Impressions of England

Charles Spencer

Wednesday, 7th May 2008

Charles Spencer remembers Sandy Denny

Denny has long seemed to me to be one of the most undervalued figures in British popular music. Her crowning achievement is undoubtedly Liege and Lief, but there is stunning work on the earlier Fairport albums What We Did on Our Holidays and Unhalfbricking, and on some of her later solo albums, though the quality dips as her rackety life began to affect her voice, and she aimed, somewhat desperately, for the commercial success that always eluded her. Denny was a fine songwriter as well as a glorious singer — the haunting ‘Who Knows Where the Time Goes’ is especially fine — and in my view she deserves the posthumous reputation that has accrued to the singer–songwriter Nick Drake since his death.

As well as listening to Denny and Fairport Convention these past weeks, I’ve also discovered that the English folk tradition has recently received an invigorating shot in the arm. The Imagined Village, released at the end of last year, is the most ambitious and engaging reinvention of folk since Liege and Lief.

Spearheaded by Simon Emmerson and featuring such artists as the Copper family from Sussex — who have been singing traditional songs for the past five generations — Martin and Eliza Carthy, Paul Weller, Billy Bragg, Trans-Global Underground, Sheila Chandra and the folktronica group Tunng, the album marries the English folk tradition to dub, electronica, modern dance rhythms and exotic world music.

The effect is haunting and hypnotic, with Benjamin Zephaniah delivering a brilliant reworking of ‘Tam Lyn’, and John Copper remembering his old grandfather on the wonderfully atmospheric opening track, ‘’Ouses, ’Ouses ’Ouses’. It describes the loss of the countryside his granddad ploughed as a boy, combining traditional folk and modern beats with the sounds of police cars and helicopters.

This is an explicitly English (rather than British) album, and one that tries to connect the England of the past with our complex, multicultural society today. English accents are joined with black and Asian voices, violins combine with the sitar and the synthesiser. All of this might be merely worthy if the tunes weren’t so strong and the performances so full of passion, charm, wit and invention. The Imagined Village, in fact, strikes me as a brilliantly inventive modern classic, recycling old tunes and old stories to create a vivid impression of England past, present and future. For those with adventurous ears, it is a disc I cannot recommend too highly.