40 years ago

Day	Month	Year	Artist
6	Nov	1970	Heron
12	Nov	1971	Al Stewart
16	Nov	1975	Richard and Linda Thompson
17	Nov	1976	National Health
6	Nov	1977	Sandy Denny

Above are extracts from the concert log which I used to maintain in the old days, when I went to concerts. The first and last entries are the most interesting, coincidentally on the same date. 

I've written about Heron and this concert before: it was a promotional tour, selling tickets for one old penny! I very much enjoyed their set, which persuaded me to buy their eponymous album (I listen to it to this day and still enjoy it very much). It was this concert which weaned me off rock acts such as Ten Years After; I was much more content to listen to this 'wooden music'.

The last concert on the list is the last time I had the pleasure of seeing Sandy Denny in her brief life. I know that there are plenty of fans who never saw her appear at all, so I should be thankful that I saw her three times - once with Fotheringay, once with Fairport and once on her own (well, with a supporting band of five musicians). To be honest, I remember almost nothing of the music, but fortunately some of the concerts on this tour were recorded; many many years later, we were treated to a cd of one of them. My name appears in the credits of this disc, which was very kind of the producers. My contribution was to send them a copy of my ticket (which was not for the date which was recorded) and an advert for an earlier Sandy record - none of which found their way into the final booklet. I admit that this is not a disc that I listen to - Sandy's voice had almost completely gone by this time.

This concert is also memorable for a more personal reason: I invited a girl to go out with me to this concert and she accepted. I don't remember whether this girl has ever crossed the pages of this blog so I had better introduce her; we had met about a month earlier at the inaugural meeting of the Jewish Society at my university. It turned out that she was in the new intake of my degree course whereas I was a final year student, so we had more than a few things in common. She also didn't live too far from me, in Swiss Cottage, which was a brisk 40 minute walk for me.

The memory which stands out about this girl (for whom I wrote the song 'M') was when I invited her about a month later to the communal house for our Chanuka party. The next morning I phoned her, asking whether she enjoyed herself; we proceeded to have a half-hour chat which left me slightly bemused. I remember saying to someone that her tone was far more friendly than it should have been. A minute later, M phoned and apologised: she thought she had been talking to someone else! Our relationship lasted only about another month, mainly because we had less in common that it might have seemed at first.