Sandy Denny List, Frequently Asked Questions

Many Ears To Please

2012-01-14T07:56:00.000-08:00

Fairport Convention: "Many Ears To Please", Live in Oslo 1975 (Molldur MDCD 0601)
Guy Anthony Brown, 8 February, 2006

Let me first make one thing perfectly clear: This IS an official release. It has the full approval of the Fairport line-up in question. Guitarist Jerry Donahue has written liner notes and also been part of the remastering process. Fiddler Dave Swarbrick and bass player Dave Pegg have also given it their full approval. All royalties for songs and arrangements are being paid for.

The background for this release is very different from most CD's you'll find. In 1975 I attended a great concert by my favourite group Fairport Convention. It did, however, feature a slightly different line-up. Drummer Dave Mattacks had just left the band. And since they had a few European shows just round the corner, there was no time to hold proper audtions for a replacement to save this short tour.

That's when roadie Paul Warren bravely told the band he'd been playing a bit of drums himself and he'd been watching Mattacks closely from the wings. A test showed he was more than good enough for the tour. So this is how Warren became Fairport's drummer for a couple of weeks. This line-up has been largely unchronicled and none of the gigs had been recorded by the band. After the tour his days in Fairport were over Bruce Rowland eventually took over permanently. This CD proves that was a massive mistake.

15 years later an old friend calls me up, telling me he's been made aware of some tape rolls in boxes that simply said Fairport Convention. He knew I was a fan and asked me up to hear it. When I arrived, I could hardly believe it. It was the very concert I'd attended in 1975. Me and a mate of mine decided to buy the tape for our own collection. No ambition of release ever crossed our minds.

But to cut a long story short, I sent copies of the tape to Dave Pegg and Jerry Donahue. Both liked it. And eventually Jerry went one step further and suggested we'd put it out on CD. So here it is, fresh from the pressing plant: The "lost" Fairport recorded in Oslo 1975. Released on the freshly created Molldur label.

The tapes were originally recorded through hanging mikes. They have now been professionally remastered and the CD comes with a 16 page booklet. Containing liner notes from Donahue and totally unseen pictures (taken the day after the gig in question).

So there you have it: The story of a very different kind of CD release. Made by the fans for the fans - with the full approval and total cooperation of Donahue, Pegg and Swarb. Sandy Denny and Trevor Lucas are, of course, no longer with us. And the elusive Warren is nowhere to be found. But the remaining members are all in it. I hope you will enjoy this CD.

Payment by Paypal or well concealed cash in letter (at buyer's risk, of course) Postage is $5 (Europe) and $8 (rest of the world). We think you will like this CD if you're a big enough Fairport fan to have read this far
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Many Ears To Please
Bill Windsor, Feb.10, 2006
Just received (very promptly & well-packaged) copy of the above from Norway yesterday and I have already informed the Oslo connection & would now like to advise all doubters & our American friends doubting the value of this release - THIS is the best recording of this tour official or otherwise!! It overshadows the Ebbets Field (still sounds like a bootleg regardless of the hard work to "tweak")and even the Woodworm's "Who Knows?"(sorry Peggy please don't shoot me nor take me off-list with future attempts on archival stuff)& in reality betters the Island Fairport "Live" Convention due to being a recording with Sandy "Officially" back in the band (the American leg only had Sandy there as a "guest"{of hubbie obviously} if I am not mistaken!!). So this recording certainly is a truer memory-recollection of the November 74 tour witnessed in Edinburgh's Usher Hall!! Can someone else please confirm that both All Along the Watchtower was played on November 25th as well as "Down In The Flood" - I always maintained that Fairport played two Dylan songs on that tour but could not find proof before this. No longer "I'm a dreamer" - how can we better this???? Anyone disagreeing PLEASE,PLEASE share!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Sandy Denny Tribute Concert, St Ann’s Church, Brooklyn

2010-02-25T07:20:00.000-08:00

Levent Varlik, July 19, 2001

I've found a review of the concert in Rolling Stone's
page, and copying below. Cheers.. Levent Varlik

St. Ann's Church, Brooklyn, N.Y., Nov. 21, 1998
It was a noble gesture, albeit a bit heavy handed attimes: an evening celebrating the music of the late, great English folk pop singer Sandy Denny, as presented by a host of talented, but at times over-reverent, contemporary artists. The brainchild of musical director Peter Holsapple -who spearheaded a similar tribute to Nick Drake last year- the tribute concert featured an impressive roster of marquee singers ranging from Darius Rucker of Hootie and the Blowfish to enigmatic Englishman Robyn Hitchock to former Bangles Vicki Peterson and Michael Steele to R.E.M. vet Mike Mills, all backed by Holsapple's versatile Americana string band, the Continental Drifters.

Denny's untimely death at the age of thirty-one in1978 robbed the world of one modern music's loveliest voices. As a member (alongside guitarist Richard Thompson) of Fairport Convention in the Sixties and as a solo artist in the Seventies, Denny was one of the quiet titans of early electric folk. Possessed of a haunting alto and a yen for commanding arrangements of traditional songs as well for penning her own achingly lovely melodies ("Who Knows Where the Time Goes," "Listen, Listen," to name but two), she achieved that rare balance of equally enthusiastic admiration from critics, peers and, most tellingly for a folk artist, the public (Melody Maker readers voted her top British female vocalist in 1970 and '71). Rock audiences today might know her best from her scene-stealing harmony vocals on Led Zeppelin's "Battle of Evermore," but her body of work forms a cornerstone of influence for many of today's modern folk artists and singer/songwriters.

Needless to say, Holsapple & Co. deserve due credit for singling out a subject long overdue for the tribute treatment. The setting -an intimate, beautiful church in Brooklyn Heights which routinely hosts performances for discriminating music lovers-was perfectly suited for Denny's music, a somber offering of English folk balladry evoking mythic beauty, mystery and doomed love. But the evening would have been well served by a healthy injection of, if not frivolity, at least life. Even the condensed biography of Denny included in the program alludes to the singer's "boisterous personality," -so why the moratorium on even acknowledging the crowd with any more than a slight head nod from each performer? Despite the indelible spirit of the music, the "come out, don't speak, sing your song and go" rules had the unfortunate effect of turning what could've/should've been a joyous revival into a solemn high mass.

Fortunately, the music was for the most part fabulous, but that's to be expected with a cast this formidable working with such a solid catalog of material. Most of the female vocalists on tap -Katell Keineg, Vicki Peterson, Sloan Wainwright, Deni Bonet, Marti Jones, Susan Cowsill, Dana Kletter and Amanda Thorpe- played it safe, singing their Denny standards as close to the original as possible. The resulting homogeneity at times suggested a mini-Lilith Fair, but considering that if Denny were still around she'd probably be it, that was to be expected. Thankfully, the male singers on hand put a different spin on Denny's songs. Darius Rucker helped break the monotony by throwing the first curveball of the evening with his gravelly, energetic take on "Blackwaterside," followed shortly by Mike Mills' choirboy delivery of "It Suits Me Well." Sharper fare came with Jolene lead singer John Crooke's harrowing reading of "John the Gun," and Don Dixon's jazz/blues version of "Gold Dust," which was a mess, but at least offered a sense of much-needed jovial respite.

In the end, however, only two performers actually achieved musical transcendence: Irish-born, New York-based singer Susan McKeown and Robyn Hitchcock. McKeown, sandwiched in between Rucker and Mills, had the audacity to out-and-out upstage not only the talent around her, but the evening's muse herself. Denny's recording of the traditional gothic folk(lore) anthem "Tam Lin" on Fairport Convention's seminal Liege and Lief flirts with high drama but never quite delivers; McKeown grabbed both song and audience by the throat, dragged them through heaven and hell and back again, and left the stage to the loudest applause heard all evening. And Hitchcock's deceptively off-the-cuff reading of the equally epic "Mattie Groves" (literally read off a scrap of paper held in front of him) would have been a fine, invigorating note to end the evening on, even if it meant forsaking Katell Keineg's subsequent rote delivery of "the hit" ("Who Knows Where the Time Goes"), and the obligatory all-star "jam" on "Peace in the End." But of course, the prevailing theme tonight was all about convention.

Rolling Stone Magazine
RICHARD SKANSE
(November 24, 1998)

Strawberry Sampler

2010-02-24T07:38:00.000-08:00

Alex Lyons. June 7, 2001

Here's the info on the Strawberry Sampler, as forwarded by Jon Hall, originally written by Dave Greener.

This, as many of you will know from the lengthier explanation on the site,is the 99 copy privately pressed album, which was put together in 1969 as a publishers' demo to help Cousins and Hooper promote their songs to other artists for cover versions.

The main interest for fans of early Strawbs is that it contains all the tracks removed from the earliest version of the Strawbs first A&M album when it was rejected by A&M execs (who expected something more acid-folk).

There are only 3 versions known still to exist (Dave has one, Tony Hooper has one and I have one).

I just came off the phone from Dave C and the news is that this is actually legitimate - not a bootleg as had first been feared. It's being brought out by Witchwood Records sometime next month, and will be available from Witchwood direct.

Great news-it means that when we get to it alphabetically, we'll be able to discuss it properly rather than me having to sing extracts down the phone ;-)

Track listing is as follows:

All I Need Is You (Cousins): A&M album 1st version, different to any version heard to date - Hooper lead vocal.

Stay Awhile With Me (Cousins): A&M album 1st version, similar backing track to Sandy version, but Cousins lead vocals.

Sail Away To The Sea (Cousins): Same as published on Sandy Denny/All Our Own Work.

Two Weeks Last Summer (Cousins): Same/similar to Sandy Denny & Strawbs version.

Nothing Else Will Do (Cousins): As All Our Own Work.

Who Knows Where The Time Goes (Denny): As Sandy Denny.

I've Been My Own Worst Friend (Cousins): Demo.

I Turned My Face Into The Wind (Cousins): Early version of this, which came out on Dragonfly.

On Growing Older (Cousins): Demo version.

And You Need Me (Cousins): A&M album 1st version, different vocals.

Ah Me, Ah My (Hooper): A&M album 1st version, same/similar to GNW.

And You Need Me/Josephine, For Better Or For Worse (Cousins): A&M album 1st version, instrumental link (there would have been a spoken word intro over this probably) then the breathy night club version of Josephine with Herb Alpert tribute brass.

Just The Same In Every Way (Cousins): Either A&M album 1st version or outtake - not dissimilar to version on Preserves, but sounds as though this one is more finished.

How Everyone But Sam Was A Hypocrite (Cousins): A&M album 1st version- UNIQUE version of this song... set in an East End pub! Breaking glasses, fights everything going on behind.

Young Again (Hooper): Alternate version, probably demo, faster version with banjo.

Whichever Way The Wind Blows (Cousins): A&M album 1st version- unreleased melodic ballad, Tony vocals.

Sweetling (Hooper): A&M album 1st version - the closer - big band treatment, with the Ted Heath Orchestra (bar Ted) in attendance.

Man of Iron, Folk Routes

2009-12-15T00:55:00.000-08:00

MAN OF IRON; Folk Routes
Tron Eivin Ovrebo, 31 December 1997

Cd's with celtic folk music are hard to find in my hometown, so I either buy them in Oslo or by postorder/ Internet. To find new (for me) artist and cd's I often buy collections. Folk Heritage i , ii & iii, Folk Heartbeat, British folk rock and so on. This have introduced me to a lot of fine music, June Tabor, Lick the Tins, Martin Carthy, and many more. The last one I bought was Folk Routes ( Island 74321 22504 2 )

The back sleeves has a picture of the "Spinning Disc Record Studio" with the sleeves of the albums where the tracks are collected from, in the front window, and a Sandy poster on the door, advertising her concert at the New Theatre Oxford Thurs 17th November 197?.

The CD includes Fotheringay's "Peace in the end" and two songs by Sandy: "It Suits Me Well" and " Man of Iron".

The first one is from "Sandy", with the following text on the sleeve: "Comparisons with Kirsty MacColl are entirely justified and worthy." Is this true? Can anyone who know MacColl's album recommend anyone to me.

"Man of Iron" has the following text on the sleeve: "In a callous ruse to attack as many buyers as possible, Sandy Denny's hardest to get single "Man of Iron" is released here on CD for the first time. It was arranged and conducted by Don Fraser and was released in the summer of '72 simultaneously with her "official" single "Listen,Listen" as an EP. It was recorded in Island's Basing street Studios for the film "The pass of arms".

According to the database on Sandy's homepage, this song is also on Attic Tracks vol.1 (cassette., poor quality) and "Dark the Night" (Nixed 006). Are all these the same version?

MAN OF IRON; Folk Routes
John Penhallow, 2 January 1998

According to the database on Sandy's homepage, this song is also on Attic Tracks 1 and "Dark the Night" (Nixed 006), are all these the same version?

Yes, and while AT1 has been withdrawn due to old age and the best tracks are on the AT CD however if you are that desperate to hear Sandy's "4 Season's Suite" and the choral version of "All our Days" as well as her singing with Charlie Drake (!) then list members can feel free to contact Liz...

Swedish Fly Girls

2009-12-14T11:51:00.000-08:00

Swedish Fly Girls
Levent Varlik, 18 September 1997

I’m typing a review about the movie "Swedish Fly Girls" is below. The movie was also marketed under the title "Christa", however the original title was "Swedish Fly Girls" that was also the title of the soundtrack. The album "Swedish Fly Girls" (music produced by Manfred Mann), Juno Records, S-1003, US1972, includes songs written by Mose Henry & Jack O’Connell, performed by Sandy Denny, Melanie, Manfred Mann and one more singer that I don’t remember now. Sandy performs "Water Mother", "What Will I Do With Tomorrow", "Are The Judges Sane" and "I Need You". There are no performer credits on the record.

