Song 178: “Who Knows Where the Time Goes?” by Fairport Convention, Part Two: “I Have no Thought of Time”

For those who haven’t heard the announcement I posted, songs from this point on will sometimes be split among multiple episodes, so this is the second part of a two-episode look at the song “Who Knows Where The Time Goes?” by Fairport Convention, and the intertwining careers of Joe Boyd, Sandy Denny, and Richard Thompson. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode.

Patreon backers also have a forty-one-minute bonus episode available, on Judy Collins’ version of this song.

Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by editing, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt’s irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/

Errata

For about an hour this was uploaded with the wrong Elton John clip in place of “Saturday Sun”. This has now been fixed. I say “The Ballad of Evermore” at one point where of course I mean “The Battle of Evermore” (the script was correct and it’s right in the transcript, I just misspoke).

Resources

Because of the increasing problems with Mixcloud’s restrictions, I have decided to start sharing streaming playlists of the songs used in episodes instead of Mixcloud ones. This Tunemymusic link will let you listen to the playlist I created on your streaming platform of choice — however please note that not all the songs excerpted are currently available on streaming. The songs missing from the Tidal version are “Shanten Bells” by the Ian Campbell Folk Group, “Tom’s Gone to Hilo” by A.L. Lloyd, two by Paul McNeill and Linda Peters, three by Elton John & Linda Peters, “What Will I Do With Tomorrow” by Sandy Denny and “You Never Know” by Charlie Drake, but the other fifty-nine are there. Other songs may be missing from other services.

The main books I used on Fairport Convention as a whole were Patrick Humphries’ Meet On The Ledge, Clinton Heylin’s What We Did Instead of Holidays, and Kevan Furbank’s Fairport Convention on Track.

Rob Young’s Electric Eden is the most important book on the British folk-rock movement.

Information on Richard Thompson comes from Patrick Humphries’ Richard Thompson: Strange Affair and Thompson’s own autobiography Beeswing. 

Information on Sandy Denny comes from Clinton Heylin’s No More Sad Refrains and Mick Houghton’s I’ve Always Kept a Unicorn.

I also used Joe Boyd’s autobiography White Bicycles and Chris Blackwell’s The Islander. 

And this three-CD set is the best introduction to Fairport’s music currently in print.

Transcript

Before we begin, this episode contains reference to alcohol and cocaine abuse and medical neglect leading to death. It also starts with some discussion of the fatal car accident that ended last episode. There’s also some mention of child neglect and spousal violence. If that’s likely to upset you, you might want to skip this episode or read the transcript.

One of the inspirations for this podcast when I started it back in 2018 was a project by Richard Thompson, which appears (like many things in Thompson’s life) to have started out of sheer bloody-mindedness. In 1999 Playboy magazine asked various people to list their “songs of the Millennium”, and most of them, understanding the brief, chose a handful of songs from the latter half of the twentieth century. But Thompson determined that he was going to list his favourite songs *of the millennium*. He didn’t quite manage that, but he did cover seven hundred and forty years, and when Playboy chose not to publish it, he decided to turn it into a touring show, in which he covered all his favourite songs from “Sumer Is Icumen In” from 1260:

[Excerpt: Richard Thompson, “Sumer is Icumen In”]

Through numerous traditional folk songs, union songs like “Blackleg Miner”, pieces by early-modern composers, Victo