Podcasts about OPEC

Is the global transition to low-carbon energy accelerating or slowing down? One answer is that it depends where you look. In the US, energy policy has shifted away from support for low-carbon technologies, but China is continuing with record installations of solar, wind, and batteries, and record sales of EVs. With AI emerging as the central arena for great power completion, which model will work best at providing the power the new technologies need?The AI revolution will be the most transformative change in human history. That's according to Gerard Reid, this week's guest, a veteran energy commentator and co-founder of the advisory firm Alexa Capital. Gerard, who also co-hosts the podcast Redefining Energy, says he thinks AI will reinvent the world's energy system. There is a widening gulf between ‘petrostates' such as the US, which are rich in oil and gas and favor fossil fuels, and the ‘electrostates', led by China, which is dominates global manufacturing for technologies such as solar panels, batteries and EVs.Europe, which is relatively resource-poor, is following China's path out of necessity, while India and others weigh up which model to adopt. Gerard, host Ed Crooks and regular guest Amy Myers-Jaffe debate the different approaches that different countries are taking to build secure energy systems that will be able to meet growing demand for electricity for AI. Electricity is now the ultimate security priority, demanding grid upgrades, new technologies to support resilience including vehicle-to-grid, and new strategic partnerships. Gerard argues that OPEC's current strategy suggest it sees oil demand peaking soon. As the world adopts Chinese EVs and other low-cost, low-carbon technologies, some big questions are becoming increasingly urgent. Will the US continue to cling to fossil fuels? Will cheap solar upend electricity industries around the world? And above all, will the race for strategic and economic success be won by whichever country integrates AI, low-cost power, and resilient grids first?Ed Crooks is Vice Chair for the Americas at Wood Mackenzie. Amy Myers-Jaffe is the Director of NYU's Energy, Climate Justice and Sustainability Lab.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Fears of a massive non-dom exodus from the UK have been allayed by initial tax data, and UK companies in China are being buoyed by diplomatic law. Plus, the FT's Jamie Smyth explains why the US shale boom may be over after a decade-long run. Mentioned in this podcast:UK companies in China buoyed by diplomatic thawUS oil producers say Opec ‘price war' will halt shale boom Initial tax data allays fears of non-dom exodus from UKSign up for the FT Weekend Festival at ft.com/festival and use the promo code “FTPodcasts” for 10 per cent off.Today's FT News Briefing was produced by Fiona Symon, Katya Kumkova, and Marc Filippino. Additional help from Sam Giovinco, Michael Lello, and Gavin Kallmann. Our acting co-head of audio is Topher Forhecz. The show's theme music is by Metaphor Music. Read a transcript of this episode on FT.com Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

A decades-long manhunt closed in on international terrorist Illich Ramirez Sanchez, aka Carlos the Jackal, on 14th August, 1994 - when he was sedated and kidnapped by French intelligence agents in Khartoum, Sudan, following a tip-off by the CIA. Affiliated with the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, the Organization for Armed Arab Struggle, and the Japanese Red Army, the Venezuelan militant had been responsible for a slew of major terrorist attacks in the 1970s and 80s, notably the storming of an OPEC meeting in 1975, during which he took hostages and demanded ransoms, and was widely considered the world's most-wanted man.  In this episode, Arion, Rebecca and Olly explain how ‘Carlos' came to acquire not just one, but two nicknames; consider how the politics of the day enabled both his terrorism and his womanising; and reveal why his sperm count ultimately cost him his freedom… Further Reading: • ‘SUDAN SEIZES TERRORIST 'CARLOS THE JACKAL'' (The Washington Post, 1994): https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1994/08/16/sudan-seizes-terrorist-carlos-the-jackal/4e8d3daa-b064-4ca7-ba16-e6f0d68744aa/?itid=sr_2 • ‘Carlos the Jackal: The Extraordinary Life of the Most Notorious Terrorist Before Bin Laden' (Vice, 2022): https://www.vice.com/en/article/4awdbq/carlos-the-jackal-communist-terrorist • ‘'Carlos the Jackal' convicted in France' (AlJazeera English, 2011): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g2sUuxYcdro This episode first aired in 2023 Love the show? Support us!  Join 

Kevin covers the following topics: Fusable's MC Advantage released their analysis of FMCSA data regarding crashes involving English Language Proficiency violators versus other violations; AI powered speed cameras can be used to find other violations; BP's latest oil and natural gas discovery; BP reports 2nd qtr. financial results; Paccar reported their 2nd qtr. results; Kevin has the details, sifts through the data, offers his insights, puts the information into historical perspective, offers his insights and a few opinions along the way. Oil and gas prices react to an unexpected rise crude oil supply, sanctions on Russia may increase or decrease pending Trump-Putin meeting on Friday, the International Energy Agency's forecast for oil supply and OPEC+ forecast global oil demand.

The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported the Consumer Price Index (CPI) and Core CPI; the National Federation of Independent Business (NFIB) released the NFIB Small Business Optimism Index; Kevin has the details, looks at the data, digs through the information, puts it all into historical perspective and offers his insights, as well as an opinion or two. Crude oil and gas prices reacts to the U.S. and China extending the tariff pause until November, upcoming Trump-Putin talks on Friday, the CPI and Core CPI, OPEC upgrading the 2026 oil demand growth forecast and the anticipated Energy Information Agency report.

Rob Thummel and Ellen Wald cover the energy space. Ellen focuses on OPEC's latest moves and how oil demand levels are being weighted around the world. Rob looks at the evolution of the energy sector, expecting natural gas demand to grow and calling electricity “the new oil.” Ellen doesn't expect any peace deal to come out of the upcoming U.S./Russia meeting and talks potential fallout, including sanctions, which could put upward pressure on crude prices.======== Schwab Network ========Empowering every investor and trader, every market day. Subscribe to the Market Minute newsletter - https://schwabnetwork.com/subscribeDownload the iOS app - https://apps.apple.com/us/app/schwab-network/id1460719185Download the Amazon Fire Tv App - https://www.amazon.com/TD-Ameritrade-Network/dp/B07KRD76C7Watch on Sling - https://watch.sling.com/1/asset/191928615bd8d47686f94682aefaa007/watchWatch on Vizio - https://www.vizio.com/en/watchfreeplus-exploreWatch on DistroTV - https://www.distro.tv/live/schwab-network/Follow us on X – https://twitter.com/schwabnetworkFollow us on Facebook – https://www.facebook.com/schwabnetworkFollow us on LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/company/schwab-network/ About Schwab Network - https://schwabnetwork.com/about

With Trump's deadline for a Russian ceasefire passing, Brent crude fell to $65.50/b, indicating market speculation about potential deals. As focus shifts back to rising OPEC+ output and summer demand, the implications for global oil and gas markets remain uncertain. Please note: this podcast is provided for information purposes only and should not be construed as an offer, or a solicitation of an offer, to buy or sell financial instruments. This podcast does not constitute a personal recommendation and is not investment advice. Investec

欢迎收听雪球出品的财经有深度，雪球，国内领先的集投资交流交易一体的综合财富管理平台，聪明的投资者都在这里。今天分享的内容叫投资中海油必须注意的11大风险！（上），来自Student黎大卫。距离上次写中海油的风险有两三个月，一方面又收集了一些新的风险点，另外一方面是对之前的风险点又加深了认知。下面我们来谈一下这些风险。第一个是长期低油价的风险。重点关注就三个数字，石油价格、成本以及产量。因为非常多的投资者认为国际石油价格是不可捉摸的，认为油价是无法预知的风险，虽然石油价格波动是真的，但仍然可以做很多定性的分析。首先我们来讲一下成本底。成本底就是油价有底。我认为“油价有底”最重要的逻辑是商业的底层逻辑——赚取利润/现金流，没有企业是能经得住长期亏损的。国际油价在60美元的时候，大多数国际巨头已经挺难受了，小油企已经亏损严重，我认为企业是无法长期亏损而生存的，他们退出产能就是下一轮繁荣的基础。有投资者认为油价是复杂的，主要受诸多因素影响，受供求关系影响，个人认为商业的目的就是要盈利，再谈政治，再有供求关系的制约，最终会通过油价影响供给，最终反作用于油价本身。企业是无法长期亏损的，我认为成本就是油价的本质，油价从全局的角度看建立在成本的基础上。这就是我说的石油的第一重底——成本底。成本可以影响产量，最终还是体现在供求关系的定价中。供求关系毫无疑问就是石油定价的最终决定因素。供求关系变量太多，不是我这种凡人能预料到的，所以供求这件事只能做到有限的认知。从供应角度来说，在过去的20年里，其实全球石油开发除了页岩气以外，可以说并没有什么突破性进展，即便包含了页岩油气开发，全球石油复合增长也才1%左右。我们去探寻增量占了全球80%的美国页岩油生产，它在2008年页岩油技术革命以后成为了世界石油增长的最大的一极，但目前看来，这股石油新势力已经疲态尽显。未来石油投资并不需要太忌惮这条20年来最大的石油鲶鱼。除此以外，我们做石油投资还忌惮全球的短期衰退，在2009年的金融风暴以及2020年的新冠危机中，我们发现石油输出国组织以大史证明过了，让石油投资免于担惊受怕于“未来哪一天”又出现负油价的噩梦之中，使得过去20年国际平均70美元的逻辑变得更有依据。再从需求方面来看，需求方面其实变量也很多，总体的需求逻辑是：虽然新能源依旧蓬勃发展，但国内燃油车存量还在增加，石油消耗量还在持续增加。火电的占比虽然在缓慢下降，但绝对量还是继续上升，可能需要十年，火电的绝对量才会缓慢下降。结论是，如果国内经济还能保持中高速增长，燃油车存量还在增加，新能源替代汽油至少在未来5年里不需要担忧。国外的能源替代，虽然欧盟方面一直在积极发展新能源，以逐步取代高能耗高污染的石油燃料，但实际上进度缓慢。欧洲一直强调大力发展电车，但因为电力以及充电桩等基础设施建设延误，欧美电动车销售仅占全部汽车的25%和10%，新能源发展远远跟不上中国，所以在OEDC里面，电动车替代汽油车的过程将非常漫长。另外一方面，以印度为代表的第三世界其实还在走我们过去的老路，他们的人口在增加，经济也有可观的发展，但污染也在增加，电力基础设施滞后，他们根本没有能力大力发展电动汽车的配套基建，所以第三世界的石油需求仍然会持续增长。石油化工的需求使得全球原油需求增加280万桶/天，但那这个量的需求增长并不能被一句带过。说完供需角度，在谈论一下OPEC底，OPEC全球成本最低的石油出口区域，如果石油价格跌到他们无法承受的程度，他们有足够的动力和能力通过减产去抬起油价。从俄乌冲突，从以色列和伊朗的冲突，或者过往经验来看，国际原油供应每天减少200万桶完全可以影响国际油价飙升20%+，所以OPEC调节作用是很惊人的。再看看油价历史综合表现,当然，历史只代表过去，不代表未来，但也会有参考意义的，供需两端的复杂因素在过去20年的时间里已经体现得淋漓尽致，多次战争、经济危机、疫情、页岩油爆发、沙特石油贸易战等等，结论是，过去20年国际长期平均油价在74美元。关于成本底，我们可以对关于国际油价的整体认识做个总结，我认为平均油价在60美元以上已经给出了安全边际，且并不是随口说的。一个是成本底，一个是OPEC底，最后一个是历史的实际反映，我认为已经有足够坚实的基础让我充分相信国际油价不会长期低于60美元的水平。说完成本底，我们再来聊一下第二个风险——新能源替代。这是投资海油不可能回避的问题，面对着目前多路新能源推进的局面，未来有多少新能源能取代石油的份额确实没有办法有个准确的结论，这件事只能见一步走一步。所以中海油看五年可以，看十年可能也可以，但十年以后的新能源取代要十年后再说。从国内来说，新能源替代不影响国内满产满销。无论新能源如何发展，按照目前70%的对外依存度，一直看到2050年我们也无法完全实现对外0依赖，当然，对外依存度不是越低越好，50%可以认为是进入一个相对安全的区域，但是石油本身是标准商品，所以优先采购央企产品逻辑上并没有太大问题。因为经济增长仍然维持在5%以上，能源需求的增加，我们可以看到，汽油车的存量还在增加，石油使用量还在增长，石油使用量的绝对下降在5年内看不到。再从国外来说，新能源替代需求看全球的新能源替代，而不是中国。当看见路上有一半车都是新能源的时候会担忧石油的需求，或者看到国内光伏、风电的大发展，甚至看到第四代核电站开建，核聚变不断取得突破就会担忧石油的需求。但是石油价格的定价权并不在中国，而在全球市场。全球市场来看，中国其实是工业发展的一支独苗，大多数发达国家，新能源替代传统能源需要的时间远远要落后于中国，所以，未来5年还看不出新能源发展对石油替代的质的变化，暂时还没有到值得担忧的程度。并且，新能源替代是一个漫长的过程。芒格在2023年提到，新能源替代传统能源需要数十年，石油的刚需属性在可预见的未来不会改变，全球能源转型的复杂性远超预期。任何技术的发展都不是一蹴而就的，我们有足够多的时间去观察新能源的发展。新能源替代真正的攻坚战在于：把实验室成果变成流水线产品、撬动巨额资本、重构电网体系、批量培育专业人才——这些环节吞噬了90%的资源。在很长一段时间里，离开政府输血，新能源企业就难以为继，本质上仍是传统能源在“反哺”这个新能源行业。再一个难点就是，新能源替代不了航空、化工等需求。有投资者可能会认为电力发展到一定程度大货车和飞机都能被新能源车替代，燃油的能量密度远高于锂电池，巴菲特问盖茨为什么飞机要用化石燃料不用电，盖茨说如果用电，那飞机要比现在重15倍，这是其一。货车改用电货车同样面对锂电池重量问题，在行驶过程中需要面临更多恶劣环境条件的制约，有高昂初始购置成本和回收周期的问题，货车使用电动驱动有着比家用车更复杂的现实问题需要解决，这是其二。所有的前沿技术都首先在国内这里先落地。新能源车的替代，先看中国能不能搞定，真搞定了再开始担忧世界的需求。第三个风险，中海油的国际开发风险。中海油的海外资产足够分散，减少对单一国家依赖。中海油的海外开发是从经济效益的角度来衡量，国际开发成本更低，效益更好，即使我们海外开发经济效益不好，中海油完全可以收缩回来，我们还有大片海域可以开发。但是这个解释是有点不负责任的，并不是一句海外资产足够分散就能掩盖所有的海外开发风险，且海外开发确实也有轻重之分，比如重中之重的圭亚那的江湖地位就跟乌干达的地位截然不同。因为圭亚那的开发因为成本低，潜力大，从年报获取的数据，目前圭亚那的产量已经占中海油产量的10.2%，这种比例已经不是一句“充分分散”就能轻描淡写的风险。如果哪一天圭亚那或者加拿大发生政治风险，那对中海油着实能产生不小影响。所以圭亚那的国际合作对中海油有重要影响。雪佛龙成功收购赫斯，取代其成为圭亚那Stabroek油田新股东。虽然，中海油没有获得优先购买权，我个人并不认为这是坏事，背靠埃克森美孚+雪佛龙两大漂亮国巨头，其实技术实力、政治稳定性都显著增强。除了圭亚那和加拿大对于中海油国际开发的影响较为明显之外，其他地区影响不大。即便去除圭亚那10%产量以外，中海油依然是一台足够强劲的印钞机。第四国内的开发风险。我们对渤海区域和南海区域这两个重要国内区域做个比较。在开发成本方面，渤海区域优势显著。其开发历史悠久，基础设施完善，依托环渤海经济圈，物流、人力及供应链成本较低；采用成熟的固定式导管架平台，单平台成本可控，钻井周期短，且受极端海洋环境影响小，作业风险低，净权益桶油成本约 24.5 美元。而南海区域因水深差异大、储层复杂，开发依赖高端设备如 FPSO 和水下生产系统，单套投资超 15 亿美元；运营中需远程供应及应对台风等风险，日费高达 100 万美元，环保成本也因深海溢油风险居高不下，整体开发成本远高于渤海。经济效益与优势层面，两者各有侧重。渤海探明储量高，产量占中海油国内产量约 40%，以中重质油为主，就近供应华北炼厂，运输成本低，短期现金流稳定。南海则资源潜力巨大，多为亿吨级油田及大型气田，原油以轻质油为主具溢价优势，天然气采收率高、开采周期长，贴近华南市场且部分出口东南亚，价格弹性高，还享有 15% 所得税减免等政策优惠，战略上支撑粤港澳大湾区发展并维护国家主权。综合来看，两者内在价值相近，中海油采取 “稳渤海、进南海” 策略，以渤海现金流支撑南海深水开发，兼顾短期效益与长期布局。然而有些投资者担忧渤海资源一样面临陆上中石油中石化的资源禀赋退化的问题。第五渤海油田的退化风险先说结论，渤海现在还是壮年早期。这主要体现在三方面，一是证实储量年限达 10.8 年，显著高于欧洲北海布伦特、墨西哥坎塔雷尔等国际油田及国内中石油、中石化；二是产量持续增长，2025 年目标产量较 2022 年增长 33%，2020-2023 年均增长 7.2%，远未到衰退阶段；三是 2023 年探明率约 26%，远低于全球主要成熟含油气盆地 50%-70% 的水平，勘探空间巨大。作为中海油浅海易开发、低成本的代表，其壮年期属性有效缓解了投资者对未来 5-10 年前景的疑虑。第六，未来成本会不会越来越高的风险。成本看三个因素，一是资源禀赋，二是技术优势，三看企业文化。资源禀赋已经分析过了，海油大型资本支出其实从2019年才开始，目前还处于非常早期的阶段，现在的渤海还处于一边增产，一边证实储量增加的年轻态，圭亚那就更不用说了，资源禀赋的问题我认为可以十年后再看。技术优势海上平台高度工程化、自动化，建成后以机器主导开采，人力干预极少；单座大型平台首轮投入超百亿，投运后仅需少量工程师值班，依托远程监控、自动注水与数字化井控，日常运转无需大量工人。尽管技术细节未详细展开，但凭借其制造能力，未来有望通过技术改造持续保持优势并进一步降低成本。企业文化方面，中海油有“成本至上文化”和“有效投资”的企业文化，加上多年以来中海油的发展和经营历史，我相信未来继续降低成本是中海油的最重要追求之一。

