Live at the BBC

(Click on the image above to enlarge the ‘promo card’.)

In 1997 a small independent label called Strange Fruit put out a CD of Sandy Denny’s BBC Sessions 1971-73. Only twenty tracks, all that could be located by the BBC archivist at the time. For reasons that I’ve never understood it was a limited edition of 3,500 copies, and not surprisingly it sold out within a day of release, going on to become one of the great rarities in the Denny discography. I’ve never seen an original copy; mine is a counterfeit bought (after a brief pang of conscience) off a market-trader in Cambridge who seemed cheerfully unconcerned that he might be doing anything wrong. Now at last we can put our scruples to one side and rejoice that Sandy Denny’s daughter and twin granddaughters will see the royalties from another great body of work. Because what Universal released this month is not just a reissue of the original Strange Fruit album but a lavish 4-disc set, beautifully illustrated with new photos and reproductions from her notebooks, and pulling together everything that survives of her recordings for the BBC. We get a cross-section of Denny’s solo work across two periods, before and after her first spell with Fairport Convention. In the early broadcasts (1966-7) she is the folk ingenue, already vocally secure but still reliant on American covers. By the second phase (1971-3), she has ‘found her own voice’ in every sense; she is concentrated on presenting her own extraordinary songs with a stark simplicity that sometimes makes you gasp. Although the sound quality varies across the set, and by the end of Disc 4 (‘Off-air recordings’) is verging on the frankly abysmal, what never wavers is the strength of the vocal performances. And though inevitably there is duplication in the repertoire, it scarcely matters because what this box reminds you is that she never sang a song the same way twice: every new singing is an event.

Highlights are almost too numerous to mention, especially on Discs 1 and 2. The intimate reading of ‘Bushes and Briars’ recorded for Bob Harris in 1972 has always been a favourite with me. The appropriately solo ‘Solo’ from a ’73 Peel show reveals a thunderous piano technique as she compensates for the absent band in the chorus with a muscular left arm. She sings ‘The Lowlands of Holland’ (a ‘trad’ song, misattributed to Denny in the booklet) unaccompanied, her restrained delivery rendering plausible its fantastical period vision of the Netherlands as a ‘wild inhabitation’ where ‘strange fruit grows on every tree’. The Paris Theatre concert, close mic’d in impressive sound quality, has a breathy immediacy, helped along by an appreciative audience. Disc 4 unearths, among other gems, a delicate take on ‘The Quiet Land of Erin’ which was new to me.

Augmention to four discs has enabled the compiler Sue Armstrong, assisted by Denny missionary Andrew Batt, to draw in materials I never thought to see in the public arena. Disc 2 has a ‘Sounds on Sunday’ concert from 1972 (misdated, I suspect, to 1973 in the packaging) where Denny also talks about her songs, by turns guarded, expansive, joky, serious, self-deprecating – all the qualities on show in the extended interview she gave to the World Service in 1972, also included here. Setting talk alongside music is a smart move: we hear how naturally her singing voice flowed out of her speech patterns. Disc 3 is a DVD giving us, at last in broadcast quality, the footage from TV that has long circulated on YouTube. Three songs in all. She seems, as she says in the interviews, ‘in a world of her own’, her eyes tight shut as the camera closes in; only in the guitar number does she look into camera, and when the song is done she gazes up at the ceiling and smiles. The BBC’s attitude to archiving back then was nothing short of barbarous. Of her several appearances on BBC TV, why are these the only performances to survive? The DVD also presents a ten-minute photo sequence of her notebooks. While I have some misgivings about publishing what she meant to be private (a point I may return to in a future post), like everything else in the box it brings us nearer to the woman. A reviewer on the Amazon UK site, ‘Sordel’, puts this rather well:

‘Overall, Island really justify their pre-release hype by delivering a Sandy Denny who is much closer to us and more accessible than ever before. Instead of being the last grudging purchase of a completist, this is the sort of archive trawl that kicks off one’s enthusiasm all over again.’

This superb and welcome new release – which is reportedly selling strongly and, unlike its predecessor, expected to stay ‘in print’ for a very long time – nearly completes the discography. Almost everything Denny recorded is now available on CD, most of it digitally remastered. Next year Fotheringay 2 will, like Adam Adamant, be released from its block of ice after 38 years. I hope one day the early home recordings will get the same reverential treatment that Universal accorded Nick Drake on the Family Tree CD. And perhaps then, too, the beautiful, sad demo of 1976 ‘Makes Me Think of You’ will find its way onto CD? Once everything is out there, taking its chances in the age of the MP3 and the iPod, we are free to construct our own Sandy Denny, and increasingly the Denny we seek out is the very one on display here. Turning away from the overripe string arrangements favoured by her later producer Trevor Lucas, we prefer our Sandy unstrung, un-Trevor’d. Although Harry Robinson was a masterful orchestrator who could sometimes open up the harmonic and melodic richness of her songs to great effect (‘The Lady’, ‘All Our Days’), it is with a small ensemble of musician friends, or solo to her own accompaniment on demos and broadcasts, that her qualities as an artist blaze through. Just as the singing is an extension of her speaking, so the writing is an expression of her living; these stripped-down versions showcase both singing and writing to perfection.