The review, written by Kell (You can see the reprint of the original press cutting of this review in Fiddlestix Magazine #38) is below:

Christa (U.S.-Danish-Color)
Cannes, May 15
Astron (New York) release of Astron & Laleren Film (Denmark) coproduction.
Produced, written and directed by Jack O’Connell. Stars Birtho Tove, Daniel Galin, Baard Owe, Clinton Greyn, Ciro Elias.
Camera (Eastmancolor) Henning Kristiansen.
Editor, Russell Lloyd.
Musical score, lyrics and playing, Manfred Mann.
Reviewed at Cinema Le Star, Cannes, May 14,’71.
Running Time: 94 MINS.

Jack O’Connell spent the summer of 1969 in Denmark. His San Fransisco feature, "Revolution", fared well at the Danish boxoffice. The Scandinavian easygoing manners, the freshly-green landscapes and the particular cool-yet-hot appeal of haute couture model Birthe Tove tempted O’Connell to make a film there and then. He approached Laterna Film’s open-minded Mogens Skot-Hansen, a production team was set up, the film was shot; then nothing was heard or seen about it till fest time Cannes 1971 with "Christa" posters everywhere.
Reportedly O’Connell’s film had an original running time of close to four hours. The editing job went from one to another until it was beautifully handled by Russell Lloyd. Al Kooper did a musical score for the film but various artistic and financial trouble seems to have arisen and Manfred Mann came around lyrics and another score with more relevance to the story line.

The woman of the title is an airline stewardess in some rather futuristic company. She does all the things airline stewardess normally never do: she flirts brashly with male passangers and give them lifts from the airport in Kastrup to her Copenhagen home where she beds down with them. The sex scenes are mostly tributes to Miss Tove’s spectacular body. The males involved are generally seen as rather stunned spectators as they might well be.

Christa, it appears, has a son by a former, short-lived affair with a young businessman (Baard Owe), but the son is kept at some rural outpost with Christa’s parents. Between lovers, Christa has embarrassing confrontations with her child’s father who is hellbent on trouble and, to prove his absolute impotence in handling the conditions of life, suicide.

Not all Christa’s lovers become real lovers. For instance Daniel Gelin frowns philosophically and insists that music (he is a symphony conductor) demands his life juices.

All the way, film is beautiful in its visual aspects. The dialog and characters are, however, so corny that they have at best camp value and provoke gigles all the way. Camera chief is Henning Kristansen but a cameraman does not, however, make a film.

Birthe Tove is a joy, a natural-born actress who has been used in other current Danish productions, such as Gabriel Axel’s "Harlequin’s Stick" and John Hilbard’s "Bottoms Up". Nudity may have been her main attractions so far, but O’Connell also brings forth an inner beauty that compares favorably with her physical look-alike, Catherine Deneuve.

Sandy Denny & The Strawbs

2009-12-14T11:44:00.000-08:00

Sandy Denny & The Strawbs
Tron Eivin Ovrebo, 10 Oct 1997

In the beginning of August I had a wonderful week-end in Copenhagen with my wife and a couple of friends. After a splendid evening in Tivoli, we ended up in a pub (Rosie McGee) with a live-band playing Celtic folk music. Then I remembered that it was about 30 years ago Sandy Denny & the Strawbs were doing their recordings and I perhaps was walking in their footsteps. I couldn't remember if it was recorded in '67 or '68.

Back in Norway I found my Sandy & the Strawbs CD, but wasn't able to say for sure when it was recorded. (I'm not the lucky owner of the original album.)

D.Cousins says that they recorded it in a cinema at daytime and played at the Tivoli in evenings. Sandy joined Fairport in may '68, so I'guess they recorded it in august '67. Can anyone confirm that? If this is true, they must have had a couple of month back in England with live appearences before Sandy joined Fairport . Is there anybody out there who saw them live?

There are different tracks on the original album and the CD. Does anybody know if there are other recordings/ outtakes from the master wich should have been released to her true friends ?

My first Sandy record was the CD pack "Who knows .." and my second was "Northstar.." The Sandy & the Strawbs record is perhaps not her best,(My wife hates it) but when I'm in a good mood I allways come back to this one. (or I play "Listen, listen" with the repeat knob in) I can't understand why it took 5 years to get it released.

Med vennlig hilsen Tron Eivin Ovrebo Stavanger, Norway

Sandy Denny The Strawbs
Levent Varlik, 11 October 1997

Hi Tron, regarding with your mail, I’m typing some info about the recording dates of All Our Own Work:

Patrick Humphries writes in Meet On The Ledge” (the first edition) as follows (page:19): "Sandy joined the Strawbs for six months in 1968, and recorded one album with them. Dave Cousins remembered her doing a floor spot at the troubador "looking like an angel, and singing like one." The album was recorded on a 2-track machine in Sweden, but not officially released here until 1973 on a budget label. All Our Own Work by Sandy Denny and the Strawbs is virtually a showcase for the material of their leader and principal songwriter David Cousins, and contains a number of his excellent songs beautifully sang by Sandy. It was a foretaste of what was to come on the "splendid" proper Strawbs debut album on A&M the following year”

“Clinton Heylin, in "Sad Refrains, The Recordings of Sandy Denny" writes as follows (pages 3-4): "In February 1967 Sandy also recorded a session with the Strawb(erry Hill Boy)s for the BBC (The Strawberry Hill Boys Sing And Play Folk Songs, BBC World Service 21/2/67: Blues Run The game, On My Way, Stay Awhile, Pretty Polly, Tell Me What You See). Again no tape is in circulation, and given that the session was for the BBC World Service, it is unlikely that the BBC have retained a copy -a shame given that it featured unique performances by sandy And The Strawbs of "Blues Run The Game" and "Pretty Polly".

Of Course this session was also the beginning of a brief association with The Strawbs. Since Sandy had previously worked with the Johhny Silvo Folk Group on an occasional basis, she was no stranger to working with a band. It would also appear that, despite reports to the contrary, Sandy was never wholly committed to joining The Strawbs on a permanent basis.

However she had recorded some demos with the band in the spring of 1967, and these had indirectly led to an offer for her and the band to play some shows in Denmark whilst recording an album in Copenhagen in the summer. As such Sandy, Dave Cousins, Ron Chesterman and Tony Hooper headed for Denmark for a two week residency at a club in Tivoli, in the meantime taping songs onto cheap two-track equipment during the day. The results were not released until 1973, when they finally appeared as the "All Our Own Work" album , on the budget "Hallmark" label.

Subject: Sandy Denny & The Strawbs
Christopher Dolmetsch, 13 October 1997

Years and years ago a friend told me he was in Copenhagen and saw Sandy & The Strawbs perform at the Tivoli Gardens Park, where they told the audience that they had -just- recorded some of their songs for an album and were seeking a label for distribution. That was the last weekend in May 1967. Dr.D.

Sandy Denny & The Strawbs, All Our Own Work
Levent Varlik, 28 October 1997

Today I've received a copy of the vinyl version of Sandy & Strawbs' "All Our Own Work" from the RockRelics (£ 25 inc. p&p). I want to reproduce the liner notes on the back sleeve:

"If you like, this is the missing link -the first recordings of us ever made. We were playing in Tivoli for a couple of weeks that Summer- in Thoger Olesen's Visevers Hus.

"Would you want to make an LP’", asked the funny man with the beetle sun glasses and big bushy beard.

"Great!"

Sandy, I remember, slept on the couch that Big Bill Broonzy had slept on; Ron fell backwards off the stage with a bottle of 'elephant' in his hand; I hit Tony under the ear with my banjo, but then he fancied Paul Bach's fifteen year old sister.

Gustav smiled and introduced us to Akvavit, which removed those '10 in the morning' throat wars in a matter o fseconds. Ivar smiled and got the best possible sounds out of the simplest of two track recording equipment. Karl said it all cost too much, and took far too long-but he smiled in the end. In fact we all smiled! Ah, those were the days!

Dave Cousins 1973."

The LP version has some slight differences compared to the CD version (for those who don't know: an orchestral background was added onto the CD version), and for that reason the LP worths to buy. Actually, I'd seen the LP at the Rock Relics stand in Cropredy this year, but I was travelling only with a backpack, and it would be hard to carry it with me till returning to Turkey, to my home, therefore, I ordered it by mail a couple of weeks ago. I was lucky for it wasn't already sold to somebody else. Thanks RockRelics!

In my opinion, the highlight of this LP is Who Knows Where The Time Goes, and it is very very different than the one on Unhalfbricking, and this LP version (not the CD one) has always been my favourite with its jazzy sound. I'd wish they'd transfer the original LP on the the CD version, without adding the orchestral backing.

I’m clarifying the differences between the LP and CD versions of "All Our Own Work" of Sandy Denny & The Strawbs:

1- The album title is "All Our Own Work" on the LP, and "Sandy Denny & The Strawbs" on the CD.
2- Track orders are different on LP and CD.
3- A lush orchestral backing for four of the songs is added on the CD. String arrangements by Svend Lundvig on "Who Knows Where The Time Goes", "And You Need Me", "All I Need Is You" and "Stay Awhile With Me".
4- "Sweetling" and "Wild Strawberries" are omitted for the CD.
5- The CD version includes "Poor Jimmy Wilson", "I’ve Been On My Worst Friend" and "Two Weeks Last Summer", while these are not recorded on the LP.
6- "Nothing Else Will Do" is sung by Sandy on the CD (which is, in my opinion, one of the highlights of the album, a beautiful performance by Sandy), while it was sung by Cousins on the LP version.
7- On "Tell Me What You See In Me", Cy Nicklin plays sitar on the CD version, that is not heard on the LP.
8- Sleeve designs and sleeve notes are different.
9- On the CD I have "Two Weeks Last Summer" is way too fast and Sandy sounds like one of the Chipmunks. On my CD this track is 2:07 (info by Paul Hosken, a listmember). On the Fotheringay CD there is a 3:27 min version of "Two Weeks Last Summer”

Sandy Denny & The Strawbs
Brent Burhans, 14 July 1998

For "All Our Own Work", are there two labels that released this-Pickwick 813 (1968) and Hallmark SHM 813 (1973)- actually the same company? And what exactly was the artist name on these?

Hallmark was an imprint of Pickwick International, so it was the same company, as I understand it. My '73 Hallmark SHM 813 has a prominent Pickwick logo and info on the back cover. Wasn't it only released in Denmark in 1968? Perhaps it was on Pickwick "proper" there. The cover of my SHM 813 has "Sandy Denny and The Strawbs" while the label has "The Strawbs featuring Sandy Denny".

She Moves Through The Fair

2009-12-14T10:44:00.000-08:00

She Moves Through The Fair
Levent Varlik, 18 May 1998

I've received the article below from the All About Eve List (a great band, a great list!) today. It's about the song "She Moves Through The Fair". Actually I always wonder if it's really "Moves" or "Moved", 'cause I've listened lots of covers under both titles. The original mail belongs to Lorna Piper rom the AAE List:

You may be interested to know that although this song is regarded as traditional it was in fact written this Century and is probably still, technically, in copyright - see article below for info.

If you were fortunate enough to see AAE perform this live their intro, with a single drum beat repeated, made this song even more powerful and emotive than other versions I've heard.

Lorna Piper

She Moves Through The Fair
If you’ve seen the film "Michael Collins" recently, you will have heard one of the most famous of Irish folk songs, "She Moves Through The Fair", sung by Sinead O’Connor, used poignantly in the build-up to the hero’s assassination. Although many a record sleeve copyright notice describes the song as "traditional", it was in fact written by a twentieth-century songwriting partnership, who might not be as well- known as the Gershwins or Lennon and McCartney, but who deserve much credit for their part in the folk music revival of the early part of this century.

The song’s words are by Irish poet Padraic Colum (1881 - 1972), a contemporary and close friend of James Joyce. According to Norman Jeffares’ book Anglo-Irish Literature, Colum’s poem is a translation from an Irish traditional piece.

The tune, based on ‘an old Gaelic tune’, is by Belfast born Herbert Hughes (1882 - 1937), folk song collector and arranger, editor of Irish Folk Music magazine, music critic of the Daily Telegraph, and father of ‘Spike’ Hughes, the well-known writer on jazz and opera. Probably his best known song is his setting of Yeats’s poem ‘Down by the Salley Gardens’. Although set for piano and voice in the tradition of Victorian parlour music, Hughes’s arrangements show great respect for the modal melodies and rhythmic quirks of the folk singers whom he would have heard. Several can be heard on reissued historic recordings by John McCormack and Kathleen Ferrier.

The original poem has four verses. Most modern recordings omit the third, as does the recently republished sheet music (Irish Country Songs, edited by Fiona Richardson, Boosey and Hawkes). This verse runs:

"The people were saying no two e’er were wed
But one has a sorrow that never was said.
And she smiled as she passed me with her goods and her gear
And that was the last
that I saw of my dear."