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit andrewsullivan.substack.comScott is a war correspondent and author. His non-fiction books include Lawrence in Arabia, Fractured Lands, and The Quiet Americans, and his novels include Triage and Moonlight Hotel. He's also a contributing writer for the New York Times Magazine. His new book is King of Kings: The Iranian Revolution: A Story of Hubris, Delusion and Catastrophic Miscalculation.For two clips of our convo — on Jimmy Carter's debacle with the Shah, and the hero of the Iran hostage crisis — head to our YouTube page.Other topics: growing up in East Asia and traveling the world; his father the foreign service officer; their time in Iran not long before the revolution; Iran a “chew toy” between the British and Russian empires; the Shah's father's affinity for Nazi Germany; Mosaddegh's move to nationalize the oil; the 1953 coup; the police state under the Shah; having the world's 5th biggest military; the OPEC embargo; the rise of Khomeini and his exile; the missionary George Braswell and the mullahs; Carter's ambitious foreign policy; the US grossly overestimating the Shah; selling him arms; Kissinger; the cluelessness of the CIA; the prescience of Michael Metrinko; the Tabriz riots; students storming the US embassy; state murder under Khomeini dwarfing the Shah's; the bombing of Iran's nuke facilities; and Netanyahu playing into Hamas' hands.Browse the Dishcast archive for an episode you might enjoy. Coming up: a fun chat with Johann Hari, Jill Lepore on the history of the Constitution, Karen Hao on artificial intelligence, and Katie Herzog on drinking your way sober. Please send any guest recs, dissents, and other comments to dish@andrewsullivan.com.

Today, Kevin covered the following stories: Climate Regulation Liberation Day; Ohio to add long-term truck parking spots; Americas Commercial Transportation Research Co. reported June Used Class 8 truck Sales data; Kevin has the details, sifts through the data, puts the information in historical perspective, offers his insights and offers some opinions along the way. Oil reacts to whether or when sanctions on Russian crude oil will proceed, President Trump increasing tariffs on India, U.S. crude oil inventory numbers and changes to OPEC+'s crude oil production volumes.

Today, Kevin covered the following stories: Climate Regulation Liberation Day; Ohio to add long-term truck parking spots; Americas Commercial Transportation Research Co. reported June Used Class 8 truck Sales data; Kevin has the details, sifts through the data, puts the information in historical perspective, offers his insights and offers some opinions along the way. Oil reacts to whether or when sanctions on Russian crude oil will proceed, President Trump increasing tariffs on India, U.S. crude oil inventory numbers and changes to OPEC+'s crude oil production volumes.

Employment Report - Revisions Gone Wild But The Dip (Aka The Bend and Snap) Earnings Season - Plenty of CapX Boeing making moves  - unions may strike PLUS we are now on Spotify and Amazon Music/Podcasts! Click HERE for Show Notes and Links DHUnplugged is now streaming live - with listener chat. Click on link on the right sidebar. Love the Show? Then how about a Donation? Follow John C. Dvorak on Twitter Follow Andrew Horowitz on Twitter INTERACTIVE BROKERS  Warm-Up - Fed - Standing Pat - Tariffs ON ( with some delays, pauses and delays - India taking Heat - OPEC at it Again Markets -Employment Report - Revisions Gone Wild - But The Dip (Aka The Bend and Snap) - Earnings Season - Plenty of CapX - Boeing making moves  - unions may strike The Bend and Snap - That is the markets - any little movement down - snaps right back up (Buy Dip with a Legally Blonde flair) - Monday saw a huge reversal after the VIX hit 21.50 and small caps were down as much as 3% after the July Employment report and lackluster earnings Jobs Report - 4.2% Unemployment Rate - Only added 73,000 in July - Revisions for May and June were larger than normal. - The change in total nonfarm payroll employment for May was revised down by 125,000, from +144,000 to +19,000, and the change for June was revised  down by 133,000, from +147,000 to +14,000. - With these revisions, employment in May and June  combined is 258,000 lower than previously reported. THEN..... - President Donald Trump on Friday fired Bureau of Labor Statistics Commissioner Erika McEntarfer, hours after the agency reported that job growth in the U.S. had slowed to a near-halt. - “We need accurate Jobs Numbers. I have directed my Team to fire this Biden Political Appointee, IMMEDIATELY,” Trump posted on Truth Social. GDP - Gross domestic product jumped 3% for the second quarter, better than the 2.3% estimate and reversing a 0.5% decline in the prior period. - Consumer spending rose 1.4% in the second quarter, better than the 0.5% in the prior period. - While exports declined 1.8% during the period, imports fell 30.3%, reversing a 37.9% surge in Q1. - HUGE Number - flurry after some Tariff uncertainty lifted in April OIL - OPEC+ agreed on Sunday to raise oil production by 547,000 barrels per day for September, the latest in a series of accelerated output hikes to regain market share, as concerns mount over potential supply disruptions linked to Russia. - The move marks a full and early reversal of OPEC+'s largest tranche of output cuts plus a separate increase in output for the United Arab Emirates amounting to about 2.5 million bpd, or about 2.4% of world demand. - In a statement following the meeting, OPEC+ cited a healthy economy and low stocks as reasons behind its decision. - Eight countries to hike September output by 547,000 bpd - Oil supported by US demands for India to stop buying Russian oil Check this out and find out more at: http://www.interactivebrokers.com/ Earnings News Coinbase - Coinbase shares fell after gains in the cryptocurrency exchange's subscription revenue failed to offset weaker trading volumes. - Revenue rose slightly to $1.5 billion from $1.45 billion in the same quarter last year, but fell short of analyst estimates. - Coinbase reported that retail trading volume, which is typically more profitable than institutional volume, grew 16% year-over-year to $43 billion, but missed the $48.05 billion expected by analysts survey Reddit - Revenue grew 78% year-over-year in the second quarter and was 17% above consensus estimates, the biggest beat in the company's short history as a public company. - Reddit said third-quarter revenue will be in the range of $535 million to $545 million, ahead of Wall Street estimates of $473 million. - Adjusted earnings in the third quarter are projected to be in between $185 million to $195 million,

Kevin discusses some of the blowback and additional information surrounding the firing of the Commissioner of the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. Additionally, Kevin covers the following stories: The University of Michigan released their Final Survey of Consumers for July; Trucking Reacts to Trump's Sweeping Tariffs; Kevin has the details discusses the data, puts the information into historic perspective, offers an opinion or two and his insights. Oil and gas prices react to OPEC+ increasing crude oil outputs and worries of weaker global demand concerns over President Trump's threats of higher tariffs on India over Russian oil purchases.

Kevin discusses some of the blowback and additional information surrounding the firing of the Commissioner of the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. Additionally, Kevin covers the following stories: The University of Michigan released their Final Survey of Consumers for July; Trucking Reacts to Trump's Sweeping Tariffs; Kevin has the details discusses the data, puts the information into historic perspective, offers an opinion or two and his insights. Oil and gas prices react to OPEC+ increasing crude oil outputs and worries of weaker global demand concerns over President Trump's threats of higher tariffs on India over Russian oil purchases.

