I've Always Kept a Unicorn

The Biography of Sandy Denny

Mick Houghton

• Publisher: Faber & Faber
• eBook ISBN:
  9780571278923
• Year: 2015

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 four 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.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Landing Page
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Illustrations
• Foreword by Richard Thompson
• Preface: Your Fickle Friends Are Leaving …
• 1: No Fear of Time 1947–1964
• 2: Learning the Game 1965–1966
• 3: Alex Campbell and His Friends 1967
• 4: Two Weeks Last Summer 1967–1968
• 5: I Must Have Grown Some Wings 1968–1969
• 6: The Wild Colonial Boy 1943–1969
• 7: Farewell, Farewell 1969
• 8: Possibly Parsons Green 1970–1971
• 9: The Queen of Light Took Her Bow 1971–1972
• 10: The Lady 1972
• 11: Things We’ll Always Hold Dear 1973–1974
• 12: A Curse on the House of Fairport 1974–1975
• 13: All Our Days 1976–1977
• 14: Stranger to Herself 1977–1978
• 15: In a Lonely Moment 1947–1978
• Acknowledgements
• Sources
• Further Reading
• Playlist
• Index
• Plates
• About the Author
• By the Same Author
• Copyright