Dave Swarbrick regularly appeared at Fairport Convention’s Cropredy festival in Oxfordshire long after his obituary was printed prematurely in the Daily Telegraph. At a public rehearsal before the festival one year, he turned up, hard of hearing, and with the oxygen cylinder that he needed to cope with his emphysema. Fairport started a song, Swarbrick came in late, and they all stopped.
“That’s all right, Dave,” said the guitarist and vocalist Simon Nicol. “If the Grim Reaper can wait for you, so can we.”
