Sandy denny biography mick houghton

I’ve Always Kept A Unicorn: The Biography of Sandy Denny
by Mick Houghton (Faber 502 pp).

Review by Andy Childs

Sandy Denny is widely acknowledged by all who knew and heard her as the finest female singer of her generation by some distance. Her singing had the power to move grown men to tears and to put her contemporaries and rivals firmly in their place. Even today artists as accomplished as Rachel Unthank are in awe of her voice – “don’t listen to her! You’ll realise that the rest of us are wasting your time”. Yet because she was always portrayed and generally perceived as a folk-singer she was never a true commercial success and never received the wider recognition that her talent should have made possible. She was also, like an awful of people with a rare talent, a deeply flawed character which, combined with the frustrations of an under-achieving career resulted in a tragic, premature conclusion and an enduring fascination.

In this new biography of Sandy Denny, Mick Houghton has, with diligent research and judicious use of quotes from an extensive range of people associated with her life and career, pieced together the story of a lady blessed with natural ability, infused with an adventurous, sometimes reckless spirit, dogged by insecurity and unfortunate choices and of a life lived out in a manner that inspired devotion and unconditional love from those around her. Houghton narrates the tale with sensitivity and even-handedness, never reticent where relevant to lay bare the extent that Denny’s destructive and erratic behaviour played a part in shaping her eventual demise, but fulsome in his obvious admiration for her music and thoroughly convincing in his appraisal of her legacy. He also very wisely refrains from lengthy, pedantic analyses of her songs and instead highlights her most notable work, offers his own authoritative opinion on her various album, and pretty much leaves it up to the reader to rise to the ch

Description for I´ve Always Kept a Unicorn: The Biography of Sandy DennyPaperback. Sandy Denny laid down the marker for folk-rock when she joined Fairport Convention in 1968, but her music went far beyond this during the seventies. This book tells the story of Sandy Denny, one of the greatest British singers of her time and the first female singer-songwriter to produce a substantial and enduring body of original songs. Num Pages: 528 pages, illustrations. BIC Classification: AVGH; AVH; BGF. Category: (G) General (US: Trade). Dimension: 130 x 242 x 36. Weight in Grams: 424.
I've Always Kept a Unicorn tells the story of Sandy Denny, one of the greatest British singers of her time and the first female singer-songwriter to produce a substantial and enduring body of original songs. Sandy Denny laid down the marker for folk-rock when she joined Fairport Convention in 1968, but her music went far beyond this during the seventies. After leaving Fairport she formed Fotheringay, whose influential eponymous album was released in 1970, before collaborating on a historic one-off recording with Led Zeppelin - the only other vocalist to record with Zeppelin in their entire career - and releasing ... Read morefour solo albums across the course of the decade. Her tragic and untimely death came in 1978. Sandy emerged from the folk scene of the sixties - a world of larger-than-life characters such as Alex Campbell, Jackson C. Frank, Anne Briggs and Australian singer Trevor Lucas, whom she married in 1973. Their story is at the core of Sandy's later life and work, and is told with the assistance of more than sixty of her friends, fellow musicians and contemporaries, one of whom, to paraphrase McCartney on Lennon, observed that she sang like an angel but was no angel. Show Less

Product Details

As tragic heroines go, Sandy Denny, the first lady of folk rock who rose to fame in the late Sixties as the singer in Fairport Convention, was an unlikely contender.

Best known for “Who Knows Where The Time Goes?” and, latterly, the inspiration for a new generation of heart-on-sleeve singers such as Laura Marling, Cat Power, and Joanna Newsom, Denny grew up in a nice house, in a nice street, with nice parents who supported her choice of career, unorthodox as it must have seemed.

Certainly, aside from a brief stint as a nurse, Denny endured little hardship before finding success. But despite her sociable nature and obvious charisma, she was dogged by an insecurity that increased as her celebrity grew, and, by the mid-Seventies, was fuelled by heavy drinking and cocaine use. She died at the age of 31 from a brain haemorrhage shortly after falling down a flight of stairs.

Mick Houghton’s scrupulously researched biography draws a detailed picture both of Denny’s increasingly complex mental state and of the London folk scene in the Sixties and Seventies, which also included now towering figures such as Richard Thompson, Bert Jansch, and Paul Simon.

If there are times, in chronicling Denny’s early career, when Houghton gets bogged down in detail (do we really need to know how far Sandy stood from the microphone during studio sessions?), he nonetheless offers a revealing portrait of a close-knit and mutually supportive scene in which musicians lived together, played together and sometimes made babies together.

If lovers were shared, it was rarely a cause of conflict. It’s with typical wit that the folk singer Linda Thompson, who had a fling with the Australian folkie Trevor Lucas before he settled down with Denny, reveals: “It was just the Sixties and back then it seemed churlish not to sleep with someone if they gave you a l