MY NORTHERN SKIES

Featured Album | 393

Sandy Denny | Rendezvous | Island ILPS 9433 | 1977

After releasing three solo albums in the early 1970s, Sandy Denny rejoined Fairport Convention, the band she first joined back in 1968 and stayed with until the following year, helping to create what was to be labeled British Folk Rock, with the release of the album Liege and Lief. Sandy’s second run with the band was also short lived with the release of one live album, followed by her final album with the band, Rising for the Moon, before she left once again, this time with husband and fellow band member Trevor Lucas, to pick up the pieces of her solo career. Unfortunately, this too was short lived, as tragedy interveined, with the death of Sandy in April 1978, the result of one of her many falls. Rendezvous was produced by Lucas and would become Sandy’s final album, released in May 1977, an album that features many of her former band mates, including Richard Thompson, Jerry Donahue, Dave Pegg and Dave Mattacks, but also other such notables as Steve Winwood, John (Rabbit) Bundrick, Gallagher & Lyle and Clare Torry, you know, the “Great Gig in the Sky” singer. Lucas’s over-production has been criticised over the years, with perhaps too much going on, though there are one or two magic moments, not least Denny’s gorgeous “One Way Donkey Ride”. The album’s not really up there with The North Star Grassman and the Ravens (1971) or Sandy (1972) but with Sandy’s voice all over it, it still has credibility in hindsight. Even Sandy’s reading of Elton John’s “Candle in the Wind” couldn’t rescue the project from its critics. A sad swansong then, from one of England’s finest voices.