Matthews Southern Comfort – Woodstock

24th July 1970 · 1970, 1970s, Music

Fairports founder Iain Matthews had his solitary hit single with a cover of this Joni Mitchell song, Woodstock, also covered by CSNY.

Confession: I have always assumed that Matthews Southern Comfort, who sang this wonderfully elegiac country-tinged hymn to the Woodstock festival, was an American band. I was wrong.

I now discover that Iain Matthews comes from Scunthorpe and was a founder member of English folkies Fairport Convention, singing on their first three albums; first with Judy Dyble (who died at the weekend) and then Sandy Denny.

Nor did I know, when this tune topped the charts in September 1970, that it had previously been recorded by Joni Mitchell,

Nor that she wrote it; nor that it had already been covered by Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, who she wrote it for them to perform at the festival.

I’ve just listened back to both of them and – sorry folks! – I have to say I much prefer this one.

It seems that, due to record label politics, it was released only after the CSNY version flopped in the UK, this one having been well received on a Radio 1 show, Live In Concert, and championed by DJ Tony Blackburn, who made it his Record of the Week.

In what ought to have been a career-killing move, after this solitary hit Matthews then left the group to which he had given his name, complaining that he had no time for interviews and promotion when he could be writing and playing music.

Awkwardly, that left the one-hit wonders saddled with a band name that no longer made much sense without him. Little wonder that they failed to bother the charts again.