The Merry Widow
The Merry Widow is an operetta by the Austro-Hungarian composer Franz Lehár. The librettists, Viktor Léon and Leo Stein, based the story – concerning a rich widow, her countrymen's attempt to keep her money in the principality by finding her the right husband – on an 1861 comedy play, L'attaché d'ambassade by Henri Meilhac; the operetta has enjoyed extraordinary international success since its 1905 premiere in Vienna and continues to be revived and recorded. Film and other adaptations have been made. Well-known music from the score includes the "Vilja Song", "Da geh' ich zu Maxim", the "Merry Widow Waltz". In 1861, Henri Meilhac premiered a comic play in Paris, L'attaché d'ambassade, in which the Parisian ambassador of a poor German grand duchy, Baron Scharpf, schemes to arrange a marriage between his country's richest widow and a Count to keep her money at home, thus preventing economic disaster in the duchy; the play was soon adapted into German as Der Gesandschafts-Attaché and was given several successful productions.
In early 1905, Viennese librettist Leo Stein came across the play and thought it would make a good operetta. He suggested this to one of his writing collaborators, Viktor Léon and to the manager of the Theater an der Wien, eager to produce the piece; the two adapted the play as a libretto and updated the setting to contemporary Paris, expanding the plot to reference an earlier relationship between the widow and the Count, moving the native land from a dour German province to a colourful little Balkan state. In addition, the widow admits to an affair to protect the Baron's wife, the Count's haven is changed to the Parisian restaurant and nightclub Maxim's, they asked Richard Heuberger to compose the music, as he had a previous hit at the Theater an der Wien with a Parisian-themed piece, Der Opernball. He composed a draft of the score, but it was unsatisfactory, he gladly left the project; the theatre's staff next suggested. Lehár had worked with Stein on Der Göttergatte the previous year. Although Léon doubted that Lehár could invoke an authentic Parisian atmosphere, he was soon enchanted by Lehar's first number for the piece, a bubbly galop melody for "Dummer, dummer Reitersmann".
The score of Die Lustige Witwe was finished in a matter of months. The theatre engaged Mizzi Louis Treumann for the leading roles, they had starred as the romantic couple in other operettas in Vienna, including a production of Der Opernball and a previous Léon and Lehár success, Der Rastelbinder. Both stars were so enthusiastic about the piece that they supplemented the theatre's low-budget production by paying for their own lavish costumes. During the rehearsal period, the theatre lost faith in the score and asked Lehár to withdraw it, but he refused; the piece was given little rehearsal time on stage before its premiere. Die Lustige Witwe was first performed at the Theater an der Wien in Vienna on 30 December 1905, with Günther as Hanna, Treumann as Danilo, Siegmund Natzler as Baron Zeta and Annie Wünsch as Valencienne, it was a major success, running for 483 performances. The production was toured in Austria in 1906; the operetta had no overture. The Vienna Philharmonic performed the overture at Lehár's 70th birthday concert in April 1940.
The embassy in Paris of the poverty-stricken Balkan principality of Pontevedro is holding a ball to celebrate the birthday of the sovereign, the Grand Duke. Hanna Glawari, who has inherited twenty million francs from her late husband, is to be a guest at the ball – and the Pontevedrin ambassador, Baron Zeta, is scheming to ensure that she will keep her fortune in the country, saving Pontevedro from bankruptcy; the Baron intends that Count Danilo Danilovitsch, the first secretary of the embassy, should marry the widow. Danilo meets Hanna, it emerges they were in love before her marriage, but his uncle had interrupted their romance because Hanna had had nothing to her name. Though they still love each other, Danilo now refuses to court Hanna for her fortune, Hanna vows that she will not marry him until he says "I love you" – something he claims he will never do. Meanwhile, Baron Zeta's wife Valencienne has been flirting with the French attaché to the embassy, Count Camille de Rosillon, who writes "I love you" on her fan.