I suspect most modern ‘folk’ recordings derive from Fairport Convention’s made in 1968, which in turn derives from the singing of the Irish traveller Margaret Barry, who recorded it in London in the 1960s. Her vocal style is very mannered but her sense of rhythm, pitch and drama give her version great power. Curiously, McCormack’s version, recorded in 1941, with the great accompanist Gerald Moore on piano, has these lines but omits the verse containing the phrase ‘She moved through the fair’, which is bizarre. He begins the last verse, ‘I dreamt it last night, my dead love came in’, which compares with Barry’s superior ‘Last night she came to me, my dead love came in’, which is much spookier. Barry sings verses 1, 2 and 4, so she has clearly got the song from a source other than McCormack’s recording.

The omission of verse 3 is a shrewd artistic judgement. Goods and gear are a bit too worldly for the overall ghostly atmosphere of the song. You get the feeling with the shortened version that the lover always was a ghost. The omission brings the song much closer in spirit to the world of traditional ballads - nothing is explained, nothing rationalised. You can put anything your imagination fancies into the great gap between the lovers’ parting in verse 2 and their nightmarish reunion in the final verse.

c 1997 Unicorn issue 59 John O'Dwyer

Lorna Piper. Probably one of the more mature Angels

Putney Vale

2009-12-14T10:42:00.000-08:00

Sandy's Grave
No'am Newman, 16 December 1998

Take the tube to Putney Bridge station (District Line). Either the 85 or 265 bus will take you to Putney Vale cemetery; they stop right outside the station. It's a ride of about 30-40 minutes. Once inside the cemetery you have to get to block V, grave 38. The people in the office there will give you a little map. Opening hours are 8am to 4pm in the summer, but I think that in the winter they open later and close earlier. Be aware that just behind Sandy's grave is a joint one 'housing' both Sandy's brother and mother.

PS: Ask in the administration after Ms. Lucas that is the name her is filed under. And when you go back to bus walk along the supermarket, next to the entrence of the cemetary and take there the bus back, then you have to cross the road.

The Original Sandy Denny

2009-12-14T10:30:00.000-08:00

The Original Sandy Denny
ENettle, 21 Mar 1998

As stated, it is selections from the 1960's Alex Campbell & Friends lps. The Sandy Denny sung trax from the 1960's Alex Campbell lps were re-issued in 1977 as "The Original Sandy Denny" lp. This 1977 re-issue appeared in two forms, 1) the UK version on Mooncrest and 2) the German version on Nova. These two lps are different in that "Ramblin Boy" only appears on the Mooncrest version along with "So Long" being sung by Campblell with Denny as back-up. The Nova version did not have "Ramblin Boy" but did have "So Long" sung by Denny with Campbell on back up. Obviously as a Denny fan the her version of "So Long" is far superior and the more desirable of the two. The "Original Sandy Denny" cd is a terribly made copy of a scratched version of the Mooncrest version, with "So Long" being sung by Campbell. It wasn't recorded live, there is so much "popcorn noise" from the bad lp they used it sounds almost like audiance noise.

For me, I had the Nova version which gave me the best "So Long", but I had to get "Ramblin' Boy" from the scratchy CD. always taped my lps onto Reel to Reel and listened mostly off cassette copies, therefore my Nova lp was in perfect shape. When DAT came out, I re-taped my collection onto DAT which serves as my master. I listen to my extremely clean vejavascript:void(0)rsion of "The Original Sandy Denny" material now off mini-disc with "Ramblin' Boy" added.

Some cd company should redo this CD with all the material, from clean sources. My lp copies sound infinatly better than this CD. Incidently, the Sandy w/ Strawbs cd is better heard from the UK Pickwick lp. This lp does not have the strings on certain tracks, which I find distracting. I'd rather hear Sandy sing than listen to the strings.

I also saw Sandy at the Well Hall Open Theater, London in 1973 (w/ R. Thompson) which I taped from the audiance. I was a very good, if short show. Sandy is my favorite singer and I enjoy her writing also.

The Original Sandy Denny
Michael A. Bonifazi, 28 March 1998

Perhaps this sounds far-fetched, but more and more I wonder if Sandy Denny ever had the opportunity of meeting and/or collaborating on songs with Donovan P. Leitch - the '1960's hippy, mellow-yellow, flower-child? I know for a fact both artists recorded with Led Zeppelin, and both artists recorded a song called: "Ramblin' Boy."

I am not sure if the song, "Ramblin' Boy" is the same song recorded by both Sandy Denny and Donovan though. Does anyone know for sure? Donovan recorded this song on his debut album, "What's Bin Did And What's Bin Hid". John Paul Jones (Led Zeppelin) arranged the song "Mellow Yellow.", and Jimmy Page also recorded with Donovan on "Museum" and "Sunshine Superman."

Did Sandy Denny ever meet Donovan? Knowing these facts regarding both Sandy Denny and Donovan it would seem likely. Similar facts regarding these two artists really makes me wonder!

The Original SD
Brent Burhans, 14 July 1998

I'm confused about that the LP version of "The Original Sandy Denny". I've seen references to "B&C Crest28" and "Mooncrest", are these the same? Was it released in 1978, was it titled simply "Sandy Denny"?

The 1978 LP was called "The Original Sandy Denny" and had "Crest 28" as it's catalogue number. However the label is "Mooncrest" and the sleeve gives "B & C Recordings Ltd." along with the label address. I have two copies, both identical except the front cover background is white on one and grey on the other.

Does aanyone have a track listing for the 1970 Saga 8153 "Sandy Denny" LP? I think this has nine of ten songs on "The Original Sandy Denny"

The missing track is 'My Ramblin' Boy'. Isn't the version of 'Been On The Road So Long' on "The Original Sandy Denny" different than the one on the Saga album?

In Sandy's Memory

2009-12-14T07:17:00.000-08:00

In Sandy’s Memory, "I have no thought of leaving..."
Pam Winters, 6 January 1998

Fifty-one years ago today, a baby was born in London. I'm sure her parents loved her. She completed a family straight out of popular song: "A boy for you, a girl for me/Can't you see how happy we will be!" But beyond that little family, no one paid much attention.

Everybody changes somebody's life. A few people, sometimes in spite of themselves, change a lot of lives. Some go on changing lives well after their own lives have ended.

Alexandra Elene Maclean Denny, in a way, has accomplished as much in the 20 years since her death as in the 31 years that preceded it. Those of us who never knew her are nonetheless lucky that she was here for a little while, and that her music is here still.

I'm going to play something joyous tonight, something that would have made Sandy laugh to think about singing it. Maybe "Down in the Flood" or "Until the Real Thing Comes Along." That's the Sandy I like best, the one who laughed. "She was a real character," people have told me, with affection in their voices. And I've watched their eyes glance back as if maybe they could glimpse her again. Listen, listen: she's still there, in a way, if we want her to be.

People celebrate their own birthdays, but especially since Sandy's not around, we should all celebrate 6 January in her honor. So happy birthday to all of you, especially to those who were fortunate enough to know her. Happy birthday to us all. Pam

In Sandy’s Memory, "I have no thought of leaving..."
Emmanuelle, 6 January 1998

Pam wrote: Everybody changes somebody's life. A few people, sometimes in spite of themselves, change a lot of lives. Some go on changing lives well after their own lives have ended. Alexandra Elene Maclean Denny, in a way, has accomplished as much in the 20 years since her death as in the 31 years that preceded it. Those of us who never knew her are nonetheless lucky that she was here for a little while, and that her music is here still.

May be lucky is not exactly what I feel. Honoured for being touched by the marvellous voice she had and even more by something she seemed to carry somewhere between mind and soul (still thinking...) that give to her songs this touch of inaccessible beauty over sadness and hope. I guess she was such a character...

Right, this merit my contribution to cheers in birthday date memory. To all of you too! Hoping reading soon more on your book. Emmanuelle

In Sandy's memory
Emmanuelle, 17 April 1998

"the most important problem of lonely people is
that's the use of freedom when you're alone
that's the problem that they cannot solve in any way
freedom has to be shared with another guilt lover
for not to let freedom look like the coldness of a dead planet..."
(Attila Ilhan)

When love is one's way, one never feel alone because freedom becomes then a permanent state and is warmed by the burning light inside...

Dear Levent, I often think of you and every Sandy Denny's friends and lovers meeting on your "super-line"... I should be with you more but with heart, but I prefer to use the web-way as less as possible. Today is a special day because my friend Denis called me from the studio where he just finished the out-take for "his" version of the Sandy's song "JanThe Gitan" -in french! it should the third of her song translated, isn't it?... For the moment this is a "rough" work not meant for being edited. He told me that it was a way for an homage in this particular day of memory of her tragical accident, homage that he wanted to share with you all.

I hope you're as well as I am on my own way and wish you the best. Still loving you all.
Emmanuelle

It was 20 years ago today...
No'am Newman, 21 April 1998

It was twenty years ago today .... I was driving home during the final days of my university career, when a red traffic light forced me to stop at the top of Hampstead High Street. Out of habit, I looked over to the other side of the road, at the entrance to the underground station; a rack of newspapers was standing there, and I could read the Melody Maker headline - Sandy Denny dead. I immediately wheeled the motorbike over to the other side of the road, and bought a copy of the deadly MM (which I had given up reading, after the rise of punk). The rest you all know.

Ten years ago, I was doing guard duty on the kibbutz and so was listening to the radio (I never listen normally, but one has to listen to something to help the time pass whilst guarding); a young South African immigrant called Charlie Solomon dedicated his entire 10pm show to the memory of Sandy. I had never even considered the possibility of Sandy being played on Israeli radio, so the fact that she received an hour was totally incomprehensible.

I shall play "Autopsy" again; I have listened to that song probably once every two weeks for the last 28 years, and its beauty never fails to move me. Keep well,
Norman

Guardian, G2, pp.8-9
Tony Swift, 23 April 1998

I'm no touch typist, but heres the transcription of todays article.

A Wound That Never Healed
Sandy Denny, the British Baez, died tragically at 31. Now two decades later, we are finally realising how good she was. Robin Denselow reports:

Twenty years ago this week the finest British female singer of the last three decades died after a tragic accident. Sandy Denny fell down the stairs of a friend's house, struck her head, and went into a coma. She never regained consciousness. She was 31. At the funeral, a lone piper played The Flowers Of The Forest. I was one of the small group of her friends and fans who stood around the grave that day wondering how she would be remembered.

Sandy was the first great female British singer of the rock era, an unlikely, genial and slightly chubby star whose quiet persona changed utterly once she started singing. Until Sandy came along, the music scene of the sixties had been dominated almost completely by men and by bands, apart from the odd blues singer like Maggie Bell and traditionalists like Norma Waterson.

It was a time when everything and everybody seemed to be connected - there were rock bands experimenting in underground clubs like UFO, and there were eccentrics like Roy Harper or the Incredible String Band emerging through the folk circuit. Sandy managed to combine both these scenes, changing the face of British music almost by accident.

She became the leading vocalist of the new and vibrant British folk-rock scene after she sang a few of her favourite trad songs to her band, Fairport Convention, one night in a dressing room. "We thought, 'What could we do that was different?' said Sandy, "so I sang them some songs." No one in the band seemed to realise the importance of the experiment at first, but Fairport's blend of traditional narrative songs and a sturdy rock band backing became one of the distinctive English rock styles of the sixties and seventies.

Then she moved on, concentrating on her own melancholy songs, many of them obsessed with death, their oblique lyrics utterly at odds with her jovial self. Again, she was moving the British music Scene into new territory, and in the process she became an icon, a home-grown answer to both Joan Baez and Joni Mitchell.

She hasn't been forgotten, 20 years on, but it's the sort of anniversary this self-effacing lady might have expected. Fairport Convention, who produced their greatest work when Sandy and Richard Thompson were part of the line-up, are "not planning to do anything special", but they did revive her best known song Who Knows Where The Time Goes on an album last year. Island records are marking the occasion with a series of releases, starting with Gold Dust, a recording of her last concert at London's Royalty Theatre in November 1977. Unfortunately it would't be in the shops until a month after the anniversary has passed.

It's unfortunate too that there's been a dispute over another "new" Denny album. Released by Strange Fruit, The BBC Sessions 1971-73, was withdrawn on the day it was released after a contractual dispute between record companies. It was special because it's the only recording on which Sandy can be heard playing solo. It's a tribute to Denny's lasting appeal that even this album-that-never-was found its way onto several "best of the year" listings at Christmas.

That might have amused her, in her droll fashion, and she would have been flattered that everyone from Blur to Sonic Youth currently claim to be Denny fans. But she would have acted as if she didn't quite believe it, for despite her achievements she remained painfully modest, even insecure about her work. If she was ever aware of the extent of her talent, she never showed it.

She may have acted at times as if she had no real confidence in herself, but once she started singing she displayed an emotional intensity that was applied to anything from the traditional songs to ragtime or her own haunting ballads.

It's easy to see why she was never quite treated as a superstar in her lifetime (even if she was voted Britain's best female singer time and again in the music press), why she suffered so badly from the whims of pop fashion, and why fellow musicians so admired her. As her latest live releases show, there was a timeless quality to her work. Her career started in a typical mid-sixties fashion. A student at Kensington Art College, she started on the folk circuit. "I liked singing", she told me, "but I was frowned on by the more ethnic folkies." She got bored "flitting around the country by myself. Finding my way to obscure pub", so she joined a then-struggling band, The Strawbs, with whom she recorded one album, before auditioning for Fairport Convention. She confessed, after she'd got the job, that she thought they were American. They certainly sounded that way, with their West Coast blend of soft-rock and Dylan songs. But while she was with them, they developed their interest in folk-rock. Sandy's strong, flexible voice was a match for both the rousing guitar work of Richard Thompson and the fiddle-playing of Dave Swarbrick. But her own song-writhing was developing too, and Who Knows Where The Time Goes was to be a bestseller for the American singer Judy Collins.

