Sandy Denny – Gold Dust: Live at the Royalty – The Final Concert
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Posted On August 1, 1998
Sandy Denny possessed a truly singular voice. To her, it was both a gift and a burden. She spent her 31 years seeking companionship; from her parents, her bandmates, her lovers, her daughter, anyone who could buffer her intense shyness and insecurity. But despite her best attempts, Denny lived a loner’s life.
Her loneliness informs her entire career, from her earliest recordings with the Johnny Silvo Folk Group, to this, her last concert performance at the Royalty in London, November 27, 1977. Even in her genre-galvanizing days with Fairport Convention, Denny’s warm yet crystalline voice betrayed her crippling solitude. She was the high lonesome queen of the olde world.
Gold Dust was recorded five months before Denny’s death. Her life was a mess. Her alcoholism was worsening, her marriage was falling apart, and her frightening proclivity for falling down stairs was on the rise (a brain hemorrhage resulting from one of these falls ultimately killed her). But none of these things, or the chain-smoking she was given to, could penetrate that voice of hers. It isn’t as keening as it was on her Fairport recordings, but it still soars like a siren and cuts cleanly through the uninspired, hired-hand accompaniment of her band on this date.
The Gold Dust set list reads like a Denny greatest hits package, including a lilting, almost nostalgic rendering of “Who Knows Where The Time Goes”, an impassioned “John The Gun”, and most affectingly, a fragile, disconsolate take on “The Sea”. Like all of Denny’s work, Gold Dust is infused with the longing that cursed and blessed her. Knowing that her longing was cut short only months later, this set is, at times, almost too poignant to bear.
