Liege and Lief - Not Influential at All

[abby (tank girl)]

ok, so today jonesy bought me my first copy of 'leige and leaf', and i have played it twice.
now i like fC, would consider myself a fan, but not an authority.

so this is where the name of the thread comes into play.

i lke it.
i like it a lot.
it will be oft played here at groove towers.
but most influential?
dunno.
we are now playing blonde on blonde (dylan) which in jonesy's opinion should be the ' most influential' folk album.
but i pointed out that that is US folk, folk with inverted commas, and not traditional by any means, but following on from the beatnik revolution.
surely US folk music would have its roots in country?
i can only speak for myself, but i would rather listen to blonde on blonde than leige and leaf.
(cue rotten tomatoes)
but maybe its my age?
i am 32, therefore l&l can not have had an influence on me in its heyday, but b on b cant have influenced me either?

how much of this is jumping on the bandwagon, and retrospect, and fondness of what is no more?
there are other fc albums that i would listen to first.


i know its a 'get yer coat' moment, but its a question rather than a rant.

(please do not throw heavy objects at me, it was intended to be a discussion point and the 'start an argument' room has disappeared)


keen to hear real reasons why (historically) this should be the 'most influential' folk album, in terms of musical climate, lineage, times and other stuff available(nick drake? barrett? was there anyone else about?).

please dont throw rotten eggs at us, its a question not an opinion.

we are part of the levellers generation......

[Jim]

look you bugger im just off to my bed and i see this

 whilst L&L and BoB might not be a direct influence on your bad self
its the all pervading influence that they have had since release
its the ripples on a pond school of thought, on first release theres the immediate impact of the record
and over time its peop;e influenced by something that was influenced by L&L and so on to infinity after the passing of 37 years
certainly fairport would have had a hugely different career, if, after the car crash they had decided on a different career move
Swarb for one would not have been involved, and i bet that by now they would have been a short lived footnote in british psychedelia
fondly remembered by a few, a bit like, say,caravan or principal edwards magic theatre
 the Zim however made groundbreaking records before BoB and has made more since and his influence is in the very air we breathe today
 say he.d been killed in the motorbike accident, he would still be the ghost at just about every table, think Nick Drake times a couple of billion
  look im off to bed let some other insomniac or colonial take you to task over your post 

[david stevenson]

Let me hoist a timorous flag in support, up to a point.  I don't dispute that L&L may well be the most influential folk album of them all, but of early FC it isn't my favourite or most played, and I write as someone who bought each of the first five albums as they came out, so a real fan from the 60s, starting with the first with our own immortal St Jude on lead - it was John Peel playing Chelsea Morning that set it all going for me.

WWDOOH with its potent mix of covers, band-penned and trad always strikes me as the best balance of them all, and Unhalfbricking, especially A Sailor's Life, has the same excitement as the premonitory rumblings of the first parts of Beethoven's Ninth.  To me it's the most interesting album as it marks the transition, the first tentative steps.  Also the band lost something significant vocally when Iain Matthews left.  L&L is the first full-on trad album, even the self-penned songs have that feel.  So for me it shouldn't be about choosing one album or another - the first five, including Full House, are all steps along the same journey.  If you took some of Unhalfbricking and half of L&L and chucked in She Moved through the Fair and Nottamun Town from WWDOOH you'd be about right.

And Blonde on Blonde is great, but Dylan's real masterpiece is Blood on the Tracks. (Discuss)

[Neil]

Liege and Lief may not be the best Fairport album but it is definitely the most influential by far. It is also probably the most consistent in sound and vision of all the early albums. A conscious effort to move away from the earlier American influences and concentrate on an English sound.

You cannott dispute it's influence on English music at the time and to this day, it was probably the direct cause of many an addled hippy plugging their violin in and letting loose. Without Liege and Lief there probably would have been no Steeleye Span or Oysterband and Zeppelin would probably have not looked beyond the blues for inspiration. It's influence goes beyond folk and reverberates through English music in many ways.

It would be more appropriate to compare it's influence to that of the Band's Big Pink album not Blonde on Blonde. Although all three albums stand to this day as testimony to the genius of their creators.

It does sound a bit polite these days though.

Now the best Fairport album is without a doubt Nine, and there is many an American influence on there. So I guess it all came around again.

