A document of one of British folk-rock's great might-have-beens, captured just weeks before it ended. Recorded live at the Grugahalle in Essen on 23 October 1970, during the third Essen Pop & Blues Festival, Essen 1970 finds Fotheringay - the short-lived band Sandy Denny formed on leaving Fairport Convention - at the height of its powers, playing with the confidence of a group that believed it had years ahead of it. Within three months, it would be gone.
Fotheringay took its name from Denny's own song about Fotheringhay Castle, where Mary, Queen of Scots was imprisoned - the track that had opened her recorded life with Fairport. Leaving that band at the close of 1969, freshly voted Britain's finest singer in the Melody Maker readers' poll, she assembled a quintet around her future husband Trevor Lucas on guitars and vocals, with Jerry Donahue on lead guitar, Pat Donaldson on bass, and Gerry Conway on drums. Signed immediately to Island, the band cut a single, Joe Boyd-produced LP in 1970 - one foot in the British traditional songbook, the other firmly in rock - before pressure on Denny to go solo, applied not least by Boyd himself, brought everything to a halt in January 1971. Their second album would wait thirty-seven years to be completed.
The Essen tapes, recorded semi-professionally by the festival's host and later restored and remastered by Donahue himself, capture the full concert from that October night. The set draws on the debut - including the band's readings of Gordon Lightfoot's The Way I Feel and Bob Dylan's Too Much of Nothing, and both sides of the The Ballad of Ned Kelly / Nothing More single - alongside the traditional Eppie Moray and material destined for the unfinished second LP, before closing, wonderfully out of character, with a charging run through Chuck Berry's Memphis. Denny moves between voice, twelve-string guitar, and piano, Donahue's Telecaster threads silver lines through everything, and the rhythm section swings with a looseness the studio records only hint at.
Live recordings of Fotheringay are scarce, and surviving documents of Denny in performance scarcer still. With sleeve notes by Denny biographer Philip Ward, Essen 1970 stands as an essential supplement to the band's slim recorded legacy - the sound of one of the great voices of the century, suspended in the brief, bright moment she had made entirely her own.
