This interview is part of the "Fairport Convention: Come All Ye" story. Please refer to the main article for related biographical and historical information.

What does Fairport's 35th Anniversary mean to you?

It's amazing, we recently got the BBC Radio Lifetime Achievement Award. I thought "My God, it's weird to get. I still feel like a beginner." Some people might say I still sound like one. [laughs] I feel like a student. I don't feel like I've hit a lifetime's achievement. I feel I'm just now starting to get the knack of things. It's also weird because we live in a world where youth and teenage culture predominates. Pre-teen music is almost totally dominant in the corporate music industry, whereas for me or any folk or jazz musician, music making is a lifetime's activity. It's not a flash-in-the-pan thing you do when you're young and than move into production or management. My icon is Stephane Grappelli. He just got better and better. As he got older, his music got younger and ever more adventurous and brilliant. The music industry is a strange beast at the moment and I think we survive despite it, not because of it.

I'm not critical of anything a musician does. I do listen to dance music and think there's some great music produced by people like the Chemical Brothers, Prodigy and Basement Jaxx. However, I am critical of the industry because I don't think it offers a true freedom of choice. It targets kids through millions of dollars of advertising. Kids have the freedom to buy what they're told. It's an illusory freedom of choice.

So, what does Fairport's 35th mean to me? At age 49, I'm very gratified to still be afforded the privilege of traveling around the planet playing music to people. That often begs the question of "What is it that's given Fairport its longevity?" My answer is always the same: the audience. We have an incredible audience. I'm as proud of how Fairport relates to its audience as I am of any music we have produced. I think we're a real people's band. Massive popular success has never bothered Fairport. We've never been put in the position of being celebrities which is good because I think celebrity is a fairly sick thing in this world. The massive celebrities we get now I don't think are healthy for the public or the celebrities. What's glamorous about having your own stalker? [laughs] Our relationship to the audience is that of friends. A Fairport concert is like a meeting of friends. We come out and chat afterwards. There's no big, security wall around us. It's kind of how music should be.

It's lovely to play for and meet all these great people, and to just make a small contribution. I play music to communicate with people, not to play in a vacuum. I believe music has a very healing power to it. I think our troubled world has never had a greater need for the power of music to bring people together. I'm very proud to be part of the greater musical community that brings people together. I remember how proud I was on the day of Live Aid, even though I had nothing to do with it. I was just proud to be a musician that day. I fervently hope I'll be able to play until the day I die.

Where do you feel the new album falls into the band's pantheon of releases?

It's not for me to say. Some of the reviews I've read have been kind enough to say it harks back to some of the band's earlier successes like Liege and Lief. All I can say is I'm very pleased with it. One thing that's interesting is when we went out on the last British tour and put the set together, we realized the first 10 items on the set list were from the new album—albeit it, three were old pieces we recorded new versions of, like "The Banks of Sweet Primroses," "Portmeirion" and "Hexhamshire Lass." We don't rely on any past glories. We're not just hacking out old stuff. It's a very current band that's continually evolving and creating. We're also very much a working band.

Some people might think "Ooh, Fairport—a '60s band." I don't think that at all. When I think of Liege and Lief, that's a whole different bunch of people. We have the name Fairport Convention. Those two words enable us guys to go out and work because the name has momentum, but actually, I don't think I'm in the same Fairport Convention that made Liege and Lief. We're just guys making music together. We're lucky enough to be able to call ourselves that name and have the lineage going back all those years so we can work. If we called ourselves "Dave Pegg's Cocktail Cowboys" and made the same records, we probably wouldn't get nearly as much work or interest. Isn't that weird? That's how it works, I guess.

Describe the considerations and musical approach the band chose for the new album.

Whenever you talk to an artist about a new record they've made, they always say it's the best one. I'm afraid I'm going to fall into that cliché too. [laughs] I think the last two records we've made—The Wood and the Wire and XXXV—sound like the work of one, together band. They have a consistent texture, soundscape and feel to them. It's because the new band has settled in and due to the wonderful work of Chris Leslie. His songwriting has been a great thing for Fairport. We also have a more open and acoustic feel to the last two albums. I think the guy who should take the most credit for the way the albums sound is the engineer Mark Tucker. He co-produced the albums and gave them a kind of space they haven't had for a few years.

