Post by Ray Langstone (was saintsray) on Apr 8, 2010 13:35:23 GMT
From: sandydenny.blogspot.com/2008/07/searching-for-lost-film.html
There is, notoriously, very little surviving film of Sandy Denny. Although she appeared a number of times on BBC television, in an era when videotape was expensive whatever survives survives by accident. In fact, there was much systematic wiping of British TV archives in the Seventies. What now seems like cultural vandalism was justified at the time by shortage of storage space, fire risk leading to increased insurance premiums, etc. [1]
The sure bets are the three songs she recorded solo for the One in Ten show in September 1971 and two numbers recorded with Fotheringay for an appearance on German TV’s Beat Club in August 1970. The BBC material (‘North Star Grassman’, ‘Crazy Lady Blues’and ‘Late November’) has now been lovingly restored to broadcast quality and reissued on DVD as part of the boxed set Live at the BBC. The German material awaits an official re-release, even though other artists’ work from the series has appeared on DVD on the Continent. It turns up, in inferior quality, on YouTube and other sites, and gives a rare opportunity to see Denny interacting with her co-musicians of choice. ‘Gypsy Davy’ is her vocal; she leads from the front, swaying gently in time to the music. On ‘Too Much of Nothing’ she sings backing, gazing across all the time at Lucas, whose lead vocal it is. A lot of mud has been slung at that man over the years – and I’ve probably been as guilty of Trevor-bashing as the next Sandyphile – but, as you watch this piece of film, it’s hard to gainsay the affection she must have felt for him.
And that’s about it, or nearly it. I guess one of the reasons (there are others) why no TV documentary has ever been made about Denny is that there’s so little archive footage to bring it to visual life. The ‘girl singers’ she displaced at the top of Melody Maker polls – Dusty Springfield, Cilla Black, Lulu – all had their own TV series in the Sixties, so are well-represented on film. Even the tedious Julie Felix fared better, as the acceptable face of Folk in the Sixties. At the Troubadour event in April, Karl Dallas told an amusing story about Felix. Around 1967 he was invited to attend one of David Frost’s famous soirées. Thinking his new protégée a cut above Miss Felix – recently sky-rocketed to national fame by her appearances on The Frost Report – he took Denny along, hoping to introduce her to the Great Communicator. The introduction was never made; and perhaps it is just as well. Even Felix felt compromised by having to trade in her usual protest songs for pap like ‘Going To The Zoo’: the price of stardom.
Well, maybe there’s more archive out there. The Television Society at Birmingham University recorded a Fairport concert at the University in June 1974. Filmed by student fans, visually it’s pretty crude stuff, to judge from the copy of a copy that I’ve seen. But it preserves a cracking performance of ‘Solo’.[2] There are false claims that Dave Pegg owns the original of the Birmingham video. In fact, no one has ever found the original; it may no longer exist. Peggy told me: ‘I only have a rough copy which I have duped a couple of times for fans. I would like to see it improved and released maybe as a charity benefit.’ The University TV Society survives but enquiries to its present office-holders have gone unanswered.
In the late Sixties to mid Seventies, there was a music show on ABC, the Australian broadcaster, called GTK, short for ‘Get To Know’. It only ran for ten minutes, four nights a week, and for a while was pretty much the only place to see contemporary music on TV down under. It was assumed most of the programmes had been wiped by now – but apparently not. Someone has been gathering them up and cataloguing them. TARA, the online archive of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, throws up this curiosity from June 1973:
ID 597456 / GTK EPISODE 674
B&W;0.00 VS BOATS IN HARBOUR, MEMBERS OF FAIRPORT CONVENTION SIT AT OUTDOOR CAFE TABLE;0.38 MCU IV LUCAS AND DAVIS RE PLAYING CONCERTS OVERSEAS, PLAYING TO LARGE AUDIENCES AT STADIUMS, TOURING, CA VS MEMBERS OF BAND AT TABLE…
Is this, as the entry suggests, three minutes of TV interview with ‘Sandy Davis’ and Trevor?
