Maartin Allcock
Guitarist who helped revitalise folk giants Fairport Convention
MAARTIN ALLCOCK, who has died of liver cancer aged 61, was a musician and record producer who spent 11 years as a guitarist with the folk giants Fairport Convention, doubling up for some of that time as guitarist and keyboard player with prog-rockers Jethro Tull.
He was also a fine bass guitarist and violinist, his other instruments including the pipes, mandolin and mandocello, or bass/ baritone mandolin, and he was a session musician on more than 200 albums. In later years he championed Welsh-language rock and folk music.
He was born Martin Allcock at Middleton, near Manchester on January 5 1957. He studied music in Huddersfield and Leeds, and when he was 19 began playing in folk clubs and dance bands. The following year he toured with the comedian and musician Mike Harding in Harding’s band, the Brown Ale Cowboys.
He lived for a short time in Brittany then trained as a chef in the Shetland Isles. In 1981 he returned to music, joining the Bully Wee Band, a Celtic folk group.
He teamed up with Fairport Convention in 1985, making his first recorded contribution on the 1986 album Expletive Delighted! Dave Pegg, a stalwart of band, recalled: “[Violinist] Ric [Sanders] and Maart were both writing stuff, composing these great instrumental pieces … So we put out an allinstrumental album.”
The band’s new line-up would be one of the most stable in the band’s history, sticking together for 11 years, and Allcock played a leading role on such albums as Red & Gold (1988), The Five Seasons (1990) and Jewel in the Crown (1995), as well as touring with the band in the US, Europe, Australia, Hong Kong and Turkey.
He changed the spelling of his first name in the mid-1980s, he recalled, after talking to a fellow musician in Dublin, who, when Allcock told him his first name, recognised his accent as north Manchester, telling him he had to spell it with a double “a” from then on.
He stayed with Fairport until 1996, doing much to revitalise a band that had been together, with shifting personnel, for nearly three decades. Between 1988 and 1991 he was also a member of Jethro Tull. He played on the band’s 1989 album Rock Island, which continued in the hard rock vein the band had recently begun tapping and went gold in Britain. He also toured with the band in Europe and the Americas.
Another project was Waz!, a band he founded with melodeon and concertina player Dave Whetstone and another multi-instrumentalist, Pete Zorn – they took the band’s names from their initials. They released two albums, the second, Fully Chromatic (1999), when Steve Tilston had replaced Whetstone.
In 2000 Allcock moved to Snowdonia. He studied Welsh at Harlech College and began working with the Welsh-language record label, Sain, as a session man and producer.
In the early 2000s he played bass for the Nashville singer and songwriter, Beth Nielsen Chapman. He recorded several solo albums, and worked with other musicians including Yusuf Islam, when the former Cat Stevens made his musical return in the 2000s; the experimental Tuvan throat singer, Sainkho Namtchylak; Robert Plant of Led Zeppelin; Adrian Edmondson’s band, the Bad Shepherds; Ralph Mctell; and the former Seeker, Judith Durham.
In August 2017 he joined up with Fairport at the Cropredy Convention Festival – founded by the band in 1979 – to mark their 50th anniversary, and this year, a few weeks before his death, he made his final public appearance at the Festival. Although he was ill, he played with the band on a rocking version of one of their best-loved songs, Matty Groves. At the end, he told Fairport’s fans: “You’re the best friends I’ve ever known.”
Maartin Allcock is survived by his wife, Jan, and by two daughters and a son from his first marriage.
Maartin Allcock, born January 5 1957, died September 16 2018