I think the last two albums in some ways hark back to the earlier Fairport albums. There's not many overdubs, whereas in many of the previous albums I was involved in, I would find myself overdubbing violins and string sections. Now, I pretty much stick to one fiddle part per track. It may be simplified, but it sounds good to me.

The period when we had a lot of electronic keyboards wasn't my favorite. I prefer the sound texture we have now. I love electronic keyboards, particularly when Joe Zawinul or Chick Corea are playing them, but not necessarily in Fairport. There were some good things though—I think Dave Mattacks did some beautiful stuff with his Fender-type sound. But as for some of those big, sequenced things we did in the past, I'm not sure the audience got off on them that much either.

In addition to Chris' writing, Gerry Conway is now settled in too. He's a very different drummer from Dave Mattacks. I love Dave's playing. He's a great friend and fantastic musician. One of Gerry's main differences is he's a great fan of using percussion outside of the kit. Gerry loves playing hand percussion, tambourine or anything he can get a noise out of.

How does the band work these days? Are decisions made democratically?

I think it's a complete democracy in as much as we'll sit 'round and talk about things and then do what Peggy [Dave Pegg] says. [laughs] Peggy is definitely the boss. That's it really. He's the group's manager as well. Without Peggy, there wouldn't be a Fairport. The energy he puts into keeping this band going is fantastic. He has quite an aggressive energy which is scary sometimes. Peggy's role is very interesting and I don't know where he gets that energy from. He's a very active person. None of us can fulfill his role. If it was left up to me, Chris or Simon [Nicol] to hustle for the band, securing fees and doing publicity, we wouldn't be able to do it. Peggy's role is far more than that of a musician. He's very ambitious and kind of streetwise as well. Fairport is kind of his thing, even though Simon is the original member. It's great that Simon is still in the group. He gives us that lineage back to the group's beginnings.

As far as the music goes, it's pretty open. From my point of view, my role is quite straightforward—it's to simply play fiddle. I'm not a multi-instrumentalist. I do play keyboards, but I don't like doing that in Fairport. For the most part, I don't think Fairport needs keyboards. So, my gig is to play and find the most appropriate playing for Fairport. As my background comes the jazz and jazz-fusion side of things, it was a surprise for me to even be in Fairport. I think in the past, maybe my playing hasn't always been appropriate. Hopefully, as the years have gone on, I've got better.

Can you elaborate on that?

It's hard to judge your own playing, but I hope my playing is more melodic now and in keeping with what Fairport is. The other thing I do on a regular basis is provide instrumentals for the group to play. I provide one or two per album including crazy dance medleys and things I would never have written had I not been in Fairport—pieces like "The Bowman's Retreat" and "The Rutland Reel." The latest one is "Everything but the Skirl." They're lighthearted, exuberant and intended to be nothing more than that. But the area of repertoire I most enjoy contributing to is the series of tunes that started with "Portmeirion" and then "Rose Hip," "Summer in December" and "A Year and a Day." We did a new version of "Portmeirion" on XXXV with Ian Anderson playing on it. Those pieces have folk-influenced, pastoral melodies. They're my best contributions to Fairport—that, and just playing good, melodic fiddle and chipping in with everyone else on the arrangements. Things are definitely arranged organically with the group of us sitting around to discuss them.

Some of Chris' songs come completely formed and I tend to bring in the instrumentals with complete sketches of them. A lot of the material we do also comes from outside the band from people like Huw Williams. Those songs will arrive in demo form or as something recorded on another album. For those pieces, we'll sit down together and arrange the hell out of them. DM [Dave Mattacks] and Martin Allcock used to do a lot of the arranging that way. The last two albums have fallen together pretty well and painlessly. I would have liked a few more days in the studio. They were made pretty fast, but that's just how the schedule works out.

How did you and Chris come to terms musically and personally with having two fiddlers in Fairport?

