I've Always Kept a Unicorn tells the story of Sandy Denny, one of the
greatest British singers of her time and the first female
singer-songwriter to produce a substantial and enduring body of original
songs. Sandy Denny laid down the marker for folk-rock when she joined
Fairport Convention in 1968, but her music went far beyond this during
the seventies. After leaving Fairport she formed Fotheringay, whose
influential eponymous album was released in 1970, before collaborating
on a historic one-off recording with Led Zeppelin - the only other
vocalist to record with Zeppelin in their entire career - and releasing
four solo albums across the course of the decade. Her tragic and
untimely death came in 1978.
Sandy emerged from the folk scene of the sixties -- a world of
larger-than-life characters such as Alex Campbell, Jackson C. Frank,
Anne Briggs and Australian singer Trevor Lucas, whom she married in
1973. Their story is at the core of Sandy's later life and work, and is
told with the assistance of more than sixty of her friends, fellow
musicians and contemporaries, one of whom, to paraphrase McCartney on
Lennon, observed that she sang like an angel but was no angel.