Guy Adami and Peter Boockvar discuss the impact of tariffs on earnings and market performance, stressing the need to remain unbiased about their benefits or drawbacks. The discussion shifts to declining rig counts and their potential influence on crude oil prices, highlighting U.S. shale production's response to OPEC's quota adjustments. The panel addresses the geopolitical ramifications of U.S. threats to tariff countries buying Russian oil, particularly China and India, noting how these actions could lead to oil price volatility. The dialogue also explores China's leverage over the U.S. due to their control of rare earth magnets, which are critical for both commercial and military applications. The episode concludes with an overview of the current market sentiment, driven by AI tech trades and a buy-the-dip mentality, contrasting it with the fragmented performance of smaller market segments. —FOLLOW USYouTube: @RiskReversalMediaInstagram: @riskreversalmediaTwitter: @RiskReversalLinkedIn: RiskReversal Media

Plus: The Trump Administration announces a pilot program requiring some travelers on visas to post bonds of up to $15,000 to enter the U.S. And, oil prices continue on OPEC+ decision to raise output. Azhar Sukri hosts. Sign up for WSJ's free What's News newsletter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Robert Yawger says crude oil has a lot of things against it right now, including the end of summer driving season and OPEC+ adding to its output. “It's going to be very difficult for this to rally.” He also notes that the U.S. is having trouble exporting oil because of its higher prices, further boosting U.S. supply. He discusses his scenarios for $70/barrel and $60/barrel.======== Schwab Network ========Empowering every investor and trader, every market day. Subscribe to the Market Minute newsletter - https://schwabnetwork.com/subscribeDownload the iOS app - https://apps.apple.com/us/app/schwab-network/id1460719185Download the Amazon Fire Tv App - https://www.amazon.com/TD-Ameritrade-Network/dp/B07KRD76C7Watch on Sling - https://watch.sling.com/1/asset/191928615bd8d47686f94682aefaa007/watchWatch on Vizio - https://www.vizio.com/en/watchfreeplus-exploreWatch on DistroTV - https://www.distro.tv/live/schwab-network/Follow us on X – https://twitter.com/schwabnetworkFollow us on Facebook – https://www.facebook.com/schwabnetworkFollow us on LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/company/schwab-network/ About Schwab Network - https://schwabnetwork.com/about

Recorded on July 25, 2025 and August 3, 2025 https://youtu.be/fxYq3F7Xntw Episode 137 of the PetroNerds podcast is a heavy hitting energy dense China focussed special. Trisha Curtis, CEO of PetroNerds and host of the PetroNerds podcast, sits down with Jason Isaac, CEO of the American Energy Institute to discuss China, energy and power generation, and energy security and national security. This podcast was prompted by a question Trisha and Jason received when recording a livestream on the Big Beautiful Bill. Someone asked if they could talk more about the US energy industry in the context of national security and energy security and China's rising power and military threat. In this Fliparoo podcast, Jason acts as the host and asks Trisha a series of questions that allow her to dive into the competition between the US and China and lay out the framework and importance of energy in this imperative head to head battle. Before getting started, Trisha updates listeners on everything happening in the oil market and the economy with a fresh introduction covering the recent OPEC output increase, Russia's provocative tweets, and the Fed. Trisha and Jason then cover everything from the Chinese grid and power generation to the US grid and power generation, the use of power generation in manufacturing military equipment, Europe's supposed increase in military spending, Shell's pulling out of a sustainability group, Chevron's purchase of Hess, and US shale productivity. Trisha specifically gets into US national security and the link to energy security, Chinese energy consumption, US power generation and consumption, Chinese power generation, Chinese oil demand, and how competing head to head with China means competing head to head with China on energy. Two great takeaway quotes from Trisha Curtis: “Energy is everything in global competition" and "Shell is waking up to the reality of energy.” Listen on Itunes

The 5 things you need to know before the stock market opens today: Tesla's board has approved a 96 million share compensation for Elon Musk, President Trump and Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney may meet over the next few days, OPEC+ will raise oil production next month, The Athletic is reporting that ESPN will acquire NFL Red Zone, and Marvel's “Fantastic Four” saw a 66% drop in box office sales since its debut weekend.  Squawk Box is hosted by Joe Kernen, Becky Quick and Andrew Ross Sorkin.  Follow Squawk Pod for the best moments, interviews and analysis from our TV show in an audio-first format. 

Texas Dems flee to Illinois (like the Indiana Dems did). FBI Director Kash Patel has now found "THOUSANDS" of Trump-Russia Collusion Hoax documents in "burn bags" at a secret room within the Bureau, per Fox. RIP Loni Anderson. Trump fires the head of BLS.Kia Recall, Russia Volcano Eruption, NJ Earthquake. Schumer is holding up getting nominees confirmed. Destroyed Porsche for sale. Hamas is stealing the food. Hillary is a horrible woman. How are the tariffs going to affect Indiana business? How is Trump getting OPEC to pump more oil? Diego Morales is the one that's fakeSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Hillary is a horrible woman. How are the tariffs going to affect Indiana business? How is Trump getting OPEC to pump more oil? Diego Morales is the one that's fakeSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Scott Bauer believes the markets could grind higher as yields fall lower. In the energy markets, Scott examines OPEC+ headlines that have the group looking to ramp up production. He weighs in on the possibility of India facing higher tariffs or sanctions due to importing Russian oil. Then, Scott looks at the fragility of the U.S. Dollar (/DX) in the wake of the latest labor market data.======== Schwab Network ========Empowering every investor and trader, every market day.Subscribe to the Market Minute newsletter - https://schwabnetwork.com/subscribeDownload the iOS app - https://apps.apple.com/us/app/schwab-network/id1460719185Download the Amazon Fire Tv App - https://www.amazon.com/TD-Ameritrade-Network/dp/B07KRD76C7Watch on Sling - https://watch.sling.com/1/asset/191928615bd8d47686f94682aefaa007/watchWatch on Vizio - https://www.vizio.com/en/watchfreeplus-exploreWatch on DistroTV - https://www.distro.tv/live/schwab-network/Follow us on X – https://twitter.com/schwabnetworkFollow us on Facebook – https://www.facebook.com/schwabnetworkFollow us on LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/company/schwab-network/About Schwab Network - https://schwabnetwork.com/about

US President Trump said on Sunday that he will announce a new head of the BLS in the next three or four days.US President Trump said he is to announce a replacement for Fed's Kugler in the next couple of days after Kugler resigned on Friday.OPEC+ said in a statement that eight members are to raise oil output by 547k bpd in September, citing steady global economic and current healthy market fundamentals; crude slips.European bourses are mostly higher, but with clear underperformance in the SMI as the region returns from holiday; US futures are broadly higher.USD is attempting to claw back some of Friday's lost ground; havens lag with clear underperformance in the CHF.Bonds are paring the NFP upside, but with focus on dovish implication of Fed's Kugler resignation & the BLS firing.Looking ahead, US Employment Trends (Jun), Durable Goods R (Jun) & Factory Orders, Earnings from Palantir, Hims & Hers, Wayfair, BioNTech & Tyson Foods. Holiday: Canadian Civic Holiday.Read the full report covering Equities, Forex, Fixed Income, Commodites and more on Newsquawk

OPEC+ has officially decided to unwind the remaining voluntary cuts, which aligns with recent market trends. This move, combined with the latest developments in US tariffs, has significant implications for oil supply and pricing. Please note: this podcast is provided for information purposes only and should not be construed as an offer, or a solicitation of an offer, to buy or sell financial instruments. This podcast does not constitute a personal recommendation and is not investment advice. Investec

APAC stocks traded mixed following a quiet weekend of newsflow and last Friday's disappointing Non-Farm Payrolls data.US President Trump said on Sunday that he will announce a new head of BLS in the next three or four days.US President Trump said he is to announce a replacement for Fed's Kugler in the next couple of days after Kugler resigned on Friday.European equity futures indicate a positive cash market open with the Euro Stoxx 50 future up 0.4% after the cash market suffered losses of 2.9% on Friday.DXY is a touch firmer after Friday's selling pressure, EUR/USD ran out of steam ahead of 1.16, USD/JPY trades on a 147 handle.Crude slightly lower after OPEC+ agreed to increase oil output by 548k BPD in September.Looking ahead, highlights include Swiss CPI (Jul), EZ Sentix Index Aug), US Employment Trends (Jun), Durable Goods R (Jun) & Factory Orders.Read the full report covering Equities, Forex, Fixed Income, Commodites and more on Newsquawk

Asian stocks fell at the open after soft US jobs data triggered a pullback in equities and fueled bets on a Federal Reserve rate cut. Oil retreated as OPEC+ wrapped up a run of major output hikes. The moves suggest Friday's sharp retreat on Wall Street — sparked by rising US unemployment and slower job creation — is still rippling through global markets. The weak data is fueling investor concern after US stocks rallied for three straight months on speculation the US economy would withstand President Donald Trump's tariff storm. We hear from Sharyn O'Halloran, Professor of Political Economy and International and Public Affairs at Columbia University. She speaks with Bloomberg's Paul Allen and Haidi Stroud-Watts on The Asia Trade. Plus - Toyota Motor Corp. and Honda Motor Co. earnings will paint a mixed picture as a stronger yen and US auto tariffs eat into profit, despite resilient unit sales. Toyota likely saw a dip in first-quarter operating profit, according to estimates. While the company posted record global sales in the first half driven by a surge in pre-tariff purchases, Bloomberg Intelligence said the automaker is likely weighed down by factors including supply chain costs.Honda's profit likely fell for the same reasons, according to BI. In June, Japanese automakers slashed US export prices by 19%, the biggest drop since records going back to 2016, sacrificing margins to remain competitive through the tariff turmoil. We preview this week's earnings with Kota Yuzawa, Head of Asia Auto Research at Goldman Sachs.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

More fraud involving MN Somalians, Jeff from Superior, Wade shared his thoughts, Shawn from Phil's Garage Door Service, another St Paul mayoral candidate, HBD USCG, the burn bags classified documents effect on the Obama legacy, Chuck Grassley, OPEC, a zoo wants your pets, and more...See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Wall Street notched its best day since May, with the S&P 500 jumping 1.5% as weaker US payrolls boosted hopes for rate cuts. Investors took the soft jobs data as a sign that the Fed may ease policy sooner than expected. Meanwhile, Tesla rallied after news of a $30 billion pay deal for Elon Musk, while Spotify shares climbed on news of premium subscription price hikes. In retail, American Eagle soared over 20%, driven by Sydney Sweeney’s viral campaign and a surprise endorsement from Donald Trump. On the commodities front, oil prices fell as OPEC raised output, easing supply concerns and pressuring energy stocks. Back home, the ASX is set to open higher, with investors awaiting job ads and spending data for local economic cues. The content in this podcast is prepared, approved and distributed in Australia by Commonwealth Securities Limited ABN 60 067 254 399 AFSL 238814. The information does not take into account your objectives, financial situation or needs. Consider the appropriateness of the information before acting and if necessary, seek appropriate professional advice.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

A quiet start to the week on the Aussie market as a bank holiday in NSW keeps trade light, but gold miners shine as the price of the precious metal surges. With reporting season now underway, Beach Energy stood out after announcing a record dividend, while BlueScope Steel slipped despite outlining plans for a potential green steel play in Whyalla. Meanwhile, ANZ led the big banks lower, and energy stocks struggled as oil prices dropped following fresh OPEC+ output moves. Plus, we look ahead to a week of earnings and data, including results from Credit Corp and updates on household spending and Chinese services activity. The content in this podcast is prepared, approved and distributed in Australia by Commonwealth Securities Limited ABN 60 067 254 399 AFSL 238814. The information does not take into account your objectives, financial situation or needs. Consider the appropriateness of the information before acting and if necessary, seek appropriate professional advice.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Greg and Chief start with where labor the numbers are right or not. Then into what products are in barrel Oil and OPEC. The John Flannigan continues about the labor numbers and the inconsistency of the them. Then little about drivers today. Then Little about International Emergency Economic Powers Act which President is using for […]

Gary Booysen of Rand Swiss runs us through the day;s market developments where we're seeing positivity despite the tariff announcements, the rand, local equities, Opec and the oil price, investor sentiment, and an update on the restructuring from MultiChoice. SAfm Market Update - Podcasts and live stream

Listen for the latest from Bloomberg NewsSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Send us a textIn this special edition of the WTR Small-Cap Spotlight Flashcast, host Tim Gerdeman sits down with Chris Degner, Managing Director in Water Tower Research's Energy Practice, to explore major shifts in the oil and natural gas markets. The discussion covers rising OPEC production, evolving global supply structures, and a deep dive into LNG market trends—including emerging export projects in the U.S. and Australia. The episode also spotlights Tamboran Resources, a small-cap company with high-potential natural gas assets in Australia. Tune in for expert insights on where the energy markets are headed and what it means for small-cap investors. 

Why fight with tanks when you can cripple enemies with trade? Here, Chokepoints author Edward Fishman reveals the new rules of economic warfare.Full show notes and resources can be found here: jordanharbinger.com/1189What We Discuss with Edward Fishman:Invisible choke points give US asymmetric power. The dollar dominates 90% of global foreign exchange, enabling sanctions on countries with no US involvement, like blocking China-Iran oil payments.Economic warfare threshold lowered, impact increased. Unlike naval blockades requiring military force, cutting countries from dollars/semiconductors imposes "just as much economic harm" with less risk.China built counter-arsenal after 2018. China now controls 99% of rare earth minerals, batteries, and clean tech supply chains, and recently forced the US to back down using export controls as leverage.US-Europe split weakens economic leverage. Acting unilaterally pushes allies toward Euro alternatives, reducing dollar dominance that enables effective sanctions against adversaries.Economic warfare offers hope over military conflict. Understanding these dynamics enables democratic participation in choosing economic tools over shooting wars.And much more...And if you're still game to support us, please leave a review here — even one sentence helps! Sign up for Six-Minute Networking — our free networking and relationship development mini course — at jordanharbinger.com/course!Subscribe to our once-a-week Wee Bit Wiser newsletter today and start filling your Wednesdays with wisdom!Do you even Reddit, bro? Join us at r/JordanHarbinger!This Episode Is Brought To You By Our Fine Sponsors: BetterHelp: 10% off first month: betterhelp.com/jordanConstant Contact: Go to constantcontact.com for more infoMint Mobile: Shop plans at mintmobile.com/jhsLand Rover Defender: landroverusa.comHomes.com: Find your home: homes.comSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

These are the stories and topics Kevin covered this morning: Trump strikes a trade deal with the EU; Chevron will soon be able to restart oil production in Venezuela; Chevron gets approval from the International Chamber of Commerce in Paris for a major acquisition; Chevron announces layoffs in the Houston area; on Friday, the U.S. Commerce Department released June Durable Goods Orders; Industry experts discuss Transport Merger and Acquisition during the first half of 2025; Kevin has the details, digs into the data, puts the information into historic perspective, offers his insights and an opinion or two. Kevn talks about the Federal Reserve meeting this week, mentioning that much of the data, upon which the Fed claims they make their decision, is being released before they have had a chance to analyze it. Oil reacts to the U.S. and EU trade agreement, President Trump shortening the deadline for Russia to end the war in Ukraine, OPEC+ stresses the need for full compliance with output limits from their members and continuing trade discussions between the U.S. and China.

