Disc 14: 1. The Sea – Fotheringay 2 Winter Winds – Fotheringay 3. The Pond and the Stream – Fotheringay 4. The Way I Feel – Fotheringay 5. Banks Of The Nile – Fotheringay 6. Winter Winds – Fotheringay 7. Silver Threads And Golden Needles – Fotheringay 8. The Sea – Fotheringay 9. Two Weeks Last Summer – Fotheringay 10. Nothing More – Fotheringay 11. Banks Of The Nile – Fotheringay 12. Memphis Tennessee – Fotheringay 13. Trouble In Mind – Fotheringay 14. Bruton Town – Fotheringay [all tracks by Fotheringay].
Disc 15: 1. The Sea Captain 2. Next Time Around 3. The Optimist 4. Wretched Wilbur 5. Crazy Lady Blues 6. Lord Bateman 7. Walking The Floor Over You 8. Losing Game 9. Northstar Grassman and the Ravens 10. Crazy Lady Blues 11. Late November 12. If You Saw Thru My Eyes 13. It’s A Boy 14. Northstar Grassman and the Ravens 15. Twelfth Of Never 16. Sweet Rosemary 17. The Lady 18. After Halloween.
Disc 16: 1. It’ll Take A Long Time 2. Sweet Rosemary 3. For Nobody To Hear 4. Tomorrow Is A Long Time 5. Quiet Joys Of Brotherhood 6. Listen, Listen 7. The Lady 8. Bushes And Briars 9. It Suits Me Well 10. The Music Weaver 11. No End 12. Whispering Grass 13. Until The Real Thing Comes Along 14. Walking The Floor Over You 15. No End.
Disc 17: 1. Down In The Flood – Fairport Convention 2. Solo – Fairport Convention 3. It’ll Take A Long Time – Fairport Convention 4. She Moves Through The Fair – Fairport Convention 5. Knocking On Heaven’s Door – Fairport Convention 6. Like An Old Fashioned Waltz – Fairport Convention 7. John The Gun – Fairport Convention 8. Crazy Lady Blues – Fairport Convention 9. Who Knows Where The Time Goes – Fairport Convention 10. Matty Groves – Fairport Convention 11. That’ll Be The Day – Fairport Convention 12. What Is True? – Fairport Convention 13. Sandy Denny – Interview 1 14. Sandy Denny – Interview 2.
Disc 18: 1. Blackwaterside 2. No More Sad Refrains 3. By The Time It Gets Dark 4. One Way Donkey Ride 5. Losing Game 6. Easy To Slip 7. By The Time It Gets Dark 8. No More Sad Refrains 9. I’m A Dreamer 10. All Our Days 11. By The Time It Gets Dark 12. Still Waters Run Deep 13. Full Moon 14. Candle In The Wind 15. Moments 16. I Wish I Was A Fool For You 17. Gold Dust 18. Still Waters Run Deep 19. Moments.
Disc 19: 1. The King And Queen Of England 2. Rising For The Moon 3. One More Chance 4. The King And Queen of England 5. After Halloween 6. What Is True? 7. Stranger To Himself 8. Take Away The Load 9. By The Time It Gets Dark 10. I’m A Dreamer 11. Full Moon 12. Take Me Away 13. All Our Days 14. No More Sad Refrains 15. Still Waters Run Deep 16. One Way Donkey Ride 17. I’m A Dreamer 18. Full Moon 19. Makes Me Think Of You.
OTHER FAIRPORT CONVENTION RELEASES W/SANDY DENNY CONTENT:
{A Fairport History} (2002) A 4-CD ‘overview’ of the entire Fairport history (and post-history), the credits are so unreliable and the source-tapes so poor that little can be trusted to be what it says it is, but the following appear to be new to officialdom:
Disc 2: 4. Mr Lacey (Dutch TV 1968).
Disc 4: 11. Stranger To Himself 12. Sloth. (both live 1975, probably Royal Albert Hall).
{Before The Moon} (2002) Disc 1: 1. Solo 2. Dirty Linen 3. One More Chance 4. Sloth 5. It’ll Take A Long Time 6. Matty Groves 7. Hens March/Medley 8. Down In The Flood.
Disc 2: 1. Solo 2. Dirty Linen 3.
Fiddlestix 4. Who Knows Where The Time Goes? 5. Like An Old Fashioned Waltz 6. Hexhamshire Lass 7. Bring ‘Em Down 8. Down In The Flood 9. John The Gun 10. Sir B. MacKenzie. [both sets from Ebbetts Field, Colorado 1974].