Denny moved on, just as the Fairports were becoming famous. At the end of 1969 she started a new band, Fotheringay, with the Australian guitarist Trevor Lucas, whom she was to marry three years later. Soon she moved on yet again, this time to a solo career. She was now the most important woman on the British music scene, but typically refused to act the part. Then 23, she lived in Fulham with Lucas, three cats and an enormous dog, and seemed happy to sit around, making tea, telling jokes, and talking about anything other than her career. I once asked if she was ambitious. "No, yes. Well, I just plod. It just happens." She wouldn't discuss what her songs were about. "They are biographical. About 10 people can understand them. I just take a story and whittle it down to essentials. I wouldn't write songs if they don't mean something to me, but I'm not prepared to tell everyone about my private life, like Joni Mitchell does. I like to be a bit more elusive than that." She elaborated by attacking John Lennon for being too explicit. "He really blew his cool when he explained exactly how he wrote Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds." It wasn't worth pursuing the subject much further.

She recorded three mostly introspective solo albums between 1971 and 1973, but she was still as restless as ever. She made an excursion into rock theatrics, appearing alongside The Who and playing the part of The Nurse in Tommy, proving again that her clear, exquisite voice was a match for any rousing backing. For a while she rejoined Fairport Convention (which now included her husband), but quit once again to make another solo album, Rendezvous, in 1977. By then she was panning to move to America with Lucas and their daughter, Georgia, who was born nine months before her death. She never had a chance to relaunch her career in the States, where the most English of singers might, ironically, have reached a wider audience.

Lyrics

2009-12-14T06:27:00.000-08:00

Sandy Denny’s Lyrics
Levent Varlik, 10 December 1997

Regarding with the email of Helge Gundersen, I’m enclosing a review about Sandy Denny’s poetry which was written by Clive Jones in 1974. Any contribution would welcome.

IN A LONELY MOMENT
By Clive James, "Let It Rock" Magazine, UK, March 1974
(Reprinted in Fiddlestix, Issue 38, Spring 1995)
Alexandra Elene MacLean Denny, you are charged that in the years between 1968 and 1974 you did, whether wilfully or out of plain carelessness, content yourself with merely becoming a British rock queen, instead of nurturing a world-class songwriting talent into the revolutionary force it once bade fair to be. How do you sing to that?

Well, we know how Sandy Denny sings. Joining Fairport Convention for their exquisite second album, What We Did On Our Holidays, she introduced a rock vocal style that kept power in reserve while energising the melody with precisely focused dynamics. The Denny singing characteristics were put on display all at once, as it no period of development were needed. Notes were hit dead centre with a white-hot needle and held while they burned and faded. It was an open space, low-volume, high-intensity vocal style that left room in its interstices for the Witchseason/Island constellation’s spellbinding electro-fold sound to develop into a new rock idiom -the idiom in which, among others, the earlier and later Fairports, Fotheringay, and Steeleye Span have at one time or another all operated.

If that special rock idiom now shows signs of regressing, of once again becoming solely a folk style -if, that is. Steeleye Span now look like becoming its true heirs and exemplars - the reason can be sought - in the material on which the idiom attempted to build. With the important exception of Richard Thompson, the one person within the style capable of writing a contemporary language was Sandy Denny. And her gift for writing such a language was the very gift which she decided -for one reason or another- not to exploit.

Somebody who can sing so beautifully has little need to be adventurous in her writing as well. It is wise, then, to be grateful for the adventurousness she did show in her early songs -wise to be grateful for that, and wise to accept her later reliance on the well-worked folk vocabulary as inevitable. On What We Did On Our Holidays, her song "Fotheringay" gave concrete evidence of the potential for innovation in "Fotheringay" gave concrete evidence the mind behind the voice:

The evening hour is fading
Within the dwindling sun
And in a lonely moment
Those embers will be gone
And the last
Of all the young bird flown.

Already she was singing with an effortless legato line reminiscent of the famous story about Elizabeth Schumann at the height of her lieder-singing powers: it’s said that Schumann could sing full force into a candle flame without making it so much as waver. Such lavish delicacy of sound, however, tends to deafen us to the quality of the world/music combination itself, which would be interesting even if Bruce Forsyth sang it. Words like "dwindling" and "moment" are partly chosen for the way their grouped consonants resist her tendency to flow unimpeded from vowel to vowel -her temptation to sing English the way Joan Sutherland sings Italian. At this stage Denny is still intent on keeping some Germanic roughage in the text, thereby providing her melodic sweetness with something to bite against.

Equally interesting is her ability to use a literary tense -"And last/Of all the young birds flown" -without slipping into archaism. This is modern grammar and syntax; complex, but contemporary. It was a path along which British rock sorely needed to advance, for there was no escaping from the fact that our most creative rock bands were hampered in their songwriting by lyricists who rarely know the difference between the subjective and objective case. If we were to add a literate element to our store of written material -something comparable to the college-educated rock-writing tradition which in America had airily come up with Jon Sebastian and Randy Newman- then this was the kind of attention to detail that needed desperately to be encouraged.

On Unhalfbricking (1969) Sandy Denny finally recorded her own version of the song airily made well-known by Judy Collins. One of the two or three dozen crucial songs in rock, "Who Knows Were The Time Goes" showed the full power -for the one and only time- of the gift its author so unselfconsciously possessed.

Across the evening sky
All the birds are leaving
But how can they know
It’s time for them to go...

Those terminal vowel sounds (sustained unaltering in the first stanza, intensified and withdrawn in the second, and so on through as many variations as required) were placed at the ideal points for her voice, yet were by no means the most important musical features of a given line. Just as important were the packed consonants, as in

Sad deserted shore
Your fickle friends are leaving...

It’s a strophic song, but short enough -and with enough minor variety from stanza to stanza- not to be in danger from predictability. And here, for once, the loose structure made sense: two stanzas about the birds leaving, and a third about a loved one being away, with no logical connection between the first two and the third, but an emotional unity that needed no interlining. The diction was open to arbitrariness (Collins sang "morning" instead of "evening" and it was hard to see that the difference mattered) but in this case the neutrality of vocabulary helped the song seem timeless by draining it of context -it was just camped elegantly in the void. A superb song, with a forward flow that the Fairport musicians decorated with fastidiously schooled guitar-lines and copybook stick-work on the rim of the snare.

But it’s hard to quell the sneaking suspicion that even this outstanding song would have had more in it if the singer’s voice had not been so capable of filling the gaps. On the same album, "Autopsy" shows Denny’s capacity for melisma taking control of her talent for the lyric and weakening it seriously.

You must philosophise
But why must you bore me to tears?

These are the first two lines of the song, and "philosophise" is the first word you can hear -the previous two are swallowed, and one picks them up in a repetition later on. Most of her attention seems to be spent on the long, virtuoso melismatic surge with which she delivers the long "i" in "philosophise", and in general the linguistic points of the song are undistinguished going on feeble, most notably in the distressing transitional pun form "in tears" to "into ears". (If I have mis-heard this last effect, it’s because the singer hasn’t striven to make it clear.) The song is sung in a continuous blur of vowels: abstract prettiness is the enemy and already rearing its gorgeous empty head.

Liege & Lief, her last album with Fairport Convention, was avowedly a folk-orientated effort: carefully edited texts from ye olde Englishe heritage. Here, had she but known it, was a straight message from the Muse: the text of "Tam Lin" should have told her that the language of the past is too alive to be copied, and can only be competed with by the language of the present. As it happened, she went on to attempt a contemporary folk language composed mainly of archaisms, and so was unable either to extend the resources of the modern song or add to the heritage of the ancient one -which was composed, in its time, not out of scholarship but out of the language of the day. Swarbrick’s excellent edition of "Tam Lin" (there are dozens of versions, but his is of exactly the right length and dramatic structure) has the continuous linguistic interest by which a strophic song can gain from its repetitive form, and inversions like "as fast as go can she" fall with a naturalness that no modern writer can possibly match. She sang the song with dazzling attack, as alive to its theatrical force as she was deaf to its lesson.

On Fotheringay (1970) her voice has begun, in good earnest, to do its own writing, and the writing has begun the destructive process of turning into a mere pretext for exercising the pipes. "The Sea" and "Winter Winds" are two of her loveliest melodies, however, and eminently listenable even when one has abandoned all attempts to find the lyric substantial. "Don’t you know I am a joker/A deceiver?" she sings in "The Sea" and it’s to become of recognisable modern English that it to become all too rare. In "Winter Winds" her leading tricks of syntax are well established.

Winter winds, they do blow cold
The time of year, it is chosen...

There folksy constructions were to become a besetting vice. Nor is the song’s structure anything better than slapdash, submetophysical arguments being advanced as if self-demonstrating. "He who sleeps, he does not see/The coming of the seasons" Fulfilling of a dream/Without a time to reason." The song didn’t care about clarifying itself along its length, and on the other hand couldn’t be called fruitfully complex: it was a bung-it-down lyric, naked and unashamed. Also becoming apparent -a disease soon to be rampant- was her reliance on a very restricted range of props. Sea-captains, birds, lonely shores: these were her belated contribution to a folk kitty already bulging with witches, blacksmiths, gibbets and butter-churns. But the awkward truth is that to separate yourself from contemporary life is no guarantee of achieving timelessness.

"The North Star Grassman and the Ravens" (1971) was a solo album in the strict sense, with Sandy Denny’s name and image dominating the cover. Witchseason Productions had given way to Warlock Music, and the fairy princess was to be seen busy among her herbs and simples. To my ear, the music which had always seemed limited to a certain kit of intervals has by now become familiar to the point of monotony, and the linguistic mannerisms are out of control. "The wine, it all was drunk/The ship, it was sunk" she sings in "Late November", and in (guess what) "The Sea Captain" we hear her declare: "From the shore I did fly/... the wind, it did gently blow/For the night, it was warn" etc. After a few tracks of such relentless syntactical fidgets, the listener’s patience, it is exhausted.

"Next Time Around" convincingly demonstrates that a strophic form can’t be sustained even by the most scrupulous singing unless either (a) the argument advances, or (b) the imagery varies. And her imagery -in the title track, to take one especially disabling example- is by this stage all too predictable. Birds and sea show up in every song. Only two songs show signs of originality: "Next Time Around", which is spoiled by its "the winter it is long" constructions beyond the ability of the tactful Harry Robinson strings to save it, and "John The Gun", which has at least one fine throwback to her early style.

... so I will teach your sons
And if they should die before the evening
Of their span of days
Why then they will die young.

"Span of days" -that really is timeless language, the very sort of ordinary/extraordinary speech she should always have been plucking out of the air, instead of drowsily half-recalling all that daft chat about sea captains.

Benefit of the doubt must be given to Sandy (1972), in which she is clearly resting on her laurels. "It’ll Take A Long Time" has its full complement of sailors, storms and sea, with a chorus which owes its sentiment to Crosby, Stills and Nash. "There is no need for rules/There’s no-one to score the game" she sings -a non-writer’s idea of profundity which would be understandable coming from one of our more notorious fake lyricists but is merely incongruous coming from her. Some lines in "The Lady" could easily provide this article with an ending:

The lady she had a silver tongue
For to sing she said
And maybe that’s said

But the conclusions I prefer to reach are very different. First of all, her upcoming album (which at the time of writing I have had no opportunity to hear) might do the unexpected and show her embarked on a different course. Second, she is more than just a singer. In a far more interesting sense than rock stars like Carole King or Carly Simon, she is a songwriter -her gift for language is unmistakable. That so marked a gift can become a casualty seems to me a fundamental problem. Is it just that the rock audience can’t tell chalk from cheese, and so discourages those who can from going on caring about the difference? Or is it that the beautiful singer, lacking limitations, is turned aside from art by having no obstacles to overcome?

Sandy Denny is a pleasant representative of the most pleasant scene in British rock- the well-bred, well brushed, clean-edged and gently lyrical constellation of electro-folk. Violins and guitars and Maddy Prior step-dancing: it’s a world of its own, an acquisition, one of the undeniably good things to have happened in British music. In a very British triumph of continuity, pop has been joined to the past. But Sandy Denny could have done, and might still do, that dangerous some thing extra, taking the full resources of contemporary speech and turning them into song.

Sandy’s Lyrics, After Halloween
Helge Gundersen, 9 December 1997

I've been subscribing to this list for a few months, and discovered Sandy Denny not too long before that. I venture to say that there is little analysis and appraisal of Sandy's music and lyrics in (on?) this list (even if Emmanuelle touched on something the other day). Maybe it takes more time to come up with that than discographical and biographical details... (I'm not saying there's anything wrong with topics like those). Anyway: One of my favourites of Sandy's tunes is After Halloween. The demo version (haven't heard the other one) is superbly sung, and the guitar accompaniment is really all she needs. The quite distinctive music must be some of the most lyrical she wrote, and the same could be said for the lyrics (given below, stolen from the music transcription section at the web site).

I wondered if any of you are willing to act as literary analysts. The lyrics look meaningful, but I feel I don't quite grasp its meaning. (Not exceptional! ...but I like this song so much that I'd like to go further.) In particular (but not only), the function of "the sea" is too unclear to me. What is it about the reality of the sea? And how is the relationship between the tears and the sea? Etcetera.