These are the stories and topics Kevin covered this morning: Trump strikes a trade deal with the EU; Chevron will soon be able to restart oil production in Venezuela; Chevron gets approval from the International Chamber of Commerce in Paris for a major acquisition; Chevron announces layoffs in the Houston area; on Friday, the U.S. Commerce Department released June Durable Goods Orders; Industry experts discuss Transport Merger and Acquisition during the first half of 2025; Kevin has the details, digs into the data, puts the information into historic perspective, offers his insights and an opinion or two. Kevn talks about the Federal Reserve meeting this week, mentioning that much of the data, upon which the Fed claims they make their decision, is being released before they have had a chance to analyze it. Oil reacts to the U.S. and EU trade agreement, President Trump shortening the deadline for Russia to end the war in Ukraine, OPEC+ stresses the need for full compliance with output limits from their members and continuing trade discussions between the U.S. and China.

Oil prices have edged higher following the recent EU trade agreement with the US, which prevents the imposition of higher tariffs. While details are still being finalized, the agreement is seen as a positive step for oil markets, with OPEC+ members set to meet next weekend to discuss September production. Please note: this podcast is provided for information purposes only and should not be construed as an offer, or a solicitation of an offer, to buy or sell financial instruments. This podcast does not constitute a personal recommendation and is not investment advice. Investec

WATCH the video on Substack by clicking the play button above or on YouTube (here).STREAM audio only on Apple Podcasts (here), Spotify (here), or your favorite podcast player app.DOWNLOAD a pdf of the slide deck by clicking the blue Download button below.Last week we published a written post that took a fresh look at a long standing theme of ours “obliterating peak oil demand” (here). We dug into OPEC Research's most recent World Oil Outlook report (here) to compare OPEC's more optimistic view of long-term oil demand to more bearish forecasts from the IEA and frankly many other leading energy voices. Our own outlook is closely aligned with OPEC's in recognizing the massive unmet energy needs of the other 7 billion people on Earth. The idea that anyone can know today that oil demand is going to permanently peak within the next decade is something we push back hard on. That post has sparked a number of questions, five of which we will aim to address today.Our On A Personal Note this week remembers heavy metal pioneer Ozzy Osbourne, who passed away on July 21. I was fortunate to catch a Black Sabbath reunion tour in 2016.

Subscribe to Our Substack For Daily InsightsWant to Add Oil & Gas To Your Portfolio? Fill Out Our Oil & Gas Portfolio SurveyNeed Power For Your Data Center, Hospital, or Business?Follow Stuart On LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/stuturley/ and Twitter: https://twitter.com/STUARTTURLEY16Follow Michael On LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/michaelta... and Twitter: https://twitter.com/mtanner_1Timestamps:00:00 - Intro00:15 - OPEC is Looking for Market Share While Playing the Long Game04:57 - EU Lowers Russian Oil Cap to $47.60 in New Sanctions Package, but Will It Do Anything?08:58 - Which Energy Markets are Moving12:23 - EQT Calls on Congress to Slash Gas Project Approval Times15:34 - California Oversteps Its Borders: Forcing Energy Policies on the Rest of the United States20:04 - If Alberta Referendum to Become the 51st State Gains Traction, What Would the Financial Reality Look Like?23:50 - President Trump Announces Three New Trade Deals26:58 - Does the Oil and Gas Industry Need $18 Trillion for Investment to Keep Prices Down?29:02 - OutroLinks to articles discussed:OPEC is Looking for Market Share While Playing the Long GameEU Lowers Russian Oil Cap to $47.60 in New Sanctions Package, but Will It Do Anything?Which Energy Markets are MovingEQT Calls on Congress to Slash Gas Project Approval TimesCalifornia Oversteps Its Borders: Forcing Energy Policies on the Rest of the United StatesIf Alberta Referendum to Become the 51st State Gains Traction, What Would the Financial Reality Look Like?President Trump Announces Three New Trade DealsDoes the Oil and Gas Industry Need $18 Trillion for Investment to Keep Prices Down?

  Oil is going through a period of uneasy calm. The higher-than-expected rise in OPEC+ production quotas for August, combined with a ceasefire between Israel and Iran, has provided oil markets some breathing space and introduced a bearish sentiment to prices, but new EU sanctions on Russia and the possibility of additional secondary sanctions by Washington could alter the price and trade flow scenarios. In this episode of Platts Oil Markets Podcast, Asia Energy Editor Sambit Mohanty discusses with Rahul Kapoor, vice president and head of oil shipping analytics at S&P Global Commodity Insights, and Dan Colover, head of oil and chemicals market engagement, on the implications of some of these developments on Asia.

Dan Deming examines the commodities market. He cites several reasons for gold coming under pressure and is watching the “psychological” $3,400 level. He sees silver supply “stretched” and thinks copper markets are hitting all-time highs because of tariffs and the “huge lead time” for production. On crude, he points to the upcoming OPEC+ meeting, which he cites as one of the reasons oil isn't able to gain right now.======== Schwab Network ========Empowering every investor and trader, every market day.Subscribe to the Market Minute newsletter - https://schwabnetwork.com/subscribeDownload the iOS app - https://apps.apple.com/us/app/schwab-network/id1460719185Download the Amazon Fire Tv App - https://www.amazon.com/TD-Ameritrade-Network/dp/B07KRD76C7Watch on Sling - https://watch.sling.com/1/asset/191928615bd8d47686f94682aefaa007/watchWatch on Vizio - https://www.vizio.com/en/watchfreeplus-exploreWatch on DistroTV - https://www.distro.tv/live/schwab-network/Follow us on X – / schwabnetwork Follow us on Facebook – / schwabnetwork Follow us on LinkedIn - / schwab-network About Schwab Network - https://schwabnetwork.com/about

Krize na Blízkém východě a především několikadenní válka Izraele a Íránu krátkodobě zvedly globální ceny pohonných hmot, což se podepsalo i na peněženkách spotřebitelů. V budoucích měsících mohou náklady zůstat nižší, především díky navýšení těžby členů kartelu OPEC. „Zdá se, že OPEC po nějaké době dospěl k rozhodnutí, že je potřeba zapojovat o tržní podíl a že jeho členové vydrží i nižší ceny,“ říká v pořadu Řečí peněz ekonomka Ilona Švihlíková.

June consumer inflation coming in as expected: Carl Quintanilla and Sara Eisen broke down the key categories to watch, sectors most impacted by tariffs, and what it all means for stocks alongside the Fed. Famed investor Mario Gabelli joined the team with his take on it all – along with some specific stock picks… While Former Fed Governor Randy Kroszner argued today's print doesn't move the needle on rates. Plus: a deep-dive on the big banks, as JPMorgan, Citi, and Wells Fargo kick off earnings from the group this week (all beating estimates).  Also in focus: the President's headed to Pittsburgh today for Pennsylvania's first ever Energy and Innovation Summit… with billions of dollars in deals and commitments around AI and data centers expected to be (or already) announced. U.S. Energy Secretary Chris Wright joined the team live from the ground with his answers to America's growing power needs – along with recent OPEC developments, and more.

Dan is flying solo to discuss a better-than-expected June jobs report, a strong market performance with the SPX and NDX seeing significant gains, and specific stock performances like Nvidia and Taiwan Semi as major tech leaders. The discussion also includes the impact of Trump's trade deals, geopolitical tensions, and sentiment indicators like CNN's Fear & Greed Index. Lastly, the episode touches on the implications of OPEC's decision on oil production and the upcoming events such as the Fed meeting minutes and initial jobless claims. Further Reading Trump Sets Aug. 1 Start for Tariffs Ahead of Wednesday Deadline (Bloomberg) Donald Trump threatens extra 10% tariff over ‘anti-American' Brics policies (Financial Times) Looking Beyond the U.S. for Trade, Canada Begins Shipping Natural Gas to Asia (NYTimes) OPEC Plus Agrees to Pump More Oil in August (NYTimes) Chinese sales of foreign phone makers, including Apple, drop 9.7% in May (Reuters) Meme Stocks and YOLO Bets Are Back and Fueling the Market's Rally (WSJ) —FOLLOW USYouTube: @RiskReversalMediaInstagram: @riskreversalmediaTwitter: @RiskReversalLinkedIn: RiskReversal Media

Andreas Steno Larsen and Mikkel Rosenvold return to discuss the Swedish inflation shock, AI's growing impact on labor markets, OPEC's price war strategy, and the Trump's looming trade deal deadline. They break down whether the market is misunderstanding Trump's tariff strategy, which countries may strike deals, and why tech employment is at an inflection point.

Watch The X22 Report On Video No videos found (function(w,d,s,i){w.ldAdInit=w.ldAdInit||[];w.ldAdInit.push({slot:17532056201798502,size:[0, 0],id:"ld-9437-3289"});if(!d.getElementById(i)){var j=d.createElement(s),p=d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0];j.async=true;j.src="https://cdn2.decide.dev/_js/ajs.js";j.id=i;p.parentNode.insertBefore(j,p);}})(window,document,"script","ld-ajs");pt> Click On Picture To See Larger Picture Europe is trouble, with event in Iran they are now seeing they are vulnerable in regards to LNG. Inflation ticked up .2%, this is not inflation this is a fluctuation. The inflation people are feeling is from the Biden admin. OPEC is ready to increase capacity, what happens to inflation. Trump trade deals incoming. The [DS] is losing every step of the way. The SC just ruled the nationwide injunctions are not constitutional. Trump can now continue with his policies, remember the judges they will nee to be impeached. Is Trump setting the Obama with U1. Lindsey is saying that 900lbs of Uranium is missing. Lindsey is an Iron Eagle. Iran was much more than people think. Its to expose it all.   Economy https://twitter.com/CynicalPublius/status/1938402609364082979 Europe's LNG Gamble Exposed By Middle East War The Israel-Iran conflict has driven up diesel, jet fuel, and gas prices. With 20% of global LNG flowing through the Strait of Hormuz, even threats of disruption have raised EU gas prices by 20%. Europe's refusal to sign long-term LNG deals or develop local hydrocarbon resources is backfiring. Oil and the security of its supply have stolen the media spotlight in the context of the new Middle East war, and with good reason. Ever since Israel first bombed Iran, diesel prices have soared, jet fuel prices have soared, and importers have been troubled. For Europe, the situation is even worse due to natural gas. Europe has been hurt more than others by the diesel price surge because it has boosted its imports considerably over the past years. About 20% of the diesel Europe consumes comes from imports, and a lot of these imports come from the Middle East. The situation is not much different in jet fuel. Europe depends on imports and a solid chunk of these imports comes from the Middle East. What's true of these essential fuels is doubly true of natural gas—even though direct imports of gas from the Middle East constitute a modest 10% of total imports. Yet they constitute a substantial portion of global gas exports, so any suggestion of disrupted supply affects gas prices in exactly the same way it has affected oil prices—and makes a vital commodity less affordable for Europeans.  Europe needs to refill its gas storage caverns for next winter. Even if it cancels the 90% refill rate requirement, it still needs to buy a lot of gas, most of it on the spot market because of that aversion to long-term gas commitments it believes is part and parcel of the transition effort. And geopolitics has made LNG costlier—which will add billions to the refill bill. Source: zerohedge.com (function(w,d,s,i){w.ldAdInit=w.ldAdInit||[];w.ldAdInit.push({slot:18510697282300316,size:[0, 0],id:"ld-8599-9832"});if(!d.getElementById(i)){var j=d.createElement(s),p=d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0];j.async=true;j.src="https://cdn2.decide.dev/_js/ajs.js";j.id=i;p.parentNode.insertBefore(j,p);}})(window,document,"script","ld-ajs"); https://twitter.com/KobeissiLetter/status/1938575712757133319   1. Sticky Services Inflation Core PCE (which excludes food and energy) is heavily weighted toward services, such as housing, healthcare, and financial services. Services inflation has proven persistent, especially in housing rent, insurance, and healthcare costs. 2. Labor Market Strength The job market remains tight: unemployment is low and wages are still rising. Higher wages boost consumer spending, which keeps demand elevated, especially in non-goods sectors like leisure,

