LEGENDARY folk musician Dave Swarbrick once famously came back from the ‘dead’ to the relief of his fans.

Now fiddle player Swarbrick, 72, and better known to everyone as Swarb, is to play a concert at the Corn Exchange, Wallingford, later this year.

Swarbrick, of Fairport Convention, Whippersnapper and Band of Hope fame, was prematurely killed off in a Daily Telegraph obituary in 1999 after he was admitted to hospital with a chest infection.

After reading of his own demise, Swarbrick was reported to have wittily commented: “It’s not the first time I’ve died in Coventry.”

Wondering whether this was just an apocryphal tale, I checked with the man himself and Swarbrick told me: “Yes, the quote about dying in Coventry is true and how fortunate I was to have come up with it.

“I was prone in a hospital bed, had to come up with a quote, opened my mouth and somehow that came out.”

Swarbrick had fallen seriously ill while on tour, leaving him to battle emphysema for the next six years. But a double lung transplant in October 2004 saw him return to form with a renewed zest to be playing music again, and Swarbrick has since toured Britain, Europe and Australia playing with his aptly-named band, Swarb’s Lazarus.

He will be visiting Wallingford on his latest 17-date tour, entitled An Evening with Swarb — aka Age before Beauty on Saturday, April 19, at 7.45pm.

English folk trio Said the Maiden, who peformed at last year’s BunkFest, will perform for the first half of the evening, with Swarbrick performing, talking and answering questions from the audience after the interval.

Not only will Swarbrick be entertaining, but, in keeping with his role as patron of the Folkstock Arts Foundation (the community interest company organising his latest tour), he will be offering a local acoustic/folk solo act or duo the chance to perform three songs at the start of the evening. The act can be of any age or any experience and Swarbrick will personally choose which act is selected.

Swarbrick said: “It will be fun I think to work with artists so young and an opportunity to find out what’s happening in the parallel world they inhabit.

“At the end of the tour, I hope to emerge with an extended vocabulary of text acronyms. Musically, they are approximately two generations further on down the folk revival road and I hope to give and get some ideas.”

Swarbrick, who lives in Coventry with his artist wife Jill Banks, was born in London in April 1941 and moved to Yorkshire when he was only three months old.

At the age of six, he learnt the rudiments of the fiddle from the local fiddle player Mr Bootham. Two years later, the family moved to Birmingham and after leaving school at the age of 15 Swarbrick became apprenticed to ICI as a letterpress printer.

During his indentured years, Dave toured and recorded extensively, meeting with many other performers including Ian Campbell. He joined the Ian Campbell Folk Group in the early 1960s, leaving his printing job shortly afterwards.

In 1966, he teamed up with Martin Carthy and they played an important role in the shake-up in British folk music in the middle- to late-1960s.

After they parted in 1969, Swarbrick joined Fairport Convention, staying with the band until 1984. Tickets for his Wallingford concert are £12 and are available from the Corn Exchange box office on 01491 825000 or online at: www.cornexchange.org.uk/ Acts interested in taking up Swarbrick’s offer of performing at the concert should live within 50 miles of the venue should send a private message or make a public post to the Folkstock Arts Foundation Facebook page, with links to them performing their music. They should also say which date and venue their application should be considered for and apply by Friday, February 28.

All social media links and information about the tour and the venues can be accessed from the foundation’s website at: www.folkstockartsfoundation.com/ Anyone with questions should email folkstock@hotmail.co.uk, but links to music and videos should be sent to the Facebook page.