We've been friends for years. We'd been planning to do some duo projects together for years before Chris came into Fairport. We were always saying "We must do something," but we could never get our schedules to work together. So, when Chris came into Fairport, it was "Hey, this is great." It's fantastic having Chris here. He feels like my brother. And now there's another vegetarian in the group. It's not just me when we go to restaurants in some foreign country trying to find out what on the menu I can eat. We can hang out and drink a lot of herbal tea and light a lot of joss sticks. [laughs] And the audience loves the two fiddle thing.

Let's discuss a couple of criticisms that have been leveled against the band. The first one is the band's decision to re-record older material in versions some consider less definitive than the originals. What's your opinion on this?

It’s their right to think what they like. I don't mind, as long as they enjoy some of it. We just do the best we can to produce music people will like. I have a relaxed attitude towards it. We're doing new versions of those pieces because we like them. Whether or not an item of folk-rock repertoire is definitive or not is monumentally unimportant to me. I'd say to them "Watch the news and get real." We haven't destroyed the previous versions. They're there for them. We're not dealing with something sacred here. We're a bunch of very human guys. When people come up and tell us after a concert what they like or don't like, we have a listen to what they have to say and take it onboard. This is a very interactive band. But if you've got enough energy to worry about if a folk-rock piece is definitive or not, surely that energy would be better directed elsewhere. [laughs]

I wouldn't disagree with someone. They may be right. They're certainly right from their point of view. If they feel the original version of "Banks of the Sweet Primroses" is better than the new one, who knows? I kind of like them both. With my own piece "Portmeirion," I like the new version better because it's recorded better. It has Ian Anderson on it. It also has beautiful mandolin playing from Chris Leslie and percussion on it.

Often, you prefer the first version you've heard of something. For instance, with classical music, my favorite interpretation is the one I heard when I was youngest—it's kind of a bias. But I kind of have the jazz musician's angle on recording pieces. I must have four or five versions of Chick Corea playing "La Fiesta." I love every one of them. I think the idea of having a definitive version of a piece is a very pop thing. It ties into the production of pop. Look at Stephane Grappelli. I must have a dozen versions or more of him playing "Sweet Georgia Brown." If I was narrow-minded, I might say "Oh no, he should have just left the one he recorded with Django Reinhardt. He should have never recorded it again." I think that's really silly.

The second criticism is that the band is veering away from its folk-rock reputation towards a more laid-back sound.

Miles Davis went in reverse. As he got older, he got more electric. People would say "Hey man, why aren't you playing 'My Funny Valentine' anymore?" And he said "Listen, that stuff's still there. The fact that we're doing what we do now doesn't take away from the fact that we did that. The records are still there. You can still listen to them."

I only have very slight control over the way this band goes. It just evolves. There's no plan, but I can think of practical reasons for why we've gone acoustic. The world is not crying out for us to tour. We're not having big promoters in America saying "Hey, forget that Britney Spears tour. We'll have Fairport instead!" When we tour America, we're playing tiny little clubs. We have to carry our own equipment in. I'm 49 now and if I’m to carry my own equipment, it's not going to include a big amplifier. Rather, I'm going to carry an acoustic fiddle. The fact that we have Chris Leslie onboard who is a more folk-oriented person kind of leaned us in an acoustic way too. It's just how things have developed.

You just go with the flow—with what feels good and what's happening. I used to always play Zeta fiddles or solid electric fiddles. When Chris came onboard, he would play the acoustic fiddle. Most of his instruments are acoustic. They're what he feels comfortable with, so I kind of went with that. I still have the electric fiddles and plan to use them on my own records.

For Fairport, when we played on our last Winter tour, Simon was playing electric guitar as well. I used to use all sorts of peddles and that stuff, but different people are always going to have different opinions. When I used to play very electric, the people who say we're too acoustic now were silent. The ones who were vocal with criticism were people who said it's too electric. So, you can't please everybody.

I'd still love to play in a kind of Weather Report-style group like my old 2nd Vision group or Soft Machine, when we had that sort of power and full-on jazz-fusion drumming, electric keyboards and Johnny Etheridge on guitar. I fantasize about going out with a big old electric band again, but it may never happen because you have to tailor things to what's practical. The production values of that sort of music are so expensive. You need roadies and a crew. I have my own trio now called The Ric Sanders Group with Vo Fletcher and Michael Gregory. We're playing that sort of repertoire. We play "Birdland," "In a Silent Way," "It's About That Time" and "Jean Pierre." We do it all with percussion, guitar and acoustic fiddle. It's practical and it all fits in a couple of cars.

