Unhalfbricking, Fairport Convention

In 1969, Bob Dylan and the group that would soon name itself The Band congregated in a Woodstock basement and began working through scores of songs that would slowly creep into the world via bootlegs. The wider musical climate was defined by the gaudiness of psychedelia, but the music they put to tape tapped somehow into an America that predated rock by at least a century. In time, via a slew of authorised cover versions and the release of The Band's Music from Big Pink, it would prompt a back-to-the-roots paradigm shift, manifested in records as diverse as the Byrds' Sweetheart of the Rodeo, the Stones' Beggars Banquet and the Beatles' Let It Be.

Among the first British musicians to hear music from The Basement Tapes were Fairport Convention, summoned to the London offices of Dylan's music publishers in 1968 with a view to recording one or more of these odd new songs. 'Most of the group went in there, sat around, and put these vinyl, white-label copies on,' recalls bassist Ashley Hutchings. 'And this strange, kind of mish-mash of styles and drawled lyrics came out of the speakers. It sounded kind of subterranean; there was this strange cloak of weirdness covering them. We loved it all. We would have covered all the songs if we could.'

Fairport were still a band in partial thrall to the US, occasionally described as 'the British Jefferson Airplane'. Their instant love of The Basement Tapes , however, neatly shines light on an element of their art that was slowly bubbling to the surface - for just as Dylan and The Band had begun digging for a more eternal American music, so Fairport were starting to move towards its British equivalent. Sandy Denny had joined the band before the recording of 1969's What We Did on Our Holidays , bringing a voice both peerless and gloriously English; for their next album they employed an esteemed folk violinist named Dave Swarbrick.

On account of one of Denny's contributions to an inexplicable on-the-road word game, the latter record would be named Unhalfbricking. It's tempting to characterise it as a work of transition, presaging their full-blown embrace of electrified folk - and yet to do so is to underestimate its magic. Here their burgeoning folk influence sits next to off-beam rock (witness their Basement Tapes cover of 'Million Dollar Bash'), the gentle influence of jazz, and wonderfully inexplicable musical exotica. Who else would have attempted a cod-Cajun rendition of another Dylan obscurity called 'If You Gotta Go, Go Now', let alone sung it in French?

It's the folk(ish) material, however, that forms the album's spine. Denny's 'Who Knows Where the Time Goes?' is a self-written ballad that gently taps into something palpably ancient. And then there is 'A Sailor's Life', taken from the folk circuit and turned into a panoramic 11 minutes, capturing both Richard Thompson's alchemical guitar playing and the endless mystery the band quickly divined in the English folk canon.

The final stroke of inspiration was the sleeve, shot at the suburban home of Denny's parents, who stand awkwardly in the fore ground while the group themselves are half hidden behind a trellis fence. The image is pretty much perfect, rendering a mundane English idea unsettling, as if the age-old strangeness that underlies our national patchwork might be about to burst forth. From here on in that's exactly what happened.

Unfortunately, the release of Unhalfbricking would be sullied by tragedy. On 12 May 1969, two months before it appeared, the group's transit van rolled over on the M1 killing drummer Martin Lamble and Thompson's girlfriend Jeannie Franklin, and couching the album in the darkest terms imaginable. That they recovered, going on to establish English folk-rock with Liege & Lief , perhaps speaks volumes about an astonishing creative strength.

Burn it: A Sailor's Life; Dear Landlord

How it felt for Ashley Hutchings: 'My memory of it is bound up with the terrible car crash.On the back cover we're all eating around a table. The shirt and the leather waistcoat I'm wearing are what I had on when the crash happened. I can clearly remember them being bloodstained. You don't forget things like that.'