Sandy Denny: Live At The BBC

Sandy Denny was and will always be to me Fairport Convention's soul: she was the one who brought the british traditional music in (in the very early days they were more keen to USA-oriented rock'n'roll), and gave Fairport one of the most beautiful songs ever written, her own Who knows where the time goes?, and she was the voice they could never replace (Fairport's songs with male vocals have always given me a hard time, by the way). If I have to be completely sincere I'll probably have to admit that, to me, Fairport were Richard Thompson's brilliant guitar playing (and songwriting) and Denny's voice (and songwriting, ok).
But this (triple) collection doesn't pick songs from the Fairport period but only from her solo years, and this makes it a more important release because -again, in my opninion- Denny's solo outputs never reached Fairport's best moments: Sandy's then new self-penned creations surely were not poorer than Fairport's material but probably 70's lush (or pompous) rock productions diminish her songwriting, making it more normal, too often as if she was only one more rock diva. Anyway, all of this yadda yadda yadda is in order to say that these versions have mostly much more stripped down arrengements (if not only piano-and-voice or guitar-and-voice sessions).

If you want to know more about this Live At The BBC go see sandydenny.blogspot

PS Big big thanks to SubcomandateMarcos for uploading these files (thank you once again!)

Live At The BBC 1
Live At The BBC 2