Tell me about the seeds of your new band and its musical approach.

Vo Fletcher is one of my oldest and dearest friends. He's played with Nigel Kennedy's group and makes a living writing for TV and film. Michael Gregory, who plays drums and percussion, was part of the Albion Band when I was in it during the late '70s. The three of us have a shared love of music of all sorts. We start our sets with little suites of music that are joined together by any tenuous connection we can think of. Sometimes it's just by name. For instance, we'll start with the standard "Nature Boy" by Eden Ahbez and then go into "Mother Nature's Son" by Paul McCartney from the Beatles' White Album.

We improvise as we flow from one piece to another in the same way modern dance groups do who connect lots of movements together. We spark off whatever we feel at the moment. It can be totally free, feature atonal improvisation and even incorporate select melodies from the classical canon—anything we can think of that has a nice groove or melody.

On the group's forthcoming record, we do "Little Wing" by Jimi Hendrix with Rick Wakeman guesting. He was brilliant. It's the result of a series of recordings that were made over three nights in Lincoln Cathedral, a magnificent cathedral with remarkable acoustics. They recorded two artists a night—that's two albums a night. Each group had two-and-a-half hours to record an album, which was scary. [laughs] Rick Wakeman was doing a solo album on the cathedral organ and piano. Our sessions crossed and I said "Would you hang on and jam with us?"

Because of the cathedral's acoustics, you have to be careful. There's such a massive echo in there. You have to be careful about playing rhythmic stuff, so we went for the more spacey side. For instance, we did "Crystal Silence" by Chick Corea which was made for that acoustic environment.

The music was recorded in stereo, binaural and Sensuround. It'll be a two-disc release, one CD will be regular stereo and the second disc will be part binaural, part Sensurround and include a little CD-ROM segment they filmed of us recording. It's a nice package. The album will come out on Voiceprint. They seem like a real nice company. It's been quite awhile since I had a relationship with a label with which I can pretty much do what I want. They also put out the 2nd Vision album.

Chris Leslie occasionally guests with the group too. Tell me about his involvement.

One of the ideas for this trio is that whenever possible, we'll have guests with us. Chris has done a number of gigs with us. We do some Django Reinhardt and Stephane Grappelli pieces with Chris playing hot mandolin. He'll also bring his Tibetan singing bowls and we'll go cosmic. There's a number of collaborations down the line. I'd like to do something with Troy Donockley, the great Irish pipe player who's with Maddy Prior's group. I'd love to do some stuff with John Etheridge and Martin Taylor. We'd love to get Nigel Kennedy to play with us too. He's an old pal. We've only jammed together previously in his pub. So, there's some good things to come down the line.

What original material does the album contain?

Vo and I write quite a lot of stuff. On the album we did "Remembrance Day" and "The Rose Hip" from my own repertoire. I also wrote one new piece for it called "A Lifetime's Love." We do a Chris Leslie piece on there too called "Tune From The Land of Snow" which was his piece dedicated to Tibet. It appears as the last track on his solo album The Flow. It was two-and-a-half-minutes on his record. When I heard it, I told Chris "There's only one thing wrong with it." He said "What? What?" I said "It should be a whole side, it's so good. It's such a great springboard for improvising." So, we did a 14 minute version of his tune. I didn't tell him about it until after we did it. We did it without him. I said "We've got a surprise for you. Here's your tune on the album!" He's since played it in public with us. I think we'll do more recording with Chris. There's no doubt about it.

How do you look back at your days with Soft Machine?

I loved Soft Machine. It was a great band to be in. I was very young and couldn't believe I was suddenly in this group. The line-up at the time was Karl Jenkins on keyboards—nominally, the group's leader and composer, the amazing John Marshall on drums, John Etheridge on guitar and Percy Jones on bass. Percy Jones was also playing with Brand X with Phil Collins back in those days, so his responsibilities crossed. Brand X started doing exceptionally well, and as he was a major contributor and composer to that group, he opted for that full-time. So, Steve Cook, a great bass player, came into the picture. That ended up being the main band I toured with. It's when I started a great relationship with John Etheridge who is a friend to this day. He's a fantastic musician, and a very easy-going, kind person. He's also very funny.