Interpretations, anyone...? Helge (Oslo, Norway)

Red and gold and halloween have passed us by,
The charcoal branches lean against the rosy sky,
You are so far away and I could touch you if I may,
But don't you worry now, I'm only dreaming anyway.
You may be lonely, you may be just on your own.
It could be anywhere, some place that I have known.
But who am I and do we really live these days at all,
And are they simply feelings we have learnt and do recall.
Oh the sea has made me cry,
But I love her too, so maybe I love you.
Tears are only made of salt and water,
And across the waves the sound of laughter.
October has gone and left me with a song
That I will sing to you although the moment may be wrong.
Could it be the sea's as real as you and I?
I often wonder why I always have to say I'm only dreaming anyway.
Could it be the sea's as real as you and I?
I often wonder why I always have to say I'm only dreaming anyway.

Sandy’s Lyrics, After Halloween
Emmanuella, 11 December 1997

Gundersen wrote:
I've been subscribing to this list a few months, and discovered Sandy Denny not too long before that. I venture to say that there is little analysis and appraisal of Sandy's music and lyrics in (on?) this list (even if Emmanuelle touched on something the other day).

I feel just a little bit more safe for what you say about my attempt for get a deeper attention on what are ( or were) these people who thouch me so deeply through their songs and music. Those who know me a little more than "good bye and hello, and how does the time go?..." may think this is a hobby for me but it's more serious: it's the only way of feeling I'm able in each encounter in my life. So, happy to find somebody to talk with about those immaterial but eternal tracks of one happening soul in a so moving and fragile woman She (Sandy) seems to me !

One of my favourites of Sandy's tunes is After Halloween. The demo version (haven't heard the other one) is superbly sung, and the guitar accompaniment is really all she needs. The quite distinctive music must be some of the most lyrical she wrote, and the same could be said for the lyrics (given below, stolen from the music transcription section at the web site). I wondered if any of you are willing to act as literary analysts. The lyrics look meaningful, but I feel I don't quite grasp its meaning. (Not exceptional! ...but I like this song so much that I'd like to go further.) In particular (but not only), the function of "the sea" is too unclear to me. What is it about the reality of the sea? And how is the relationship between the tears and the sea? Etcetera.

This song is one of my favourite too, and I did wonder too about the meaning of the sea, in this one and in the others, as more as she said that may be she didn't gave any sense only she likes the sea and likes to be moved by the sea. In " after Halloween" I think the sea couls symbolise the way she loosed her lover as if he was a sailor ( like in a lot of traditional songs). What is outstandingly well evoked in this song, I think, is the quiet sway of mind between dream and reality, between hope and acceptance, when one does want to trust life and fate whatever could have happened. What touchs me so much that I can't explain it in a few words is the way she uses to say as simply as if it was so simple that you can touch anybody you love anywhere he could be, if only you could make your dream be reali ty. Well, it may seem strange to explore that kind of feelings in an english song for a french girl who can't lay claim to any acknowledged ability on that as long as I need to compare the two or three or five... possible senses of each word I use here... May be I dreamed that I met somebody who could understand what I mean...

Helge, yesterday I was wondering about a probable link between tears and the sea in the song "The Sea". Is that a simple coincidence or is there here one kind of trail? One could ask too about the dream meanings... (After Halloween, I'm A Dreamer, Winter Winds...) One could ask about impossibility of sharing the understanding of life... (Solo, The Sea, Nothing more...)

Two weeks ago, I have been very happy to meet and drink a beer, speaking of music and people, with the Fairport Convention actual members, after one hearty joyfull excellent concert in Belgium. They are men like we are but they have so much fair music and intemporal images... despite of being as human as us, poor and glorious, glorious and poor. That's what interest me. Sandy is a great people, that's why I am here. But the one who stones me is Richard Thompson... Would anybody be interested on discussion and comparisons in that way of analysis about those people and what they did?

If not,

"I'm sorry for taking so much of your space"
"I'll be taking my business elsewhere"

All my regards to everybody d.chum, Emmanuelle

Sandy’s Lyrics, After Halloween
John Russell, 16 December 1997

Helge and Emmanuelle have gotten me thinking about the sea now too. Part of After Halloween seems to be in the same vein as The Music Weaver - a story about longing and the melancholy of being alone: perhaps After Halloween is about missing Trevor when he's off on tour and she home alone? The sea then is this vast distance, this body which separates and isolates and which surrounds her -she lives on an island after all- but is also something that can be overcome, because tears will end and the sea is just a whole bunch of tears, just salt and water, and the loneliness will end. It's a very melancholy song and think some of the images are just impressions of that melancholy, images to give a feeling of melancholy and of longing: the first stanza is perfect in that regard - it sets up a bleak landscape. I really liked Emmanuelle's idea of Sandy expressing the impossibility of sharing the understanding of life - Sandy's songs seem often to be expressing feelings about how there can be so much distance between people, that there is so much that can't be conveyed. Not in the sense of absolute alienation of someone like Nick Drake, but conveying an uncertainty about getting people to understand - "Maybe I dreamed that I met somebody who could understand what I mean..." as Emmanuelle put it.

Well, enough fun; I've got to get back to writing a paper.

John Russell, Boston College

Sandy’s Lyrics, After Halloween//Ecoute Ecoute
Emmanuelle, 17 December 1997

John Penhallow wrote: In French, not only does Sandy sing the song for a mature expanded world market audience but it just sounds so more sensitive, how that never got release on the Continent I'll never know..... or did it??

Well, well, as a french speaker, I must admit I am not too convinced about Sandy's spelling. I am not surprised it was never released in France. BTW, "si tu dois partir" may also sound excitingly exotic to British listeners but not exactly french to french ears. I don't know what Emmanuelle thinks of this. I definitely would not include any of these two in my Sandy playlist.

I can't tell my opinion about "Ecoute, Ecoute" as long as I don't know the version ( still hoping some body will tell me on what record it has been released ). What I think about " Si tu dois partir " : it sounds exotic to me too, because of the so english accent. I take the song for what it has been, I think : a trying of special hommage to Dylan and Cajun music, in a special cheerful ( possibly cheers-full too, if I dared a guess, paying attention of accidental percussions noises in the song) moment... A funny wink from an english folk band to french folk's "amateurs" listeners... It is not in my play list neither in yours but I don't dislike to listen it, for the fun.

Thanks too, Levent. I agree with the special attention on the "living" modern language Sandy she uses in her songs. It gives a kind of wave movement to the verses: the sea again...

John Russell wrote: Helge and Emmanuelle have gotten me thinking about the sea now too... I really liked Emmanuelle's idea of Sandy expressing theimpossibility of sharing the understanding of life - Sandy's songs seem often to be expressing feelings about how there can be so much distance between people, that there is so much that can't be conveyed. ot in the sense of absolute alienation of someone like Nick Drake, but conveying an uncertainty about getting people to understand - "Maybe I dreamed that I met somebody who could understand what I mean..." as Emmanuelle put it.

Thank you, John, for your ideas about After Halloween. I think you must be right. Happy to meet somebody who seems to understand what I mean... although we aren't speaking about our own personnal understanding of life. Speaking of others is a beginning of sharing that, I think, that's why some are writing songs may be...

d.chum Emmanuelle

Sandy’s Lyrics, After Halloween
Helge Gundersen, 17 December 1997

Emmanuelle, John, and you others,
I was first thinking of the same as John, the sea as something vast which separates people (like "My Bonnie is over the ocean", ha-ha). But if I understand Emmanuelle correctly, she suggests we have an allusion to the way sea takes away people (they drown), for instance the fate of many fishermen. Maybe this isn't crucial; "he" is in some way "gone" in any event, and death can simply symbolise "not near" (but perhaps a certain permanence in this separation?). She (or "I") is singing this after Halloween, when, as far as I understand (I live in a very protestant country...) the dead souls are remembered and honoured. The landscape, as John points out, does evoke melancholy. But we may perhaps more specifically add that the branches look like burnt, and the leaves are dead and gone (did they glow red and gold like embers?).

But is also something that can be overcome, because tears will end and the >sea is just a whole bunch of tears, just salt and water, and the loneliness will end.

A-ha, this looks interesting. Emmanuelle wrote something about the sway between dream and reality, hope and acceptance, and it seems like if it's so that the loneliness will end, it will be as an acceptance of the "gone-ness", not that the two people will physically meet. Or what?

She obviously loves the sea, and to me this just seems like a fact in this song (I don't know why she does). But why should she maybe love him because she loves the sea? (I'm thinking aloud now.)

Possibly the song can be taken on more than one level: picturing a personal relationship between two people, and more general relationships between people. I agree that Emmanuelle's idea of understanding between people is interesting.

Helge, yesterday I was wondering about a probable link between tears and the sea in the song "The Sea". Is that a simple coincidence or is there here one kind of trail? One could ask too about the dreammeanings... (After Halloween, I'm A Dreamer, Winter Winds...) One could ask about impossibility of sharing the understanding of life... (Solo, The Sea, Nothing more...)

This certainly looks like worth looking into. But I don't think I've much to deliver myself in this respect at the moment (maybe you have?). Just some general thoughts: When an author often returns to a motif, like the sea, or dreaming, she may do so in more or less different ways in different poems or songs. I don't remember the lyrics for "I'm a dreamer" now, but isn't the dream motif in "After Halloween" on a more personal level than in that song?

I haven't looked much at the lyrics for "The Sea", but so far I can't see how tears come in. But do tell me what you think. The music of "The Sea" is great, and the whole band plays it soooo beautifully. I'm a bit unsure about the lyrics. But immediately it looks like "After H." comes more straight out of Sandy's heart, while "Sea" is slightly mannered. And what does the song really convey? Maybe "hiding from the island" is a clue? The people think the sea is doing that, while she is really doing quite the opposite (taking land). But why? But it may very well be me, and not the song!

This is more than a nice change of pace from the acetate matrix numbers and exact marriage dates... (friendly smile).

Cheers, Helge

Sandy’s Lyrics, On The Flow, Again: After Halloween
Emmanuelle, 17 January 1998

Thinking about the Sandy's lyrics evolution through the years.

I've listened the Fotheringay album a lot these times... (I love it a lot). Then I remembered our view exchanges about the sea in Sandy's songs. What about "This" Sea, in Fotheringay?

I told you my feeling that there was a link between tears and sea in this song, as it appears more evidently - I concede - in After Halloween. Going more far into this feeling that seemed first so tenuous and inexplicable, I got the clue as standing out the flow (and look, I'm trying here a double sense image...) because it's actually this word that evoked me tears. But why?

OK! She seems to have some reproaches counter to people who didn't understand or didn't care about what she felt or thought or did. Tears are never so far when you feel that way, isn't it? And as tears flow, seas grow... Nobody knows, and you feel angry because they only can't see, thinking you're hiding because they only see a shell that could be empty. Then the anger grows, as the flow is growing, and should they be all drowned in the downpour...

Tears, sea, and downpour. Well, you could think it's late at the end of the week and I must be exhausted by taking care about people's feeling and understanding of life as doing my job too seriously and may be in vain utopia hopes but... I really see her waiting for the land, after the sea will end...

I come again in the dream'n'reality sway point. I think this is why I love Sandy although her voice and singing are so moving. She is like a little girl (a psychologist would have say "a child" but I prefer "little girl" as I'm one too I think) still owning this marvellous chilhood's magic thought...

By the way she seems to be, at the Fotheringay period, in a constructive view, looking back with a kind of serenity: no matter of past errors, they were fallacy as all is vain, just believe and wait, trust your dream ...

One guitarist listmember asked before Christmas about if Sandy was depressive or not. I think people like her become depressive when they loose their natural hability to question life and I think alcool (that we know she used a bit) is a way for some to entertain this way of thinking , in opposition of those who prefer to watch life as drawned in the marble of certainty and become depressed when questions appear (then, alcohol becomes a symptom, isn't it doctor?).

Well it's late, really! and I have some more message to send.

So, cheers to you all.

Emmanuelle (french but not dumb)

Sandy’s Lyrics, On The Flow, Again: After Halloween
Emmanuelle, 18 January 1998

Thinking about the Sandy's lyrics' evolution through the years. [About the sea] I really see her waiting for the land, after the sea will end... By the way she seems to be, at the Fotheringay period, in a constructive view, looking back in a kind of serenity: no matter of past errors, they were fallacy as all is vain, trust your dream...

Then, Helge and I had an exchange about the images weared by the sea in After Halloween. And thinking about what we said I reminded having red something in a Sandy's interview on the absolutely welcomed "golddust" site ( Interview by Jerry Gilbert in Sounds, 08/09/73)

(... about a preoccupation with sea, in her earlier solo albums ..) ...I dunno, I just love things like that. When I write songs I often picture myself standing on a beach or standing on a rock or promenade or something like this (...) and I find myself describing what I am looking at and often it's the sea. (...) I really can't anywhere that's nicer than that.

So when she says, in After Halloween:

Oh the sea has made you cry
And I love her too
So may be I love you too.

I think it may be a private reference to her personal life and the easier guess is about Trevor and her ( then, I join here John Russel, and it's becuase I tried to crosscheck the dates I had here or there about Sandy's life and recording ). It's possibly a reference to a real event of their life and remember the Fotheringay had been recording just one year before : Late November in automn 1970, ( AH recorded in spring 72 must have been wrote in autumn 71). Looking back to her airplane fear wich she recognizes to be the source of Late November, can't we imagine that the sea, wich is in the heart of this song too, remains her in this alone anniversary of Halloween 71 (Trevor's with FC in US, isn't he? Please correct me if I mistake) all they share a year before. May be they laughed about this fear...

across the waves the sound of a laughter...

