Judy Dyble (71) – Fairport Convention – was born on February 13, 1949 in north London to Jessica and Albert Dyble. She was educated at Minchenden Grammar, Southgate, sang in a choir and took piano lessons from an early age. By her mid-teens she was hanging out in folk clubs and was still at school when in 1964 she formed her first group, Judy and the Folkmen.
Three years later she was asked to join Fairport Convention. “They thought they might like to have a girl singer and, more importantly, none of the band really liked singing,” she said with characteristic self-deprecation.
Dyble was soon forced to choose between a place at library school or trucking up and down the M1 to gigs in a decrepit Commer Van with no heating and a hole in the bottom where the snow blew in. It was, she said, “no contest”. Fortunately, the group’s roadie had a dog which Dyble persuaded to curl up at her feet, covering the hole in the floor. At one early gig on a houseboat, the vessel began to sink, forcing a hasty rescue mission as instruments were hurled ashore.
In 1967 when her friends and fellow musicians were dropping acid and getting as high as kites, Judy Dyble’s preference was to take out her knitting.
On one famous night at London’s hip Speakeasy Club, she sat stitching and purling while her boyfriend Richard Thompson jammed on stage with Jimi Hendrix. Even when singing with her own band, Fairport Convention, she was known to reach for her knitting when not required to sing during the instrumental passages.
“The stupid thing was I cannot knit for toffee,” she said many years later. So shapeless were her efforts that they couldn’t even serve as scarves and so she “gave them away as dish cloths”. Knitting them was “just something for me to do while the big solos were going on”, she explained.
That Dyble never quite fitted the Psychedelic Sixties template was perhaps unsurprising. On leaving school she had become a library assistant and her first paid gig as a singer came at a “candlelight soirée” organized by the local Conservative Association. Yet she left an indelible mark on the development of 1960s pop music and helped to establish Fairport Convention as Britain’s foremost folk-rock band.
On the group’s self-titled 1968 debut album she sang songs by Bob Dylan and the little-known Joni Mitchell as well as original material in a pure voice blessed with crystal-clear diction. She also played autoharp, recorder and piano on the album, which the band’s record company Polydor quaintly advertised as “put together by unusual personalities for seekers to whom real music, oddly enough, seems to matter”.
The album’s folk tradition and electric guitars established Fairport Convention as a force to be reckoned with, while the combination of male and female lead vocals between Dyble and Iain Matthews earned the group the tag “the British Jefferson Airplane”.
Yet it was Dyble’s only album with the group. As her relationship with Thompson, the lead guitarist, fell apart, she was asked to leave and was replaced by Sandy Denny. Her last gig with Fairport Convention came in Rome, a week before the group’s debut album was released. She made her way to the airport alone after being asked to hand back her autoharp, which had been purchased out of band funds. “It was absolutely devastating. My friends had turned me out of their gang,” she said.
Further musical adventures however followed her expulsion from Fairport Convention. She helped her next boyfriend, Ian McDonald, to form the band that became King Crimson, placing an ad in Melody Maker which said “Musicians wanted. Serious ones only.” Robert Fripp was among those who replied, but after splitting up with McDonald she left the nascent group before King Crimson achieved fame.
By 1970 she had formed the duo Trader Horne with Jackie McAuley, who had played in Them with Van Morrison. They made an album, Morning Way, later regarded as a psych-folk classic. However, Dyble then met her future husband Simon Stable and “ran away from everything” to embrace a life of motherhood, librarianship and dog-walking. Simon Stable, whose real name was Simon de la Bédoyère, was a DJ and music writer, the son of Count Michael de la Bédoyère, who edited the Catholic Herald for nearly 30 years.
As Fairport Convention went on to greater success, they established their own annual festival at Cropredy, Oxfordshire, in the late 1970s. By then Dyble had retired from music but as she lived near by she became a regular attendant.
“Sometimes they’d sing some song that I’d sung with them, and I’d think, ‘Oh, I used to sing that’, and I’d be a bit melancholic,” she admitted. “But then I’d take the children home, walk the dog and everything returned to normal.”
Having reverted to her original profession, she was back at work in Bicester Library on Monday morning.
After her children left home her main companions were a succession of greyhounds that she adopted from an animal shelter. There was also an unplanned return to music when in 1997 she was invited on stage at the Cropredy Festival to sing with Fairport Convention for the first time in almost 30 years. “I was completely out of practice and really felt that it had been a mistake to ask me,” she said. “But I started singing at the rehearsal and suddenly the years fell away and I remembered how to do it.”
She performed with Fairport Convention again at the 2002 festival and went on to stage a well-received comeback, recording a series of solo albums on which she defied rheumatoid arthritis, emphysema, sciatica and a spinal operation to sing with a mature and graceful elegance.
“You might think that my musical career has been fairly meandering and directionless and you’d be right,” she admitted. “I have never knowingly decided to follow any particular path. But I’ve been lucky enough to be in the right place at the right time with the most talented of people.”
Judy Dyble passed away on July 12, 2020 at age 71.
