The North Star Grassman and The Ravens

The classic status of Sandy Denny's first solo album is assured, and the recent archival activity surrounding her career – including the 19-CD set and release of the aborted Fotheringay 2 album that immediately preceded Grassman – means that her profile as one of the great British singers and songwriters of the rock era, is more prominent than perhaps it has ever been.

Recorded in the spring of 1971, the Grassman sessions featured a dozen musicians, including Richard Thompson on most of the tracks, the Dransfield brothers, Trevor Lucas and the rest of the Fotheringay line-up, and string arrangements from Harry Robinson.

Though the album was remastered back in 2005 with four extra tracks, here we get a whole new CD of demos, BBC sessions, and BBC ‘In Concert’ recordings – recorded, it seems, with a hand-held mic directed at a 1970s transistor radio. Though fidelity is low on some of those live captures, the atmosphere is as rich and strange as Denny's magical songs. Alas, there's no sign of her cover of the Stones’ ‘Honky Tonk Woman’ (imagine her voice sandblasting that one right through the studio wall), but the unaccompanied ‘Lord Bateman’ (there's also an instrumental-only version), and live versions of ‘Lowlands of Holland’ and ‘Bruton Town’ are real gems. If you‘re a completist, you’ll have the 19-CD set already, which includes all these extras, bar the instrumental ‘Lord Bateman’; for those who have the original album, or even the 2005 remaster, this deluxe edition is worth snapping up for the time-travelling delights of those radio broadcasts whistling and hissing their way out of the 1970s time-warp.