Pop Music Reviews : Folk-Rocking Fairport: Humorous Hucksters

Among the conclusions drawn from Fairport Convention’s show Monday at the Roxy: You can’t keep a good band down.

During its 20-year history, the seminal English folk-rock group has experienced a potentially crippling number of lineup changes and limited commercial success.

Maybe now they want to challenge the big boys on the charts: In a two-hour Roxy show, the quintet took every opportunity to plug its current release, “Red and Gold,” executing a job of record promotion that in the hands of a less charming or humorous outfit would have seemed like shameless hucksterism.

Of course, it helped that the selections they played from that album were uniformly strong, whether they were soaring instrumentals written by the band, or compositions by such United Kingdom folk stalwarts as Ralph McTell, or band arrangements of traditional instrumentals, or songs composed by Fairport members--well, you get the idea.

The group (which also plays the Coach House tonight and Bogart’s on Thursday) also covered considerable ground when not performing (or plugging) the new material, from Simon Nicol’s gentle and gorgeous “The Deserter” to the fiery, foot-stomping, set-closing medley of, as guitarist Martin Allcock put it, “Celtic dance tune-type things.”

Ex-Fairport fret-maestro Richard Thompson--along with another former Fairport guitarist, Jerry Donahue--jumped into the fray for a rip-roaring double encore to cap an exquisite, exhilarating evening.