Sometime in 1975, possibly early September, Fairport (with Denny on board) recorded a half hour session for Westward TV. This was first broadcast in the Westward region on September 25 1975 and repeated on Thames TV (December 22) and Yorkshire TV (29 December). Super-sleuth Jamie Taylor is on the case, checking whether any of these now defunct companies left a copy behind for posterity.
In January 1973 Fairport appeared at the The Great Ngaruawahia Music Festival in New Zealand. Although Denny wasn’t to rejoin the band officially until the following year, she was there supporting her other half. Years later, on a visit to the NZ Broadcasting Corporation, Trevor Lucas was buttonholed by a cameraman. Let John Penhallow, Fairport’s first manager, take up the story:
Trev says ‘Right mate – what’s up?’ – and the guy says he was a freelance cameraman working for NZBC at the time and he shot Fairport’s set at the Festival – and he kept the roll(s) of 16mm film in his home as NZBC didn’t want to use it – so Trev says ‘oh that’s nice’ and walks on! I said ‘Trevor you didn’t! What was his name – where can we find him again?’ But by then it was year old news and we didn’t have the means to track him down if Trevor had’ve recalled his full name. So there you are – in an ageing cameraman’s attic somewhere in NZ is a reel or two of Fairport in colour with sound from the built in mic I suppose, including a couple of songs with Sandy who guested with Fairport.[3]
Could there be more? Home cine, perhaps? By the Sixties parents who could afford it had started to record their children’s embarrassments on 8 and 16mm. The breathless sleeve notes to Sandy and Johnny (1967) claim that ‘Sandy… has just completed one television series with Alex Campbell and is about to commence another’, though I’ve never found confirmation of that anywhere. And what about overseas sales? Some of the missing episodes of favourite British sitcoms have been rediscovered mouldering in the basements of foreign TV stations. Was The Old Grey Whistle Test (Denny appeared on the first series in June 1972) sold abroad? Does the Van Speyk Show from KRO-TV Holland, on which Fairport Convention featured in January 1975, gather dust somewhere? I’ve seen one beautiful still photo from an appearance on Danish TV in November 1969 (her last with the Liege & Lief line-up) but it seems only to survive in audio. And what on earth did she mean in her March 1977 interview with Patrick Humphries by saying, ‘I’ve only done television shows since I left Fairport’?
There is, notoriously, very little surviving film of Sandy Denny. Although she appeared a number of times on BBC television, in an era when videotape was expensive whatever survives survives by accident. In fact, there was much systematic wiping of British TV archives in the Seventies. What now seems like cultural vandalism was justified at the time by shortage of storage space, fire risk leading to increased insurance premiums, etc. [1]
The sure bets are the three songs she recorded solo for the One in Ten show in September 1971 and two numbers recorded with Fotheringay for an appearance on German TV’s Beat Club in August 1970. The BBC material (‘North Star Grassman’, ‘Crazy Lady Blues’and ‘Late November’) has now been lovingly restored to broadcast quality and reissued on DVD as part of the boxed set Live at the BBC. The German material awaits an official re-release, even though other artists’ work from the series has appeared on DVD on the Continent. It turns up, in inferior quality, on YouTube and other sites, and gives a rare opportunity to see Denny interacting with her co-musicians of choice. ‘Gypsy Davy’ is her vocal; she leads from the front, swaying gently in time to the music. On ‘Too Much of Nothing’ she sings backing, gazing across all the time at Lucas, whose lead vocal it is. A lot of mud has been slung at that man over the years – and I’ve probably been as guilty of Trevor-bashing as the next Sandyphile – but, as you watch this piece of film, it’s hard to gainsay the affection she must have felt for him.
And that’s about it, or nearly it. I guess one of the reasons (there are others) why no TV documentary has ever been made about Denny is that there’s so little archive footage to bring it to visual life. The ‘girl singers’ she displaced at the top of Melody Maker polls – Dusty Springfield, Cilla Black, Lulu – all had their own TV series in the Sixties, so are well-represented on film. Even the tedious Julie Felix fared better, as the acceptable face of Folk in the Sixties. At the Troubadour event in April, Karl Dallas told an amusing story about Felix. Around 1967 he was invited to attend one of David Frost’s famous soirées. Thinking his new protégée a cut above Miss Felix – recently sky-rocketed to national fame by her appearances on The Frost Report – he took Denny along, hoping to introduce her to the Great Communicator. The introduction was never made; and perhaps it is just as well. Even Felix felt compromised by having to trade in her usual protest songs for pap like ‘Going To The Zoo’: the price of stardom.