Now, alone she thinks about it, and about the sea can separate people so definitively sometimes even if the era of shipping is ended because airplanes can fall as ship could sink...

Ultimately, this song is a real love song about wondering what IS love. Is it when you miss somebody as a kind of jealous asking - "does he think about me just now?". Is it when you're move by those leasts remindings ? Does she know ?

I come again in the dream'n'reality sway point.

I think this is why I love Sandy although her voice and singing are so moving. She is like a little girl (a psychologist would have say "achild" but I prefer "little girl" as I am one too I think) still owning this marvellous childhood's magic thought...

At this time she seems to be in another mood than serene secure feelings. Life gave her some grain to mill... But she stays so cristalline for all that... So lovely... I think now to her two first solo albums... Well, enough words for today.

So, cheers to you all.

Emmanuelle (french but not dumb - oh! God what a chatter!)

Sandy’s lyrics, song interpretations
Ellie Leonard, 6 May 1998

I thought I'd mail you all to see what you thought of something I've been thinking about a lot recently. I know Sandy said herself that the meanings of her songs are meant to be obscure, and that it's very hard for us now to appreciate why and how she wrote them. But I was interested in hearing how other fans have interpreted her songs in a personal way. I don't mean by trying to guess what she meant in the first place, but by applying them to personal situations. I'd be especially interested to hear from people who have been helped by the strong positive meanings in some of the songs. So I guess I ought to start the ball rolling...

To me, "No more sad refrains" spoke about thinking more positively, and encouraged me to make an effort to recover from a couple of bad depressions. On a bad day it seemed like there was no way out and that thinking positively wasn't going to help, but on the better days the message of this song ("I won't linger over any tragedies...") seemed so relevant and full of hope.

"Full Moon", although directed at someone identified only as "lover", has connotations of a spiritual discovery and I found this quite positive too, that we never need be alone.

During one of my worst times, I made a compilation of favourite songs (mostly Sandy, FC & Runrig), starting with slow reflective ones like "Sloth" and a couple of my more gloomy self-compositions, and working towards these songs which I found to be very positive. This tape helped to improve my mood every time I listened to it.

Looking forward to hearing from you,

Ellie , (currently in the middle of finals, but just rediscovered "Heyday"

Late November

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Late November
Christopher Dolmetsch, 29 October 1997

Since the topic of "different versions of Sandy songs" is timely,
"I thought I'd point out another one that many might not be aware of. On Hannibal's CD The Best Of Sandy Denny, is a Fotheringay version of "Late November" that is credited as coming from the Island Sampler "El Pea". I have this sampler & much to my surprise, the version on it is NOT the same version as the one on the aforementioned CD. I haven't closely compared them but its obvious that Sandy's vocals, at least, are from a completely different take. Anyone out there who can shed some light on this?
Alan Bershaw"

You're absolutely correct on this! There are -supposedly- three versions of "Late November". One is the version issued on El Pea (and as far as I know, it's not available anywhere else); one is the Northstar version (remixed with some overdubbed instrumental bits for the "Best Of..." and box set discs); and one version is by Fotheringay, which I'm not at all sure I've actually heard...but may have. Anyway, the "Best Of..." and box set version were supposed to be based on the El Pea version, but the Northstar tape was used instead. Why? I dunno!

Late November
No'am Newman, 30 October 1997

As far as I know, there are three different versions of 'Late November', all of them based on the same backing track. They are:
a. 'Elpea' - SD vocal one
b. 'Boxed set' - as (a) but with different vocal
c. 'North Star Grassman' - as (b) but with added RT guitar
Version (a) is the rarest. Joe Boyd's sleeve notes in the boxed set regarding this song are in error.

Late November
David Wright, 1 November 1997

(b) and (c) have clearly different vocal tracks as well, though -- on the words in the third verse, "Oh, the tears which are shed/They won't come from me." On the boxed set version Sandy ornaments the melody line there a little more. The other verses sound the same to me though Is that correct?

Late November
Alan Bershaw, 4 April 1998

The most prominent difference is an earlier & significantly different lead vocal track by Sandy. I think the instrumental is primarily the same (correct me if I'm wrong on that, folks). I remember buying "The Best Of Sandy Denny" CD strictly to upgrade that one track to CD & discovering that it was not the same as the "El Pea" version as the liner notes claimed.

Gold Dust

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Gold Dust, Irish Times
Olivier Le Dour, 29 May 1998

I am sure that many readers will find the following piece downloaded from today's "Irish Times" website interesting. "SISTER, YOU'RE A POET by Brian Boyd

A mysterious album called The BBC Sessions, on the Strange Fruit label and featuring the voice of Sandy Denny, was released for a period of 24 hours last year. Various lawyers from various record companies had it pulled from the Shelves of the record shops after its all-too-brief availability, but still The BBC sessions made it on to many a critic's "best albums of the year" list. The fascination with Sandy Denny continues apace. Called the finest British female singer of the last three decades (and when the competition includes Maggie Bell, Norma Watterson and June Tabor, that ain't half bad) she helped break down the "folk" and "rock" boundaries, mainly through her work with Richard Thompson in Fairport Convention, and was seen as a home-grown answer to Joan Baez and Joni Mitchell.

Now cited by both Blur and Sonic Youth as "the best female rock singer ever", her life has disturbing parallels with that of Nick Drake: both were English singer-songwriters, both were fixated on morbid themes, both died at an early age and both have only been truly acknowledged decades after their death. It wasn't just her awesome voice that propelled her into "retro cult", it was the quality of her s ongwriting - lyrical and romantic but always with a Emily Dickinson type twist, she's probably best remembered for Who Knows Where The Time Goes (famously covered by Judy Collins) but there's a lot more to her than that.

Born in 1947 and attending the same art college as Jimmy Page, she first made a name for herself on the thriving folk club circuit in London in the 1960s. Singing Tom Paxton covers as well as a rake of her own stuff, she soon tired of the folkie purists, or the "ethnic folkies" as she called them, and after one too many solo tours of Britain, she joined the then-unknown Strawbs (way before their Part Of The Union mini-success).

Tiring of their limited sound, she auditioned for the band that were then the talk of the town, Fairport Convention. Innocently, she presmumed the band to be American due to their West Coast sound of soft folk-inflected rock and Byrds-like arrangements, but Sandy's strong, earthy voice soon brought them to a different level; she is credited with curbing some of their "ethnic" excesses and helping the band to cross over to contemporary music territory.

Interestingly, she left the band when they decided they would take the purist path at the expense of original material, and she went on to form Fotheringay, who may only be a footnote in the history of popular music, but a pretty impressive footnote they remain. Her songwriting came to attract as much, if not more, attention as her voice, mainly because of her other-worldly lyrical ability. "The songs are biographical but only about 10 people can understand them," she once said. "I just take a story and whittle it down to essentials. I wouldn't write songs if they didn't mean something to me, but I'm not prepared to tell everyone about my private life like Joni Mitchell does.

I like to be more elusive than that. Take John Lennon, I think he really blew his cool when he explained exactly how he wrote Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds." Towards the end of her life, she resumed her solo career, and albums like North Star Grassman And The Ravens (1971), which features the song John The Gun, remain as evocative and eloquent as ever - her powerful voice and poetic lyrics would probably have her sounding like Portishead, or maybe Garbage, if she was around today.

On the eve of a massive American tour in 1978 and aged just 31, she fell down the stairs of a friend's house and lapsed into a coma from which she never awoke. A 1977 live album has just been released and is doing very nicely, thank you; and as more and more people get switched on to her wondrous voice and words, expect more and more of her material to be re-released, pending lawyers sorting everything out. Shameful that it took us 20 years to realise just how good she was.

Gold Dust - Sandy Denny Live At The Royalty has just been released by Island/ Polygram Records.

Re: Irish Times
John Penhallow, 30 May 1998

A 1977 live album has just been released and is doing very nicely, thank you; and as more and more people get switched on to her wondrous voice and words, expect more and more of her material to be re-released, pending lawyers sorting everything out. Shameful that it took us 20 years to realise just how good she was.

There's an unsustantiated optomistic statement for you!! I can assure all Sandy fans in this group that there is no more in the cupboard worthy of a CD release. All I want to see is a settlement of the BBC Sessions between Polygram, the BBC and Strange Fruit so that all those new fans drawn in by the publicity of Mojo, Irish Times and the Guardian get another chance to buy the CD as a "follow-up" to Gold Dust, hopefully by Christmas. This is just my optimistic wish that's all.

Reasonably assessed, without a fans heart overruling one's head, take another look at the Attic Tracks cassettes and tell me if there is anything in there that would gel as an album with a meaning for both fans and Sandy's attractions. Sure there's some interesting demos and the All our Days choral and orchestral versions but they formed part of the Rendezvous sessions and belong on an extended re-issue of Rendezvous to make any sense and that's just unlikely to happen.

This Gold Dust release is like "The End" - all that remains is the lost Fotheringay BBC sessions and their abandoned second album tracks like John the Gun as mentioned in the Mojo article and by Jerry D as a version with his dad taking a sax solo, but they are not surfacing despite many hours of research by Martin Jonas and others. The Attic Tracks CD was the mop up CD of the best of the outtakes" and it still is very enjoyable as 70 minute roundup record of varying styles and performances of Sandy and Trevor - many that didn't "fit" with the albums being completed at the time they were recorded or were just bits of fun to warm up their hands before getting serious.

I don't think anyone would be too interested in the early BBC demos as Sandy's singing style was still in early development and better songs and performances are still available on the Mooncrest and Strawbs CDs. Real long term fans can still purchase the AT3 cassette and, if pestered, I'll run off an AT1 to order although the master is getting old and I'm not going to reassemble it again.

Let's just enjoy what we've got as listed in Mojo's discography and hope that enough new fans buy enough of the catalague each year to keep them in print. Keep those reviews and comments on Gold Dust happening - Liz and I sure love reading them - and when we get our stock - hopefully next week - we'll be able to discuss favourite track, most improved song over the bootleg or AT3 version, Jerry's best solo and if you reckon any song is preferred to the original studio version.

Gold Dust
Levent Varlik, 5 January 1999

Today I've received a mail from the Fairport List about the correct track listing of Sandy's Gold Dust. I'm copying the info below with the "possible" permission of Brent Burhans.

Program the "Gold Dust" CD in the above order, and you will have the correct sequence of the actual concert, according to John Penhallow. After comparing the sequencing of "Gold Dust" to that of the original cassette release, the bootleg CD and Clinton Heylin's listing in "Sad Refrains: The Recordings Of Sandy Denny 1966-1977", I wrote John asking for the actual performance order of the concert, which he kindly provided me. It makes for a different listening experience, though one does have to ignore the abrupt gaps in the between-song applause caused by resequencing the CD. Beginning the concert with 'Solo' is a considerable change from beginning with 'For Shame Of Doing Wrong', for instance. As for the end, I think that WKWTTG was probably the first of two encores ('No More Sad Refrains' being the second), rather than the last song of the concert. With virtually all the between-song applause and chat missing, it's hard to tell for sure. Is the "concert" better because of the resequencing? Not to my ears, but I readily admit to being a "purist". As with the "improvement" of the overdubs, I prefer the un-improved original, including the original performance order of the concert; not the order that someone-20 years later-thinks would sound better.
Brent

Georgia

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HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO GEORGIA
Willem Doornkamp, 13 July 1997

Here's my birthday wish to Georgia: Dear Georgia, A very happy birthday to you! I saw your father and mother in real life 22 years ago and it clearly showed beyond any doubt that they really loved each other very much. I still remember feeling happy when your birth was announced in the music press. Now, twenty years later, I felt the same excitement all over again when John announced the birth of your two lovely daughters. Perhaps I'll live to see the day your grandchildren are born. May you have a happy and fulfilling life.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO GEORGIA
Pam Winters, 14 July 1997

I hope I'm not too late! I was away all weekend. Georgia: Welcome to your 20s! It's a marvelous decade--far better than the teens, no matter what all those cheesy old pop songs say. What a great life you have ahead of you! And as happy as everyone is about your beautiful new daughters, make sure you get some special birthday time for yourself. Take a few minutes, bask in love, play a favorite tune or two. Go forth and have fun

Banks of the Nile

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Banks of the Nile (Condamine)
Martin Jonas, 22 Feb 1998

"I don't know if this has been discussed before, but "The banks of the Nile" is also an old Australian folk song called "Banks of the Condamine" It's about "Willy" leaving his love "Nancy" to go mustering, and meeting again on the banks of the "Condamine", a river in Queensland. I first heard "The Banks of the Nile" on the "Attic tapes" CD earlier this year, and having a fairly strong background inAustralian folk music, was surprised to hear another, probably more original version of the song. Does anyone know the history here?"

The Banks of the Condamine is a 19th Century Australian parody of The Banks of the Nile, sung to the same tune. Trevor Lucas first recorded it on his 1966 album Overlander, and I'm fairly certain that he based the Fotheringay arrangement of Banks of the Nile on that earlier version, as the tune differs a bit from that used by other UK folk acts (e.g. The Young Tradition). Lyrics to The Banks of the Condamine are in the Digital Tradition (www.deltablues.com).