I got into the group because Alan Wakeman—Rick's cousin—who was playing soprano sax left the group. So, they were looking for another sax player. At the time, I was playing with the great British jazz pianist Michael Garrick—an unsung hero of British jazz who's coming up on 70 years of age now. As an aside, Michael's son Christian is a very fine jazz violinist who plays in John Etheridge's group Sweet Chorus—a kind of Django and Stephane tribute group, so it all comes 'round again.

I'd sent a tape to Michael asking for jazz theory lessons. Michael responded by saying "Why don't you come and do some gigs instead?" Very nervously, I went along and played some gigs. John Marshall was also Michael's drummer. Because violin covers a similar tonal area to soprano sax, I got the gig after playing with John in Michael's group.

I still remember the Soft Machine audition, such as it was. I was terrified. John Etheridge wasn't there. It was just Karl Jenkins, Percy Jones and John Marshall. I remember Karl saying "Right, you start!" So, I started jamming and we jammed for two hours. We didn’t play any pieces. It was completely improvising and grooving. Then Karl said "Right, that's it! Down to the pub then!" So, we went down to the pub near the rehearsal space in London and he took out two albums: Bundles and Softs, picked out 10 or 12 pieces and said "Right, learn them! We're going on tour next Tuesday with Shakti."

I took those albums home. I had never worked so hard in a few days in my life. I learned the stuff and suddenly I'm in a van with John McLaughlin, Shankar, Vikku [Vinayakram] and Zakir Hussain. I'm like 23 and just couldn't believe it. I think John McLaughlin must have thought I was pretty strange the first week. Every time he would say anything to me during the first week, I would just reply "Ahhh…" because I just couldn't believe it was happening. [laughs] It was a knock-out of an experience. I remember Shankar being overwhelmingly generous. During the soundcheck of the first gig, he came up and said "You play violin too!" We'd sit in the back of the bus and he'd show me these incredible ragas and then I'd play him some Morris dance tunes. [laughs] It was great.

I wish Soft Machine had carried on longer, but in actual fact, the title of the album I recorded with them: Alive and Well—Recorded in Paris wasn't exactly accurate, the "Alive and Well" part in particular. The band had pretty disastrous management over the years and it was not in a particularly good way financially. I don't really know the details, but it kind of fell apart. It kind of ceased to operate. It was a shame because they were very nice people to work with and great musicians. It happened during the same period when I was in the Albion Band which was having a golden period. We had just made the album Rise Up Like the Sun which was getting a lot of attention. The manager Joe Lustif gave me the opportunity of putting together a group and that's where 2nd Vision came from. John Etheridge and I never really left Soft Machine. It was a sinking ship really.

I haven't seen you discuss 2nd Vision much. What can you tell me about your time with the group?

It was an impossible time to do what we were doing because it was during the New Wave movement. We were moving into the '80s, coming out of punk. It wasn't the right time to form a jazz-fusion-folk-world music-influenced group like ours. We did get some great reviews. The inner sleeve of the record was done by the great Derek Jewell, one of the finest music journalists. He had a radio show and was a genuinely open-minded and enthusiastic person. He's the best type of music journalist. Like what you do with Innerviews, it was about enthusiasm, not criticism. He wanted to turn people on to music and open their minds.

I love the album. I can't believe it was 22 years ago. John Cameron, a really good musician, produced us. We recorded at Sound Techniques, the same studio Liege and Lief was made. It was very enjoyable. It will always be one of my favorite things I've done. I've got some tapes of demos and a few live recordings of 2nd Vision which may see the light of day some time.

The group never worked very much. What limited work 2nd Vision did live was great. We did our debut concerts at Riverside Studios in Hammersmith. Joe Lustif had the idea we should each night have an opening act who was more famous than we were. Each night we would play a 2nd Vision set and also play with the guest artist. Over the course of four nights, we had June Tabor, The Albion Morris Men, Gordon Giltrap, David Palmer—the keyboard player from Jethro Tull and Richard Thompson. For instance, I would play a few tunes with Richard. Dave Bristow would do a keyboard thing with David Palmer. It's during those gigs that I met Gordon Giltrap which turned out to be a fruitful meeting. I've worked a lot with him.

