Man" was released in April 1965 and reached #1 on the U.S. and UK singles charts, setting off the mid-1960s folk rock movement. The Beatles' late 1965 album, Rubber Soul, contained a number of songs influenced by the American folk rock boom, such as "Nowhere Man" and "If I Needed Someone". During this period, a number of electric bands began to play rock versions of folk songs and folk musicians used electric musical instruments to play their own songs, including Dylan at the Newport Folk Festival in the summer of 1965. Folk rock became an important genre among emerging English bands, particularly those in the London club scene towards the end of the 1960s. The skiffle movement, to which many English musicians, including the Beatles, owed their origins as performers, meant that they were already familiar with American folk music As they emulated the guitar and drum based format that had crystallised as the norm for rock music, these groups often turned to American folk and folk rock as the focus of their sound and inspiration. Among these groups from 1967 were Fairport Convention, who had enjoyed some modest mainstream success with three albums of material that was largely American in origin or style, before a radical change of direction in 1969 with their album Liege & Lief, which came out of the encounter between American inspired folk rock and the products of the English folk revival. The first English folk music revival had seen a huge effort to record and archive traditional English music by figures such as Cecil Sharp and Vaughan Williams in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The second revival in the period after the Second World War, built on this work and followed a similar movement in America, to which it was connected by individuals like Alan Lomax, who had fled to England in the era of McCarthyism. Like the American revival, it was often overtly left wing in its politics, but, led by such figures as Ewan MacColl and A. L. Lloyd from the early 1950s, it also attempted to produce a distinctively English music that was an alternative to the American dominance of popular culture, which was, as they saw it, displacing the traditional music of an increasingly urbanised and industrialised working class. Most important among their responses were the foundation of folk clubs in major towns, starting with London where MacColl