I have equal respect for them both, but I've always loved Fairport, from the first time I heard them on Peel's show around 1968. There is genuine greatness, joy and tragedy which is inseparable from the band - we old folks doddering around Cropredy with 6X in one hand and adjusting our hearing aids with the other know this.

Someone said Fairport had succeeded through marketing to the beery blokes. MARKETING? Fairport? Are you kidding? Any success they've had is in spite of marketing. Mind you they did discover mailing lists around 1979, which helped a bit.

Alleged marketing success is far more relevant to Steeleye - for God's sake they had Jo Lustig for a manager! To steal a few lines from my old classmate Richard Williams -

"One day (Lustig's) sceptical Yiddish mother asked him what it was, exactly, that he did for a living. Well, mom, he said, people pay me to get their names and addresses into the newspapers and on to the radio. "You get people's names and addresses into the newspapers and on to the radio?" Yes, mom. "And you get paid for it?" That's right, mom. "Who pays you? The newspapers and radio?" No, mom, the people pay me. "And their names go in the newspapers and radio, because you ask?" Yes, mom. "So what are you, such a big shot?""

Then of course, Steeleye also had Mike Batt as a producer.....

Michael asks "what sort of Convention would that be then?"
Around the mid 1960s an assorted bunch of young musicians convened in a house called Fairport, at the corner of Fortis Green Road in Muswell Hill. That's the sort of convention it was. A musical one.