This is an excerpt from the print edition of Dirty Linen magazine #102 (October / November 2002). The magazine is available on newsstands and by subscription.

Shakin' Out the Sheets: Dirty Linen Classics
by Jim Lee

Fairport Convention
Fairport Unconventional
Free Reed FRQCD 35 (2002)

This new four-CD set from Free Reed Records sets out to do an almost impossible task: Make some sort of coherent musical sense out of the 35 years that Fairport Convention has been making music together. That's not an easy job with all the lineup changes and different musical directions the band has taken in its extensive career and by the varying quality of music produced by all those different lineups. It was a job made harder by Neil Wayne's decision (which was the correct one) not to duplicate the studio material available on the Island Records compilations History of...., Introduction To... and the recently released What We Did On Or Holidays. With Island also in the process of re-releasing Fairport's early back catalog titles with bonus tracks (Heyday with eight, Liege & Lief with two, Full House with five) and getting first choice of the quality material, it further reduced what was available to Wayne. So he opted to go with almost all unreleased and unavailable live, studio, and BBC-session material to tell the band's story.

In the previous box sets Free Reed has released, they've felt a need to group songs into theme sets — not always to the music's best advantage. With the Fairport Box, it's done the same way, even though a chronological running order showing the evolution of the band's music would have made more sense and made for less jarring contrasts between some of the different talent levels of the band. It would also have made for a more attractive package for someone who only liked, say, the earlier years of the group's music and made it easier to ignore some of the lesser-quality material produced by later versions of the band.

With that in mind then, it's no surprise that Disc 1, Fairport — A History, the only one in (mostly) chronological order, is the one that flows best from track to track. Ignoring the first two out-of-place Cropredy-related tracks (more on that later), we get the band's first single, "If I Had a Ribbon Bow," and a host of early BBC radio sessions: a version of "Staines Morris" from the 1970 Philadelphia Folk Festival, a song from the extremely short-lived Roger Hill/Tom Farnell lineup, an early version of "Rising for the Moon" without the fiddle intro, the band's last single in 1980, a 17-year jump to a couple of lackluster songs from the '90s, and finishing with an excerpt from "One Sure Thing" from their first studio session in 1967.
Disc 2, Rareport Convention, is a collection of rare and obscure material that also holds together well, with the majority of the tracks being from 1968-1973 (with again the weakest two tracks dating from 1989 and 2001). On this disc are found outtakes of "Percy's Song," "Dear Landlord," and "Autopsy"; two more songs from the 1968 French TV performance, "Reno Nevada" and "Time Will Show the Wiser"; a version of "The Deserter" from 1969, sung by Dave Swarbrick; two outtakes from the "Rosie Sessions" with David Rea; a throwaway version of Richard Thompson singing "The Lady is a Tramp"; and ends with a musically intriguing (but poor in sound) version of "A Sailor's Life" from 1968, reportedly the first time the band ever performed the song.

This is an excerpt from an article in Dirty Linen #102 (Oct./Nov. '02). Read the full text in the magazine, available via subscription or on newsstands and in bookstores.