Josienne Clarke is currently touring “Across The Evening Sky: Josienne Clarke Sings The Songs Of Sandy Denny”. Danny Neill catches up with Josienne to chat about Sandy Denny and Josienne’s own solo journey.
The music of Sandy Denny came into the world of Josienne Clarke early when, aged seventeen, she was performing ‘Lily Of The West’ on the folk sing-around circuit and someone told her “you sound a bit like Sandy Denny.” As she recalls during this KLOF Mag interview about her current show performing Sandy Denny music, the comparison prompted her to go and find “my spirit music basically. Everything from that, The Strawbs, Fairport Convention, Sandy’s solo records and her contemporaries at the time like Pentangle, was a thick vein of great music. Sandy was weirdly contemporary and old fashioned at the same time; she plays with time weirdly. Even now it still sounds contemporary and old-fashioned and that kind of appealed to me, like she’s stranded in the wrong century, and I feel a bit like that myself.” This statement prompts an enquiry into what century Josienne feels she belongs to. “The Edwardian era maybe? Something with a bigger dress!”
Speaking as someone whose relationship with Sandy Denny’s music stretches back nearly thirty years and being a long-term admirer of Josienne Clarke too, I have to say there are strong ties that bind them together; I suspect those enduring songs are in the right hands with this tour. Not only is there a similarity in melancholia between the two, but there is also a strong fighting spirit uniting them, as does a playful self-effacing humour and a dark gothic timbre. Our conversation takes place at an exciting time for Josienne, at roughly the midway point of her tour and with an album of new songs just announced for the autumn, which she says is “the only time I’ve left it to be only guitar and voice”, for now though I am keen to dig further into her relationship with the music of Sandy Denny and attempt to place it all in an overall context of her ever evolving career to date.
On your ‘Now And Then’ release, you took a lesser-known Sandy Denny song as the title track and included a very Sandy-esque version of ‘Reynardine,’ were they the seeds of the current live project?
I’ve been singing Sandy Denny covers for my whole career since I found all of that music, but I guess when I was younger, I didn’t want to be known as that girl who sings Sandy Denny. People seemed to like it, it would be popular, and I would love doing it, but I also wanted to be Josienne Clarke first and foremost. Also, I feel that those songs are so important to people that you can’t mess it up. Perhaps being a little bit older, learning a lot of lessons about what to do, what not to do and how to handle that stuff and also with more life experience, I can carry those songs in a way that perhaps I couldn’t when I was 28 or whatever.
When you first discovered Sandy was that your starting point for a deep dive into that late sixties, early seventies scene in general?
Yes, I’ve never really left that search; I’m still finding things today. But both as a singer and as a songwriter, her singing is like weirdly classical and not, it can sound really formal, and it can take on a floaty jazz tinge here and there and that not having to sit in one genre or another appealed to me as well. Then songwriting, it’s the same, she’s folky, but it’s not really folk music, it’s a hundred other things as well.
Sandy Denny told the NME in 1971 that she preferred working with a band; she said, “A band can flesh out ideas better than I can alone at a piano or guitar”. Is that something that you can echo?
Yes, I mean I love playing solo just me and a guitar but there is something about on record, like if you write the songs well enough, which Sandy definitely did, they contain an entire universe, they contain fifteen different ways you could arrange them and I feel that when I’ve written my songs well enough. For example ‘Silverline’ when I first released that it had a chamber orchestra and that sounds beautiful, then more recently it’s got loads of electronic keyboards and electronic guitar and stuff and I think that is certainly true of Sandy Denny’s music, beautiful just one woman and a piano but they could have an entire orchestra or a huge rock band. They could take anything, and that’s a testament to the quality of how they’re written.
Do you think that with Sandy, she was just sometimes more comfortable with people around her? There’s a live recording where she refers to the piano as her friend or enemy, and she seemed quite willing to share with an audience how nervous she was sometimes.
Yes, and I think that’s hugely relatable, and I have a similar relationship to my guitar playing. I’m not so much playing the guitar as trying to tame it. I’ve read a lot of the biographies where they talk about her being a nervous performer, and I feel that there is a comfort that comes from a band, and I’m certainly finding that now. This band is probably the largest band I have played with on a tour before. It definitely feels like this lovely bed of sound that you could float on top of, and I can see why she would want that. But I feel that it’s a shame that she felt like that about her on her own, because she was more than enough. I love those demo recordings; I love the versions that are just her and a piano, and I’ve tried in the arrangements to really strip it back down and asked people, “don’t play for this verse”, etc.
What was behind your decision to do this tour with a band? Was it because you felt that was what the music needed, or more so you could focus just on the singing?
I think it was a combination of things. Personally, they are hard songs to sing, and I consider myself to be a reasonably good singer, but I have to work hard. They’re not easy, you can’t just chuck that stuff out, there’s lots of vocal technique required, and I don’t want to be stilted or held back by having to think about a guitar or a piano or any of that, so it’s partly that. Also, those songs are so rich with texture, and I’d like to explore all of the textures that you can get from her. A woman came to the gig the other day and she had no idea who Sandy Denny was, she didn’t know any of her music and she was like “oh I love the bits where it gets really rocky” and I thought, oh that’s interesting that you feel that it goes into a really strident, heavy rock sound. How great that you can do that, and then there’s ‘Fotheringay’ where the bass player just goes off.
