simon NicolGuest
Jason BarnardHost
The, the band primarily has two formats, and what I think of as the main format is the one that's going out in October, which is the four-piece.
Jerry Conway, our long-term drummer, retired a- after the festival in 2022 with failing health, and it was him for, time for him to step away and stop touring.
And since then we've been continuing as a four-piece, occasionally bringing in Dave Mattacks.
Dave lives in America and has done since last century, in fact, [laughs] getting on for 30 years.
And he's very happy to come over and enlarge our musical arsenal for Cropredy and for the, what I call the winter tour, the tour where we go around slightly larger venues than we're playing on this October tour.
There's a considerable degree of overlap between the two repertoires, but when you play a, in a seated acoustic format as opposed to a electric guitars and full drum kit enhanced by keyboard situation, then you obviously get two very different interpretations of the repertoire.
So it keeps it very fresh for us, and that's what I particularly look forward to.
'Cause the interesting thing about the autumn tour is that sometimes you play village halls and social clubs and things like that-
They're smaller stages in general, and a, a more intimate atmosphere is created.
By the fact that we're shoulder to shoulder on chairs, there's more room for banter.
I feel very privileged that we've got this opportunity to present the music to people who love the band and have loved the band for such a long time, in some cases, and just be ourselves.
The, uh, 60th anniversary show's May 2027, so they're where Dave comes over from the States and it's the full band show?
Yeah, he'll be over for that, and we're gonna recognize the fact it's the 60th anniversary of the band's first gig as Fairport Convention, 27th of May, when we did our first gig under that name in St. Michael's Church Hall in Golders Green.
But we thought, "No, we'll go somewhere a bit bigger than that [laughs] this time." So we're going back to our regular London haunt, which is the wonderful Union Chapel, and prior to that we've got gigs in Birmingham, Manchester, and Perth up in beautiful Scotland to sort of prepare for that and to spread the Fairport glory.
The, the band primarily has two formats, and what I think of as the main format is the one that's going out in October, which is the four-piece.
Jerry Conway, our long-term drummer, retired a- after the festival in 2022 with failing health, and it was him for, time for him to step away and stop touring.
And since then we've been continuing as a four-piece, occasionally bringing in Dave Mattacks.
Dave lives in America and has done since last century, in fact, [laughs] getting on for 30 years.
And he's very happy to come over and enlarge our musical arsenal for Cropredy and for the, what I call the winter tour, the tour where we go around slightly larger venues than we're playing on this October tour.
There's a considerable degree of overlap between the two repertoires, but when you play a, in a seated acoustic format as opposed to a electric guitars and full drum kit enhanced by keyboard situation, then you obviously get two very different interpretations of the repertoire.
So it keeps it very fresh for us, and that's what I particularly look forward to.
'Cause the interesting thing about the autumn tour is that sometimes you play village halls and social clubs and things like that-
They're smaller stages in general, and a, a more intimate atmosphere is created.
By the fact that we're shoulder to shoulder on chairs, there's more room for banter.
I feel very privileged that we've got this opportunity to present the music to people who love the band and have loved the band for such a long time, in some cases, and just be ourselves.
The, uh, 60th anniversary show's May 2027, so they're where Dave comes over from the States and it's the full band show?
Yeah, he'll be over for that, and we're gonna recognize the fact it's the 60th anniversary of the band's first gig as Fairport Convention, 27th of May, when we did our first gig under that name in St. Michael's Church Hall in Golders Green.
But we thought, "No, we'll go somewhere a bit bigger than that [laughs] this time." So we're going back to our regular London haunt, which is the wonderful Union Chapel, and prior to that we've got gigs in Birmingham, Manchester, and Perth up in beautiful Scotland to sort of prepare for that and to spread the Fairport glory.
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