“We don’t hear Sandy Denny on the radio these days. Her records, few that they are, don’t fit the current formats, don’t send the programmers into paroxysms, don’t have listeners voting in. She couldn’t be considered for Sixties, Seventies hit nostalgia; she never had hits. Rock album stations? Never sold enough albums. Even Nick Drake sneaks into the odd Easy Listening show, the music lulling and deceiving, with its attractive surfaces hiding the pain within, something romantic for a cult to cling to. But where is Sandy’s cult? Where are the graveside vigilants à la Jim Morrison? The colour supplemental cultural dissections? The South Bank Show eulogies, the bad TV- and film-biopics telling us who should be important in our lives? Somewhere the taste gurus have failed the flock, have failed to tell us, after twenty years of hindsight opportunity, that Sandy Denny was the greatest British female artist of her generation.”
Richard Thompson
