Fairport Convention — Byfield, Northamptonshire

In the early hours of May 12, 1969, a van carrying Fairport Convention home from a gig in Birmingham crashed on the M1 motorway near Scratchwood Services, killing drummer Martin Lamble and guitarist Richard Thompson's girlfriend Jeannie Franklyn. The crash was a defining trauma for British folk rock and for Thompson personally — a young man whose response to grief was to throw himself into the most ambitious recording project the band had attempted. The album recorded in its aftermath, "Liege and Lief" (1969), is considered the founding document of British folk rock: the moment when electric rock instrumentation was deliberately and systematically applied to the English and Celtic traditional music repertoire.

Fairport Convention had formed in North London in 1967 — a band of extraordinary musicians including Thompson, Sandy Denny, Ashley Hutchings, and Simon Nicol — and had been moving through various folk-rock configurations when the crash interrupted everything. "Liege and Lief" was made in the shadow of the accident, in a rented house in Farley Chamberlayne, Hampshire, where the survivors retreated to grieve and work. Sandy Denny's voice on recordings like "A Sailor's Life" and "Tam Lin" is one of the great instruments in British music.

The M1 crash site near Byfield is not formally marked, but it is documented in the band's history and in accounts of the British folk revival. Fairport Convention, in various configurations, has continued performing and recording for more than fifty years, holding an annual festival at Cropredy in Oxfordshire. Sandy Denny died in 1978 from a brain haemorrhage following a fall; Richard Thompson went on to a solo career of enduring distinction.