LIEGE & LIEF

On Liege & Lief Fairport Convention made their definitive break away from previous 60s folk rock precedents, which had concentrated mostly on presenting modern material from singer- songwriters like Dylan, and instead applied a folk rock approach to adapting more traditional folk fare, focusing in particular on arrangements of British folk standards with only a smattering of original compositions.

It's spoken of as a groundbreaking album, and it is, but to perceive this you need to remember that the real inventiveness here is in the arrangements rather than in the compositions themselves, with mellow electric guitar solos and the like being worked into the mix so naturally you'd have imagined these songs were originally composed for electric instruments. Fairport Convention weren't the first people to take this sort of approach to British folk rock, but few were as successful as they are here.