Richard Thompson told me for KLOF Mag that he regrets getting Sandy to do a couple of rock ‘n’ roll covers on her early album because he subsequently believed her records should have been entirely her compositions, but he did it to break up the tempo because she could get locked into quite an introspective, melancholy one-pace mode. I would venture to suggest that you might have the same kind of issue. Is it fair to say your default mode is quite melancholy?
Yes, before I do my last song I often say “so this barrage of misery is almost over” because it does feel sometimes that it’s just ballad after ballad and you think you can’t get any sadder and you can’t get any slower, but to be fair to my audience they do seem to like it. An interesting piece of feedback from the gigs is that lots of people really like the ballads, that’s what they’re coming to hear and I feel, as the consumer of Sandy Denny’s music, that she doesn’t have one perfect album and I feel like she had bad advice for the tracklisting for her albums. I understand there are all these commercial pulls at the time, she’s trying to tip over into being more well known and I understand that I’m not judging but like on ‘Like An Old Fashioned Waltz’, if she’d just left some of the other stuff and committed to the thing that it was it would have been devastating and I don’t think it would have been less popular.
In the shows you’re doing, amongst other classics, ‘Reynardine’ & ‘The Sea,’ are you also doing any lesser well-known songs?
I’m trying to do a mixed bag in terms of tempo and spanning the records, so we’re doing stuff like ‘Autopsy’, ‘Late November’ and ‘Next Time Around’, so those ones don’t get as much airtime. ‘Now And Then’ I already had a go at covering that, and that never really got its day on her records, it’s more of a sort of buried demo, so we do that one, and it goes down particularly well. Every night, I get suggestions of ones that we should do, like people want to hear ‘Banks Of The Nile’, and I will start mixing in other ones, but we had two rehearsals before we got this tour on the road. I had my set of songs, and I wasn’t going to make anyone do any more, but we’re really up and running now, so maybe I could start to mix in others. I’d like to do ‘Milk And Honey’, which isn’t her own song, but it also gets requested.
Josienne Clarke at The Live Room, Saltaire:
I feel that ‘In All Weather’, your 2019 album, was a requiem for your duo years [Josienne left a long-term musical duo set-up in 2018], whereas 2021’s ‘A Small Unknowable Thing’ is a lot punchier, like you were ready to move forward?
At the time, ‘In All Weather’ felt like a really bold statement, and when I listen back to it now, I think, Jesus, that person is broken, I can’t quite bear to listen to it. Gosh, that’s quite sad. Whereas with ‘A Small Unknowable Thing’, I was building it back up.
[At this point, one of my daughters briefly interrupts the interview by trying to phone me, so I ask Josienne,] How do you, as a fairly new parent yourself, manage to juggle that responsibility with making enough room for creative space in your life?
It is quite hard, and I guess I knew it would be, and, in some ways, perhaps leaving doing that until later in my life in some sense makes it easier because I am very comfortable with my creative rhythm. Lots of people worry that they’ll never write another good song, and I never really feel like that anymore. I know that it will appear in the spaces that I give it. I don’t have as many spaces anymore, but it will find a way and I do find a way. My mum looks after him when we’re on tour, and I’m very lucky to have that resource because I wouldn’t be able to do it without her. But also, it gives your life this other dimension that’s more important than all of the tittle tattle that goes with that. So yes, I’m busy, I’m so busy and so tired, but I’m also full in all these joyous ways as well.
I mean, you’re very prolific, aren’t you? You’re getting a physical product out pretty much every year in addition to all the touring and live work. Is that a reflection on the freedom you’ve enjoyed since going solo?
Yes, I used to work really, really hard, I used to work against the tide, and I’m now working with it. It’s a testament to what you can achieve without a millstone around your neck. I never minded working hard, it’s who I’m working for.
Sandy would often navigate around revealing too much personal stuff in her lyrics by writing little character portraits of clergy or seafaring folk, whereas I sense that your work is a little less guarded, you seem to put it all out there, is that fair?
I understand the temptation for people to hide behind a character, and no one does it better than her. Actually, on the album I’m just doing, I’ve got more of that and slightly less ‘me songs’. I mean the single will come out and you’ll be like “that’s classic Josienne Clarke,” you know it’s sinister, sad and also like weirdly violent – classic me – but there are some other songs on that record where I’m a little further back. I’m having a thought about a thing here, and there’s less turgid me at the front of it. I’ve really enjoyed that about this writing process and feel like it’s just a question of time and where I was, and perhaps, I’m a little calmer. Able to think and hypothesise rather than express.
Do you feel it’s important to counterbalance your introspection by showing people that you can laugh at yourself? I’m thinking about the video to ‘Chicago’ where there’s a joke about sending the audience to sleep. Many performers would not be prepared to laugh at themselves like that.