Kenneth Tynan famously wrote: ‘I doubt if I could love anyone who did not wish to see Look Back in Anger’. To adapt the formula, I doubt if I could love anyone who did not wish to hear this music.

Note on musican credits

While the majority of the material on this carefully researched box is Denny solo, I was surprised to find so few credits to other musicians where they are due. To the best of my knowledge, this is the missing information:

Disc 1 tracks 3-4 plus Johnny Silvo (gtr), Roger Evans (gtr), Dave Moses (dbl bass).
Disc 1 tracks 16-17 plus Ian Armit ? (piano), Diz Disley ? (gtr), Danny Thompson ? (dbl bass), Dave Mattacks ? (drums), Basing Street Brass ?
Disc 1 tracks 18-19 plus Hughie Burns (elec gtr), Pat Donaldson (elec bass), Willie Murray (drums).
Disc 4 tracks 1-4 plus Roger Evans (vcls, gtr), Dave Moses (dbl bass).

On A Boxful of Treasures, where two of the 1973 recordings also appear, the piano credit on the jazz standards is given to Denny, but this surely cannot be right. Her piano soloing, evident elsewhere on the BBC box, didn’t go much further than rhythmic elaboration of chords; the voice was her instrument for improvisation. The pianist here is fluent in melodic improv in a trad jazz style. Ian Armit or Armitt (1929-1992) was a veteran jazz man who worked with Chris Barber, and later Long John Baldry and Alexis Korner; more to the point, he played on the studio recording of these two songs made earlier in the year. The arrangements used on both versions sound broadly the same. What’s unclear is whether they were recreated by the same personnel or whether Burns, Donaldson and Murray were able to turn their hands to a totally different style of music (which I doubt).

Although the session on Disc 4 was billed as the ‘Johnny Silvo Folk Four’, Silvo was apparently off sick that day with the ’flu. Bootlegs preserve some horseplay where Denny pretends to be the absent Silvo, before the presenter segues, by way of an execrable pun, into ‘This Train’.

Note on missing tracks

In her booklet note the compiler puts out a call for the ‘two missing tracks’, if anyone has them. It occurs to me that there are rather more than two BBC tracks missing-in-action. By my reckoning there’s a ‘Cellar Full of Folk’ session from January ’67, an appearance with the Strawberry Hill Boys from April of that year, another ‘Cellar Full of Folk’ from April ’67 and ‘Folk Voice’ from BBC Radio Newcastle, October ’72.

There may also have been another television appearance in early 1967. At first glance, the brightly-lit photo (left) used on the cover of Sandy and Johnny (recorded April ’67) has something of the appearance of a TV set-up,* but where and when it was taken remains a puzzle. In his biography Heylin claims (p56) that the album Alex Campbell and His Friends, recorded a month earlier, was intended to tie in with a TV series. He also has April 5 pencilled in as ‘television appearance (presumably on Alex Campbell’s show)’ (p269). However, according to his chronology, she was playing in Great Yarmouth on the same day and in an era when most TV was broadcast live it’s hard to see how she could have been in two places at the same time. Checking the TV listings in The Times digital archive only muddies the waters further. There was no folk music anywhere on the schedules on Wednesday 5th (although BBC1 offered Glenn Gould talking about Schoenberg – quite unimaginable in today’s dumbed-down marketplace). I can find no Alex Campbell TV show in 1967. The only folk programme showing in April was Grief and Glory, a competition for modern folk-songs, conducted by Roy Guest, in which the shortlisted entries were sung by those reliable workhorses of the day Robin Hall and Jimmie Macgregor, with the help of Nadia Cattouse, a Belize-born singer now sadly forgotten. As to what Denny performed on that mysterious occasion, we can only use our eyes. In the picture she has the guitar capo’d at the third fret and is fingering A minor, giving a C minor chord. Small help with identification, I fear.

*(On the other hand, it could be a theatre stage with a backdrop and a spotlight somewhere over to the left causing the pool of shadow on the right. I have a hunch that the photo was taken at the ‘Peace in Vietnam’ concert at the Unity Theatre London on 1 August 1966, surely the one and only time Denny shared a stage with Ewan MacColl. Anyone able to confirm?)