{Who Knows? 1975} (2005) 1. Rising For The Moon 2. One More Chance 3. Brilliancy Medley 4. Hexhamshire Lass 5. Restless 6. Stranger To Himself 7. Sloth 8. Iron Lion 9. John The Gun 10. Sir B. MacKenzie 11. Lark In The Morning 12. Down In The Flood 13. Who Knows Where The Time Goes? [live 1975].
{Fairport Convention Live At The BBC} (2007)
This 4-CD set contains the following Sandy-era BBC performances not already available on the expanded Heyday:
Disc 1: 6. Marcie 7. Night In The City 8. Jack O’ Diamonds 12. Eastern Rain 18. Book Song 19. Who Knows Where The Time Goes?
Disc 2: 1. You’re Gonna Need My Help 10. Sir Patrick Spens 11. Medley 12. The Lady Is A Tramp.
Disc 3: 11. John The Gun 12. Fiddlestix 13. Rising For The Moon 14. Down In The Flood.
Disc 4: 9. Meet On The Ledge 10. Light My Fire.
Nothing More?
AN INTEMPERATE DISQUISITION ON THE PLUNDERING OF SANDY DENNY’S MUSICAL LEGACY
It was Richard Thompson who in the early nineties used to regularly sing the jocular ‘Now That I’m Dead (I’m Finally Making A Living)’. Has there ever been another song that could be more appositely applied to Richard’s dear old friend, Sandy than this French, Frith, Kaiser, Thompson track? Did she jump or was she pushed?
In the decade since I wrote my Sandy Denny biography, there has been such an eye-watering, wallet-busting harvest of Denny product that it has worn clean through the bottom of the barrel, and even now Universal are sweeping up the shavings previous compilers considered mere chaff. Leaving aside ‘expanded’ remasters of all of Sandy’s albums, even the Saga and Strawbs collections, there has been the fake Fotheringay 2, plus no less than three boxed-sets of four (Live at the BBC), five (A Boxful of Treasures) and nineteen discs (Sandy Denny) respectively.
For all one’s natural curiosity about her ‘lost’ recordings, amply discussed herein, one imagines Sandy herself would have been appalled to see quite so much of her carefully wrought output second (and third and fourth …) guessed. And the fact that a principal beneficiary of her hard work should be the woman who ‘stole’ her husband, Trevor’s third wife, Elizabeth Hurtt-Lucas, I must imagine would only amplify her hurt.
But in this, as in so many other ways, it was Trevor’s actions, or inaction (he died intestate), that ultimately allowed the estate to be controlled by someone whose investment in Sandy, as an artist and as a person, was negligible. As a result there has been no indentured hand on the rudder determined to nix material unworthy of her memory; as has been the case with Sandy’s contemporary, Nick Drake, whose estate has been overseen with an iron hand by sister Gabrielle.
As such, at a time when demand for her dead brother’s work has never been higher, Gabrielle has resolutely resisted releasing any last scrapings from the Universal (or indeed the BBC) vaults, just for the sake of Universal’s bottom-line, and her bank account. She alone knows whether anything worthy of Drake’s legacy remains in said vaults, but one thing is sure: it won’t appear on a 6-CD boxed-set, five-sixths of which have already been previously available.
And if Sandy was not the perfectionist in the studio that Nick was, she was no less technically accomplished as a singer-musician. So not surprisingly there has been a smattering of life-enhancing wheat in amongst the recently-released detritus. But such has been the indiscriminate use of material excavated, and the lack of any discernible aesthetic displayed by recent archival compilers – loosed on the Universal vaults by recently-appointed, self-proclaimed Sandy fan Sue Armstrong – that the discriminating fan has needed not so much an audio sieve to sift through it all as their own fine-tuned bullshit detector.
The trouble really dates back to 1998 when Jerry Donahue and Jerry Boys, the architects behind the official release of Sandy’s last official concert at the Royalty Theatre in November 1977, got away with what was a travesty of a release (Gold Dust: Live At The Royalty). Rather than releasing this poignant document with all its inherent flaws, surviving musicians had set about redoing their parts, even as the real focal point (Sandy’s contribution) stayed frozen in time. As Peter Gabriel once wrote of his own re-worked live performances, ‘The generic term of this process is “cheating”.’
But that was not all. The integrity of the original occasion was abandoned as soon as they decided to resequence the entire concert applying a logic lost on me. The result was the worst of all possible worlds, neither a snapshot of a moment, nor an album that was so transcendent musically that one forgave the musicians their trespasses (as, say, most rock fans forgive the Stones
their trespasses on Get Your Ya-Ya’s Out, perhaps the most ‘unlive’ classic concert album in rock history).
