All Our Own Work

“I met Sandy Denny at the Troubadour in Earl’s Court in late 1966,” Strawbs vocalist, guitarist, and banjoist David Cousins said. “I dropped in late one night to hear an angel singing. Sandy was sitting on a stool, wearing a white dress, a straw hat, and playing a Gibson Hummingbird guitar. When she came off stage, I introduced myself and asked if she fancied joining a group. ‘Who are you?’ she said. ‘Strawbs,’ I replied. ‘OK,’ she said. I went to the pay phone and called Tony Hooper to tell him we had a girl singer.”

Sandy Denny & the Strawbs were booked across the North Sea for a fortnight, with an option to record what would be their only album. The quartet spent days in a makeshift studio set up on the theatrical stage of Vanløse Bio, breaking down the Tandberg three-track reel-to-reel in time for the movie theater’s evening screenings before heading off to their nightly gig. In all, a dozen original songs were set down, including Denny’s recently completed “Who Knows Where The Time Goes.” From the moment Sandy Denny hesitantly delivered her original “Across the purple sky...” lyric, the song took wing toward canonization. But the world would wait another two years before hearing it, on Fairport Convention’s 1969 masterpiece Unhalfbricking. Only after four more subsequent years did the Copenhagen recordings come to light. All Our Own Work hit the marketplace midway through 1973 on budget imprint Hallmark in a cheap sleeve with brief, offhand notes from Cousins and fell out of print by the end of the decade. This 2014 vinyl issue collects the original 12 track album, plus a series of outtakes from the Vanløse Bio sessions previously unavailable on vinyl.