On April 29 1999, the Daily Telegraph ran a lovely obituary of the former Fairport Convention violinist and singer Dave Swarbrick. It described him as “a small, dynamic, charismatic figure” who could “electrify an audience with a single frenzied sweep of his bow”. There was only one problem: he wasn’t dead. The paper subsequently apologised for the ill-timed obit, which was shown to Swarbrick as he recovered from a serious illness at a hospital in Coventry. His wife, Jill, said: “He read the obituary and didn’t quarrel with any of the spellings or the facts - apart from the obvious one.”
The following August, Swarbrick made his first public appearance after being hospitalised - at the Cropredy folk music festival, where he took delight in signing copies of the obit for fans. “It’s not the first time I’ve died in Coventry,” he said at the time.
Swarbrick’s illness - the lung disease emphysema - has worsened in recent years. The 63-year-old violinist is currently on a waiting list for a single lung transplant. “I’m pretty much bedridden at the moment,” he says, in a brief interview. “I can’t work much because I keep getting infections.”
To help him through this difficult time his friends in Fairport Convention, and other folk musicians, have organised a benefit concert for him at Birmingham Symphony Hall this Sunday. “The operation’s on the NHS, but he’s pretty poor, so the money raised will help him and his wife financially,” says his longtime musical partner, the guitarist Martin Carthy. “We just want to raise him some money so he’s go something to live on. He gets a few royalty payments, but there’s a limited amount that he can do right now.”
The last time Swarbrick played live was last September, when he and Martin Carthy were on a British tour. “He was playing like a bastard,” says Carthy. “Really brilliantly.” By that stage, Swarbrick’s emphysema was so bad that he was obliged to take an oxygen canister on to stage to help with his breathing. “But as the tour went on, he had figured it out - how not to panic and how to take oxygen without it interrupting his playing. He was quite weak, so we would do a song and then I would give him a rest, but the rests he took got fewer and fewer.
“After one gig, though, some person who shall remain nameless came up to him and said: ‘I’ve got a bad cold, I’ll stay away from you.’” Then they wound up flinging their arms around him, and that gave him a terrible chest infection. He got emphysema really from smoking pretty much anything you can think of since he was 14, but the infection laid him very low indeed. He ended up missing the last gig of the tour and he was furious about that. It was only due to fantastic work by Warwick and Papworth hospitals that he was able to pull through.”
Swarbrick and Carthy met about 40 years ago on a TV music show called Hullabaloo. Blitz-born, Birmingham-raised and of Polish extraction, Swarbrick had started as a guitarist in a ceilidh band in the late 1950s before becoming a violinist for the Ian Campbell Folk Group, where his fiddle-playing virtuosity became recognised.
The early 1960s was a time when there was folk music in the cafes at night and revolution in the air - or at least Bob Dylan had made folk briefly voguish both in the US and in Britain. Dylan went electric in 1965, and soon after British folk musicians started featuring instrumental breaks in their songs and some went so far as to work with rock-style rhythm sections. The result was that bastard musical form - folk rock.
At the time, Swarbrick and Carthy weren’t part of that lucrative scene. Instead, for three years between 1966 and 1969, they performed as a duet touring northern folk clubs, where the standard fee was £12. The pair made most of their money from passing the hat around the crowd.
In 1969, though, Swarbrick’s fortunes changed when he plugged in an electric violin and guested on an album called Unhalfbricking by British folk rockers Fairport Convention. At that time the band was mutating from a British version of American electric folkies the Byrds and Buffalo Springfield into a singular combo that gave British folk songs, jigs and reels an electric makeover. On Unhalfbricking, for instance, the band transformed an ancient ballad called A Sailor’s Life. It started with the lovely keening singing of Sandy Denny and then became a rock track, featuring a lengthy call-and-response jam between Swarbrick and guitarist Richard Thompson. The thing lasted 12 minutes. He became a fully fledged member the following year, when Fairport recorded their next album, Leige and Lief, widely regarded as the group’s best work.
During the 1970s, Swarbrick led a double musical life. In Fairport, he played electric violin and sang in the world’s most successful electric folk band, steering them through a baffling array of line-up changes. But he also increasingly performed as a traditional folk musician at ceilidhs around Scotland in a band known as the Three Desperate Mortgages. He released six well-received solo albums during this time, finally leaving Fairport in 1984. Since then he’s worked in a variety of projects as a soloist, a duo partner of folk musicians like Carthy, Simon Nicol, Alistair Hulett and Pete Hawkes, as well as playing in folk groups like Whippersnapper, Band of Hope and the Keith Hancock Band - in so doing becoming an iconic figure in both British traditional folk and folk rock.
“I’ve always loved working hard and playing live,” says Swarbrick. “But I can’t do that at the moment. I really miss it.” Presumably you’re not singing any more? “Not at all. I’ve had three tracheotomies. So it’s going to be a long time before I’m able to sing at all.” Are you able to play the violin? “Pretty much every other day. I’ve got a recording studio in my home and I record there when I can quite a bit.”
Tickets for the benefit concert at which Richard Digance, Ralph McTell, the current Fairport Convention line-up and some special guests will perform, will be £17.50. It’s the second SwarbAid concert that the violinist’s friends have organised. There will probably be a whip-round for him afterwards too. “I don’t want to be twee about this,” says Carthy, who will be performing with his wife, the singer Norma Waterson, “but people love Swarb. That’s very much part of that folk scene ethic.
“He stands a really good chance of having a lung transplant. He’s passed all the tests - heart, blood and psychological.” Is there a chance that Dave Swarbrick will once more electrify an audience with a single frenzied sweep of his bow? “I hope so. I just want him to get back to playing as he was this time last year. I certainly had never heard him play better.”