Watch The X22 Report On Video No videos found (function(w,d,s,i){w.ldAdInit=w.ldAdInit||[];w.ldAdInit.push({slot:17532056201798502,size:[0, 0],id:"ld-9437-3289"});if(!d.getElementById(i)){var j=d.createElement(s),p=d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0];j.async=true;j.src="https://cdn2.decide.dev/_js/ajs.js";j.id=i;p.parentNode.insertBefore(j,p);}})(window,document,"script","ld-ajs");pt> Click On Picture To See Larger PictureThe Federal Reserve has been in a holding pattern, they have been waiting for event to justify why they are not lowering the rate. War is not coming and they were hoping to raise rates on higher fuel prices which would cause inflation to go up. Trump countered the [CB] and now they are running out of time. Trump has now obliterated the [DS] in Iran, the entire narrative of a nuclear bomb is now gone. Trump has showed the world what strength looks like and now he has the leverage. Iran will be calling him. The people of Iran will begin to rise up, the mullahs are panicking. No war, peace. DHS issues a warning that terrorists might attempt a cyber attack or a physical attack, the [DS] is trying to fight back. This will fail, more people are trusting Trump.   Economy (function(w,d,s,i){w.ldAdInit=w.ldAdInit||[];w.ldAdInit.push({slot:18510697282300316,size:[0, 0],id:"ld-8599-9832"});if(!d.getElementById(i)){var j=d.createElement(s),p=d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0];j.async=true;j.src="https://cdn2.decide.dev/_js/ajs.js";j.id=i;p.parentNode.insertBefore(j,p);}})(window,document,"script","ld-ajs"); President Trump Issues a Stern Warning as Iran Parliament's Vote to Close Strait of Hormuz Threatens to Send Oil Prices Through the Roof With the potential closure of the strait on his mind and a potential catastrophic spike in oil prices, Trump sent a powerful message to those seeking to gouge Americans at the gas pump and rake in the profits off the war. “Everyone, keep oil prices down, I'm watching!” Trump wrote in all caps. “You're playing right into the hands of the enemy. Don't do it!” he added. It's anyone's guess at this point what action Trump will take should OPEC and others ignore his message, but Iran has already learned the hard way what happens when you try to call his bluff. Trump later ordered the Department of Energy to act proactively to keep oil and gas prices low, Source: thegatewaypundit.com https://twitter.com/PolymarketIntel/status/1937133481378619475 Strike on Iran, Trump tariffs could drive inflation back up to highest levels in two years ‘More near-term inflation may make the Fed wary of cutting rates imminently,' says James Knightley, ING's chief international economist U.S. inflation remained surprisingly muted through May, with limited impact from President Donald Trump's tariffs. But U.S. airstrikes on Iran's nuclear facilities over the weekend could contribute to pressures that may send price gains back to the highest levels in two years. Source: marketwatch.com Trump's Iran strikes may have given the Fed another reason to keep rates high Trump wants lower rates, but he may have just given the Fed a new reason to sit tight. America's strikes on Iran sent oil prices higher, a development that could worsen inflation. Source: businessinsider.com Federal Reserve is expected to hike rates due to rising oil prices and inflation risks The Federal Reserve is now heading toward rate hikes as inflation threatens to rise again. The pressure is coming from rising oil prices, triggered by military conflict in the Middle East. Source: msn.com https://twitter.com/DC_Draino/status/1937167751367307731 New York To Build Gigawatt Nuclear Power Plant, Backed By Trump-Era Reforms New York is going to build the first major new US nuclear-power plant in more than 15 years, in what the Wall Street Journal described as "a big test of President Trump's promise to expedite permitt...

