Who Knows Where the time went?
On this day, January 6 1947, the woman we came to know as Sandy began her tragically short life as Alexandra Elene MacLean Denny. When she died just 31 years later, music - in living form at least - was robbed of an exceptional talent, an artist I regarded then and regard now as among the finest singer-songwriters Britain has produced.
Sandy Denny sang like an angel and created some outstanding songs. As might be expected given that mighty combination of talents, her work has been kept alive by the great fund of recordings she left behind and also the extraordinary range of respect paid by singers ranging from Nina Simone to Judy Collins, Richard Thompson to Rufus Wainwright, Mary Black to Nanci Griffith, Nana Mouskouri to Eva Cassidy, Barbara Dickson to Kate Rusby.
Jef Aerosol’s image of Sandy Denny which he permits me to use
Gifted singers including Chris While, Vikki Clayton and Carla Fuchs have successfully reproduced or built on her work. It was While who stepped sublimely into Denny’s shoes at the annual Fairport Convention festival at Cropredy, Oxfordshire in 2007 to recreate,the band’s seminal 1969 album Liege and Lief. Sandy Denny had been Fairport’s lead singer and it was an unforgettable open-air experience for those of us present, all the original male members reassembled on stage.
Liege and Lief did not contain Denny’s best-known song, Who Knows Where The Time Goes? That had appeared earlier the same year on Unhalfbricking, an LP memorable for its musical brilliance but also for the cover photograph showing Denny’s parents outside the family home in Wimbledon, south-west London.
As a journalist who, while for the most part working as a reporter or news desk man, writes regularly (and as a fan) on folk music and folk-rock, I see it as a song of the highest quality, fully deserving of the borrowed celebrity brought by the covers of others.
There is the added poignancy of the song being the last Denny performed live, just weeks before her death at a charity concert.
For my own Desert Island Discs playlist, however, I would choose another or her songs (Fotheringay, a haunting depiction of the last, pre-execution days and hours of Mary Queen of Scots, and not remotely “gauche” as a Guardian writer once put it). But Who Knows … is a wonderful, beautiful song - “almost too beautiful,” my friend and confrere Bill Taylor has written - and all those covers, plus Denny’s own versions, have been viewed by many millions of YouTube users.
Many, many years ago, I was challenged by Julian, the husband of one of my wife’s colleagues, to compile for him a cassette of different versions. Who Knows …, he told me, was by far his favourite song.
I never quite got round to it. When I finally offered the consolation of an article at my little music website, it brought together what I described as “the good, the not so good and the downright ugly … some assaults on the ear that were simply so gruesome that it would be unkind to everyone concerned to expose them to Salut! Live's small but probably quite discerning audience”.
This weekend, to commemorate what would have been Sandy Denny’s 77th birthday - and how that dates those of us who remember her when she was alive - Salut! Live will reproduce the results of that search on behalf of Julian, as successively updated.
But Denny’s artistry stretched way beyond the inspired composition - and flawless delivery - of two great songs. There were numerous other examples of her songwriting and vocal skills. And I still take enormous pleasuin listening to how well she interpreted other styles, not least two disparate facets of Bob Dylan’s writing, Percy’s Song and Si Tu Dois Partir (the charming French translation of If You Gotta Go, Go Now).
In the late 1960, the American producer Joe Boyd, who worked with Fairport Convention among many other artists, tended to discourage the band’s attraction to crowd-pleasing songs from across the pond. However well Denny sang them, he argued, “as an American, my view was that Americans did these sort of songs in their sleep better than any English band could hope to”. When BBC recordings of such material were finally released on a gloriously feelgood 1987 album Heyday, Boyd wrote in the sleeve notes: “Of course, I am now forced to admit it is hard to find an American band who can do these songs equal justice.”
Much as she might have appreciated those words, Sandy Denny was not always a happy woman.
Beyond her musical attributes, she was sharp and immensely attractive. But she fretted about her weight. There was relentless insecurity, drug use and excessive alcohol consumption, none of it greatly unusual among people involved in 1960s/70s rock and folk-rock. She was described by her friend Linda Thompson, another mesmerising British folk-rock artist, as having "really started going downhill in 1976", showing manic and depressive behaviour on growing levels.
Sandy Denny’s daughter Georgia Rose Lucas (left) with the singer-songwriter Carla Fuchs at Sandy’s graveside in 2023
On April 17 1978, she was found unconscious at the foot of stairs at a friend’s home and died four days later in hospital. Cause of death was found to be a traumatic mid-brain haemorrhage aggravated by blunt force trauma to her head in the fall.
All those years on, Sandy Denny is remembered for the fabulous, captivating and intelligent, if also troubled, person she was. Happy birthday, Sandy, and rest in peace.
My music website Salut! Live has published a large number of articles on the music of Sandy Denny. This generic link - https://www.salutlive.com/sandy-denny/ - leads you to much of that work. A simple search of her name at the site will yield other items, for example those about Fairport Convention or her other band, Fotheringay.
The pledge I made, early in the life of these Salut! Life pages, to devote some of the proceeds of any paying subscriptions to the homelessness charity Crisis has borne a little fruit. A donation of £70 was transferred this week.
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