We also did the Capitol Radio Jazz Festival which was fantastic. We were on before Stephane Grappelli—a great honor. John Etheridge was playing guitar in Stephane's group as well. So, John did the 2nd Vision set, left the stage after playing searing jazz-rock guitar, then came right back on with Stephane with an acoustic guitar. I got to meet Stephane at that time through John, which was fantastic.

During my whole career, 2nd Vision was the thing I most wanted to happen that didn't happen. I'm glad we made the album and wish we'd done more. Certainly, the trio with Vo Fletcher and Michael Gregory is trying to carry on with that line of musical thinking—to stay open to everything in approach. I still keep in touch with all the 2nd Vision guys, like Dave Bristow, who went into the programming side of things, working with Yamaha to develop the DX7. He now works with Emu, based in California. I hope in the future each of the 2nd Vision guys will be able to collaborate with the new trio.

After 2nd Vision, we changed the name to The John Etheridge-Ric Sanders group and toured all of the British jazz venues. It was a slightly different group because Mickey Barker, the drummer, had joined Magnum. Dave Bristow toured with us and we got a young bass player named Fred Thelonious Baker who I'd met while visiting the Birmingham School of Music where he was studying. We also had a drummer named Nick Wyman and did a nationwide tour. It was the closest thing we'd ever done to a 2nd Vision tour, although we had a lot of new repertoire by then. After doing the tour of British jazz venues, there was nowhere else to go and we turned to earning our living doing different projects.

It'd be lovely to do stuff with all these guys again. Look at Michael Gregory. The last time I played in a band with him was 1979 in the Albion Band. He went off to a group called The Home Service, a great band led by John Tams. Since then, Michael and I have talked, planned, plotted and schemed to work together, then we'd go off on our different ways. Amazingly enough, now, we've just got 'round to doing it and it's 20 years later! You think "My God! It took us 20 years." But it's kind of encouraging because it's never too late.

What are some of your key memories of the Rise Up Like The Sun sessions?

From my point of view, the interesting tale is about the track "Afro Blue/Danse Royale." I was just sitting around in rehearsal, just dingling away, playing the theme to "Afro Blue" to myself. Ashley Hutchings came along and said "That's a nice jig." That's how he heard it. I said it's actually a Mongo Santamaria tune that John Coltrane played. Ashley wasn't particularly familiar with jazz repertoire, but he thought it was a nice tune and said "Would you like to do it on the record?" I said "You bet!" Then he said "How about doing it as a violin solo?" I thought to myself "Yeah, but what I really need is Dave Bristow playing keyboards, but he's not in the group." Dave at the time was demonstrating keyboards in a big keyboard store in Birmingham. He was just becoming a master of the new Yamaha CS-80 polyphonic synthesizer, one of the first to come out.

To get Dave on the record, I went down the store one day and said "Listen, can you play a backing track for 'Afro Blue?'" He agreed, so I played my acoustic fiddle in the store, so we could play it as a duo. He had a Revox two-track stereo recorder and played the synth part straight down to tape. There were actually people milling around the store. I think someone actually asked him while he was playing to have a look at something. Dave said "Let me have a minute and I will." [laughs] So, I got the keyboard backing on tape recorded that day in the shop and went back to Sound Techniques and worked with the engineer to put it onto the multitrack and then added violin to it. I played it back to the band the next morning and said "I hope you don't mind, I took the liberty of recording this keyboard part." I hadn't told them I recorded it in a shop. They said "Oh, we love that! Let's get it on the record." So, that part was recorded in a shop and we then fused it to that "Danse Royal" thing which was a tune from Phil Pickett's repertoire—a stompy, dance tune. It worked well and made for a very quirky instrumental.

Many point to the album as one of the most important folk-rock records ever made. Do you agree?

