Trip to the Fair

Trip to the Fair opens Scheherazade and Other Stories and runs just under eleven minutes. Dunford, Thatcher and Tout share the writing credit. Haslam said it came from her first date with Roy Wood, when they drove to Hampstead, remembered that the fair had come to Hampstead Heath, and found it closed and dark. She phoned Thatcher the next day to describe the evening.

While recording the vocal, Haslam kept making the same mistake at the same point and broke into laughter each time. The other band members had the laughter takes dubbed together in a staggered form, which gives the track its madcap laughing passage. Louder describes the piano-led opening as initially austere but in the end a sweet record of the date that began Haslam's four-year relationship with Wood. Dunford's own later band named an album after the song.