Ashley Hutchings’ Million Dollar Bash

Ashley Hutchings has played a key role in the history of British folk-rock, but ‘The Guv’nor’ who co-founded Fairport Convention, Steeleye Span, various iterations of The Albion Band and other projects, will pay tribute to an American hero when he celebrates his 80th birthday at what promises to be a historic and epic event.

The early Fairport Convention started out playing songs by Bob Dylan, whom Ashley says he “loved since I was a teenager, and we did a lot of Dylan covers, mainly songs I found that were not well known.” They even played ‘Si Tu Dois Partir’, a French version of Dylan’s ‘If You Gotta Go, Go Now’, on Top Of The Pops in 1969, the year Dylan played at the Isle of Wight Festival. Fifty years later, in 2019, Ashley formed the Dylancentric band to celebrate that anniversary by playing Dylan songs.

He learned that Dylan was also a fan of his work. He received an email from the man himself, saying “Fairport Convention released some of the best versions of my unreleased songs”, while a follow-up message said “My friend Ashley Hutchings is the Godfather of folk-rock. He made us a genre we couldn’t refuse.” “Isn’t that wonderful!” says Ashley, of the friend he has yet to meet in person. Dylan also told him, “[I] loved Sandy Denny, and when I made Self Portrait, I’d been listening to Liege & Lief – can’t you tell?”. “No,” says Ashley, “we didn’t have a clue”.

No surprise, then, that Dylancentric will be reformed for Million Dollar Bash, the birthday celebrations, as part of a line-up of around 50 musicians reflecting different stages of Ashley’s lengthy career. There will be three 45-minute sets, with Ashley acting as MC and playing bass on “some key tracks”. It will start with a reminder of Fairport’s classic 1969 folk-rock album Liege & Lief, with surviving members Richard Thompson and Simon Nicol playing on ‘Come All Ye’ and ‘The Deserter’. The Steeleye era will be represented by Martin Carthy, who will play solo and chat with Ashley, no doubt discussing their collaborations and his memories of the young Dylan’s visit to London in 1962.

The setlist was compiled with help from Ashley’s son Blair Dunlop, and it won’t present the songs in chronological order. But there will, of course, be reminders of Ashley’s love of morris and the 1972 Morris On album with tunes featuring squeezebox hero John Kirkpatrick, Richard Thompson… and morris dancers. Songs and a chat with singer-songwriter and actor John Tams will mark Ashley’s time at the National Theatre. There will be songs from different Albion line-ups, including from the 1978 Albion Band album Rise Up Like the Sun (featuring Tams and Richard Thompson) and the social commentary of the album 1990 (with Phil Beer).

Then, of course, there will be songs from Ashley’s “favourite album”, the much-praised By Gloucester Docks I Sat Down and Wept (1987), which will include singer Polly Bolton, while from 2018’s Paradise and Thorns there will be a father-and-son duet with Blair on ‘32 Years and a Lifetime’. The list also includes the return of Ashley’s Rainbow Chasers band and a revival of his 2001 Street Cries project, now featuring Jim Moray.

As for the finale, it will involve “as many as we can get on stage” singing ‘Who Knows Where The Time Goes’ (“for obvious reasons”) and ‘All of a Row’, a “scything song” from the 1980 album of the National Theatre’s Lark Rise to Candleford (for which The Albion Band provided the music and in which Tams and Carthy both played and acted).

It promises to be an extraordinary evening.

The Million Dollar Bash will take place on April 18 in Birmingham: bmusic.co.uk

Hutchings will also be touring from March 19