Paying tribute to Sandy Denny (Part 2)
January 07, 2024
Following on from Colin Randall’s piece on Sandy Denny yesterday, Salut! Live has been doing some research into people paying tribute to her since her death. Where better to start, perhaps, than with Richard Thompson, who played with her on the great Fairport records Liege and Lief and Unhalfbricking, doing a version of Who Knows Where The Time Goes?
Do listen to Thompson’s introduction to the song, which is both funny and a bit self-deprecating:
In a slightly more unusual vein, the Thin Lizzy vocalist Phil Lynott turned up in 1984 on RTE’s Late Late Show with the Irish folk band Clann Edair. Lynott had produced and sung on a Clann Edair song written in tribute to Sandy, as he explains to the show’s host before we get to the performance in the studio.
Thea Gilmore’s tribute is a little more structured. Sandy Denny left quite a lot of unfinished songs behind, including lyrics that had no melodies to go with them. In 2010 her estate and Island Records commissioned Gilmore—a fan as well as a musician—to write melodies for these, and record them. Don’t Stop Singing, which Gilmore wrote with her then husband and collaborator Nigel Stonier, was the result of this. London, from that record, was used in the BBC’s 2012 Olympics coverage, and it’s astonishing to me that Fairport don’t seem to have recorded this song—it sounds tailor-made for them.
But I’ve picked Pain in my Heart here. One of the reasons we love Sandy Denny is because of her utterly distinctive voice, but the other is that her songs have unexpected chords and melodic progressions, in a similar way to those of Nick Drake, and these catch us off guard. The lyrics here are poignant, and Gilmore’s arrangement catches some of that unexpectedness. And maybe—although music isn’t psychotherapy—there’s some of Gilmore’s difficult marriage in here as well.
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