Well, maybe there’s more archive out there. The Television Society at Birmingham University recorded a Fairport concert at the University in June 1974. Filmed by student fans, visually it’s pretty crude stuff, to judge from the copy of a copy that I’ve seen. But it preserves a cracking performance of ‘Solo’.[2] There are false claims that Dave Pegg owns the original of the Birmingham video. In fact, no one has ever found the original; it may no longer exist. Peggy told me: ‘I only have a rough copy which I have duped a couple of times for fans. I would like to see it improved and released maybe as a charity benefit.’ The University TV Society survives but enquiries to its present office-holders have gone unanswered.
In the late Sixties to mid Seventies, there was a music show on ABC, the Australian broadcaster, called GTK, short for ‘Get To Know’. It only ran for ten minutes, four nights a week, and for a while was pretty much the only place to see contemporary music on TV down under. It was assumed most of the programmes had been wiped by now – but apparently not. Someone has been gathering them up and cataloguing them. TARA, the online archive of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, throws up this curiosity from June 1973:
ID 597456 / GTK EPISODE 674
B&W;0.00 VS BOATS IN HARBOUR, MEMBERS OF FAIRPORT CONVENTION SIT AT OUTDOOR CAFE TABLE;0.38 MCU IV LUCAS AND DAVIS RE PLAYING CONCERTS OVERSEAS, PLAYING TO LARGE AUDIENCES AT STADIUMS, TOURING, CA VS MEMBERS OF BAND AT TABLE…
Is this, as the entry suggests, three minutes of TV interview with ‘Sandy Davis’ and Trevor?
Sometime in 1975, possibly early September, Fairport (with Denny on board) recorded a half hour session for Westward TV. This was first broadcast in the Westward region on September 25 1975 and repeated on Thames TV (December 22) and Yorkshire TV (29 December). Super-sleuth Jamie Taylor is on the case, checking whether any of these now defunct companies left a copy behind for posterity.
In January 1973 Fairport appeared at the The Great Ngaruawahia Music Festival in New Zealand. Although Denny wasn’t to rejoin the band officially until the following year, she was there supporting her other half. Years later, on a visit to the NZ Broadcasting Corporation, Trevor Lucas was buttonholed by a cameraman. Let John Penhallow, Fairport’s first manager, take up the story:
Trev says ‘Right mate – what’s up?’ – and the guy says he was a freelance cameraman working for NZBC at the time and he shot Fairport’s set at the Festival – and he kept the roll(s) of 16mm film in his home as NZBC didn’t want to use it – so Trev says ‘oh that’s nice’ and walks on! I said ‘Trevor you didn’t! What was his name – where can we find him again?’ But by then it was year old news and we didn’t have the means to track him down if Trevor had’ve recalled his full name. So there you are – in an ageing cameraman’s attic somewhere in NZ is a reel or two of Fairport in colour with sound from the built in mic I suppose, including a couple of songs with Sandy who guested with Fairport.[3]
Could there be more? Home cine, perhaps? By the Sixties parents who could afford it had started to record their children’s embarrassments on 8 and 16mm. The breathless sleeve notes to Sandy and Johnny (1967) claim that ‘Sandy… has just completed one television series with Alex Campbell and is about to commence another’, though I’ve never found confirmation of that anywhere. And what about overseas sales? Some of the missing episodes of favourite British sitcoms have been rediscovered mouldering in the basements of foreign TV stations. Was The Old Grey Whistle Test (Denny appeared on the first series in June 1972) sold abroad? Does the Van Speyk Show from KRO-TV Holland, on which Fairport Convention featured in January 1975, gather dust somewhere? I’ve seen one beautiful still photo from an appearance on Danish TV in November 1969 (her last with the Liege & Lief line-up) but it seems only to survive in audio. And what on earth did she mean in her March 1977 interview with Patrick Humphries by saying, ‘I’ve only done television shows since I left Fairport’?
