Farewell, Dave Swarbrick

My heart didn’t stop exactly, but I had to swallow hard a couple of times last night when I read the Sunday Times from June 12 (carried around in my handbag unread for two weeks) and happened to glance at the obituaries page: Dave Swarbrick had died on June 3rd and I hadn’t known.

Where is that damned Facebook when you need it? It was Dave Swarbrick! Swarbs! Fiddler, singer and on and off frontman of legendary folk/rock band Fairport Convention. And he was my first love.

I mean, my first distant celebrity love whose photos I drooled over and whose angelic voice and violin I listened to until my ear canals were completely worn out.

Now I realise that he must have been in his mid-thirties in the months and years that I loved him as a young teenager (the crazy infatuation changed to indifference when he grew a beard) but he looked so young! So …not demonic, but slightly devious, certainly mischievous, laconic and knowing. He was the epitome of perfect manliness for me in the 70s: Short build, long hair, highly gifted musician and composer and he wore one big gold earring, a habit I immediately copied and which plunged me into hippiedom (a state from which I didn’t escape until I moved to London in 1982).

I’ve put most of the music from my younger years behind me, but Fairport Convention has remained steadfastly in my album collection and hardly a week has gone by without me listening to them.

Oh, Dave Swarbrick. Oh, my youth. When your beautiful idols die aged 75 looking like a gnome, you realise your youth is well and truly over. Farewell, farewell. A great musician and, apparently, delightful human being, has left us.

As a bonus, here is the most beautiful version of The Flowers of the Forest ever recorded with Dave Swarbrick forever young and beautiful.