For those who haven't heard the announcement I posted, songs from this point on will sometimes be split among multiple episodes, so this is the second part of a two-episode look at the song “Who Knows Where The Time Goes?” by Fairport Convention, and the intertwining careers of Joe Boyd, Sandy Denny, and Richard Thompson. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a forty-one-minute bonus episode available, on Judy Collins’ version of this song. Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by editing, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt's irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/ Erratum For about an hour this was uploaded with the wrong Elton John clip in place of “Saturday Sun”. This has now been fixed. Resources Because of the increasing problems with Mixcloud’s restrictions, I have decided to start sharing streaming playlists of the songs used in episodes instead of Mixcloud ones. This Tunemymusic link will let you listen to the playlist I created on your streaming platform of choice — however please note that not all the songs excerpted are currently available on streaming. The songs missing from the Tidal version are “Shanten Bells” by the Ian Campbell Folk Group, “Tom’s Gone to Hilo” by A.L. Lloyd, two by Paul McNeill and Linda Peters, three by Elton John & Linda Peters, “What Will I Do With Tomorrow” by Sandy Denny and “You Never Know” by Charlie Drake, but the other fifty-nine are there. Other songs may be missing from other services. The main books I used on Fairport Convention as a whole were Patrick Humphries' Meet On The Ledge, Clinton Heylin's What We Did Instead of Holidays, and Kevan Furbank's Fairport Convention on Track. Rob Young's Electric Eden is the most important book on the British folk-rock movement. Information on Richard Thompson comes from Patrick Humphries' Richard Thompson: Strange Affair and Thompson's own autobiography Beeswing.  Information on Sandy Denny comes from Clinton Heylin's No More Sad Refrains and Mick Houghton's I've Always Kept a Unicorn. I also used Joe Boyd's autobiography White Bicycles and Chris Blackwell's The Islander.  And this three-CD set is the best introduction to Fairport's music currently in print. Transcript Before we begin, this episode contains reference to alcohol and cocaine abuse and medical neglect leading to death. It also starts with some discussion of the fatal car accident that ended last episode. There’s also some mention of child neglect and spousal violence. If that’s likely to upset you, you might want to skip this episode or read the transcript. One of the inspirations for this podcast when I started it back in 2018 was a project by Richard Thompson, which appears (like many things in Thompson’s life) to have started out of sheer bloody-mindedness. In 1999 Playboy magazine asked various people to list their “songs of the Millennium”, and most of them, understanding the brief, chose a handful of songs from the latter half of the twentieth century. But Thompson determined that he was going to list his favourite songs *of the millennium*. He didn’t quite manage that, but he did cover seven hundred and forty years, and when Playboy chose not to publish it, he decided to turn it into a touring show, in which he covered all his favourite songs from “Sumer Is Icumen In” from 1260: [Excerpt: Richard Thompson, “Sumer is Icumen In”] Through numerous traditional folk songs, union songs like “Blackleg Miner”, pieces by early-modern composers, Victorian and Edwardian music hall songs, and songs by the Beatles, the Ink Spots, the Kinks, and the Who, all the way to “Oops! I Did It Again”: [Excerpt: Richard Thompson, “Oops! I Did it Again”] And to finish the show, and to show how all this music actually ties together, he would play what he described as a “medieval tune from Brittany”, “Marry, Ageyn Hic Hev Donne Yt”: [Excerpt: Richard Thompson, “Marry, Ageyn Hic Hev Donne Yt”] We have said many times in this podcast that there is no first anything, but there’s a reason that Liege and Lief, Fairport Convention’s third album of 1969, and the album other than Unhalfbricking on which their reputation largely rests, was advertised with the slogan “The first (literally) British folk rock album ever”. Folk-rock, as the term had come to be known, and as it is still usually used today, had very little to do with traditional folk music. Rather, the records of bands like The Byrds or Simon and Garfunkel were essentially taking the sounds of British beat groups of the early sixties, particularly the Searchers, and applying those sounds to material by contemporary singer-songwriters. People like Paul Simon and Bob Dylan had come up through folk clubs, and their songs were called folk music because of that, but they weren’t what folk music had meant up to that point — songs that had been collected after being handed down through the folk process, changed by each individual singer, with no single identifiable author. They were authored songs by very idiosyncratic writers. But over their last few albums, Fairport Convention had done one or two tracks per album that weren’t like that, that were instead recordings of traditional folk songs, but arranged with rock instrumentation. They were not necessarily the first band to try traditional folk music with electric instruments — around the same time that Fairport started experimenting with the idea, so did an Irish band named Sweeney’s Men, who brought in a young electric guitarist named Henry McCullough briefly. But they do seem to have been the first to have fully embraced the idea. They had done so to an extent with “A Sailor’s Life” on Unhalfbricking, but now they were going to go much further: [Excerpt: Fairport Convention, “Matty Groves” (from about 4:30)] There had been some doubt as to whether Fairport Convention would even continue to exist — by the time Unhalfbricking, their second album of the year, was released, they had been through the terrible car accident that had killed Martin Lamble, the band’s drummer, and Jeannie Franklyn, Richard Thompson’s girlfriend. Most of the rest of the band had been seriously injured, and they had made a conscious decision not to discuss the future of the band until they were all out of hospital. Ashley Hutchings was hospitalised the longest, and Simon Nicol, Richard Thompson, and Sandy Denny, the other three surviving members of the band, flew over to LA with their producer and manager, Joe Boyd, to recuperate there and get to know the American music scene. When they came back, the group all met up in the flat belonging to Denny’s boyfriend Trevor Lucas, and decided that they were going to continue the band. They made a few decisions then — they needed a new drummer, and as well as a drummer they wanted to get in Dave Swarbrick. Swarbrick had played violin on several tracks on Unhalfbricking as a session player, and they had all been thrilled to work with him. Swarbrick was one of the most experienced musicians on the British folk circuit. He had started out in the fifties playing guitar with Beryl Marriott’s Ceilidh Band before switching to fiddle, and in 1963, long before Fairport had formed, he had already appeared on TV with the Ian Campbell Folk Group, led by Ian Campbell, the father of Ali and Robin Campbell, later of UB40: [Excerpt: The Ian Campbell Folk Group, “Shanten Bells (medley on Hullaballoo!)”] He’d sung with Ewan MacColl and A.L. Lloyd: [Excerpt: A.L. Lloyd, “Tom’s Gone to Hilo” ] And he’d formed his hugely successful duo with Martin Carthy, releasing records like “Byker Hill” which are often considered among the best British folk music of all time: [Excerpt: Martin Carthy and Dave Swarbrick, “Byker Hill”] By the time Fairport had invited him to play on Unhalfbricking, Swarbrick had already performed on twenty albums as a core band member, plus dozens more EPs, singles, and odd tracks on compilations. They had no reason to think they could actually get him to join their band. But they had three advantages. The first was that Swarbrick was sick of the traditional folk scene at the time, saying later “I didn’t like seven-eighths of the people involved in it, and it was extremely opportune to leave. I was suddenly presented with the possibilities of exploring the dramatic content of the songs to the full.” The second was that he was hugely excited to be playing with Richard Thompson, who was one of the most innovative guitarists of his generation, and Martin Carthy remembers him raving about Thompson after their initial sessions. (Carthy himself was and is no slouch on the guitar of course, and there was even talk of getting him to join the band at this point, though they decided against it — much to the relief of rhythm guitarist Simon Nicol, who is a perfectly fine player himself but didn’t want to be outclassed by *two* of the best guitarists in Britain at the same time). And the third was that Joe Boyd told him that Fairport were doing so well — they had a single just about to hit the charts with “Si Tu Dois Partir” — that he would only have to play a dozen gigs with Fairport in order to retire. As it turned out, Swarbrick would play with the group for a decade, and would never retire — I saw him on his last tour in 2015, only eight months before he died. The drummer the group picked was also a far more experienced musician than any of the rest, though in a very different genre. Dave Mattacks had no knowledge at all of the kind of music they played, having previously been a player in dance bands. When asked by Hutchings if he wanted to join the band, Mattacks’ response was “I don’t know anything about the music. I don’t understand it… I can’t tell one tune from another, they all sound the same… but if you want me to join the group, fine, because I really like it. I’m enjoying myself musically.” Mattacks brought a new level of professionalism to the band, thanks to his different background. Nicol said of him later “He was dilligent, clean, used to taking three white shirts to a gig… The application he could bring to his playing was amazing. With us, you only played well when you were feeling well.” This distinction applied to his playing as well. Nicol would later describe the difference between Mattacks’ drumming and Lamble’s by saying “Martin’s strength was as an imaginative drummer. DM came in with a strongly developed sense of rhythm, through keeping a big band of drunken saxophone players in order. A great time-keeper.” With this new line-up and a new sense of purpose, the group did as many of their contemporaries were doing and “got their heads together in the country”. Joe Boyd rented the group a mansion, Farley House, in Farley Chamberlayne, Hampshire, and they stayed there together for three months. At the start, the group seem to have thought that they were going to make another record like Unhalfbricking, with some originals, some songs by American songwriters, and a few traditional songs. Even after their stay in Farley Chamberlayne, in fact, they recorded a few of the American songs they’d rehearsed at the start of the process, Richard Farina’s “Quiet Joys of Brotherhood” and Bob Dylan and Roger McGuinn’s “Ballad of Easy Rider”: [Excerpt: Fairport Convention, “Ballad of Easy Rider”] Indeed, the whole idea of “getting our heads together in the country” (as the cliche quickly became in the late sixties as half of the bands in Britain went through much the same kind of process as Fairport were doing — but usually for reasons more to do with drug burnout or trend following than recovering from serious life-changing trauma) seems to have been inspired by Bob Dylan and the Band getting together in Big Pink. But very quickly they decided to follow the lead of Ashley Hutchings, who had had something of a Damascene conversion to the cause of traditional English folk music. They were listening mostly to Music From Big Pink by the Band, and to the first album by Sweeney’s Men: [Excerpt: Sweeney’s Men, “The Handsome Cabin Boy”] And they decided that they were going to make something that was as English as those records were North American and Irish (though in the event there were also a few Scottish songs included on the record). Hutchings in particular was becoming something of a scholar of traditional music, regularly visiting Cecil Sharp House and having long conversations with A.L. Lloyd, discovering versions of different traditional songs he’d never encountered before. This was both amusing and bemusing Sandy Denny, who had joined a rock group in part to get away from traditional music; but she was comfortable singing the material, and knew a lot of it and could make a lot of suggestions herself. Swarbrick obviously knew the repertoire intimately, and Nicol was amenable, while Mattacks was utterly clueless about the folk tradition at this point but knew this was the music he wanted to make. Thompson knew very little about traditional music, and of all the band members except Denny he was the one who has shown the least interest in the genre in his subsequent career — but as we heard at the beginning, showing the least interest in the genre is a relative thing, and while Thompson was not hugely familiar with the genre, he *was* able to work with it, and was also more than capable of writing songs that fit in with the genre. Of the eleven songs on the album, which was titled Liege and Lief (which means, roughly, Lord and Loyalty), there were no cover versions of singer-songwriters. Eight were traditional songs, and three were originals, all written in the style of traditional songs. The album opened with “Come All Ye”, an introduction written by Denny and Hutchings (the only time the two would ever write together): [Excerpt: Fairport Convention, “Come All Ye”] The other two originals were songs where Thompson had written new lyrics to traditional melodies. On “Crazy Man Michael”, Swarbrick had said to Thompson that the tune to which he had set his new words was weaker than the lyrics, to which Thompson had replied that if Swarbrick felt that way he should feel free to write a new melody. He did, and it became the first of the small number of Thompson/Swarbrick collaborations: [Excerpt: Fairport Convention, “Crazy Man Michael”] Thompson and Swarbrick would become a brief songwriting team, but as much as anything else it was down to proximity — the two respected each other as musicians, but never got on very well. In 1981 Swarbrick would say “Richard and I never got on in the early days of FC… we thought we did, but we never did. We composed some bloody good songs together, but it was purely on a basis of “you write that and I’ll write this, and we’ll put it together.” But we never sat down and had real good chats.” The third original on the album, and by far the most affecting, is another song where Thompson put lyrics to a traditional tune. In this case he thought he was putting the lyrics to the tune of “Willie O'Winsbury”, but he was basing it on a recording by Sweeney’s Men. The problem was that Sweeney’s Men had accidentally sung the lyrics of “Willie O'Winsbury'” to the tune of a totally different song, “Fause Foodrage”: [Excerpt: Sweeney’s Men, “Willie O’Winsbury”] Thompson took that melody, and set to it lyrics about loss and separation. Thompson has never been one to discuss the meanings of his lyrics in any great detail, and in the case of this one has said “I really don't know what it means. This song came out of a dream, and I pretty much wrote it as I dreamt it (it was the sixties), and didn't spend very long analyzing it. So interpret as you wish – or replace with your own lines.” But in the context of the traffic accident that had killed his tailor girlfriend and a bandmate, and injured most of his other bandmates, the lyrics about lonely travellers, the winding road, bruised and beaten sons, saying goodbye, and never cutting cloth, seem fairly self-explanatory: [Excerpt: Fairport Convention, “Farewell, Farewell”] The rest of the album, though, was taken up by traditional tunes. There was a long medley of four different fiddle reels; a version of “Reynardine” (a song about a seductive man — or is he a fox? Or perhaps both — which had been recorded by Swarbrick and Carthy on their most recent album); a 19th century song about a deserter saved from the firing squad by Prince Albert; and a long take on “Tam Lin”, one of the most famous pieces in the Scottish folk music canon, a song that has been adapted in different ways by everyone from the experimental noise band Current 93 to the dub poet Benjamin Zephaniah to the comics writer Grant Morrison: [Excerpt: Fairport Convention, “Tam Lin”] And “Matty Groves”, a song about a man killing his cheating wife and her lover, which actually has a surprisingly similar story to that of “1921” from another great concept album from that year, the Who’s Tommy. “Matty Groves” became an excuse for long solos and shows of instrumental virtuosity: [Excerpt: Fairport Convention, “Matty Groves”] The album was recorded in September 1969, after their return from their break in the country and a triumphal performance at the Royal Festival Hall, headlining over fellow Witchseason artists John and Beverly Martyn and Nick Drake. It became a classic of the traditional folk genre — arguably *the* classic of the traditional folk genre. In 2007 BBC Radio 2’s Folk Music Awards gave it an award for most influential folk album of all time, and while such things are hard to measure, I doubt there’s anyone with even the most cursory knowledge of British folk and folk-rock music who would not at least consider that a reasonable claim. But once again, by the time the album came out in November, the band had changed lineups yet again. There was a fundamental split in the band – on one side were Sandy Denny and Richard Thompson, whose stance was, roughly, that Liege and Lief was a great experiment and a fun thing to do once, but really the band had two first-rate songwriters in themselves, and that they should be concentrating on their own new material, not doing these old songs, good as they were. They wanted to take the form of the traditional songs and use that form for new material — they wanted to make British folk-rock, but with the emphasis on the rock side of things. Hutchings, on the other hand, was equally sure that he wanted to make traditional music and go further down the rabbit hole of antiquity. With the zeal of the convert he had gone in a couple of years from being the leader of a band who were labelled “the British Jefferson Airplane” to becoming a serious scholar of traditional folk music. Denny was tired of touring, as well — she wanted to spend more time at home with Trevor Lucas, who was sleeping with other women when she was away and making her insecure. When the time came for the group to go on a tour of Denmark, Denny decided she couldn’t make it, and Hutchings was jubilant — he decided he was going to get A.L. Lloyd into the band in her place and become a *real* folk group. Then Denny reconsidered, and Hutchings was crushed. He realised that while he had always been the leader, he wasn’t going to be able to lead the band any further in the traditionalist direction, and quit the group — but not before he was delegated by the other band members to fire Denny. Until the publication of Richard Thompson’s autobiography in 2022, every book on the group or its members said that Denny quit the band again, which was presumably a polite fiction that the band agreed, but according to Thompson “Before we flew home, we decided to fire Sandy. I don't remember who asked her to leave – it was probably Ashley, who usually did the dirty work. She was reportedly shocked that we would take that step. She may have been fragile beneath the confident facade, but she still knew her worth.” Thompson goes on to explain that the reasons for kicking her out were that “I suppose we felt that in her mind she had already left” and that “We were probably suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder, though there wasn't a name for it back then.” They had considered inviting Trevor Lucas to join the band to make Denny more comfortable, but came to the (probably correct) conclusion that while he was someone they got on well with personally, he would be another big ego in a band that already had several, and that being around Denny and Lucas’ volatile relationship would, in Thompson’s phrasing, “have not always given one a feeling of peace and stability.” Hutchings originally decided he was going to join Sweeney’s Men, but that group were falling apart, and their first rehearsal with Hutchings would