[Mark]

I have to agree with Neil, L&L is by far the most influential English Folk Album. Its key accomplishment was the moving of the folk revival into the mainstream. Whilst many FC fans would not choose it as their favourite FC album, I would wager that it is the only album most non-FC fans have heard of.

Where it stands today in relation to the early gems in the Zim's oeuvre, I wouldn't like to say, but in the 60s and 70s in the Uk, I would say it was probably more influential. As has been noted, some big, big names can be ticked off as having been influenced by it!

[folkicons]

How many other listeners discovered "traditional" music and folk customs as a result of Liege & Lief? Perhaps that's a measure of it's influence as well.

[Speleologist (Robin)]

I'd go along with Neil and Mark. Definintely the most influential English folk album of all time. Whether it's a favourite or not is a different question. I wasn't quite as early a starter as David, my first purchase was WWDOOH, but at the time I was also listening to a lot of folk music. (Ian Campbell, Robin Hall & Jimmy McGregor, Rory & Alex McEwan). What was noticable though, was that most of my contemporaries weren't. After Liege and Leif that noticably changed. It led to a huge reawakening of interest in folk music, in a way that not even Dylan seems to have achieved.

So definitely the most influential, and I like it a lot, but  no way could I choose a favourite out of thefirst five.

[PLW (Peter)]

Without L and L there would almost certainly have been no Steeleye Span, no Albion Band, no Morris On, no Fotheringay, no Home Service, and Richard Thompson's work would probably have developed in an entirely different way. It's possible that the "folk" tracks on Led Zeppelin IV would have had an entirely different feel. East of Eden might never have had a hit with "Jig a Jig". Thousands of young musicians who previously wouldn't have even heard a traditional tune suddenly discovered it was cool and started putting rock rhythms behind folk music. Alan Stivell might never have formed his electric band (listen to "Chemins de Terre" and hear how he actually quotes musically from "Matty Groves"). Later bands like Oysterband, The Levellers, The Men They Couldn't Hang, even the Pogues, The Eighteenth Day of May, and musicians like Jim Moray all have some descent from that album.

It was (as Martin Carthy described Folk Roots, New Routes) a Great Leap Forward. No one had ever done anything quite like it before - not a whole album. Forty Minutes of music that created a genre.

Might not sound that revolutionary now - but imagine placing that needle on the disc when there had been nothing like it before.

[abby (tank girl)]

thanks for those replies folks, and not a rotten egg in sight!

[Alex Lyons]

Here's your answer...."the first (literally) British folk rock LP ever". That's why it's influential. Everything that came after was directly influenced by those two sides of black plastic - surely the true meaning of the word "influential", it's not just a self-contained album, but something that started a whole genre. "Influential" has almost become a synonym for "favourite" with these endless magazine polls, where some gormless student's heard half a dozen albums and votes for 'OK Computer' but that's what it really means.

It's worth bearing in mind the meaning of the term "folk-rock" (in it's British sense) as well. Nick Drake etc aren't (British) folk-rock - it basically means the fusion of traditional folk music with rock, the template Fairport set with 'L&L'.

I wouldn't say it's my favourite Fairport album either, partly due to personal taste, and also over-exposure I suppose. But every now and again I can put it on & still here that freshness - the same excitement that a lot of the 70s albums had, that feeling that everything was being done for the first time. Steeleye, 'Morris On', the Albion Band on 'Battle of the Field' and 'Rise Up Like The Sun', the Home Service 'Alright Jack'.

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[abby (tank girl)]

i am beginning to see what i could not have known having not been around when it was released - the knock on effect the album had rather than its stand alone brilliance.
thanks!

[Andy]

Context is all. There are many influential albums and songs that sound fairly tame these days, because we're all used to them and their progeny. Another example: Sgt. Pepper was described to me the other day as "just another concept album". Hah!

[Malcolm]

Big subject which, I think, is more to do with the continuity of FC than the tracks involved although there are only two completely newly written non-trad.arr tracks (Farewell, Farewell is Willy o' Winsbury with new words).

If they had not re-grouped post the accident and done something as ground-breaking as L & L, English folk and its influences would have dropped back into the clubs with their limitations on amplification. Students, who formed one of the main cores of FC support, would have picked up on some other aspect of USA influenced music or else followed the derivations of Pink Floyd and other prog type music (not knocking that).

