The other day the estimable Jonathan Calder over at Liberal England drew attention to the Homage to Sandy Denny that’s currently touring
the UK, and posed the question as to whether she really was Britain’s greatest
singer songwriter. Last night, I took
myself off to the Barbican to find out…
Sandy has certainly always been difficult to pigeonhole, not
that that has ever stopped people. Her
early work with Strawbs and Fairport put her quite neatly into the folk
category, but I think that to see her as a purveyor of folk whimsy would be to
do her a great disservice. Nowadays, she
is frighteningly forgotten. I don’t mean
by the trad folk denizens of the Whitby or Sidmouth folk festivals, who still
recognise her even though she had arguably outgrown them even before she joined
Fairport Convention, or even by the attendees of the latter’s annual Cropredy
Festival. Mr Calder is absolutely right
when he contrasts Sandy with Nick Drake – once united in their relative
obscurity and unacknowledged genius, he has gone on to TV background music
ubiquity, while poor old Sandy, outside the cognoscenti, continues to languish.
The current tour is a restaging of a one-off show put
together for the 30th anniversary of her death in 2008, and features
a host of Sandy’s contemporaries, along with the best of a new generation of
folkies. Well, I say folkies, but it is
still as you would expect drawn largely from the compromised electro-folk end
of the scale, rather than the new-trad exponents like say the Young ‘Uns. A quite extraordinary line-up has been
assembled including Joan Wasser (Joan As Policewoman), Lavinia Blackwall from
Trembling Bells, Thea Gilmore, and Scritti Politti’s Green Gartside, coupled to
PP Arnold, most of Bellowhead and three people who actually knew Sandy well –
Maddy Prior, Jerry Donahue and the legend that is Dave Swarbrick.
Before we get on to the meat of the show, a quick word about
Swarb. He’s announced his retirement in
the near future, and to see him now is rather akin to seeing say Barry Cryer
performing with I’m Sorry I Haven’t A Clue – worth going a very great distance
to be in on it.
The material spans the whole of Sandy’s career from the
earliest days, through Fairport to the tragically short-lived Fotheringay, out
the other side with the North Star Grassman and the Ravens album which was
salvaged from the ruins of that band’s projected second album, and then onto
the solo work which saw her increasingly spread her wings and move beyond folk
through the course of the seventies.
Inevitably, some of the performances were stronger than
others – Lavinia Blackwall stands out as perhaps the most Sandy-like of the
cast, and her interpretation of A Sailor’s Life (accompanied by Swarb) was a
great intro. She then moved on to a
perfect rendition of the eerily bleak Late November, a song whose lyrics sound
traumatic enough before you know what the subject being obliquely treated is…. I did feel though that the evening was
weirdly stop-start, and a lot of the enjoyment depended on sympathy or
otherwise with the person who happened to be singing at the time. I thought Green Gartside’s highly distinctive
voice just about got through The North Star Grassman and the Ravens, but he
murdered Nothing More. I don’t think
there’s anything he could have done differently, and it’s a shame because
between songs he came across as possibly the most genuine fan, but it just wasn’t
for me.
Thea Gilmore ran through a few numbers from last year’s Don’t
Stop Singing, which confirmed Sandy’s status as a lyricist of the first rank I
think, but the night seemed on surer ground when it was going through the back
issues of the sandy songbook. Maddy
Prior got going with a slightly halting version of Fotheringay which had me
fearing she had some sort of throat infection, but as her vocal chords warmed
up over the evening she was on her usual transcendent form with a storming
rendition of John the Gun – a track crying out for its own horror film.
My personal highlight of the evening was when Maddy, Thea
and Lavinia combined with Swarb for a rendition of The Quiet Joys of
Brotherhood so perfect that any record label with half a brain will get it
released sooner rather than later – it really was joyous.
The male side of things was less satisfactory, I think
because you just don’t associate Sandy’s songs with anything much below an
alto. Having said that, the Dennis
Hopper Choppers’Ben Nicholls pulled off
a wonderful interpretation of Matty Groves (although I suppose, strictly
speaking, that’s “trad. Arr.” In any case).
Blair Dunlop got through a competent take on It’ll Be A Long Time, but
other than that, nothing else really stuck in my mind.
Joan Wasser, on the other hand, was a revelation. She;s another one that really ought to get
something from the night released because that woman was born to sing The
Lady. PP Arnold was extremely nervous,
and had to start I’m A Dreamer three times before getting beyond the first
verse, once she’d got over the hump though she was as good as you would
expect. Incidentally, for all Arnold’s
fans namecheck her work with Nick Drake, Roger Waters and Ike and Tina Turner,
I bet I was the only one there last night who first saw her onstage with Ocean
Colour Scene at the NEC in 1998….
Last night in many ways was an opportunity to sit down and
really put Sandy in context across the output of her career. Consequently, it was possible to see how much
she progressed as a writer, and experimented with different genres, whilst all
the time managing to pull off the difficult trick of being life affirming
whilst being very red wine at three am ( at trait she shares with early Barclay
James Harvest in that respect).
I suspect globe spanning fame will continue to elude her for
a while yet, although if enough of us keep the flame it can only be a matter of
time. Personally I think it went a long
way towards answering the question posed on Liberal England at the beginning of
the week:
“Up to a point, Lord Bonkers”