Pre-Fotheringay Band

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Pre-Fotheringay Band: Poet and the One Man Band
Olivier Le-Dour, 25 November 1997

A couple of years ago, See for Miles records has issued a CD By Head, Hands & Feet, called 'Home from Home- The Missing album'. The Compiler claims it is a long-shelved, never-issued album of 1968 by Head, Hands & Feet, but if you pay attention to the Line Up: Tony Colton, Albert Lee, Pat Donaldson, Ray Smith, Pete Gavin, Mike O_Neill and Jerry Donahue, you realise it is not an early Head Hands & Feet, but actually a Poet & the One man Band album.

Poet and the One Man Band was Donaldson & Donahue (& Albert Lee)_s Pre-Fotheringay Band. They made an album on the Paramount Label in the sixties,which has its good moments. Pete Frame writes that the label folded right after that. This might be the reason why these recordings were not released before 95. Poet & the O.M.B. became Head, H & F when Donaldson & initially Albert Lee, then Donahue left to start Fotheringay with Sandy, Trevor & Gerry Conway.

BTW, Donahue & Donaldson also recorded for Johnny Halliday, during the late 6Os. Born in Belgium, Halliday was (& still is, although older than Mick Jagger) the incarnation of French Rock Music, even if (Like, e.g. Peter Maffay in Germany) he is not an exportable product at all. Johnny Halliday used to have his recording sessions in London at the time. Among others session (& stage) musicians, were Mick Jones (later of Foreigner, not Clash), and even Hendrix is rumoured to have played on Halliday_s cover of Hey Joe.I cannot give you a detailed list of these albums, not being a big fan of Johnny Halliday (to put it mildly).

David Bailey

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David Bailey, The Phographer On The "Sandy" Album
Christopher Dolmetsch, 7 May 1998

David Bailey did very traditional photo shoots with the fashion models (Twiggy) and rock'n rollers of the Sixties and Early Seventies (there was a nice folio-size book of his stuff published once; wish I had bought it at the time, but it was selling for about $60 as I recall). He would get his subjects made-up as he wanted them to appear and then run through about four or five rolls of film in no time with auto-wind. Bailey was the model photographer for the character David Hemmings played in the Antonioni film "Blow Up" (1966). His photos graced many an album cover (see DECCA: Rolling Stones, Rolling Stones II, Out Of Our Heads [US and UK], and For Collectors Only [GER]). He always used soft focus, and filters to obtain a pastel glow. I always thought Sandy was fairly plain and ordinary in appearance until I saw Bailey's gorgeous photos of her all made up and with flowing hair (achieved by using a fan!).

Cropredy 1997, Fairport Convention's 30th Anniversary

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Cropredy - Peggy's triumph!
John Penhallow, 22 Aug 97

Hello Everyone, Well it's two weeks now since the big event and I've just got my photos back from photoshop and I'm living it all over again. Firstly you just have to wonder at the scale of the organisation of the festival - Christine Pegg is amazing - I am just full of admiration for her ability to keep a firm grip on it all considering everything that was going on - I reckon she spent 2 days solid in her caravan! 20,000 people came through the gates and all the emergency services were in attendance and little used, but they had their compounds all set up and ready and I'm sure the ambulance and fire service truck patrols around the perimeter of the site were just practice runs unless someone got sunstroke from the unusually hot British weather that Peggy's mate upstairs turned on for us (shame about Sidmouth!).

The loos were great, the variety of food stalls was wonderful and the bar didn't run out of beer - at one stage I'm sure they were filling up the 4 pint plastic jugs directly from the huge 6X tanker on the site! I had a problem with the beer though, it gave me incredible stomach cramps and a build up of gas that I wasn't always able to let loose due to my working in the confined space of the CD tent! So if you saw me in there with a tortured look on my face - now you know! I think Peggy once said that Cropredy was becoming less of a band reunion and more of a fan reunion! And it's true, I was reunited with my sister-in-law Viv whose ex was Keith Roberts, my co-manager of Fairport back in 1967 for the first 9 months, I was also reunited with Judy Dyble and Kingsley Abbott and his wife Elaine, Kingsley was signing copies of his Fairport book Fairportfolio and was the best man at my wedding in 1969!

So we had a patch of ground for ourselves we called the Durnsford Road Gang named after the swimming pool that used to be opposite Ashley's house where we all used to go swimming during the summer school holidays back in the early 60's. Other groups I found on my wanderings around the field were the Friends of Fairport with Steve Sheldon and Mark Fuller holding court, I also came across a group sitting underneath an Australian and Aborigine flags so I introduced myself and found out to my surprise that he was a local Cropredy regular from Banbury and that nobody talked to him when he flew a British flag but someone gave him the Aussie flags and people dropped in to say hi! and it's true while I was there a lady from Alice Springs called by to say hello too!

The PA and Lights were great although I think the Saw Doctors tested the PA out to the max and maybe took out an amp or a mid-range cabinet as there was an occasional crackle the next day which was a shame but not too drastic. Fairport's sets were well thought out and while they didn't dwell too long on the groups tragic events in their history, what I found touching was DM's announcement that "Percy's Song" was a tribute to Martin Lamble on Friday night; the Full House Lineup singing Now Be Thankful; Ashleys role as the narrator linking the lineup changes to the groups history; the CD track of Sandy's singing of "The Quiet Joys" was a nice touch; Simon singing "Polly on the Shore" for Liz, Clancy and Georgia; and the return of the GPs was the in-house "extra special" treat, not Roy Wood or Robert Plant who were both there enjoying the festival from the audience perspective, Vikki and Cathy paid homage to the songs that Sandy used to sing with the band, culminating in the final "Meet on the Ledge" choruses from just the audience. DM was brilliant of course, with only one song off the stage in Woodworm Swing!

Peggy took us on a rollercoaster of emotion from tears to laughter, from the familiar to the surprises and it was fabulous!

Thanks Peggy!

The Sandy Denny Covers

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Sandy's Songs Covered By Other Musicians
Levent Varlik, 19 July 1997

Here are the songs written by Sandy and covered by other musicians. This list is the result of just a raw research. I'd welcome further additions.

01-Judy Collins: LP: Who Knows Where The Time Goes, "Who Knows Where The Time Goes", 1968
02-Judy Collins: LP: Colours of the Day, "Who Knows Where The Time Goes" (an earlier recording than that on the preceding disc, this was initially the flip side of "Both Sides Now", 1972
03- Fairport: LP: Gottle O’Geer, "Sandy’s Song" (this was issued under the title"Take Away The Load"), 1976
04-Barry Dransfield: LP: Bowin’ and Scrapin’, "Who Knows Where The Time Goes", 1978
05-Julie Covington: LP: Julie Covington, "By The Time It Gets Dark, 1978
06-Thieves: LP: Yucatan, "Dawn", 1979 07-Dave Swarbrick: LP: Smiddyburn, "It Suits Me Well", 1981
08-Emmylou Harris: LP: White Shoes, "Like An Old Fashioned Waltz, 1983
09-Fairport Convention: CS: The Boot-1983 Fairport Reunion, "Come All Yee", "Who Knows Where The Time Goes", "Rising For The Moon", 1983
10-Kate Wolf: LP: Give Yourself to Love, "Who Knows Where The Time Goes", 1983
11-Richard Thompson: CS: Doom & Gloom From The Tomb, Volume 1, "I’m A Dreamer" (performed by Richard & Linda Thompson), 1985
12-Carin Kjellman: LP: Karin Kjellman, "Winter Winds", "Solo", 1985
13-Whippersnapper: LP: Promises, "One Way Donkey Ride", 1985
14-Fairport Convention: CS: The Other Boot-1986 Fairport Reunion Concert, "Who Knows Where The Time Goes", 1986 15-Mary Black: LP: By The Time It Gets dark, "By The Time It Gets Dark", 1988
16-Fairport Convention: CS: The Third Leg-1987 Fairport Reunion, "Who Knows Where The Time Goes", "John The Gun", "It’ll take A Long Time", 1987

(Source: 01-16 taken from Dirty Linen, Summer 1988, compiled by Ed Haber)

17-Fish: CD: Yin Yan, "Solo", 1996
18-Albion band & Julie Covington: CD:
Ashley Hutchings-The Guv’nor Vol. 3, "By The Time It Gets Dark, 1995
19-Fairport Convention: CD: All Through The Year (Hokey Pokey compilation), "Late November" (vocals by Vicky Clayton, recorded at the Cropredy 1991), 1991
20-Fairport Convention: CD: Circle Dance (Hokey Pokey compilation), "Who Knows Where The Time Goes" (vocals by Julianne Regan, ex-All About Eve, recorded at the Cropredy 1989), 1990
21-Richard Thompson: CS: Doom And Gloom From The Tomb, vol 2, "John The Gun" (with Christine Collister on vocals, recorded 1985), 1991
22-Linda Thompson: CD: Dreams Fly Away, "I’m A Dreamer", 1996
23-Nina Simone: LP: Black Gold (Recording live session 1969), "Who Knows Where The Time Goes, 1969
24-Nina Simone: Recording: Recording Live session 1968 Jun. 16, Montreux, Second Jazz Festival(Never published), "Who Knows Where The Time Goes", 1968
25-Vicky Clayton: CD: It Suits Me Well, a bunch of SD songs, 1994.

Magnus Kjartansson, "Clockworking Cosmic Spirits"

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"Clockworking Cosmic Spirits"
Levent Varlik, Feb 18, 2008

"Clockworking Cosmic Spirits" by Magnus Kjartansson, an Islander musician, features Sandy Denny & Linda Thompson on backing vocals.

MM Records MM1 1973 (it's probably a private release, like many icelandics are), made in England by Lyntone Records LTD LYN 2718.
The tracks are:
1: Helga
2: Clockworkin' Cosmic Spirits
3: Easy Way Out
4: Pull The Trigger
5: My Sweet Little Lady Friend
6: Stay With Me
7: Pollution
8: I Did'nt Know
9: I Know It's True
10:The Instruments Must Take Over

It's not listed where they are singing back up.
There are backing vocals on tracks 1-2-3-4-5-7-8

The Group:
MAGGI, Magnus Kjartansson: Keyboard, singer
Finnbogi Kjartansson: Bass
Vignir Bergman: Guitar
Hròlfur Gunnarsson: Drums

Guest musicans:
John Mitchell: Synthesisser
Steve Gregory: Sax
Sandy Denny: Backing Vocals
Linda Thompson: Backing Vocals
Producer: Maggi (Magnus Kjartansson)
Cutting: Apple Studios
Magnus Kjartansson came from the group TRUBROT, and this group + Maggi became JUDAS in 1975."

Pics and info obtained by Arne Rasmussen. Thanks to Arne..

Bootlegs

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Sandy Denny Bootlegs-Nixed CDs
Koen Hottentot, 1 Jan 1998

NIX001 Richard & Linda Thompson - Rafferty's Folly
This is the original Gerry Rafferty-produced Shoot Out The Lights from 1980, notably different from the released version - a must have really. I believe this is also on another bootleg CD which name escapes me. Bonus tracks are 2 June 1980 demos recorded at Woodworm (Lucky In Life and How Many Times) and 4 tracks with Fairport in 1981 (Granada TV show). Very well produced including sleevenotes.

NIX002 Sandy Denny - One Last Sad Refrain
contains Sandy's last concert - but why bother with this one - it's available as the Attick Tracks 3, the proceeds of which go to a much worthier cause than where your money would have gone to if you buy this CD. And the cassette has 1966 demos as well... buy that one instead! The CD does contain Sandy's 4 songs from the Swedish Fly Girls soundtrack (1972) as a bonus, but frankly they are not that special.

NIX003 Fairport Convention - A Chronicle Of Sorts 1967-69
Containing Fairport BBC sessions from this period, half has Judy, the other half Sandy, sound quality not too fantastic but this is a piece of History really.

NIX004 Richard Thompson - Nocturnal Emissions (Live Broadcasts & Demos 1980-2) BBC TV appearances from 1980/81
Not very good sound quality really, in fact my own audio tape is better. Augmented by 4 nice Sugarhill Records demos recorded when RT was shopping for a label in 1982, plus another 1980 session.

NIX005 (any info on this?)

NIX006 Sandy Denny - Dark The Night
Unreleased demos and BBC sessions 1966-72. Some of these are I believe on the deleted official BBC sessions CD, though not all. Man Of Iron and Here In Silence are on this as well, in a very good sound quality. The CD's all look fantastic, some thought has gone into designing these things; but there are some disturbing mistakes, like the constant misspelling of Simon's name as
Nichol and a pic of the Strawbs on NIX006 while they are not on the CD at all.

NIX004 is not really worth your money and NIX002 is a rip off of the Attick Tracks 3, but the others are definetely worth finding. I don't know where to get them - look at record fairs; the Fairport and Sandy ones I spotted various times at normal CD prices. I just read (millenium omens!) that a total sun eclipse during the daytime is due for some time in August 1999. Wouldn't it be pretty nice if this would be during Cropredy - and have George Harrison as a special guest singing Here Comes The Sun when the eclipse nears its end? Dream on...