Having got away with this assault on Sandy’s last sad refrain, Donahue was emboldened to begin work on a wholly unhistorical version of the abandoned second Fotheringay album. As he well knew, this could never be a case of ‘completing’ a nearly finished artifact – as had been the case with, say, Janis Joplin’s Pearl, one of Sandy’s favourites. Work on the original Fotheringay 2 had been abandoned with less than a side’s worth of songs completed to Sandy’s (or producer Joe Boyd’s) satisfaction. Even if BBC recordings of these songs could or were added into the mix, the sum total needed some more spare parts.
His solution, sadly, was misguided at best. Choosing not to utilize the rehearsal version of ‘Bruton Town’ that I had already informed him about (and which was ultimately included on the recent 19-CD set, albeit from a truncated MP-3 dub!); nor the backing track of Anne Briggs’ ‘Go Your Own Way My Love’ completed at those second-album sessions, and still worth hearing despite no Sandy vocal (as per Pearl‘s ‘Buried Alive In The Blues’). Nor did he use Sandy’s glorious accapella ‘Lowlands Of Holland’, recorded the same month as the sessions for the BBC, and extant from a BBC transcription disc.
Rather, he took an outtake from the first Fotheringay album (already released on Boxful of Treasures), ‘Silver Threads & Golden Needles’, and placed it alongside a (rejigged) version of Dylan’s ‘I Don’t Believe You’ featuring a Trevor Lucas vocal recorded by a different band at a later album session (it’s a Fairport Convention Nine outtake!).
The result was an(other) album that was neither an indication of what might have been, nor one entitled to stand alongside (or even in the same room as) its illustrious predecessor. In short, it was an expensive indulgence (all the redubbing and remixing apparently ran up studio costs that ran to five figures). And it was compounded by the baffling decision by Univeral to transfer the copyright in the original Fotheringay recordings to the parties responsible for Fotheringay 2. Not surprisingly, such stupidity came back to bite Universal on its golden ass.
When the next quasi-systematic attempt to compile a ‘representative’ boxed-set of part-released, part-unreleased Sandy recordings, the 5-CD A Boxful of Treasures, compiled by David Suff, was released in 2004, he was only able to use two tracks from that ill-fated second Fotheringay LP, ‘Gypsy Davey’ and ‘Late November’, both previously released (the latter, in Sandy’s lifetime, on El Pea). And even when a 2007 3-CD/1-DVD boxed-set of Sandy’s post-Fairport BBC recordings appeared, intended to supercede the long-deleted single CD, The BBC Sessions 1971-73, it was obliged to omit the many Fotheringay sessions – some of the most intriguing of Sandy’s work at the BBC – from this lavish set entirely, even though the set was supposed to cover her non-Fairport sessions from 1966 through 1973.
This was hardly the only problem with the BBC set, which was meant to announce Denny advocate Sue Armstrong’s tenure at Universal. In some of the most ill-informed sleeve-notes of the entire CD era, Armstrong revealed that the set had been made possible thanks to one Andrew Batt, “a fan of Sandy’s who had somehow managed to obtain copies of her BBC recordings that were so rare they were practically unheard of.” He had achieved this remarkable coup by purchasing two commercially released bootleg CDs issued by one Rob Johnstone (now the proprietor of the various Chrome Dreams imprints), prior to his two-year incarceration for bootlegging. Both bootlegs had been detailed in the one Sandy Denny biography then available; and in every instance these bootleg CDs were culled from inferior generational cassette dubs of reels that Sandy’s father had dubbed for himself.
But no attempt was made, by Batt or Armstrong, to trace these tapes back to their source (although three separate dubs had been made from Neil’s master by a Manchester-based Fairport archivist in the early nineties). Indeed, there seemed to be no underlying archival expertise evident in the entire release, just untramelled fandom.
This BBC boxed-set, a bootleg in all but name, was bad enough, but when Batt, a publicist of sorts with no experience as either an archivist or a compiler of boxed-sets, petitioned Armstrong to do a ‘definitive’ set of ‘everything’ Sandy-related, she readily agreed. It was a disastrous decision that, three years later, resulted in the monstrous 19-CD Sandy Denny boxed-set, surely the most ill-conceived anthology of the CD era. This outlandish release treated the lady like she was some folk-rock equivalent of Miles Davis, when in fact her performances were almost always measured and exact – meaning that surprises in the studio were few and far between.
