14 May 1969: During a UK tour, Fairport Convention's van crashed on the M1 motorway on the way home from a gig in Birmingham, killing the group's 19 year-old drummer Martin Lamble and Richard Thompson's girlfriend Jeannie Franklyn. Sandy Denny was not involved, as she traveled separately on a train with Trevor Lucas.
In all these years, it has never dawned on me before that this accident occurred on "Bonny Black Hare Day", whose lyrics begin "On the fourteenth of May at the dawn of the day....". This was a 'holiday' observed by hard-core Fairport fans.
Another coincidence which I did notice several years ago: Fairport had just released "Unhalfbricking" at the time of the accident. One of its stand-out tracks is the obscure Dylan song, "Percy's song", whose narrator is pleading with a judge to reduce the sentence of 99 years which was handed out to a friend of the narrator, who fell asleep whilst driving, thus killing three people. In true life, Harvey Branham, Fairport's driver, was sentenced to three months in prison for causing the M1 crash (coincidentally the name of an instrumental on Fairport's eponymous and obscure first album).
The drumming on the first few Fairport albums is surprisingly good; Martin could have developed to become an excellent drummer.
[Edit from a few years later: according to Ashley Hutchings' website, the crash was on May 12, not May 14]
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