DAVE PEGG

Every month we get inside the mind of one of the biggest names in music. This issue it’s Dave Pegg. The bassist (and sometime guitarist) is Fairport Convention’s longest-serving member and also played a significant role in Jethro Tull in the 80s and 90s. He appeared on key recordings by John Martyn, Nick Drake and Ralph McTell, as well as his bandmates’ solo works. As he prepares for this year’s Cropredy Convention, he shares with Prog fond memories of Sandy Denny and Nick Drake, tales of accidentally concussing bandmates, and reflects on his time with Ian Anderson’s Tull. And as he looks ahead to the future, he reveals the details of a very special musical board game that’s currently in production.

Words: James McNair

Peggy to his friends, Dave Pegg is one of prog’s most affable and gregarious individuals: a virtuosic, Brummie-born bassist who professes to have taught Fairport Convention and Jethro Tull how to drink. He joined the Fairports in 1969, one week after seeing them play on his 22nd birthday. Revered LP Liege & Lief was just newly baked then, but bassist Ashley Hutchings was leaving to form Steeleye Span, while storied frontwoman Sandy Denny was leaving to form Fotheringay.

The Ian Campbell Folk Group, 1968. L-R: Ian Campbell, Brian Clark, Dave Pegg, John Dunkerley and Lorna Campbell, plus John Masters (lower right), the Double Zero Club treasurer.

BIRMINGHAM POST AND MAIL ARCHIVE/MIRRORPIX/GETTY IMAGES

When Pegg teamed with Richard Thompson, Simon Nicol, Dave Swarbrick and Dave Mattacks, his life changed forever. Folk-rock –or ‘fock’, as he likes to call it –would become his long-term vocation, not only via such special Fairport LPs as Full House, Angel Delight and Rising For The Moon (the latter marked Denny’s return). Peggy’s session outings include bass on Nick Drake’s Bryter Layter and various Richard Thompson and Sandy Danny solo albums, while, from 1980-1995, he was a fully-fledged member of Jethro Tull (when Ian Anderson first called him in 1979, Pegg thought it was a journalist of the same name who wrote for Folk Roots).

Chatting to Prog from his home near the port of Lorient in Brittany, France, Pegg is in excellent form as he gears up for Fairport’s Cropredy Convention, the gathering which has been a cherished staple of the UK festival season for over 40 years now.

“It’s very proggy this year,” he says with a smile. “We’ve got Big Big Train, we’ve got Focus…” Behind him are various gold and silver discs.

“I put them up there when I’m doing Zoom calls so people think I’m really successful,” he jokes. “There’s a token gold disc for the combined one million sales of all the Fairport albums, and the rest are various Tull discs for stuff like The Broadsword And The Beast and Crest Of A Knave.”

In his memoir, Off The Pegg: Bespoke Memories Of A Bass Player, Pegg details encounters variously touching or hilarious with everyone from Robert Plant to Ozzy Osbourne to Nick Drake, and his account of accidentally soiling himself onstage in white jeans is not for the faint-hearted. Generous as he is with his time, we can only skim the surface of what Pegg has experienced in the last 76 years.