Unhalfbricking by Fairport Convention

Unhalfbricking, Fairport Convention's third album, came out on Island in July 1969, and you can hear the group turning its back on its American folk-rock models and wading into the British tradition. Joe Boyd and Simon Nicol produced it at Sound Techniques and Olympic, with Sandy Denny now the voice at the center, Richard Thompson and Nicol on guitars, Ashley Hutchings on bass and Martin Lamble on drums.

The centerpiece is "A Sailor's Life", a rolling traditional ballad where Dave Swarbrick's fiddle saws against a rock beat, the first time anyone had married an old British song to a rock rhythm section like that. Denny's "Who Knows Where the Time Goes?" became her signature song, a batch of Dylan songs he hadn't yet released filled out the set, and a French-language take on Dylan's "If You Gotta Go, Go Now", retitled "Si Tu Dois Partir", gave the band its only top 40 single. Just ahead of the release, Lamble died in a crash on the M1, and nothing about Fairport was the same afterwards.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.