RISING FOR THE MOON

Rising For the Moon was a last roll of the dice for Fairport Convention; they'd got Sandy Denny back, giving a welcome additional dimension to the band which had been missing since Liege & Lief (they'd done no less than five albums between that and this without female vocals at all), and they shifted style accordingly, moving away from the comparatively straightforward Brit-country of Rosie and Nine in favour of a taste of their classic electric folk approach comprehensively updated for the mid-1970s. In short, it was their big bid for a commercial breakthrough of the sort which their offshoot, Steeleye Span, had already accomplished.

On that level, it didn't work; it found its way into the UK album charts, for sure, but nowhere near the level that Steeleye had been accomplishing with albums like Now We Are Six, Commoners' Crown, or All Around My Hat, and after peaking at number 52 it faded away. And to some, the classic era of Steeleye Span faded away with it. Sandy Denny left again and after putting out her final solo album (Rendezvous) would die tragically young, perpetually closing the door on further reunions.

The band staggered on, with further departures hitting the lineup, and after knocking out Gottle o' Geer - one of those contractual obligation albums where the artists can't even be bothered to sound enthusiastic - they would sign to Vertigo, producing a couple of releases so tepidly received that eventually the label bought them out of their contract rather than insisting on them producing the four studio albums they'd signed on for. Patchy reunions here and there led to the group eventually re-coalescing, but to some listeners the magic had gone away, at least as far as their studio releases went, and it's certainly the case that none of their latter-day albums have really seemed as musically important as their run from the debut to this.

So, even though strictly speaking this album wasn't the end for Fairport Convention or Sandy Denny, it's hard to listen to it now without feeling a sense of finality in the air. None of the participants knew it would be the last time Sandy would grace a Fairport album - indeed, everyone was hoping that it would be quite the opposite - but as a listener, knowing that it is only enhances the moody, melancholic, nocturnal atmosphere of the album.

Stylistically speaking, this sounds a lot like Steeleye Span - with the folk-rock dial turned closer to rock than was typical for Fairport Convention, and both the "folk" and "rock" sides of that equation sounding more like Steeleye's approach to those than Fairport. It's a subtle distinction, not least because Steeleye Span started out by building on the foundation laid by Liege & Lief, but if you compare the different routes Steeleye and Fairport's music took in the intervening six years or so, this feels more like the product Steeleye's musical evolution than it does a direct followup to Rosie or Nine.

It might be an imitation, but it's a damn good one - as you'd expect from musicians who understood the roots of this particular folk-rock sound better than anyone, because they had a direct hand in laying those roots to begin with. If this is the end of Fairport's golden age, this is as good a send-off as could perhaps be expected under the circumstances - and is certainly a big step up from Nine.