Brian Maxine, "Ribbon of Stainless Steele"

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An Obscure Sandy Denny Session
Martin Jonas, 12 Aug 1998
Brian Maxine was a professional wrestler in the UK whose recording career was entirely on the back of his wrestling fame and, it is safe to say, not caused by any particular musical talent. "Ribbon of Stainless Steel" has not been released on CD and I wouldn't think it ever will be -- more of a curio than a musical must. As far as I can see it's mostly cover versions of standard country and bar rock songs, aimed at the UK trucker market. That said, somehow the Fairport gang got friendly with him and apart from Sandy, several of the others are also featured on this album. As I said, the album is not available at the moment. However, Brian Maxine was invited as a guest to Cropredy 82 and you can see him singing one of the songs from the album Six Days On The Road, backed by Fairport and guests, on the official video available from Musicfolk. Somewhat disconcertingly, there's a woman dancing on stage in the video looking very much like Sandy. I don't know who she is, but it's a bit eerie.

A Sandy Denny Biography

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A Sandy Denny Biography
Levent Varlik, June 9, 1997

This is a short biography which was enclosed in the 4-LP-Box Set of Sandy:

Sandy Denny was born in London and grew up in suburban Wimbledon. She began playing piano and guitar at an early age. She was a lazy student and would always get her teacher to first play any piece assigned for practice. The suspicious teacher began including deliberate mistakes in her preliminary performances and when they appeared note for note in Sandy’s renditions the following week, the truth came out -Sandy was not learning to read music, she was playing everything by ear from memory.

She left nursing course at college to start pursuing a career as a folk singer. Performing both American singer-songwriter and British traditional styles, her powerful voice soon gained her a reputation in the small pubs and clubs of the folk "circuit" in England in the mid-’60s. She was invited to sing in a BBC radio broadcast and this led to a record deal with Saga Records. Dave Cousins was preparing the first Strawbs lp and asked Sandy to join them. She recorded with them in 1967 as "Sandy and the Strawbs". One of the songs from that record, "Who Knows Where The Time Goes?" was heard in the US by Judy Collins and recorded on her lp of the same name. Only the second song Sandy ever wrote, it has now become a classic.

In 1968, Sandy was invited to replace Judy Dyble in the Fairport Convention. Her lively and boisterous personality had an immediate effect on the rather quiet, self-effacing Fairports. Her songs and singing added a new dimension to their sound and she spurred particularly Richard Thompson into a more adventurous and unique style of playing and songwriting.

Following the success of the group’s next two lps, "What We Did On Our Holidays" and "Unhalfbricking", they were preparing their first American tour when, returning from a concert from Birmingham, their van overturned on the highway and the drummer, Martin Lamble and Jeannie The Taylor, Richard’s girlfriend were killed.

Later that year they re-formed adding Dave Mattacks on drums and Dave Swarbrick on violin. Swarbrick had first played with the Fairport when they recorded a traditional song Sandy had taught them, "A Sailor’s Life". That recording was to prove a watershed in what is now known as "British folk- rock", combining the San Fransisco-influenced quasi-psychedelic instrumentals with the revivalist/traditional folk approach of Sandy and Swarbrick and the strict-tempo jazz flavoured dance-band drumming of Mattacks.

The band turned away from American influences for their new album and recordd the historic "Liege & Lief" album which began where "A Sailor’s Life" left off and remains to this day the best selling and most influential British folk-rock recording.

In 1970, bassist Ashley Hutchings left Fairport to form Steeleye Span and Sandy left to form Fotheringay with her husband-to-be Trevor Lucas. After one outstanding album, the group broke up and Sandy began a series of solo recordings and tours which continued with one interval (a re-formed Fairport Convention with Trevor and Jerry Donahue as wall as Mattacks, Swarbrick and Dave Pegg in 1974/75) until her death in 1978. During this period she achieved something resembling the acclaim she deserved.

She won many readers’ and critics’ polls as "Female Vocalist of the Year" from Melody Maker and other magazines.Led Zeppelin asked her to sing on "The Battle of Evermore" and she joined many other top stars on a recording of "Tommy". She toured the States once with a backing band led by Richard Thompson and again with Fairport in 1974. In 1977 she gave birth to a daughter, Georgia, who now lives in Melbourne, Australia with Trevor. In 1978 Sandy fell down a flight of stairs and died a week later without having regained consciousness.

The BBC Sessions, 1971-73

2009-12-09T13:02:00.000-08:00

Live At the BBC
John Penhallow, 13 May 1997

Hi Tyler, you wrote: Two weeks before the latest BBC CD was released a dear friend gave me "One Last Sad Refrain", which appears to be the same concert, along with the Swedish Fly Girls tacked on the end. While I love One Last Sad Refrain for its historical significance (in the realm of SD/Fairport), the sound quality is quite spotty. Am I correct in assuming that the BBC is in better shape? I feel obligated to respond to your message so that you get a couple of wrong assumptions cleaned up.

1) In the main, both the illegally issued bootleg CDs of Sandy's work, comprise of tracks "stolen" from our "Attic Tracks" series of Cassettes that bought to the fore many of Sandy's outtakes and previously un-issued versions of her songs in a "fans only" cassette format. The revenue raised by these tapes helped out the family that Trevor left behind here in Australia in the years immediately after and subsequently financed the start of FoF Music by Mail, Liz's business. No money from these bootlegs has ever been offered or received by Sandy's estate from the sales generated despite a written request sent to the person believed to have something to do with their appearance. What's more my copy won't play the Swedish Fly Girl tracks as it is faulty! So as you can guess I'm not impressed with them at all!!!

2) The Sandy BBC Sessions CD is 20 never-been-commercially released tracks recorded while Sandy was persuing her solo career between 1971 and 73 before rejoining Fairport for the second time. None of the tracks appeared on your "Sad Refrain" Bootleg which is from a 1977 Concert. 8 of the tracks appeared on another companion Boot called "Dark the Night" probably lifted from our cassette and one or two songs have also appeared on yet another Bootleg taken from BBC transcription service discs made of Fairport's, Fotheringay's and Sandy's recording sessions and sent out to the colonies for transmission on the ABC, NZBC and CBC and Hong Kong Radio services complete with aging DJ Brian Matthews' introductions and interviews. I remember him as old in the 60's and he's still on the air on Saturday mornings in London! On the BBC Session CD only 4 tracks were taken from Trevor's cassette collection as the Masters for the other four sessions were located in the archives and cleaned up by Strange Fruit before mastering so 16 of the tracks are the best we're ever going to get of those sessions and the 8 tracks that are duplicated by the boot version pale into "waste of money" by comparison. Somebody out there back me up on this!

3) We do hope that one day we will be able to recover enough useable tracks recorded during Sandy's final tour (as it turned out to be, unfortunately) in 1977 and get them properly mixed and released, but that will be down to Polygram's willingness to cooperate with us, for all the right reasons.

4) We've still got stock of the BBC sessions at FoF Music if you want one. Visit our website and order it. Cheers! JP PS For Tim, Wild Mountain Thyme was recorded by Sandy with Fotheringay on one of their BBC Sessions. When the BBC Licence Contract fuss is over we plan to lobby the winning Record Label to go searching in the archives again for their recordings of perhaps a dozen songs. The research is done re-session dates and song titles etc. and Jerry D wants to hear them all over
again. Yes of course I've got it on cassette, the best version is off of that last bootleg - damm it!

------------------------------
More Answers
John Penhallow, 13 July 1997

Mitch wrote in:
"1- What was the nature of the non-concert BBC sessions? Were they rehearsals for an upcoming broadcast? Recorded for a special they were going to broadcast about Sandy"

The BBC's policy during the '60's and '70's was to include a quota of BBC studio recorded songs to meet a Musicians Union requirement about work and exposure for British artists otherwise Britain would be overrun by those damned Americans and the rock & roll and Boogie Woogie Music! So there is a legacy of recordings that has included the Beatles, Jimi Hendrix, Led Zeppelin, Fleetwood Mac, Pentangle and of course Fairport, Fotheringay & Sandy. They all trouped into the BBC's Studios around London and laid down 4-5 tracks per session, in one take mono originally, without overdubs and with minimal production gizmo's on hand. So it was a great learning curve for the bands that went through the routine, you had to have a disciplined approach for the Beeb. Once the recordings were done then the 4 tracks would be sprinkled in to the playlist of a 2 or 3 hour music radio show on Radio On. They then got passed around to other shows, got played on the BBC World Service Short Wave Folk Programmes and had acetates (short life 12" records) made that were shipped out to the "Colonies" national broadcasters like Australia's ABC, NZBC, Canada's CBC, Hong Kong's HKBC and a few others who had agreements to play them whenever and destroy them after 8 years. The Folk Song Cellar tracks on our Attic Tracks Vol. 3 cassette come from an acetate NOT destroyed but kept in the archives at the ABC in Perth, WA, and copied for me in their studios by a Fairport Friendly presenter, producer and penfriend who also sent me some Ralph McTell, ISB and John Martyn shows from the Cambridge Folk Festivals in the early 80's - damm good stuff.

"2- Who is Elizabeth Hurtt-Lucas?"

As Levent said she is Mrs Lucas - the third, my good friend and business partner in FoF Music, mother of Clancy Lucas and Curly the Ayrdale, stepmother to Georgia Lucas, Trevor & Sandy's daughter, whose 20th birthday was yesterday - the 12th. Send your greetings emails via the list and we'll print them out for her on Tuesday.

"3- The "In Memory Of Sandy Denny Homepage" says that 3500 copies of this CD were saved from destruction and released? Is this true? Can you tell me more about the nature of the legal battle, and the issuance of the CD?"

Yes 3500 only pre-ordered copies was the first production run on this CD. Yes Polygram changed their mind in a "spoiling" tactic and withdrew approval for it's release (they have to give approval because Sandy was signed to Island at the time these recordings were made and they do pick up an overriding percentage for their troubles). This was done because the BBC licence is up for renewal and Polygram are making a bid to take it off of Strange Fruit - as I understand it. Obviously, if Polygram were successful they wouldn't want Strange Fruit to have sold all the copies possible before they got to reissue it themselves - a typical record company spat! A compromise with them was reached to let the 3500 into the market on the Monday of release and then to delete the title. By Thursday they had changed their mind again and the order to destroy the product was written, by which time, fortunately, the stock had all been shipped so the got the one finger salute from Strange Fruit! As I compiled it for them and Elizabeth is the executor of the Sandy Denny Estate we were able to secure a substantial quantity of those 3500 but I may say we are down to the last box of stock and if anyone's waiting for the CD tent at Cropredy to get theirs - forget it -I don't think they'll last 3 weeks at the current rate of orders from the internet web page and our mailing list. However the light on the horizon says that Polygram will have sorted out their situation with the BBC and will no doubt see it's re-release closer to Christmas - this year, cross your fingers and everything else!. Our contact at Strange Fruit told me last week that it's been the best "Teaser" campaign ever and when it's back in stock there won't be a shop in the UK that won't buy it, every overseas distributor wants it, and the frustrated CD buyers of the UK, USA and Europe must have all rung her over the last 3 months for an explanation about the lack of stock - it's quite extraordinary! The Mojo review made things worse - in a nice kind of way! Whew - is that the end? Hope your happy now Mitch! (Levent, please save this reply as a FAQ reply and copy and paste it to any new member privately who asks the same question in the future so that I don't have to do this all over again! Thanks)

Cheers! jp
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Sandy's BBC CD Review
John Penhallow, 30 July 1997

Two days to go before we leave for London on the Festival Tours trip to Cropredy and my good friend Bruce Elder has decided to publish the review he said he'd do back in April in this Monday's Sydney Morning Herald Entertainment Guide! Talk about putting Liz and I under pressure, the phone's been ringing with Sydney and NSW Country people ordering copies. Anyway here's the review: If Sandy Denny had been born and raised in America she would easily eclipsed Joan Baez and been lionised as the greatest folk voice of her generation (A Great Statement!- jp).

Being born in England, she had to live with modest acclaim, work hard to gain a level of success with Fairport Convention and struggle to convert herself from lead vocalist to solo performer. This 77-minute unpretentious and beautiful rarity was recorded by a number of BBC producers on five seperate occasions from August 1971 to November 1973. It showcases Denny's voice which, with th exception of the last four tracks, is accompanied only by guitar or piano. For those who love Denny's voice when it is simple, passionate and unadorned there are gems - Northstar Grassman with solo piano, Sweet Rosemary and the glorious Who Knows Where the Time Goes? with guitar - which will send shivers down the spine. This is much more than a bootleg. It is well recorded, the performances are universally excellent and the choice of material offers not only an insight into Denny's quite remarkable songwriting and arranging talents but some of the best singing the 1960s-1970s folk boom ever produced. **** (a 4 star review is rated as "excellent"-just one star short of "exceptional") I am understandably very happy with this review.

Fairport Convention, "Amazing Grace Tour", Chicago 1975

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Fairport Convention: "Amazing Grace", 1975
Matt Gogola, 5 Jan. 1998

Two interesting bits of information about this. There are actually two shows, one early and one late. The early concert, while not fantastic, is much better than the late show. It is the only FC concert tape I have from this era which contains a version of " Tam Lin. Although I am a devoted Sandy & Fairport fan, I must admit that the late show is horrible. The band is obviously very drunk. So much so, that they have to stop in the middle of "One More Chance" and start over. Secondly, while record hunting on the North Side of Chicago, I happened to meet the person who organized the Fairport concerts in Chicago. He claims that Sandy invited him back stage to drink with her between shows. He seemed pretty impressed with the amount of alcohol she was able to consume. When I speculated that if she had lived, she might have been better than Richard Thompson is today, his only response was, "I dono, she was a hard drinking woman".