Fairport Connects With the Simple Folk

On screen and on stage, the English have entertained us for years with some quickly recognizable character types: the sniffy, upper-crust toff; the colorful cockney; the dutiful military man with the stiff upper lip.

Friday night at the Coach House, Fairport Convention--the group that more or less invented British folk-rock nearly 30 years ago--jumped delightfully into one of the most venerable character types of all: the band of merry men.

Jokes verbal, visual and musical flew frequently throughout Fairport’s 100-minute concert, hitting their marks so surely that one would have to have been the Sheriff of Nottingham to not have one’s funny bone set a-quiver.

Like Robin Hood’s merry band, this Fairport--a drummerless, four-man acoustic version of what usually is a five-piece rock group--made sport with its verbal byplay but did serious business with its hands. If it had been handling bows and arrows instead of guitars and fiddles, every shot would have been a bull’s-eye.

The leading instrumental marksmen were Ric Sanders, whose violin playing was nightingale sweet or powerfully biting as the richly varied repertoire required, and Maartin Allcock, whose sallies on guitar and bouzar (an eight-stringed cross between a bouzouki and a guitar) were nimble, emphatic, economical and melodically charged. Sanders’ facial mugging and wild body English while sawing away were extroverted counterparts to his bandmates’ dryer, subtler contributions to the ensemble humor.

Singer Simon Nicol’s rhythm guitar and Dave Pegg’s bass gave the band a supple rhythmic foundation. Missing was Dave Mattacks, the ace drummer who remains in the band in its electric incarnations, but currently is on tour with Fairport’s illustrious alumnus, Richard Thompson.

Fairport is famous for having electrified British folk music, but the acoustic approach (also taken on the band’s new album, “Old, New, Borrowed, Blue”) was a satisfying departure. The exciting clangor of chiming, modal electric guitars, bringing hot 20th century voltage to fierce 17th century folk songs (and more recent facsimiles thereof), wasn’t a part of this show, but the no-drums approach put the focus on lyrics, melodies and vocal harmonies that are worth focusing on.

While Fairport’s great songwriting tradition ended in the early ‘70s with the departure of Thompson and the late Sandy Denny (one of the best and most influential folk-rock singers of all time, as Denny wannabe Natalie Merchant would attest), the band has, from its beginnings, also been great at interpreting all kinds of outside material from traditional British folk songs to Bob Dylan and ‘50s rock oldies.

The current Fairport is mainly a band devoted to interpretation, with a knack, in recent years, for featuring less-heralded but worthy contemporary folk songwriters. This show included good material from Ralph McTell, Steve Tilston, Jon Richards and others that stood well alongside a handful of nuggets from the Thompson days.

Monotony was never a threat in a program that ranged from gorgeous ballad lyricism (the seafaring song “Lallah Roohk” and an instrumental, “Portmeirion,” composed by Sanders, were two good examples among many) to narrative songs both reverently romantic (McTell’s “The Hiring Fair,” in which boy gets girl in rural olde England) and amiably fatalistic (Tilston’s “Slipjigs and Reels,” in which English boy sails to America, finds fun and fortune in the Old West but winds up vulture feed).

Some songs were serious (the fine, plaintive, anti-war “The Deserter”), and some were larks (the jaunty, country-style “Walk Awhile”).

This being British folk, there had to be corpses. The night’s body count was at least four, with swords through a lady’s heart the mode of dispatch common to two of them--Thompson’s brooding “Crazy Man Michael,” wherein the stabber is loving but delusional, and the fiery traditional “Matty Groves” in which the haughty but cuckolded Lord Arnold consummates his rage with a cruel thrust.

The jokes included absurdly ceremonious, Monty Pythonesque wielding of guitar picks by Nicol and Allcock in a sort of folkie changing of the guard, and big visual buildups to instrumental solos that consisted of a single note (or, in one Nicol air-guitar flourish, none at all). Having known tragedy--the death of original drummer Martin Lamble in a van wreck in 1969, and Denny’s fatal fall down stairs in 1978--Fairport knows the value of a good laugh.

Noting early on that the band would be sitting for portions of its acoustic show, Sanders said that Fairport would use “acoustic chairs” for the occasion. “They’re the best kind to have, acoustic chairs,” he mused. “Consider the alternative.”

While the electric Fairport deserves a chair in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame for what it accomplished in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s, this latter-day, acoustic Fairport is something to cheer about too.

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Common Ground, a folk-inflected rock band from Riverside and Orange County, deserves cheers just for carrying on after the death of Cheryl Cloud, its talented, sweet-voiced singer-songwriter. The band--which includes her husband, guitarist Mark Cloud--didn’t allude to the loss in its 35-minute set, which focused on material from a new album that she wrote before dying of cancer last year.

Mike Tunstall, who has stepped forward as lead singer, has a strong, sometimes Marty Balin-esque voice. But his delivery was too plain and stolid, lacking the twists and inflections of phrasing and timbre that add emotional depth. The material was uneven, and the rhythm section was sometimes blocky. But “Wings of Silver,” the new album’s title track, was a sweet, soaring plaint, and the blues-rock number “I Know” showed a good, gritty side.

Opener Tom Long, a high-caliber veteran of the Orange County acoustic music scene, was impressive in his half-hour set of guitar instrumentals. He played with precision and a subtle touch that built tension and lyricism into pieces that were mainly quiet and contemplative. Meaningful inwardness--which Long consistently achieved, notably in the expressive original “Battersea Park”--was a strength.

But it would have helped for him to have balanced it against some moments of simpler, more accessible and extroverted playing. His version of Skip James’ blues song “I’m So Glad” reflected that same mulling temperament at a point when the set could have used a touch of the freedom and earthy proclaiming of the blues.