SANDY DENNY MYSTERY
Sandy has been called Britain's finest female singer-songwriter by Mojo and Uncut and is considered a true founder of the British folk rock movement. Her composition, "Who Knows Where The Time Goes?" has been covered by numerous artists as diverse as Judy Collins, Nina Simone and Cat Power and is now regarded as a classic. As well as her solo material and work with Fairport Convention, she is also noted for her duet with Robert Plant on the song "The Battle Of Evermore" from Led Zepellin's IV. She remains to this day the only guest vocalist on a Led Zeppelin album.
A 19 CD anthology of her solo material will be released by Universal Music Catalogue in October and during the gathering of material for the box set, an unidentified recording has been brought to light, from a reel of Sandy's home recordings sent to Universal by her estate.
We are helping out with trying to find out the background to this un recognised folk song….so if you have an idea please email us info@rokpool.com and stop Universal and ourselves fretting so much!
These are the lyrics that can be made out:
"I saw a dark star against the black sky
Of a night thirteen hundred years long
It cast shrouding shadows upon the desert
of the dark moons that formed in her eyes
On the vowel of her rack the sun never smiled
And the noon of the day was in shadow
And the sky left its beard on the black barren earth
And the … was … in …
On a shrine of black flowers Ethusel lay dead
as he had for thirteen centuries
At his feet five crows stood and watched to his keep
And the whisper of time sighed around the hills
Pannasowna has tried fair winged [weird] for it stead
though the sky's in search of the star
and the serpent entwined about the stag's head
tried to reach out and poison her hair.
O no, Pannasowna, you will not go far
Ethusel [Methusa] has only one hour
and if you do not reach him before it is over
then rada falls into the ocean. [then the world falls into the sea].
There are several more verses but you get the idea.
Universal Music is putting together a strictly limited edition 19 CD box set. 11 of the CDs feature Sandy's studio recordings with Alex Campbell, Johnny Silvo, Fotheringay, Strawbs, Fairport Convention and solo with additional content; outtakes, demos and live recordings. There are 8 CDs of bonus material; unreleased songs, demos, unreleased BBC recordings, alternate takes, live recordings, acoustic versions, and rare radio interviews. This set includes the legendarily 'long lost' Lord Bateman, pencilled in for her first solo album, The North Star Grassman and The Ravens.
The set is lavishly packed and features all new artwork. It comes with a 72 page 11" square hardback book containing over 100 rare and mostly unseen photographs, Sandy's handwritten lyrics (many of which are unrecorded songs) and fascinating memorabilia.
Each CD is housed in an individual gatefold digipak sleeve. The box also contains reproductions of: a beautiful original Island press pack, an exceptionally rare A3 promo colour poster for Northstar Grassman and The Ravens, a set of Postcards, the receipt for the purchase of her first piano and one of Sandy's handwritten notebooks.
The boxset will be limited to only 3000 copies worldwide. A second edition, limited to 100 sets, is available only from the Island 50 web store. It comes with a framed print of the artwork, signed by the artist and individually addressed to each purchaser.
The complete track details have not been announced as the Island archive is still being searched. Discoveries will be announced on Lost Tunes’ Twitter page; http://twitter.com/losttunesdotcom