A live show of mine is a strange combination of sad songs and sarcasm, where most of the songs are cut between me being reverent about the songs and irreverent about myself outside of them. I feel it’s important, in a live sense, for your audience to relax in between the songs; you’re asking a lot of them to be in a heightened state, I need to relax, and they need to relax, so let’s be a bit silly between the songs. That is an important balance; I want to take music really seriously, but I don’t want to take myself really seriously. I am doing less that with the Sandy Denny tour because it’s not me, they’re not my songs, but when I played Kings Place, one of her long-term friends, Bambi Ballard, came along. She said “Sandy was really funny, you can let that be like that” and it was such a great piece of feedback because I could just relax and perform in the way that I do, which is to take the songs incredibly seriously, commit to them and be in them and just be a fallible human being.
What kind of people are attending the shows? Are they your fans or old Fairport heads?
My fans are coming because this is a thing that they like to hear me do, but there are a fair number of people who are there because they love Sandy Denny songs; you don’t get that much opportunity to hear a whole evening of them live. Obviously, there are the Sandy Denny projects and stuff, but it’s not something that everybody’s doing very often. I had one, at the last gig down in Whitstable, there was a guy at the merch stand and he didn’t have the courage to say this to me, he said it to my husband Alec, he said “I came along thinking this will be funny, this will be shit”. He said he had no idea who I was, he was just saying “I love Sandy Denny songs but this will be rubbish but fair play, she’s having a go” but then he was like “oh my, it was one of the best gigs I’ve ever been to, in general, not just of Sandy Denny things” so I think, well that’s a massive win isn’t it?
Oh yes, I’m looking forward to it too, do you think there’s more life beyond this tour? Could you carry this on further?
I was going to see what the appetite was for it; I think personally, I am happy to keep on doing it alongside my own songs. I’m not going to stop doing my own songs because that’s what I am about. I’ll do those records and do those gigs, but if there’s an appetite for this to continue into the future, I’ll just keep on doing it until people don’t want to hear it anymore. From the reception so far, I don’t think they are going to tire; people seem to love those songs, and they don’t get tired of them. This tour runs until the end of June, and then I’ve basically got the summer off, but I’ll be announcing a tour for the launch of my next own record. That will be me playing my own songs, and then my agent’s looking into 2026 and beyond for more Sandy Denny things. I’m hoping that I’ll get some festivals next year for it. It would be a nice festival headliner if I could convince anyone of that.
Finally, what can we expect from the brand new Josienne Clarke album that is ready to go?
I crowdfunded for this record, because ‘Parenthisis, I’ cost me thirty thousand pounds to make and that’s not even a particularly expensive way to make a record but that is what it cost; this time I have to do something a bit cheaper because I haven’t made all my money back from that yet. So, a friend of mine, Murray Collier, a Scottish sound engineer who works at La Chunky in Glasgow, owns and can use an analogue tape machine. So, we hired a little cabin in the highlands of Scotland and went for a week. I had some rough ideas of the songs, and we took a guitar and a couple of keyboard bits, and we were going to release what we came out with at the end of that week. It’s a little stripping back, lo-fi little record, very different to some of the things I’ve done, basically my ‘Nebraska.’
Springsteen never meant to release that as it was just a demo, but then he felt he couldn’t improve upon it. Is that how you feel? Have you captured what you were looking for?
It’s lovely; it’s got little string buzzes; it’s got tape noise, and it’s all atmospheric and unpolished, but it’s still what you’d want from a record of me. Very clear but with all these other sounds, lots of sort of presence in it.
Josienne recently announced her new album Far From Nowhere, due out this autumn via Corduroy Punk. The the first single ‘Tiny Bird’s Lament’, is out now.
The album will be accompanied by a short film titled Deluded (see trailer below), directed by Alec Bowman_Clarke, offering a candid, behind-the-scenes portrait of the album’s creation. Currently screening at festivals, the film will be shown throughout Clarke’s UK tour this October – full dates now announced – before its general release on November 30th.
Josienne Clarke Sings The Songs Of Sandy Denny (Upcoming Tour Dates)
Thursday, 15th May 2025 – Barnard Castle, The Witham
Friday, 16th May 2025 – Newcastle, Gosforth Civic Centre
Tuesday, 10th June 2025 – Exeter, The Phoenix
Wednesday, 11th June 2025 – Penzanze, The Acorn
Thursday, 12th June 2025 – Dorchester, Dorchester Arts Centre
Friday, 13th June 2025 – Dursley, Prema Arts Centre
Saturday, 14th June 2025 – Stamford, Arts Centre
Thursday, 26th June 2025 – Cardiff, Acapela Studio
Friday, 27th June 2025 – Cambridge, The Junction
‘Far From Nowhere‘ Album Launch Tour Dates
Saturday, 18th October 2025 – London, Bush Hall
Sunday, 19th October 2025 – Worcester, Huntingdon Hall
Friday, 14th November 2025 – Liverpool, Philharmonic Room
Thursday, 27th November 2025 – Skipton, Skipton Town Hall
Friday, 28th November 2025 – Newcastle, Alphabetti Theatre
Tickets: https://josienneclarke.com/live/