Valencienne puts off Camille's advances. However, they lose the incriminating fan, found by embassy counsellor Kromow. Kromow jealously fears that the fan belongs to his own wife and gives it to Baron Zeta. Not recognising it, Baron Zeta decides to return the fan discreetly, in spite of Valencienne's desperate offers to take it "to Olga" herself. On his way to find Olga, the Baron meets Danilo, his diplomatic mission takes precedence over the fan; the Baron orders Danilo to marry Hanna. Danilo offers to eliminate any non-Pontevedrin suitors as a compromise; as the "Ladies' Choice" dance is about to begin, Hanna becomes swarmed with hopeful suitors. Valencienne volunteers Camille to dance with Hanna hoping that the Frenchman will marry her and cease to be a temptation for Valencienne herself. True to his bargain with the Baron, Danilo circulates the ballroom, rounding up ladies to claim dances and thin the crowd around the
River Thames
The River Thames, known alternatively in parts as the Isis, is a river that flows through southern England including London. At 215 miles, it is the longest river in England and the second longest in the United Kingdom, after the River Severn, it flows through Oxford, Henley-on-Thames and Windsor. The lower reaches of the river are called the Tideway, derived from its long tidal reach up to Teddington Lock, it rises at Thames Head in Gloucestershire, flows into the North Sea via the Thames Estuary. The Thames drains the whole of Greater London, its tidal section, reaching up to Teddington Lock, includes most of its London stretch and has a rise and fall of 23 feet. Running through some of the driest parts of mainland Britain and abstracted for drinking water, the Thames' discharge is low considering its length and breadth: the Severn has a discharge twice as large on average despite having a smaller drainage basin. In Scotland, the Tay achieves more than double the Thames' average discharge from a drainage basin, 60% smaller.
Along its course are 45 navigation locks with accompanying weirs. Its catchment area covers a small part of western England; the river contains over 80 islands. With its waters varying from freshwater to seawater, the Thames supports a variety of wildlife and has a number of adjoining Sites of Special Scientific Interest, with the largest being in the remaining parts of the North Kent Marshes and covering 5,449 hectares; the Thames, from Middle English Temese, is derived from the Brittonic Celtic name for the river, recorded in Latin as Tamesis and yielding modern Welsh Tafwys "Thames". The name may have meant "dark" and can be compared to other cognates such as Russian темно, Lithuanian tamsi "dark", Latvian tumsa "darkness", Sanskrit tamas and Welsh tywyll "darkness" and Middle Irish teimen "dark grey"; the same origin is shared by countless other river names, spread across Britain, such as the River Tamar at the border of Devon and Cornwall, several rivers named Tame in the Midlands and North Yorkshire, the Tavy on Dartmoor, the Team of the North East, the Teifi and Teme of Wales, the Teviot in the Scottish Borders, as well as one of the Thames' tributaries called the Thame.
Kenneth H. Jackson has proposed that the name of the Thames is not Indo-European, while Peter Kitson suggested that it is Indo-European but originated before the Celts and has a name indicating "muddiness" from a root *tā-,'melt'. Indirect evidence for the antiquity of the name'Thames' is provided by a Roman potsherd found at Oxford, bearing the inscription Tamesubugus fecit, it is believed. Tamese was referred to as a place, not a river in the Ravenna Cosmography; the river's name has always been pronounced with a simple t /t/. A similar spelling from 1210, "Tamisiam", is found in the Magna Carta; the Thames through Oxford is sometimes called the Isis. And in Victorian times and cartographers insisted that the entire river was named the Isis from its source down to Dorchester on Thames and that only from this point, where the river meets the Thame and becomes the "Thame-isis" should it be so called. Ordnance Survey maps still label the Thames as "River Isis" down to Dorchester. However, since the early 20th century this distinction has been lost in common usage outside of Oxford, some historians suggest the name Isis is nothing more than a truncation of Tamesis, the Latin name for the Thames.
Sculptures titled Tamesis and Isis by Anne Seymour Damer can be found on the bridge at Henley-on-Thames, Oxfordshire. Richard Coates suggests that while the river was as a whole called the Thames, part of it, where it was too wide to ford, was called *lowonida; this gave the name to a settlement on its banks, which became known as Londinium, from the Indo-European roots *pleu- "flow" and *-nedi "river" meaning something like the flowing river or the wide flowing unfordable river. For merchant seamen, the Thames has long been just the "London River". Londoners refer to it as "the river" in expressions such as "south of the river"; the river gives its name to three informal areas: the Thames Valley, a region of England around the river between Oxford and West London. Thames Valley Police is a formal body. In non-administrative use, the river's name is used in those of Thames Valley University, Thames Water, Thames Television, publishing company Thames & Hudson and South Thames College. An example of its use in the names of historic entities is the Thames Ironworks and Shipbuilding Company.
