I didn't discover that Nina Simone had recorded this Sandy Denny song until recently. It is on her LP* Black Gold, which was recorded in 1969 at the Philharmonic Hall, New York City.
It's a beautiful performance, and I love the spoken introduction too. Even the play out at the end makes you wish you had been there.
* Is using "LP" desperately old fashioned now? I still often write it and then replace it with "album".
But the Walker Brothers weren't the only big names to play Harborough in those days. I've blogged before about Jethro Tull, and now I can add some more names to the list.
Because a reader kindly pointed me towards an old post about the town on the Soul Source site:
The club was called the Frollockin' Kneecap and had been there since 1968, I saw Brenton Wood, Blossom Toes, Ferris Wheel, Keef Hartley, Dantallian's Chariot (Zoot Money), Brenton Wood and the best of all the Family 3 times, once with Fairport Convention jamming; about 700 in for that one!
It goes on to say that the club called itself The Lantern for "allnighters", which suggests there was such a thing as East Midland Soul.
I can't give you Family and Fairport jamming, but here's Dantalian's Chariot (Andy Summers, later of the Police, is on guitar) with their most famous track.
A passing mention in this video has led me to a snippet from an Uncut interview with Richard Thompson:
"Syd Barrett wasn't a great musician in the orthodox sense but he had a good instinct for the possibilities of music I recently learned that Syd's father's great-grandmother was a cousin of Elizabeth Garrett Anderson, Britain's first female doctor who was my mother's great-great-aunt. Syd and I were, in fact distant, cousins."
This is a song written by Richard Thompson and Dave Swarbrick and sung by Sandy Denny. It appeared on Fairport Convention's 1969 album Liege and Lief.
Thompson had first set his words to a traditional folk tune, but Dave Swarbrick wasn't convinced:
"I thought that the words were great but that the tune weakened it ... He said that if I felt like that, why didn’t I write a tune for it? So I did."
It's usual to read Crazy Man Michael as an expression of grief and guilt at the death of Thompson's girlfriend Jeannie Franklyn when Fairport Convention's van overturned on the motorway coming back from a gig.
Richard Thompson himself is more measured:
Anyway, it's a magical song and a reminder of Fairport Convention in the days when they had two geniuses in the shape of Thompson and Sandy Denny."It is a very emotional song. In fact, it’s a song I only really started singing myself [in about 2004]. Firstly because it’s a difficult song melodically to sing, and I wanted to find a way to modify the melody slightly.
"Plus it’s about Fairport’s car crash in ’69; there’s nothing in it directly about what happened. You could look at it circumspectly and say, ‘This is about losing my girlfriend,’ but at the time I was in hospital and I just began by writing a story, just enjoying the process of putting down a story. It emerged that it was about stuff close to home.
"It is nice, given all that, to be able to get close to the traditional model."