Would Jethro Tull have developed the way they did? I don't suggest I  know the answer to that.

Certainly a 'genre' would not have existed. Listen to Mike Harding on Wednesdays and think of the variety of styles he has available. Folk on the radio in the late 60's used to be what you could hear any night in a folk club (Tom Paxton or Bob songs and some utterly cringemaking home-made CND type songs) and nothing else English. (not knocking the USA).


Good on yer, Groovy, for starting such a philosophical thread

[Curt]

I agree that L&L is probably the most influential - although the 'Status Quo with a fiddle' sound of tracks like Come All Ye and Medley has sometimes grated on me over the years, I still think its a great album that has stayed with me.

I wouldn't agree with the 'without it no folk rock, no continuation of 'traditional' songs' sort of argument.

Pentangle would have existed without L&L - and I think the 'people who once lived with Bert Jansch' stream of musicians like the Incredible String Band or Donovan would have still done their thing.  I also think Nick Drake was more influenced by Bert Jansch than FC (hence his covers of Courting Blues and Strolling Down the Highway). 

Furthermore, I don't think L&L influenced Led Zepplin to do folkie stuff - Sandy Denny new Plant and Page before she was in FC and given that White Summer on the Yardbird's Little Games is a rip off of Davey Graham's She Moved thro the Bizarre and page idolized Bert Jansch (so much that he couldn't be bothered to credit him for BMS) I think Zep would done the folk stuff anyway. 

[The Happy Man (Rob)]

here is what is about this album on the fairport website:-

"With Liege & Lief, Fairport had invented British folk-rock in spectacular style. It was a milestone album for them, and an inspiration for many others."

It was a milestone album, it an inspiration for many others, but did they invent British Folk Rock?
Not in book they didn't. The Animals 'House of the rising sun" pre-dates this by 4 years. This was a traditional song with a rock arrangement. Also this was the song that caused Dylan to go electric.

From Rob

[Mark]

I wouldn't agree with the 'without it no folk rock, no continuation of 'traditional' songs' sort of argument.

I agree with that, but it was L&L that moved traditional music out of the folk clubs and into the wider public conciousness. Fairport lent credibility to the folk movement in the eyes of the younger generations - they made folk "cool"

[David W]

Not in book they didn't. The Animals 'House of the rising sun" pre-dates this by 4 years. This was a traditional song with a rock arrangement. Also this was the song that caused Dylan to go electric.

From Rob

Ah yes, There is a House in New Maldon they call the Rising Sun.

Surely for it to be British folk-rock the songs needs to be british rather than the musicians, otherwise its Bris playing American folk rock?

Jackdaw

[Mark]

The Animals 'House of the rising sun" pre-dates this by 4 years. This was a traditional song with a rock arrangement.

It is also an AMERICAN folk song. Nothing to do with the English/British folk explosion of the L&L period.

(You beat me to it JD!)

[Jim]

just a point,
 pentangle never ever rocked
they folked and they jazzed but no rocking
 fact of the matter is that liege and lief got there first, so every thing else is derivative
 zep may well have had a go as page was well into bert, but it would have been 3 years laterthan l&l
 and i cant see them as the leaders of any subsequent folk rock boom

blood on the tracks- no question its bobs best, but the mid 60's trilogy of bringing it all back home, highway 61 and BoB wernt too shabby

 the animals were a blues rock(r&b) band doing an old blues song, not folk

[Alex Lyons]

Aye, as Jackdaw, Mark and Jim have said, "British folk-rock" means the material....not the musicians. Blues-rock is a similar thing though, but I think it was much more of a logical thing to add electricity to the blues, a lot of the older blues artists readily accepted it and were at the forefront, whereas the British folk scene was very much against the rocking up of "their" music (it wasn't theirs at all of course but that's a different thread entirely...).

I think the problem is that lots of stuff that obviously isn't (British) folk-rock tends to get lumped in - people throwing in Nick Drake, Bert Jansch, Pentangle...Dylan?! Maybe the genre should have been given a better title, although I think it suits the sort of thing Fairport patented (literally folk mixed with rock) better than it does the singer-songwritery style it keeps getting applied to.