The administrative powers of the Thames Conservancy have been taken on with modifications by the Environment Agency and, in respect of the Tideway part of the river, such powers are split between the agency and the Port of London Authority. The marks of human activity, in some cases dating back to Pre-Roman Britain, are visible at various points along the river; these include a variety of structure
Lighterman
A lighterman is a worker who operates a lighter, a type of flat-bottomed barge, which may be powered or unpowered. In the latter case it is today moved by a powered tug; the term is associated with the skilled men who operated the unpowered lighters moved by oar and water currents in the Port of London. Lightermen were one of the most characteristic groups of workers in London's docks during the heyday of the Port of London, but their trade was rendered obsolete by changes in shipping technology, they were associated with the watermen, who carried passengers, in 1700 joined the Company of Watermen to form the Company of Watermen and Lightermen. This is not speaking, a livery company but a "City Company Without Grant of Livery", formed in 1700 by Act of Parliament; the Guild continues to license lightermen working on the River Thames. Watermans' Hall is located at 16 St Mary At Hill, in Billingsgate, it is the only surviving Georgian guild hall. The construction of the docks was bitterly opposed by the lightermen and other vested interests, but went ahead anyway.
However, they did win a major concession: what became known as the "free-water clause", first introduced into the West India Dock Act of 1799 and subsequently written into the Acts governing all of the other docks. This stated that there was to be no charge for "lighters or craft entering into the docks... to convey, discharge or receive ballast or goods to or from on board any ship... or vessel." This was intended to give lighters and barges the same freedom in docks that they enjoyed on the open river. In practice, this proved damaging to the dock owners, it allowed ships to be loaded and unloaded overside, using barges and lighters to transfer their goods to and from riverside wharves rather than dock quays, thus bypassing quay dues and dock warehouses. This reduced the docks' income and harmed their finances, while boosting the profits of their riverside competitors. Not the dock owners lobbied vigorously—but unsuccessfully—for the abolition of this damaging privilege; the lightermen were a vital component of the Port of London before the enclosed docks were built during the 19th and 20th centuries.
Ships anchored in the middle of the Thames or near bridge arches transferred their goods aboard or in respect of a few exports from lighters. Lightermen rode the river's currents — westward when the tide was coming in, eastward on the ebb tide — to transfer the goods to quay-sides, they transferred goods up and down the river from quays to riverside factories and vice versa. This was an skilled job, requiring an intimate knowledge of the river's currents and tides, it demanded a lot of muscle power, as the lighters were unpowered. The lightermen's trade was swept away by the docks mentioned as well as economic and technological changes the introduction of containers, which led to the closure of London's major central docks in the 1960s. Few written accounts of the process of becoming an apprentice now exist, though the best-known is Men of the Tideway by Dick Fagan and Eric Burgess.. In the book, Fagan mentions the exploitative nature of lighterage and expresses his disdain for what he called a "free-for-all capitalist system".
The term lighterman is still used for the workers who operate motorised lighters to access a vessel, too large or due to conditions unable to moor at a dock and the phrase to alight goods is used in the goods trade compared to the phrase'alighting of passengers' which has become archaic across most of the English-speaking world except in formal contexts and on some railways, having been replaced with the terms'exit','leave' or'depart'. Company of Watermen and Lightermen The Thames Barge Driving Race Containerization Lightering Watermen's Hall Official Site Men of the Tideway by Fagan and Burgess Waterman's Hall Company of Watermen and Lightermen http://www.portcities.org.uk/london/server/show/conMediaFile.1397/A-London-lighterman-c-1910.html Thames Lighterman photos Lighterman apprentice certificates and licences Website dedicated to history of Lightermen Stephen Dobbs, The Singapore River, Part 1 - 3 Lightermen: Migration and destiny. This book devotes a chapter to Indian lightermen in the Singapore River
Decca Records
Decca Records is a British record label established in 1929 by Edward Lewis. Its U. S. label was established in late 1934 by Lewis, along with American Decca's first president Jack Kapp and American Decca president Milton Rackmil. In 1937, anticipating Nazi aggression leading to World War II, Lewis sold American Decca and the link between the UK and U. S. Decca labels was broken for several decades; the British label was renowned for its development of recording methods, while the American company developed the concept of cast albums in the musical genre. Both wings are now part of the Universal Music Group, owned by Vivendi, a media conglomerate headquartered in Paris, France; the US Decca label was the foundation company that evolved into UMG. The name "Decca" was coined by Wilfred S. Samuel by merging the word "Mecca" with the initial D of their logo "Dulcet" or their trademark "Dulcephone". Samuel, a linguist, chose "Decca" as a brand name; the name dates back to a portable gramophone called the "Decca Dulcephone" patented in 1914 by musical instrument makers Barnett Samuel and Sons.