Leaving aside Batt’s unhealthy obsession with releasing almost every note he could find of his favourite diva, such a project – and a retail price just shy of £200 – was bound to incense not just the fans, but a number of Sandy Denny’s closest friends. Miranda Ward, formerly on good terms with Batt, lambasted his project on an on-line Sandy mailing list, calling the set a ‘rip off’, and voicing a sense of betrayal on her friend’s behalf to others’:
“For the first time I could actually tell myself that I was glad that Sandy was dead. She would have hated this hotch potch of releases for commercial gain. Even the ‘Golddust’ Live concert CD was in the wrong running order and did not include all the banter that Sandy had with the audience. She used to spend ages sometimes agonising over running orders and these people behind the money making schemes under the guise of encouraging new fans are actually sullying her memory whilst patting themselves on the back for this seemingly endless stream of ‘definitive collections’. They have no real concept of Sandy nor any emotional interest in the person she was and have thus failed to hold true to any ‘memory’ of Sandy Denny, the musician, songwriter, singer and woman.”
For all the talk of hours of rarities and unheard nuggets, when the details of the set finally did appear on-line (and Batt did his damnedest to keep the actual contents close to his chest), it was clear that this third ‘career overview’ in boxed-set form, for all its implicit claims of definitiveness, would contain less than 5-CDs worth of previously unreleased material; i.e. barely 25% of the set would be ‘new’ to fans, a percentage significantly lower than either the original Who Knows Where The Time Goes, or Suff’s A Boxful of Treasures. To add insult to injury, not only would the recent Fairport remasters serve as the basis for five of the discs, but Donahue’s outfake version of the Royalty concert would again be served up in this tainted form; while the Fotheringay 2 era was largely passed over, with the usual three Boyd mixes made to suffice.
As for the kind of surprises that all such sets demand, it was only at the last minute that the ‘Bruton Town’ Fotheringay rehearsal was added to the set, and then only when a long-term collector gave Batt a truncated copy, deliberately downgraded, on the strict understanding that he would receive a copy of said set, and due credit. Rather than get a corrected dub of the track, Batt used the copy he was given for reference purposes; thus, in one swell foop, ensuring he lost a second chance of gaining access to a direct dub of Neil Denny’s ‘demo’ reels. Not smart.
Other genuine surprises proved few and far between: an early demo of ‘Methuselah’; half a dozen demos for the Fotheringay album that includes a devastating ‘Banks Of The Nile’; the much fabled solo ‘Lord Bateman’ from the North Star sessions (actually something of a disappointment, being clearly just a guide vocal); the stunning one-off ‘Crazy Lady Blues’ from the 1974 Troubador shows; an undocumented 1975 TV performance featuring Sandy playing the new ‘No More Sad Refrains’ and the traditional ‘Blackwaterside’. But the exquisite Rendezvous demos had already appeared on A Boxful of Treasures (albeit again resequenced), and almost every alternate take on the extravagant set was inferior to the one Sandy had preferred – even if Batt included a smattering of string-free mixes from Sandy’s first three solo albums.
As for the one opportunity Batt had to give fans a superior, alternate version of an entire album, he squandered it. In his trawl through the Universal vaults – and he was
nothing if not industrious – he had found the original, 1976 sequence of her fourth solo album, then called Gold Dust. This ten-track forty-six minute album had many subtle differences and a couple of not-so-subtle differences from the album eventually released as Rendezvous. With the likes of ‘Full Moon’ and ‘Still Waters Run Deep’ in their correct place (and mixes), and no ‘Candle In The Wind’, it was in every way a superior artefact. But rather than give this version as a stand alone sequence, Batt scattered a smattering of the choicer alternates across two separate CDs, one an expanded version of the album, one a largely random sweeping up of latter-day Sandy demos and outtakes. Few would wade through the endless alternate takes when sequenced so, and with such minimal annotation in a boxed-set booklet given over largely to some personal fetish for pictures of The Lady, not the recording information expected of fans of her music.
And now comes the depressing news that Universal have a ‘Deluxe’ two-CD version of North Star Grassman & The Ravens due for release in June, which merely cherry-picks the tracks found on the 19-CD set, to bolster a straight remaster of an album that was last remastered – and perfectly respectably – in 2005. One imagines the other solo albums will follow, as apparently will a 4-CD boxed-set of Fotheringay recordings that will be both BBC tapes and two previously undocumented latter-day concerts, one from Essen that could well have been their penultimate gig. That, at least, may be something to get excited about. But for the rest of Universal’s shameless fleecing of fans’ bank accounts, it is hard not to agree with The Lady herself, that the time for more such sad refrains has passed.
Chronology of Recordings & Performances
All media, studio and demo sessions are listed in bold
No More Sad Refrains: The Life and Times of Sandy Denny Page 33
