Not Fade Away 1967: Who Knows Where the Time Goes, Sandy Denny

Am I cheating? I think I might be cheating. It's possible this week's entry will have to be referred to the Not Fade Away Standards and Ethics committee (a particularly severe group of martinets; three parts Christian Grey, one part James Brown - you can imagine how messy their meetings get), because I've chosen a song, not a record. Can I get away with that?

It's not as if there aren't records to choose. I could easily have made it a hat trick for The Beatles for A Day in the Life or Strawberry Fields Forever in 1967. Or given the gong to LA band Love for Alone Again Or (the best argument for psychedlic rock if you ask me). Or Smokey for Tears of a Clown, or The Velvet Underground for the sonic adventure (and Boho subject matter) of Venus in Furs or Heroin, or even given Scotland the nod thanks to Lulu’s To Sir with Love, a beautifully polished post-Brill Building slice of pop (though if I'm honest I'd have to say I prefer the Trashcan Sinatras version of the song).

But no, I've gone for Who Knows Where the Time Goes, written and first recorded in 1967 though it would be another two years before the definitive version, recorded by its writer Sandy Denny with Fairport Convention, made it to vinyl. But the fact is, I can't wait. I want it now.

Denny wrote and recorded Who Knows Where the Time Goes when she was 20 years old. Let me say that again. She was 20 years old. Maybe you'd have to be that young to write a line like “I have no thought of time”.  And yet, it's a song that, as the title implies, knows all too well how quickly it passes. In short, it's a sad, gorgeous meditation on time and other thieves (as Joni Mitchell once said), sung in a voice pure and true.

Why do I like it so much? That voice perhaps. One of my problems with Fleetwood Mac's Christine McVie was always that her vocals seemed too clean for me. Denny's isn’t that different but maybe where McVie's singing has a cool, detached sheen, Denny's, whilst clear, is also rich in feeling. "This voice is bell-like, only bearing the faintest patina of an oor-aargh yodel, the voice of Tradition un-clotted by Style: unmistakeably, the voice of a human being, not a chunky jumper," Nick Coleman wrote in the NME IN 1986.

I am a relatively recent, slightly reluctant, convert to the pleasures of folk music. For far too long the very word folk conjured up cliched images in my head of goatees and Arran jumpers, and what my dad used to call "kamalye singers". (It took me years to realise he was saying "come-all-ye".)

Folk was rural. Pop music was urban. Pop represented the present and the future, folk meant the past and I was never that interested in the past.

As you get older, though, the past becomes where you increasingly spend your time in your head and maybe the tone and texture of folk music begins to make more sense. And so I have been opened up to folk's pleasures, simple and bucolic as they may be.

And anyway, I reckon that Who Knows Where the Time Goes is quite simply one of the most beautiful songs I've ever heard. It is one of two songs that will appear in Not Fade Away that I want played at my funeral (the other one won't turn up until the late 1990s).

It went through a number of versions after Denny's simple, stark demo. She recorded a version with the Strawbs in 1967 as well, a sweet, ever so slightly fussy version that may suffer for me simply because it's not the version I’m most familiar with. Judy Collins in the US heard the song and recorded it in 1968 and a year later Denny, by then a member of the folk rock supergroup (a phrase that would once have had me running screaming to the hills), Fairport Convention recorded the version I first heard some time in the nineties. 

Music exists for a number of reasons. But the main one, I've always thought, is for dancing to. But sometimes it can be something you listen to in the dark, in silence. When I hear this I don't think about Denny's tragically early death in 1978. I don't think of what might have been if alcohol and irrationality hadn't sideswiped her. I think about beauty and how a voice can change your place in the world. And I think without time maybe there is no beauty. It's only the fact that it will be lost that makes us prize it so greatly.

Other Contenders

Waterloo Sunset, The Kinks

A Day in the Life, The Beatles

Strawberry Fields Forever, The Beatles

The Look of Love, Dusty Springfield

Respect, Aretha Franklin

Alone Again Or, Love

Venus in Furs, The Velvet Underground

Heroin, The Velvet Underground

Tears of a Clown, Smokey Robinson & The Miracles

Brown Eyed Girl, Van Morrison

White Rabbit, Jefferson Airplane

To Sir with Love, Lulu

Pleasant Valley Sunday, The Monkees

By the Time I Get to Phoenix, Glen Campbell

The First Cut is the Deepest, PP Arnold

Best-selling UK single of 1967 - Release Me, Engelbert Humperdinck