That company was renamed the Decca Gramophone Co. Ltd. and sold to former stockbroker Edward Lewis in 1929. Within years, Decca Records Ltd. was the second largest record label in the world, calling itself "The Supreme Record Company". Decca continued to run it under that name. In the 1950s the American Decca studios were located in the Pythian Temple in New York City. In classical music, Decca had a long way to go from its modest beginnings to catch up with the established HMV and Columbia labels; the pre-war classical repertoire on Decca was select. The 3-disc 1929 recording of Delius's Sea Drift, arising from the Delius Festival that year, suffered by being crammed onto six sides, being indifferently recorded and expensive. However, it won Decca the loyalty of the baritone Roy Henderson, who went on to record for them the first complete Dido and Aeneas of Purcell with Nancy Evans and the Boyd Neel ensemble. Heinrich Schlusnus made important pre-war lieder recordings for Decca. Decca's emergence as a major classical label may be attributed to three concurrent events: the emphasis on technical innovation, the introduction of the long-playing record, the recruitment of John Culshaw to Decca's London office.
Decca released the stereo recordings of Ernest Ansermet conducting L'Orchestre de la Suisse Romande, including, in 1959, the first stereo LP album of the complete Nutcracker, as well as Ansermet's only stereo version of Manuel de Falla's The Three-Cornered Hat, which the conductor had led at its first performance in 1919. John Culshaw, who joined Decca in 1946 in a junior post became a senior producer of classical recordings, he revolutionised recording -- in particular. Hitherto, the practice had been to put microphones in front of the performers and record what they performed. Culshaw was determined to make recordings that would be'a theatre of the mind', making the listener's experience at home not second best to being in the opera house, but a wholly different experience. To that end he got the singers to move about in the studio as they would onstage, used discreet sound effects and different acoustics, recorded in long continuous takes, his skill, coupled with Decca engineering, took Decca into the first flight of recording companies.
His pioneering recording of Wagner's Der Ring des Nibelungen conducted by Georg Solti was a huge artistic and commercial success. Solti recorded throughout his career for Decca, made more than 250 recordings, including 45 complete opera sets. Among the international honours given Solti for his recordings were 31 Grammy awards – more than any other recording artist, whether classical or popular. In the wake of Decca's lead, artists such as Herbert von Karajan, Joan Sutherland and Luciano Pavarotti were keen to join the company's roster. However, Culshaw was speaking, not the first to do this. In 1951, Columbia Records executive Goddard Lieberson partnered with Broadway conductor Lehman Engel to record a series of unrecorded Broadway musical scores for Columbia Masterworks, including what Engel, in his book The American Musical Theatre: A Consideration, termed "Broadway opera", in 1951, they released the most complete Porgy and Bess recorded up to that time. Far from being a mere rendering of the score, the 3-LP album set used sound effects to realistically recreate the production as if the listener were watching a stage performance of the work.
Until 1947, American Decca issued British Decca classical music recordings. Afterwards, British Decca took over distribution through its new American subsidiary London Records. American Decca re-entered the classical music field in 1950 with distribution deals from Deutsche Grammophon and Parlophone. American Decca began issuing its own classical music recordings in 1956 when Israel Horowitz joined Decca to head its classical music operations. To further American Decca's dedication to serious music, in August of 1950, Rackmill announced the release of a new series of disks to be known as the "Decca Gold Label Series", to be devoted to "symphonies, chamber music, opera and choral music." American and European arti
Hatfield, Hertfordshire
Hatfield is a town and civil parish in Hertfordshire, England, in the borough of Welwyn Hatfield. It had a population of 29,616 in 2001, 39,201 at the 2011 Census; the settlement is of Saxon origin. Hatfield House, home of the Marquess of Salisbury, forms the nucleus of the old town. From the 1930s when de Havilland opened a factory until the 1990s when British Aerospace closed it, aircraft design and manufacture employed more people there than any other industry. Hatfield was one of the post-war New Towns built around London and has much modernist architecture from the period; the University of Hertfordshire is based there. Hatfield lies 20 miles north of London beside the A1 motorway and has direct trains to London King's Cross railway station, Finsbury Park and Moorgate. There has been a strong increase in commuters. In the Saxon period Hatfield was known as Hetfelle, but by the year 970, when King Edgar gave 5,000 acres to the monastery of Ely, it had become known as Haethfeld. Hatfield is recorded in the Domesday Book as the property of the Abbey of Ely, unusually, the original census data which compilers of Domesday used survives, giving us more information than in the final Domesday record.
