DAYS OF FUTURE PASSED


October sees the release of a limited edition SANDY DENNY box set featuring her entire released output plus previously unavailable demos and live recordings, spread over 19 CDs and housed in an ornate illustrated box.


ANDY MORTEN catches his breath then catches up with compiler Andrew Batt.


What kind of things might that be? “For example, I knew that other compilers had made searches to find Sandy’s long lost 1971 recording of ‘Lord Bateman’, which fans had known about for years, but which had so far failed to materialise. We were going through the tape and had basically given up, thinking the reel was empty, when suddenly, at the end, Sandy’s voice rang out in the studio. A song that had most likely not been heard since the early ’70s – that was a special moment, something I was very keen to find and luckily I did!”


Alexandra Elene Maclean Denny’s star has continued to rise since her music began being seriously rediscovered and name-checked by sundry inward-looking guitar slingers and piano bashers in the ’90s. She became the unsuspecting figurehead for the immense belated interest in late ’60s/early ’70s folk-rock that reached something of a pinnacle with the BBC’s Folk Britannia season and its sister live event at London’s Barbican in 2006. More than that, new generations of listeners have found Sandy’s music through TV, radio, magazines and the internet and been touched by it; they’ve found someone whose music speaks to them with a beauty and intensity lacking in much modern singer-songwriter catharsis.


“I think there’s been a real shift in the perception of Sandy’s career in the last few years,” agrees Batt. “For a long time she was, for many, simply‘the singer in Fairport Convention’. But now, with a growing interest in female writers and performers generally, there’s a greater appreciation of the quality of Sandy’s solo work, her gifts as a composer and the variety of music she performed and the people she worked with. All of her albums have been reissued and remastered, so a collection like this has allowed us to explore Sandy’s recorded legacy even further, uncovering glorious demos, live recordings and studio out-takes.”


And how. Of the 19 CDs that make up the box set, no less than eight comprise previously unreleased material spanning her first home recordings in ’66 (then-boyfriend Jackson C Frank’s ‘Blues Run The Game’) through to ‘Makes Me Think Of You’, demoed in ’77 following the sessions for her troubled final album Rendezvous and, poignantly, the last ever lyric to be written in her notebook.


“S 12


andy has an extensive discography that goes off in all kinds of interesting directions,” laughs Andrew Batt when asked where on earth he began in undertaking this mammoth project. “I knew her back catalogue very well and


so had a head start on the kind of things I would want to include.”


In between are a host of fascinating rarities and curiosities including the Fairports’ ‘Mr Lacey’ with Sandy on lead vocal, Fotheringay’s ‘The Way I Feel’ – their first ever studio recording – cut live in a single take and featuring a Sandy/Trevor Lucas duet later binned for the album version, master tape-sourced versions of the three Northstar Grassman tracks Sandy cut live for BBC TV’s


One In Ten in ’71 and a ton of solo demos such as ’70 benchmark ‘The Pond And The Stream’, which – like many of Sandy’s demos – sounds like a finished master that often surpasses the eventually released versions.


“I managed to track down songs from all periods of Sandy’s career. We even located some early home reels from the ’60s which contained unreleased tracks including her earliest version of ‘Who Knows Where The Time Goes?’”


The box promises to be as visually stunning as it is definitive. The artwork and packaging must be among the most luxurious Shindig! has ever seen in a product of this kind – and that’s saying something


these days. “I think when this project came into existence,


Island wanted to do something really special. The designer Phil Smee had worked on all of the reissues of Sandy’s albums so he seemed the natural choice to design the set. Aside from the fact that he’s a massive Sandy fan and understands her music, he’s always so inventive. We discussed artistic direction and both thought that something in the Art Nouveau style of Mucha would be fitting – Sandy actually had a reproduction of one of Mucha’s works hanging in her front room for years and seemed to like art and design from that period, with William Morris wallpaper and a collection of Jardinieres.”


And what of the reproduction Island press pack, rare A3 colour promo poster for Northstar Grassman, set of picture postcards, receipt for the purchase of her first piano and even one of Sandy’s handwritten notebooks? “Phil came up with the idea of reproducing the Like An Old Fashioned Waltz press release and a facsimile of her notebooks featuring lyrics to some of her best known songs. Sandy’s estate provided a lot of photographic material that had not been seen before and I did quite a bit of picture research. The same images of Sandy seem to keep on turning up, yet she was photographed a lot. So, for this collection, we aimed to have as many new and newly restored images as possible.”


The box, simply titled Sandy Denny, is set for release in a quantity of just 3000 copies through Island/Universal in October and will retail at £145 – or £175 if you fancy the even more deluxe edition containing an extremely limited edition print signed by Smee


Smee himself.


“I think we all want Sandy to have the kind of resurgence and cult following that Nick Drake enjoys,” surmises Batt, “and projects like this deluxe box set are an excellent way to do that. Fans can purchase something really special.”


With many thanks to Mick Houghton.


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