also be their last as a group, with only Hutchings and guitarist and mandolin player Terry Woods left in the band. They added Woods’ wife Gay, and another couple, Tim Hart and Maddy Prior, and formed a group called Steeleye Span, a name given them by Martin Carthy. That group, like Fairport, went to “get their heads together in the country” for three months and recorded an album of electric versions of traditional songs, Hark the Village Wait, on which Mattacks and another drummer, Gerry Conway, guested as Steeleye Span didn’t at the time have their own drummer: [Excerpt: Steeleye Span, “Blackleg Miner”] Steeleye Span would go on to have a moderately successful chart career in the seventies, but by that time most of the original lineup, including Hutchings, had left — Hutchings stayed with them for a few albums, then went on to form the first of a series of bands, all called the Albion Band or variations on that name, which continue to this day. And this is something that needs to be pointed out at this point — it is impossible to follow every single individual in this narrative as they move between bands. There is enough material in the history of the British folk-rock scene that someone could do a 500 Songs-style podcast just on that, and every time someone left Fairport, or Steeleye Span, or the Albion Band, or Matthews’ Southern Comfort, or any of the other bands we have mentioned or will mention, they would go off and form another band which would then fission, and some of its members would often join one of those other bands. There was a point in the mid-1970s where the Albion Band had two original members of Fairport Convention while Fairport Convention had none. So just in order to keep the narrative anything like wieldy, I’m going to keep the narrative concentrated on the two figures from Fairport — Sandy Denny and Richard Thompson — whose work outside the group has had the most influence on the wider world of rock music more broadly, and only deal with the other members when, as they often did, their careers intersected with those two. That doesn’t mean the other members are not themselves hugely important musicians, just that their importance has been primarily to the folk side of the folk-rock genre, and so somewhat outside the scope of this podcast. While Hutchings decided to form a band that would allow him to go deeper and deeper into traditional folk music, Sandy Denny’s next venture was rather different. For a long time she had been writing far more songs than she had ever played for her bandmates, like “Nothing More”, a song that many have suggested is about Thompson: [Excerpt: Fotheringay, “Nothing More”] When Joe Boyd heard that Denny was leaving Fairport Convention, he was at first elated. Fairport’s records were being distributed by A&M in the US at that point, but Island Records was in the process of opening up a new US subsidiary which would then release all future Fairport product — *but*, as far as A&M were concerned, Sandy Denny *was* Fairport Convention. They were only interested in her. Boyd, on the other hand, loved Denny’s work intensely, but from his point of view *Richard Thompson* was Fairport Convention. If he could get Denny signed directly to A&M as a solo artist before Island started its US operations, Witchseason could get a huge advance on her first solo record, while Fairport could continue making records for Island — he’d have two lucrative acts, on different labels. Boyd went over and spoke to A&M and got an agreement in principle that they would give Denny a forty-thousand-dollar advance on her first solo album — twice what they were paying for Fairport albums. The problem was that Denny didn’t want to be a solo act. She wanted to be the lead singer of a band. She gave many reasons for this — the one she gave to many journalists was that she had seen a Judy Collins show and been impressed, but noticed that Collins’ band were definitely a “backing group”, and as she put it “But that's all they were – a backing group. I suddenly thought, If you're playing together on a stage you might as well be TOGETHER.” Most other people in her life, though, say that the main reason for her wanting to be in a band was her desire to be with her boyfriend, Trevor Lucas. Partly this was due to a genuine desire to spend more time with someone with whom she was very much in love, partly it was a fear that he would cheat on her if she was away from him for long periods of time, and part of it seems to have been Lucas’ dislike of being *too* overshadowed by his talented girlfriend — he didn’t mind acknowledging that she was a major talent, but he wanted to be thought of as at least a minor one. So instead of going solo, Denny formed Fotheringay, named after the song she had written for Fairport. This new band consisted at first of Denny on vocals and occasional piano, Lucas on vocals and rhythm guitar, and Lucas’ old Eclection bandmate Gerry Conway on drums. For a lead guitarist, they asked Richard Thompson who the best guitarist in Britain was, and he told them Albert Lee. Lee in turn brought in bass player Pat Donaldson, but this lineup of the band barely survived a fortnight. Lee *was* arguably the best guitarist in Britain, certainly a reasonable candidate if you could ever have a singular best (as indeed was Thompson himself), but he was the best *country* guitarist in Britain, and his style simply didn’t fit with Fotheringay’s folk-influenced songs. He was replaced by American guitarist Jerry Donahue, who was not anything like as proficient as Lee, but who was still very good, and fit the band’s style much better. The new group rehearsed together for a few weeks, did a quick tour, and then went into the recording studio to record their debut, self-titled, album. Joe Boyd produced the album, but admitted himself that he only paid attention to those songs he considered worthwhile — the album contained one song by Lucas, “The Ballad of Ned Kelly”, and two cover versions of American singer-songwriter material with Lucas singing lead. But everyone knew that the songs that actually *mattered* were Sandy Denny’s, and Boyd was far more interested in them, particularly the songs “The Sea” and “The Pond and the Stream”: [Excerpt: Fotheringay, “The Pond and the Stream”] Fotheringay almost immediately hit financial problems, though. While other Witchseason acts were used to touring on the cheap, all packed together in the back of a Transit van with inexpensive equipment, Trevor Lucas had ambitions of being a rock star and wanted to put together a touring production to match, with expensive transport and equipment, including a speaker system that got nicknamed “Stonehenge” — but at the same time, Denny was unhappy being on the road, and didn’t play many gigs. As well as the band itself, the Fotheringay album also featured backing vocals from a couple of other people, including Denny’s friend Linda Peters. Peters was another singer from the folk clubs, and a good one, though less well-known than Denny — at this point she had only released a couple of singles, and those singles seemed to have been as much as anything else released as a novelty. The first of those, a version of Dylan’s “You Ain’t Goin’ Nowhere” had been released as by “Paul McNeill and Linda Peters”: [Excerpt: Paul McNeill and Linda Peters, “You Ain’t Goin’ Nowhere”] But their second single, a version of John D. Loudermilk’s “You’re Taking My Bag”, was released on the tiny Page One label, owned by Larry Page, and was released under the name “Paul and Linda”, clearly with the intent of confusing particularly gullible members of the record-buying public into thinking this was the McCartneys: [Excerpt: Paul and Linda, “You’re Taking My Bag”] Peters was though more financially successful than almost anyone else in this story, as she was making a great deal of money as a session singer. She actually did another session involving most of Fotheringay around this time. Witchseason had a number of excellent songwriters on its roster, and had had some success getting covers by people like Judy Collins, but Joe Boyd thought that they might possibly do better at getting cover versions if they were performed in less idiosyncratic arrangements. Donahue, Donaldson, and Conway went into the studio to record backing tracks, and vocals were added by Peters and another session singer, who according to some sources also provided piano. They cut songs by Mike Heron of the Incredible String Band: [Excerpt: Linda Peters, “You Get Brighter”] Ed Carter, formerly of The New Nadir but by this time firmly ensconced in the Beach Boys’ touring band where he would remain for the next quarter-century: [Excerpt: Linda Peters, “I Don’t Mind”] John and Beverly Martyn, and Nick Drake: [Excerpt: Elton John, “Saturday Sun”] There are different lineups of musicians credited for those sessions in different sources, but I tend to believe that it’s mostly Fotheringay for the simple reason that Donahue says it was him, Donaldson and Conway who talked Lucas and Denny into the mistake that destroyed Fotheringay because of these sessions. Fotheringay were in financial trouble already, spending far more money than they were bringing in, but their album made the top twenty and they were getting respect both from critics and from the public — in September, Sandy Denny was voted best British female singer by the readers of Melody Maker in their annual poll, which led to shocked headlines in the tabloids about how this “unknown” could have beaten such big names as Dusty Springfield and Cilla Black. Only a couple of weeks after that, they were due to headline at the Albert Hall. It should have been a triumph. But Donahue, Donaldson, and Conway had asked that singing pianist to be their support act. As Donahue said later “That was a terrible miscast. It was our fault. He asked if [he] could do it. Actually Pat, Gerry and I had to talk Sandy and Trevor into [it]… We'd done these demos and the way he was playing – he was a wonderful piano player – he was sensitive enough. We knew very little about his stage-show. We thought he'd be a really good opener for us.” Unfortunately, Elton John was rather *too* good. As Donahue continued “we had no idea what he had in mind, that he was going to do the most incredible rock & roll show ever. He pretty much blew us off the stage before we even got on the stage.” To make matters worse, Fotheringay’s set, which was mostly comprised of new material, was underrehearsed and sloppy, and from that point on no matter what they did people were counting the hours until the band split up. They struggled along for a while though, and started working on a second record, with Boyd again producing, though as Boyd later said “I probably shouldn't have been producing the record. My lack of respect for the group was clear, and couldn't have helped the atmosphere. We'd put out a record that had sold disappointingly, A&M was unhappy. Sandy's tracks on the first record are among the best things she ever did – the rest of it, who cares? And the artwork, Trevor's sister, was terrible. It would have been one thing if I'd been unhappy with it and it sold, and the group was working all the time, making money, but that wasn't the case … I knew what Sandy was capable of, and it was very upsetting to me.” The record would not be released for thirty-eight years: [Excerpt: Fotheringay, “Wild Mountain Thyme”] Witchseason was going badly into debt. Given all the fissioning of bands that we’ve already been talking about, Boyd had been stretched thin — he produced sixteen albums in 1970, and almost all of them lost money for the company. And he was getting more and more disillusioned with the people he was producing. He loved Beverly Martyn’s work, but had little time for her abusive husband John, who was dominating her recording and life more and more and would soon become a solo artist while making her stay at home (and stealing her ideas without giving her songwriting credit). The Incredible String Band were great, but they had recently converted to Scientology, which Boyd found annoying, and while he was working with all sorts of exciting artists like Vashti Bunyan and Nico, he was finding himself less and less important to the artists he mentored. Fairport Convention were a good example of this. After Denny and Hutchings had left the group, they’d decided to carry on as an electric folk group, performing an equal mix of originals by the Swarbrick and Thompson songwriting team and arrangements of traditional songs. The group were now far enough away from the “British Jefferson Airplane” label that they decided they didn’t need a female vocalist — and more realistically, while they’d been able to replace Judy Dyble, nobody was going to replace Sandy Denny. Though it’s rather surprising when one considers Thompson’s subsequent career that nobody seems to have thought of bringing in Denny’s friend Linda Peters, who was dating Joe Boyd at the time (as Denny had been before she met Lucas) as Denny’s replacement. Instead, they decided that Swarbrick and Thompson were going to share the vocals between them. They did, though, need a bass player to replace Hutchings. Swarbrick wanted to bring in Dave Pegg, with whom he had played in the Ian Campbell Folk Group, but the other band members initially thought the idea was a bad one. At the time, while they respected Swarbrick as a musician, they didn’t think he fully understood rock and roll yet, and they thought the idea of getting in a folkie who had played double bass rather than an electric rock bassist ridiculous. But they auditioned him to mollify Swarbrick, and found that he was exactly what they needed. As Joe Boyd later said “All those bass lines were great, Ashley invented them all, but he never could play them that well. He thought of them, but he was technically not a terrific bass player. He was a very inventive, melodic, bass player, but not a very powerful one technically. But having had the part explained to him once, Pegg was playing it better than Ashley had ever played it… In some rock bands, I think, ultimately, the bands that sound great, you can generally trace it to the bass player… it was at that point they became a great band, when they had Pegg.” The new lineup of Fairport decided to move in together, and found a former pub called the Angel, into which all the band members moved, along with their partners and children (Thompson was the only one who was single at this point) and their roadies. The group lived together quite happily, and one gets the impression that this was the period when they were most comfortable with each other, even though by this point they were a disparate group with disparate tastes, in music as in everything else. Several people have said that the only music all the band members could agree they liked at this point was the first two albums by The Band. With the departure of Hutchings from the band, Swarbrick and Thompson, as the strongest personalities and soloists, became in effect the joint leaders of the group, and they became collaborators as songwriters, trying to write new songs that were inspired by traditional music. Thompson described the process as “let’s take one line of this reel and slow it down and move it up a minor third and see what that does to it; let’s take one line of this ballad and make a whole song out of it. Chopping up the tradition to find new things to do… like a collage.” Generally speaking, Swarbrick and Thompson would sit by the fire and Swarbrick would play a melody he’d been working on, the two would work on it for a while, and Thompson would then go away and write the lyrics. This is how the two came up with songs like the nine-minute “Sloth”, a highlight of the next album, Full House, and one that would remain in Fairport’s live set for much of their career: [Excerpt: Fairport Convention, “Sloth”] “Sloth” was titled that way because Thompson and Swarbrick were working on two tunes, a slow one and a fast one, and they jokingly named them “Sloth” and “Fasth”, but the latter got renamed to “Walk Awhile”, while “Sloth” kept its working title. But by this point, Boyd and Thompson were having a lot of conflict in the studio. Boyd was never the most technical of producers — he was one of those producers whose job is to gently guide the artists in the studio and create a space for the music to flourish, rather than the Joe Meek type with an intimate technical knowledge of the studio — and as the artists he was working with gained confidence in their own work they felt they had less and less need of him. During the making of the Full House album, Thompson and Boyd, according to Boyd, clashed on everything — every time Boyd thought Thompson had done a good solo, Thompson would say to erase it and let him have another go, while every time Boyd thought Thompson could do better, Thompson would say that was the take to keep. One of their biggest clashes was over Thompson’s song “Poor Will and the Jolly Hangman”, which was originally intended for release on the album, and is included in current reissues of it: [Excerpt: Fairport Convention, “Poor Will and the Jolly Hangman”] Thompson had written that song inspired by what he thought was the unjust treatment of Alex Bramham, the driver in Fairport’s fatal car crash, by the courts — Bramham had been given a prison sentence of a few months for dangerous driving, while the group members thought he had not been at fault. Boyd thought it was one of the best things recorded for the album, but Thompson wasn’t happy with his vocal — there was one note at the top of the melody that he couldn’t quite hit — and insisted it be kept off the record, even though that meant it would be a shorter album than normal. He did this at such a late stage that early copies of the album actually had the title printed on the sleeve, but then blacked out. He now says in his autobiography “I could have persevered, double-tracked the voice, warmed up for longer – anything. It was a good track, and the record was lacking without it. When the album was re-released, the track was restored with a more confident vocal, and it has stayed there ever since.” During the sessions for Full House the group also recorded one non-album single, Thompson and Swarbrick’s “Now Be Thankful”: [Excerpt, Fairport Convention, “Now Be Thankful”] The B-side to that was a medley of two traditional tunes plus a Swarbrick original, but was given the deliberately ridiculous title “Sir B. McKenzie’s Daughter’s Lament For The 77th Mounted Lancers Retreat From The Straits Of Loch Knombe, In The Year Of Our Lord 1727, On The Occasion Of The Announcement Of Her Marriage To The Laird Of Kinleakie”: [Excerpt: Fairport Convention, “Sir B. McKenzie’s Daughter’s Lament For The 77th Mounted Lancers Retreat From The Straits Of Loch Knombe, In The Year Of Our Lord 1727, On The Occasion Of The Announcement Of Her Marriage To The Laird Of Kinleakie”] The B. McKenzie in the title was a reference to the comic-strip character Barry McKenzie, a stereotype drunk Australian created for Private Eye magazine by the comedian Barry Humphries (later to become better known for his Dame Edna Everage character) but the title was chosen for one reason only — to get into the Guinness Book of Records for the song with the longest title. Which they did, though they were later displaced by the industrial band Test Dept, and their song “Long Live British Democracy Which Flourishes and Is Constantly Perfected Under the Immaculate Guidance of the Great, Honourable, Generous and Correct Margaret Hilda Thatcher. She Is the Blue Sky in the Hearts of All Nations. Our People Pay Homage and Bow in Deep Respect and Gratitude to Her. The Milk of Human Kindness”. Full House got excellent reviews in the music press, with Rolling Stone saying “The music shows that England has finally gotten her own equivalent to The Band… By calling Fairport an English equivalent of the Band, I meant that they have soaked up enough of the tradition of their countryfolk that it begins to show all over, while they maintain their roots in rock.” Off the back of this, the group went on their first US tour, culminating in a series of shows at the Troubadour in LA, on the same bill as Rick Nelson, which were recorded and later released as a live album: [Excerpt: Fairport Convention, “Sloth (live)”] The Troubadour was one of the hippest venues at the time, and over their residency there the group got seen by many celebrities, some of whom joined them on stage. The first was Linda Ronstadt, who initially demurred, saying she didn’t know any of their songs. On being told