No other records remain until 1226, when Henry III granted the Bishops of Ely rights to an annual four-day fair and a weekly market. The town was called Bishop's Hatfield. Hatfield House is the seat of the Marquesses of Salisbury. Elizabeth Tudor was confined there for three years in what is now known as The Old Palace in Hatfield Park. Legend has it that she learnt here of her accession as queen in 1558, while sitting under an oak tree in the Park, she held her first Council in the Great Hall of Hatfield. In 1851, the route of the Great North Road was altered to avoid cutting through the grounds of Hatfield House; the town grew up around the gates of Hatfield House. Old Hatfield retains many historic buildings, notably the Old Palace, St Etheldreda's Church and Hatfield House; the Old Palace was built by the Bishop of Ely, Cardinal Morton, in 1497, during the reign of Henry VII, the only surviving wing is still used today for Elizabethan-style banquets. St Etheldreda's Church was founded by the monks from Ely, the first wooden church, built in 1285, was sited where the existing building stands overlooking the old town.
In 1930 the de Havilland airfield and aircraft factory was opened at Hatfield and by 1949 it had become the largest employer in the town, with 4,000 staff. It was taken over by Hawker Siddeley in 1960 and merged into British Aerospace in 1978. In the 1930s it produced a range of small biplanes. During the Second World War it produced the Mosquito fighter bomber and developed the Vampire, the second British production jet aircraft after the Gloster Meteor. After the war, facilities were expanded and it developed the Comet airliner, the Trident airliner, an early bizjet, the DH125. British Aerospace closed the Hatfield site in 1993 having moved the BAe 146 production line to Woodford Aerodrome; the land was used as a film set for Steven Spielberg's movie Saving Private Ryan and most of the BBC/HBO television drama Band of Brothers. It was developed for housing, higher education and retail. Part of the former British Aerospace site was intended to be the site of a new £500-million hospital to replace the Queen Elizabeth II Hospital in Welwyn GC and a new campus for Oaklands College, but both projects were cancelled.
Today, Hatfield's aviation history is remembered by the names of certain local streets and pubs as well as The Comet Hotel built in the 1930s. The Harrier Pub is named after the Harrier bird, not the aircraft, hence the original pub sign showing the bird; the de Havilland Aircraft Heritage Centre, at Salisbury Hall in nearby London Colney and displays many historic de Havilland aeroplanes and related archives. The Abercrombie Plan for London in 1944 proposed a New Town in Hatfield, it was designated in the New Towns Act 1946, forming part of the initial Hertfordshire group with nearby Stevenage, Welwyn Garden City and Letchworth. The Government allocated 2,340 acres for Hatfield New Town, with a population target of 25,000; the Hatfield Development Corporation, tasked with creating the New Town, chose to build a new town centre, rejecting Old Hatfield because it was on the wrong side of the railway, without space for expansion and "with its intimate village character, out of scale with the town it would have to serve."
They chose instead St Albans Road on the town's east-west bus route. A road pattern was planned that offered no temptation to through traffic to take short cuts through the town and which enabled local traffic to move rapidly. Hatfield retains New Town characteristics, including much modernist architecture of the 1950s and the trees and open spaces that were outlined in the original design; as of 2017, a redevelopment of the town centre was planned. Hatfield is part of Welwyn Hatfield borough council in the county of Hertfordshire, it has a town council. It is twinned with the Dutch port town of Zierikzee. Hatfield is part of the Welwyn Hatfield constituency; the MP for Welwyn Hatfield is Grant Shapps. Hatfield experiences an oceanic climate like most of the United Kingdom. Hatfield has a nine-screen Odeon cinema, a stately home, a museum, a contemporary art gallery, a theatre and
Fairport Convention
Fairport Convention are a British folk rock band, formed in 1967 by Richard Thompson, Simon Nicol, Ashley Hutchings, Shaun Frater, with Frater replaced by Martin Lamble after their first gig. They started out influenced by American folk rock and singer-songwriter material, with a setlist dominated by covers of Bob Dylan and Joni Mitchell songs and a sound that earned them the nickname “the British Jefferson Airplane.” Vocalists Judy Dyble and Iain Matthews joined them before the recording of their self-titled debut in 1968. Denny began steering the group towards traditional British music for their next two albums, What We Did on Our Holidays and Unhalfbricking the latter featured fiddler Dave "Swarb" Swarbrick, most notably on the song A Sailor's Life, which laid the groundwork for British folk rock by being the first time a traditional British song was combined with a rock beat. However, shortly before the album's release, a crash on the M1 killed Lamble and Thompson's then-girlfriend, Jeannie Franklyn.
