Fairport Convention - Shuffle and Go '2020

Tracks list

Tracklist
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01. Dont Reveal My Name
02. Cider Rain
03. Good Time for a Fiddle and Bow / The Christmas Eve Reel
04. A Thousand Bars
05. Shufffle and Go
06. Moses Waits
07. Steampunkery
08. Linseed Memories
09. The Year of Fifty Nine
10. The Byfield Steeplechase
11. Moon Dust and Solitude
12. Jolly Springtime
13. Precious Time

Three swift years on from when Fairport’s 50th was celebrated, and
they’re still making consistent music that never falls below the
top-notch bracket, keeping it all fresh with regular touring activity and a
steady flow of new material for stage and subsequently record. A
tried-and-tested modus operandi that works for this most long-established of
Fairport lineups, one that shows no sign of getting stale, instead, an
astonishing, seemingly never-ending capacity for reinvention and reinvigoration.
Shuffle And Go, which must be somewhere around the band’s 30th studio
offering (yeah, I’ve lost count!), is inevitably a further demonstration.
Its brilliant disc package, knowingly designed by Mick Toole, says it all, and
to perfection. The outer cover displays (alongside the essential tracklisting
– which is properly readable, unlike that of so many albums nowadays!)
Mick’s painting (a snappy montage gathering together familiar retro and
heritage-nostalgia elements). In contrast, the inner gatefold opens to reveal a
generous portrait gallery of the five individual band members in poses that can
only be described as happy bunnies, content with their lot, contented without
being complacent, comfortable in their own skins and enjoying every blessed
moment of it!

And so, then, to the moment of (audio) truth – the all-important music
within… Well up to expectations, of course! For with any new Fairport
album, we’ve come to expect something like 50-odd minutes of
high-quality, caring and fun-loving music-making; nifty, natural and wholly
unassumingly brilliant playing (and singing); and a great new bunch of
accessible and relevant songs and instrumentals that will outlast the years yet
doubtless also plant some earworms along the way. But there’s also bound
to be some surprises in the mix, and a “discovery” cover or two. And
all the while, the process – and folk tradition, both ancient and modern
– is treated with due respect, as is the listener.

So far so true for Shuffle And Go, then. Although, as a personal observation
following the pattern set by many of the band’s previous studio albums,
the track sequence may prove a bit of a challenge at first, and not reveal its
logic initially. Here, too, it certainly feels to demand some thought
en-passant. But heigh-ho… The album kicks off with brooding drumbeat
ushering in Don’t Reveal My Name, an edgy, perhaps cryptically ominous
card-sharp-outlaw ballad, the first of five well-contrasted Chris Leslie songs
on the album and a bit of a slow-burner: pretty powerful, if not the most
obvious choice for an album opener. The second track, Cider Rain, switches style
onto easy-mid-tempo jangling summersome folk-pop built around a vision of a
bucolic haven. It’s a composition credited to James Wood, Luc Boisseau
and Philippe Richalley (“members of the band Rosemary & The Brainless
Idiots, who live in Nantes in Brittany”, to quote Peggy’s liner
note). Well, I guess I’m none the wiser, except that it’s an
attractive little number that earns its keep companionably enough.

What most listeners would term “the real traditional Fairport”
breezes in at track 3 with Good Time For A Fiddle And Bow, a bouncing reel-time
Chris Leslie number inspired by the life of the great Donegal fiddler John
Doherty, featuring (of course) great little fiddle solos, suitably infectious
rhythms and handclaps and more than a little of a John Gaudie feel; it’s
generously rounded off by a sprightly jaunt through Tommy Coen’s
Christmas Eve Reel. Then Simon takes centre stage for the second of the
album’s covers – and the first of two by Rob Beattie. A Thousand
Bars is a nicely observed reflective commentary on changing society and mutual
tolerance, a bit of a lament and a bit of an anthem set up with a suitably
catchy “list” chorus (think Little Johnny England, Merry Hell, John
Richards); I suspect this one’s destined to become something of a
favourite.

 

Then it’s down to rockin’ the joint with Shuffle & Go itself, on
which Mr Leslie dons his quiff and aftershave for an authentic
’50s-reeking reminiscence, a delectable summertime-blues
’n’ morris conflagration from the same class in school as the
Tyger Hutchings Beat Combo. Tremendous retro fun, and brilliantly dispatched in
the regulation 3 minutes! Ringing the contrast once again, and back to the
skilled songwriting of Rob Beattie, With its gently lilting kalimba rhythms,
Moses Waits takes Rob’s community observation into a more personal realm
but, with a more widely embracing outlook, transposes the story to Kenya,
invoking that country’s ambiguous practices and society as portrayed by
the watchful Moses himself. Back to instrumental high-jinks then for the first
of the disc’s two Ric Sanders compositions, the evocatively-titled
Steampunkery – a cautiously turbocharged slice of dextrous jollity
under-riffed by the Peggy Bass that charges in like Hank Marvin then soon
develops a frenetic mandolin-led double-time swing and a fast shuffle to the
finishing line.

The chug-along uke-led Linseed Memories, which constitutes the next interlude,
chummily reprises a James Wood song that graced Peggy & PJ (Wright)’s duo
album Galileo’s Apology back in 2006. It’s pleasingly
“customised” by some judicious double-tracking, but overall it
doesn’t quite convince me it needed another “innings” here in
the context of this album. No matter, for it’s soon over, and Chris
Leslie’s cheery opus The Year Of Fifty-Nine, which follows, proves
another of the disc’s high spots; inspired by a newspaper account of a
UFO sighting near Chris’s home town of Banbury in that very year, as it
might have been observed by Chris himself at a very early age; it’s a
rather catchy piece, bedecked with namechecks for contemporaneous (and almost
contemporaneous!) events and artefacts. Local legend continues to figure large
in the ensuing Byfield Steeplechase, a rumbustious P.J. Wright number in the
distinctly-traditional mould, with one of those “I should know that
melody!” tunes (a bit like The Widow’s Promise maybe?) set to a
bouncy, joyfully folk-rock beat. Inevitably, it’s a stirring tale of
betting derring-do – and yes, it tips the nod to Sandy Denny’s
home village!

Into the final stretch now, and the outer-space theme returns for the final
Chris Leslie composition, Moondust And Solitude, which imagines the lonesomeness
of Apollo 11 astronaut Michael Collins when he was left on board the module when
his colleagues walked on the moon; a lilting waltz-time setting is a perfect
vehicle for this wistful song (and am I fanciful in hearing an echo of Paul
Simon’s America here too?); the track’s closing stages incorporate
a sample of the astronaut’s voice. The delightful penultimate track is an
unusual choice of cover – Jolly Springtime, a simple little folky-gospel
creation by James Taylor (as I only recently discovered myself –
it’s from his 2015 comeback album Before This World), which is topped and
tailed in glorious a cappella and also incidentally features Ric’s bass
uke. The song sure sounds custom-made for Fairport! The album’s final
track is a pensive and beautiful Ric Sanders instrumental, Precious Time,
plainly dedicated “for Angie” and absolutely lovely. Who knows where
it all goes, indeed?…

So there we have it. Shuffle And Go is another solid, and solidly desirable,
entry in the Fairport canon. For the vintage Fairport fans (and I mean that in
the kindest sense), there may be no strictly-“trad-arr Fairport”
here, but the wonderful music on this album is firmly in what has come to be
regarded as the “latter-day Fairport tradition”.

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