they knew all of hers, she joined in with a rendition of “Silver Threads and Golden Needles”. Thompson was later asked to join Ronstadt’s backing band, who would go on to become the Eagles, but he said later of this offer “I would have hated it. I’d have hated being on the road with four or five miserable Americans — they always seem miserable. And if you see them now, they still look miserable on stage — like they don’t want to be there and they don’t like each other.” The group were also joined on stage at the Troubadour on one memorable night by some former bandmates of Pegg’s. Before joining the Ian Campbell Folk Group, Pegg had played around the Birmingham beat scene, and had been in bands with John Bonham and Robert Plant, who turned up to the Troubadour with their Led Zeppelin bandmate Jimmy Page (reports differ on whether the fourth member of Zeppelin, John Paul Jones, also came along). They all got up on stage together and jammed on songs like “Hey Joe”, “Louie Louie”, and various old Elvis tunes. The show was recorded, and the tapes are apparently still in the possession of Joe Boyd, who has said he refuses to release them in case he is murdered by the ghost of Peter Grant. According to Thompson, that night ended in a three-way drinking contest between Pegg, Bonham, and Janis Joplin, and it’s testament to how strong the drinking culture is around Fairport and the British folk scene in general that Pegg outdrank both of them. According to Thompson, Bonham was found naked by a swimming pool two days later, having missed two gigs. For all their hard rock image, Led Zeppelin were admirers of a lot of the British folk and folk-rock scene, and a few months later Sandy Denny would become the only outside vocalist ever to appear on a Led Zeppelin record when she duetted with Plant on “The Battle of Evermore” on the group’s fourth album: [Excerpt: Led Zeppelin, “The Battle of Evermore”] Denny would never actually get paid for her appearance on one of the best-selling albums of all time. That was, incidentally, not the only session that Denny was involved in around this time — she also sang on the soundtrack to a soft porn film titled Swedish Fly Girls, whose soundtrack was produced by Manfred Mann: [Excerpt: Sandy Denny, “What Will I Do With Tomorrow?”] Shortly after Fairport’s trip to America, Joe Boyd decided he was giving up on Witchseason. The company was now losing money, and he was finding himself having to produce work for more and more acts as the various bands fissioned. The only ones he really cared about were Richard Thompson, who he was finding it more and more difficult to work with, Nick Drake, who wanted to do his next album with just an acoustic guitar anyway, Sandy Denny, who he felt was wasting her talents in Fotheringay, and Mike Heron of the Incredible String Band, who was more distant since his conversion to Scientology. Boyd did make some attempts to keep the company going. On a trip to Sweden, he negotiated an agreement with the manager and publisher of a Swedish band whose songs he’d found intriguing, the Hep Stars. Boyd was going to publish their songs in the UK, and in return that publisher, Stig Anderson, would get the rights to Witchseason’s catalogue in Scandinavia — a straight swap, with no money changing hands. But before Boyd could get round to signing the paperwork, he got a better offer from Mo Ostin of Warners — Ostin wanted Boyd to come over to LA and head up Warners’ new film music department. Boyd sold Witchseason to Island Records and moved to LA with his fiancee Linda Peters, spending the next few years working on music for films like Deliverance and A Clockwork Orange, as well as making his own documentary about Jimi Hendrix, and thus missed out on getting the UK publishing rights for ABBA, and all the income that would have brought him, for no money. And it was that decision that led to the breakup of Fotheringay. Just before Christmas 1970, Fotheringay were having a difficult session, recording the track “John the Gun”: [Excerpt: Fotheringay, “John the Gun”] Boyd got frustrated and kicked everyone out of the session, and went for a meal and several drinks with Denny. He kept insisting that she should dump the band and just go solo, and then something happened that the two of them would always describe differently. She asked him if he would continue to produce her records if she went solo, and he said he would. According to Boyd’s recollection of the events, he meant that he would fly back from California at some point to produce her records. According to Denny, he told her that if she went solo he would stay in Britain and not take the job in LA. This miscommunication was only discovered after Denny told the rest of Fotheringay after the Christmas break that she was splitting the band. Jerry Donahue has described that as the worst moment of his life, and Denny felt very guilty about breaking up a band with some of her closest friends in — and then when Boyd went over to the US anyway she felt a profound betrayal. Two days before Fotheringay’s final concert, in January 1971, Sandy Denny signed a solo deal with Island records, but her first solo album would not end up produced by Joe Boyd. Instead, The North Star Grassman and the Ravens was co-produced by Denny, John Wood — the engineer who had worked with Boyd on pretty much everything he’d produced, and Richard Thompson, who had just quit Fairport Convention, though he continued living with them at the Angel, at least until a truck crashed into the building in February 1971, destroying its entire front wall and forcing them to relocate. The songs chosen for The North Star Grassman and the Ravens reflected the kind of choices Denny would make on her future albums, and her eclectic taste in music. There was, of course, the obligatory Dylan cover, and the traditional folk ballad “Blackwaterside”, but there was also a cover version of Brenda Lee’s “Let’s Jump the Broomstick”: [Excerpt: Sandy Denny, “Let’s Jump the Broomstick”] Most of the album, though, was made up of originals about various people in Denny’s life, like “Next Time Around”, about her ex-boyfriend Jackson C Frank: [Excerpt: Sandy Denny, “Next Time Around”] The album made the top forty in the UK — Denny’s only solo album to do so — and led to her once again winning the “best female singer” award in Melody Maker’s readers’ poll that year — the male singer award was won by Rod Stewart. Both Stewart and Denny appeared the next year on the London Symphony Orchestra’s all-star version of The Who’s Tommy, which had originally been intended as a vehicle for Stewart before Roger Daltrey got involved. Stewart’s role was reduced to a single song, “Pinball Wizard”, while Denny sang on “It’s a Boy”: [Excerpt: Sandy Denny, “It’s a Boy”] While Fotheringay had split up, all the band members play on The North Star Grassman and the Ravens. Guitarists Donahue and Lucas only play on a couple of the tracks, with Richard Thompson playing most of the guitar on the record. But Fotheringay’s rhythm section of Pat Donaldson and Gerry Conway play on almost every track. Another musician on the album, Ian Whiteman, would possibly have a profound effect on the future direction of Richard Thompson’s career and life. Whiteman was the former keyboard player for the mod band The Action, having joined them just before they became the blues-rock band Mighty Baby. But Mighty Baby had split up when all of the band except the lead singer had converted to Islam. Richard Thompson was on his own spiritual journey at this point, and became a Sufi – the same branch of Islam as Whiteman – soon after the session, though Thompson has said that his conversion was independent of Whiteman’s. The two did become very close and work together a lot in the mid-seventies though. Thompson had supposedly left Fairport because he was writing material that wasn’t suited to the band, but he spent more than a year after quitting the group working on sessions rather than doing anything with his own material, and these sessions tended to involve the same core group of musicians. One of the more unusual was a folk-rock supergroup called The Bunch, put together by Trevor Lucas. Richard Branson had recently bought a recording studio, and wanted a band to test it out before opening it up for commercial customers, so with this free studio time Lucas decided to record a set of fifties rock and roll covers. He gathered together Thompson, Denny, Whiteman, Ashley Hutchings, Dave Mattacks, Pat Donaldson, Gerry Conway, pianist Tony Cox, the horn section that would later form the core of the Average White Band, and Linda Peters, who had now split up with Joe Boyd and returned to the UK, and who had started dating Thompson. They recorded an album of covers of songs by Jerry Lee Lewis, the Everly Brothers, Johnny Otis and others: [Excerpt: The Bunch, “Willie and the Hand Jive”] The early seventies was a hugely productive time for this group of musicians, as they all continued playing on each other’s projects. One notable album was No Roses by Shirley Collins, which featured Thompson, Mattacks, Whiteman, Simon Nicol, Lal and Mike Waterson, and Ashley Hutchings, who was at that point married to Collins, as well as some more unusual musicians like the free jazz saxophonist Lol Coxhill: [Excerpt: Shirley Collins and the Albion Country Band, “Claudy Banks”] Collins was at the time the most respected female singer in British traditional music, and already had a substantial career including a series of important records made with her sister Dolly, work with guitarists like Davey Graham, and time spent in the 1950s collecting folk songs in the Southern US with her then partner Alan Lomax – according to Collins she did much of the actual work, but Lomax only mentioned her in a single sentence in his book on this work. Some of the same group of musicians went on to work on an album of traditional Morris dancing tunes, titled Morris On, credited to “Ashley Hutchings, Richard Thompson, Dave Mattacks, John Kirkpatrick and Barry Dransfield”, with Collins singing lead on two tracks: [Excerpt: Ashley Hutchings, Richard Thompson, Dave Mattacks, John Kirkpatrick and Barry Dransfield with Shirley Collins, “The Willow Tree”] Thompson thought that that album was the best of the various side projects he was involved in at the time, comparing it favourably to Rock On, which he thought was rather slight, saying later “Conceptually, Fairport, Ashley and myself and Sandy were developing a more fragile style of music that nobody else was particularly interested in, a British Folk Rock idea that had a logical development to it, although we all presented it our own way. Morris On was rather more true to what we were doing. Rock On was rather a retro step. I'm not sure it was lasting enough as a record but Sandy did sing really well on the Buddy Holly songs.” Hutchings used the musicians on No Roses and Morris On as the basis for his band the Albion Band, which continues to this day. Simon Nicol and Dave Mattacks both quit Fairport to join the Albion Band, though Mattacks soon returned. Nicol would not return to Fairport for several years, though, and for a long period in the mid-seventies Fairport Convention had no original members. Unfortunately, while Collins was involved in the Albion Band early on, she and Hutchings ended up divorcing, and the stress from the divorce led to Collins developing spasmodic dysphonia, a stress-related illness which makes it impossible for the sufferer to sing. She did eventually regain her vocal ability, but between 1978 and 2016 she was unable to perform at all, and lost decades of her career. Richard Thompson occasionally performed with the Albion Band early on, but he was getting stretched a little thin with all these sessions. Linda Peters said later of him “When I came back from America, he was working in Sandy’s band, and doing sessions by the score. Always with Pat Donaldson and Dave Mattacks. Richard would turn up with his guitar, one day he went along to do a session with one of those folkie lady singers — and there were Pat and DM. They all cracked. Richard smashed his amp and said “Right! No more sessions!” In 1972 he got round to releasing his first solo album, Henry the Human Fly, which featured guest appearances by Linda Peters and Sandy Denny among others: [Excerpt: Richard Thompson, “The Angels Took My Racehorse Away”] Unfortunately, while that album has later become regarded as one of the classics of its genre, at the time it was absolutely slated by the music press. The review in Melody Maker, for example, read in part “Some of Richard Thompson’s ideas sound great – which is really the saving grace of this album, because most of the music doesn’t. The tragedy is that Thompson’s “British rock music” is such an unconvincing concoction… Even the songs that do integrate rock and traditional styles of electric guitar rhythms and accordion and fiddle decoration – and also include explicit, meaningful lyrics are marred by bottle-up vocals, uninspiring guitar phrases and a general lack of conviction in performance.” Henry the Human Fly was released in the US by Warners, who had a reciprocal licensing deal with Island (and for whom Joe Boyd was working at the time, which may have had something to do with that) but according to Thompson it became the lowest-selling record that Warners ever put out (though I’ve also seen that claim made about Van Dyke Parks’ Song Cycle, another album that has later been rediscovered). Thompson was hugely depressed by this reaction, and blamed his own singing. Happily, though, by this point he and Linda had become a couple — they would marry in 1972 — and they started playing folk clubs as a duo, or sometimes in a trio with Simon Nicol. Thompson was also playing with Sandy Denny’s backing band at this point, and played on every track on her second solo album, Sandy. This album was meant to be her big commercial breakthrough, with a glamorous cover photo by David Bailey, and with a more American sound, including steel guitar by Sneaky Pete Kleinow of the Flying Burrito Brothers (whose overdubs were supervised in LA by Joe Boyd): [Excerpt: Sandy Denny, “Tomorrow is a Long Time”] The album was given a big marketing push by Island, and “Listen, Listen” was made single of the week on the Radio 1 Breakfast show: [Excerpt: Sandy Denny, “Listen, Listen”] But it did even worse than the previous album, sending her into something of a depression. Linda Thompson (as the former Linda Peters now was) said of this period “After the Sandy album, it got her down that her popularity didn't suddenly increase in leaps and bounds, and that was the start of her really fretting about the way her career was going. Things only escalated after that. People like me or Martin Carthy or Norma Waterson would think, ‘What are you on about? This is folk music.'” After Sandy’s release, Denny realised she could no longer afford to tour with a band, and so went back to performing just acoustically or on piano. The only new music to be released by either of these ex-members of Fairport Convention in 1973 was, oddly, on an album by the band they were no longer members of. After Thompson had left Fairport, the group had managed to release two whole albums with the same lineup — Swarbrick, Nicol, Pegg, and Mattacks. But then Nicol and Mattacks had both quit the band to join the Albion Band with their former bandmate Ashley Hutchings, leading to a situation where the Albion Band had two original members of Fairport plus their longtime drummer while Fairport Convention itself had no original members and was down to just Swarbrick and Pegg. Needing to fulfil their contracts, they then recruited three former members of Fotheringay — Lucas on vocals and rhythm guitar, Donahue on lead guitar, and Conway on drums. Conway was only a session player at the time, and Mattacks soon returned to the band, but Lucas and Donahue became full-time members. This new lineup of Fairport Convention released two albums in 1973, widely regarded as the group’s most inconsistent records, and on the title track of the first, “Rosie”, Richard Thompson guested on guitar, with Sandy Denny and Linda Thompson on backing vocals: [Excerpt: Fairport Convention, “Rosie”] Neither Sandy Denny nor Richard Thompson released a record themselves in 1973, but in neither case was this through the artists’ choice. The record industry was changing in the early 1970s, as we’ll see in later episodes, and was less inclined to throw good money after bad in the pursuit of art. Island Records prided itself on being a home for great artists, but it was still a business, and needed to make money. We’ll talk about the OPEC oil crisis and its effect on the music industry much more when the podcast gets to 1973, but in brief, the production of oil by the US peaked in 1970 and started to decrease, leading to them importing more and more oil from the Middle East. As a result of this, oil prices rose slowly between 1971 and 1973, then very quickly towards the end of 1973 as a result of the Arab-Israeli conflict that year. As vinyl is made of oil, suddenly producing records became much more expensive, and in this period a lot of labels decided not to release already-completed albums, until what they hoped would be a brief period of shortages passed. Both Denny and Thompson recorded albums at this point that got put to one side by Island. In the case of Thompson, it was the first album by Richard and Linda as a duo, I Want to See the Bright Lights Tonight: [Excerpt: Richard and Linda Thompson, “I Want to See the Bright Lights Tonight”] Today, I Want to See the Bright Lights Tonight is widely regarded as one of the greatest albums of all time, and as one of the two masterpieces that bookended Richard and Linda’s career as a duo and their marriage. But when they recorded the album, full of Richard’s dark songs, it was the opposite of commercial. Even a song that’s more or less a boy-girl song, like “Has He Got a Friend for Me?” has lyrics like “He wouldn’t notice me passing by/I could be in the gutter, or dangling down from a tree” [Excerpt: Richard and Linda Thompson, “Has He got a Friend For Me?”] While something like “The Calvary Cross” is oblique and haunted, and seems to cast a pall over the entire album: [Excerpt: Richard and Linda Thompson, “The Calvary Cross”] The album itself had been cheap to make — it had been recorded in only a week, with Thompson bringing in musicians he knew well and had worked with a lot previously to cut the tracks as-live in only a handful of takes — but Island didn’t think it was worth releasing. The record stayed on the shelf for nearly a year after recording, until Island got a new head of A&R, Richard Williams. Williams said of the album’s release “Muff Winwood had been doing A&R, but he was more interested in production… I had a conversation with Muff as soon as I got there, and he said there are a few hangovers, some outstanding problems. And one of them was Richard Thompson. He said there’s this album we gave him the money to make — which was I Want to See the Bright Lights Tonight — and nobody’s very interested in it. Henry the Human Fly had been a bit of a commercial disappointment, and although Island was altruistic and independent and known for only recording good stuff, success was important… Either a record had to do well or somebody had to believe in it a lot. And it seemed as if neither of those things were true at that point of Richard.” Williams, though, was hugely impressed when he listened to the album. He compared Richard Thompson’s guitar playing to John Coltrane’s sax, and called Thompson “the folk poet of the rainy streets”, but also said “Linda brightened it, made it more commercial. and I thought that “Bright Lights” itself seemed a really commercial song.” The rest of the management at Island got caught up in Williams’ enthusiasm, and even decided to release the title track as a single: [Excerpt: Richard and Linda Thompson, “I Want to See the Bright Lights Tonight”] Neither single nor album charted — indeed it would not be until 1991 that Richard Thompson would make a record that made the top forty in the UK — but the album got enough critical respect that Richard and Linda released two albums the year after. The first of these, Hokey Pokey, is a much more upbeat record than their previous one — Richard Thompson has called it “quite a music-hall influenced record” and cited the influence of George Formby and Harry Lauder. For once, the claim of music hall influence is audible in the music. Usually when a British musician is claimed to have a music ha