For this album Swarb joined full-time alongside Dave Mattacks on drums. Both Denny and Hutchings left before the year's end; the 1970s saw numerous lineup changes around the core of Swarb and Pegg, with Nicol absent for the middle of the decade, declining fortunes as folk music fell out of mainstream favour. Denny, whose partner Trevor Lucas had been a guitarist in the group since 1972, returned for the pop-orientated Rising for the Moon in 1975 in a final bid to crack America, they played a farewell concert in the village of Cropredy, where they’d held small concerts since 1976, this marked the beginning of the Cropredy Festival which has become the largest folk festival in Britain, with annual attendance of 20,000. The band was reformed by Nicol and Mattacks in 1985, joined by Maartin Allcock and Ric Sanders and they have remained active since. Allcock was replaced by Chris Leslie in 1996, Gerry Conway replaced Mattacks in 1998, with this lineup remaining unchanged since and marking the longest-lasting of the group's history.
Their 28th studio album, 50:50@50, released to mark their 50th anniversary, was released in 2017, they continue to headline Cropredy each year. Despite little mainstream success – with their only top 40 single being Si Tu Dois Partir, a French-language cover of the Dylan song If You Gotta Go, Go Now from Unhalfbricking – Fairport Convention remain influential in British folk rock and British folk in general. Liege & Lief was named the "Most Influential Folk Album of All Time" at the BBC Radio 2 Folk Awards in 2006, Pegg's playing style, which incorporates jigs and reels into his basslines, has been imitated by many in the folk rock and folk punk genres. Additionally, many former members went on to form other notable groups in the genre, including Fotheringay, Steeleye Span, the Albion Band. Hers ended with her death in 1978, though she is now regarded as Britain's finest female singer-songwriter, her song Who Knows Where the Time Goes? – recorded by Fairport on Unhalfbricking – has become a signature for herself and the band.
Bassist Ashley Hutchings met guitarist Simon Nicol in North London in 1966 when they both played in the Ethnic Shuffle Orchestra. They rehearsed on the floor above Nicol's father's medical practice in a house called "Fairport" on Fortis Green in Muswell Hill – the same street on which Ray and Dave Davies of the Kinks grew up; the house name lent its name to the group they formed together as Fairport Convention in 1967 with Richard Thompson on guitar and Shaun Frater on drums. After their initial performance at St Michael's Church Hall in Golders Green on 27 May 1967, they had their first of many line-up changes as one member of the audience, drummer Martin Lamble, convinced the band that he could do a better job than Frater and replaced him, they soon added a female singer, Judy Dyble, which gave them a distinctive sound among the many London bands of the period. Fairport Convention were soon playing at underground venues such as UFO and The Electric Garden, which became the Middle Earth club.
After only a few months, they caught the attention of manager Joe Boyd who secured them a contract with Polydor Records. Boyd suggested they augment the line-up with another male vocalist. Singer Iain Matthews joined the band and their first album, Fairport Convention, was recorded in late 1967 and released in June 1968. At this early stage Fairport looked to North American folk and folk rock acts such as Joni Mitchell, Bob Dylan, The Byrds for material and inspiration; the name "Fairport Convention" and the use of two lead vocalists led many new listeners to believe that they were an American act, earning them the nickname'the British Jefferson Airplane' during this period. Fairport Convention played alongside Jefferson Airplane at the First Isle of Wight Festival, 1968. After disappointing album sales they signed a new contract with Island Records. Before their next recording Judy Dyble was replaced by the band with Sandy Denny, a
