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We had a fabulous time at the Union Chapel in London in November and there are more gigs in the pipeline with the John Martyn Project, who were lovely as well as being outstanding musicians.

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DATES

See the live page for forthcoming dates - lots coming in now! We're doing a good number of festivals this summer as well as a tour of the north of England and the south coast. For those in the midlands, we are playing at Huntingdon Hall in Worcester on June 6th, and for those in far flung Norfolk we are appearing at the Folk on the Pier Festival in Cromer in May. All dates and festivals are on the live page.

 

If you know a venue near you which would like to book us (so we can dedicate the performance to you!) please let us know. We'd love to play wherever there are fans of Sandy's music. You can email us at thesandydennyproject@gmail.com or fill in the contact form here.

 

Live Album - SDP 2

The album is nearly here!! It includes lots of new tracks which all the band members have chosen as their favourites.

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Thanks for all your love and support so far.

All love

Sally, Marion, Gemma, Mark, Mat and PJ

xxx

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From Mick Donovan:

'Just inspired by a perfect weekend to express the below….

The voice of Sandy Denny will always transport me to another place deep within. The voice an improvement on that of any angel. She remains the only singer who has that effect. The outward signs are tears seeping from the ducts in my eyes.

And her songs are the perfect vehicle for it.

The combination is the nearest we beings get to musical perfection.

To hear and see Sandy Denny live will always be among my treasured memories.

Since that has not been possible to repeat for 44 years, it has been left to interpreters of her muse.

And the best I have ever heard got those tears seeping at the Byfield Village Hall on Saturday, 30 April 2022.

Sandy performed to an audience for the last time on the same stage - and there's a blue plaque hanging outside the building a few hundred yards from her home in The Thwistles to commemorate that date, 1st April 1978.

And the six-piece treading the same boards - the Sandy Denny Project - sung and played their hearts out to try and echo that performance.

Their music wafted around the room packed with around 200 believers on green plastic chairs and up into the rafters like a magic feelgood potion to mix and float with the one Sandy conjured up on 1st April 1978.

I think it was current folkie and Denny acolyte Rachel Unthank who underlined the degree of difficulty in reaching anywhere near the level of Sandy Denny's singing. Unthank was quoted in Mick Houghton's Denny biography I've Always Kept A Unicorn biography saying: “Don’t listen to her! You’ll realise the rest of us are wasting our time.”

But someone has to keep Sandy's music alive. It makes the world a better place.

And Sally Barker (vocals, guitar), Marion Fleetwood (vocals, violin), Anna Ryder (vocal, keyboards, banjo and brass) and PJ Wright (lead guitar) led the band out front, with Mat Davies (bass) and Mark Stevens (drums) giving it a firm foundation.

It began with Listen, Listen, via The Lady and Fotheringay, with Sally, Marion and Anna taking turns on empathetic lead vocal. And the trio combined acapella on Quiet Joys of Brotherhood. The band rocked out on Matty Groves, jazzed it up for Until the Real Thing Comes Along

And it encored with Solo and the greatest song ever written in my book, Who Knows Where The Time Goes?, with Sandy's daughter Georgia Rose watching and listening from Australia via Facebook thanks to Marion's smart phone.

The intimacy of the gig smacked of understatement. It was a community ‘do’, not a turbo-charged, high-profile promotion.

The SD Project even sold their own merch. Sally Barker leapt from the stage moments after performing beautiful Quiet Joys of Brotherhood to serve me a SandyFest t-shirt and a signed poster during the interval, telling me Anna Ryder dealt with card transactions! The band were also their own roadies. The Project were merely trying to save what money they could after only recently returning to playing live. Sally Barker described it as a "cottage industry".

A group performing some of the best songs ever written by the best singer of all time would deserve the biggest of stages, but it was fitting that this one was in a village hall a few hundred yards from where Sandy Denny lived and sung her last note to a crowd.

My partner and I visited that house the following day. And completed the perfect weekend by walking around the cow-occupied site in a nearby village which in August would stage the annual Fairport's Cropredy Convention where the headline act consistently perform the music of Sandy, once a member, often with the assistance from members of the Project.

Roll on 2024 when the Project return to the Hall for the next SandyFest.’