It sounds arrogant to agree when it's something you've done, but I'd like to agree with that very much. It's a great record. I'm proud to be on it. I consider it a great privilege to have been a part of that. It came together very organically. In my opinion, a great deal of credit for how that album came together should be given to John Tams. Joe Boyd was commissioned to be the album's producer, but in actual fact, John Tams really produced it from the point of view of the music. What Joe Boyd provided was getting great people in like Kate McGarrigle, Martin Carthy and Andy Fairweather-Low to play on it. Joe was great at overseeing a lot of that, but the actual flavor of the record—if it came from one particular person—came from John Tams.

When the reviews came out, there was a lot of attention given to the fact that Richard Thompson and Kate McGarrigle were on there. I got a fair amount of attention because I was known as the guy from Soft Machine. For the press it was "Oh, the guy from Soft Machine plays with the Albions." I was very pleased for that attention, but I certainly would say the lesser-known players deserve a great deal of credit such as Graeme Taylor, Michael Gregory and Pete Bullock.

I love the album to this day. There's never been another one quite like it. It was one of those magic times when things just fall into place—everything. I love the cover as well. There's never been an Albions cover like that before. It just has a special flavor to it.

People say there's Liege and Lief, Please To See The King and Rise Up Like The Sun as the great folk-rock records. Personally, I'd add Alright Jack by The Home Service to that. It's the same team who did Rise Up—John Tams, Graeme Taylor and Michael Gregory.

You've often said you're more of a jazz musician than a folk musician. What keeps Fairport interesting as a full-time gig given that?

I like playing for people and Fairport affords me the opportunity to do that. I hope that over the years I've learned to tailor my playing to the group. Actually, there's more of a jazz influence in what I do in Fairport now than I ever did before, but in a more subtle way. I still think of my heart as the heart of jazz musician because I feel my best playing is improvised. Improvising is a magical thing. It's an art form that lets you play stuff you can't play. Keith Jarrett calls it a "state of grace." He seems to be able to tap into that miraculous energy any time he wants. Stephane Grappelli, Coltrane and Miles could too.

I don't consider myself a fiddle virtuoso. And though I think I have the heart of a jazz musician, I don't know what I am. I do have great affection for folk music and have played a lot of that repertoire, but jazz is still the music I listen to the most. It's the closest to my heart. I love the way Miles used to play just one note and the quality of that note would be magical.

Are you more enamored with straightahead jazz or fusion?

It's the whole lot. Right now, my trio is working up pieces by both Joe Zawinul and Sting. We're quite interested in doing what Stephane Grappelli used to do which is take popular songs of the day and interpret them as jazz instrumentals and use them as vehicles for jazz improvisation. Admittedly, it's not possible with most of what's in the charts because things have become so production-based. You don't really get melodies in popular music much anymore, rather, you get repeated motifs with bass patterns reacting underneath. You don't get many autonomous melodies in pop music these days—the sort that Paul McCartney, George Harrison and Stevie Wonder mastered.

We're also working up stuff that's timeless, such as Joe-John-Keith-Chick-Herbie repertoire. But I don't make much distinction between any music. There's enough barriers keeping people apart in life. I sometimes think it's a shame when I hear people argue about music. I think "Come on, it's music! You're missing the point here. Let's share the enthusiasm." No-one likes everything, but let music bring people together. There's so many religious, economic, philosophical and national barriers keeping people apart. It's a shame that musicians can't always agree on things.

I am proud of music when it demonstrates an open mind and when its energy is positive. When you hear some young musician talking about older musicians like they're dinosaurs and when you hear some older musician saying "The young guys can't play. They're just messing about on computers" and slagging people off, it's just negative. The arts are here to pave way the way for togetherness. I'd happily play with almost anybody, just for the coming together of it. I'd do a session with Kylie Minogue, but she hasn't asked. [laughs]

A bandleader friend of mine claims violinists are the most eccentric musicians to work with. What do you think?

Let's look at the evidence: Dave Swarbrick. Yeah, he's right! That's enough on its own! Swarb is the proof! You don't need to go any further. [laughs] I'd like to think I'm eccentric. Eccentrics make the world a more interesting place—as long as they're harmless eccentrics. It's an eccentric world in which we live. I can't puzzle out who is sane. Playing music is an eccentric thing to do, really. What I love about music is the passion. I love being passionate about things, and opinionated, but still saying "That's cool. You don't have to agree."

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