Fantasy Jukebox - 4. Fairport Convention - Who Knows Where The Time Goes

Imagine a fantasy jukebox that contained all the most influential, innovative, adventurous and just plain great music since the dawn of the recording era. OK, so the likes of iTunes, YouTube and Spotify have made this more of a reality than a fantasy, but setting aside their rather indiscriminating presence, what should it include?

Continuing a series exploring some of the key musical statements of the recording era, Matthew Vizard picks a totemic modern folk-rock standard.

4. Fairport Convention - Who Knows Where The Time Goes (1969, Island Records) Writer: Sandy Denny

Where a voice like Sandy Denny's arrives from is an enchanting mystery. In simple genetic terms, her gift can be traced back to her grandmother, a Scot, who was a singer of traditional song; but its rare ethereal beauty suggests it can only be sourced from some mythical musical wellspring from where only those with the most ageless, spectral power are lifted.

That siren call is showcased on Denny's signature song, which became a talismanic work for the progressive folk movement of the late sixties, early seventies and way beyond.

Denny first recorded Who Knows Where The Time Goes in 1967 when she was 20; a version with The Strawbs was trialled during her brief tenure with them, but not released until several years later.

Judy Collins, who had also provided some early exposure for Joni Mitchell's songs, recorded it on her album of the same name in '68. It's a lovely, pure reading, but it is Denny's 1969 version with Faiport Convention on the band's Unhalfbricking album that was, and will always remain, the definitive version.

This was the pre-classic Fairport line-up of Denny, Richard Thompson, Ashley Hutchings, Simon Nicol and Martin Lamble, on the cusp of their folk-rock creative breakthrough: Later that same year, enabled by the addition of Dave Swarbrick and Dave Mattacks after the tragic death of Lamble, they would bunker down in the legendary house in Farley Chamberlayne and record the still astonishing Liege And Lief.

Accompanied by Richard Thompson's fluid guitar lines and a restrained rhythm section of drums, bass and acoustic guitar, Who Knows Where The Time Goes' wistful melancholy provides it with an aptly timeless quality.

It is, in many ways, an extraordinary song for a 20-year-old to have written, beholden as it is with ancient metaphysical lyrical themes - most obviously the unfathomability of love and the passing of time; but also nature, the seasons, the land and sea.

These themes would become familiar totems of folk's re-emergence from rock's hedonistic adolescence. The turn of the new decade would see rock forking in one direction towards the more fantastical elements of the nascent prog rock, and in the other towards a rediscovery of latent musical forms and a craving for simpler, more pastoral values.

But while Who Knows Where The Time Goes provided something of a blueprint for born again folkies; the song stands alone - too authentic to be linked with the hippy-ish contrivances of the progressive era, far removed as it is from the Tolkein-inspired fripperies of fairytale lands and weird woodland creatures.

Consider for a moment the notion of a 20-year-old in 1967 writing a line like "Sad, deserted shore, your fickle friends are leaving/Ah, but then you know it's time for them to go", while most British 20-year-olds were lapping up the psychedelic daydreams of Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, and you get a sense of Denny's natural poetic presence.

Like her contemporary, Nick Drake, Denny seemed out of time; a somewhat uncomfortable beacon for a new British music that was ultimately too fleeting and phantasmal to harness.

Her other work with Fairport, Fotheringay, and solo, offers many more examples of her gifts, making her 1978 death (from a brain hemorrhage after a fall) all the more desperately poignant.

Denny's masterpiece, together with Unhalfbricking's tour de force take on the traditional A Sailor's Life, helped forge a brave new world for British folk music. Respectful of the past and the music's traditions, it nevertheless offered an advancement of the art form.

As British folk music enjoys its latest revival, and US artists such as Fleet Foxes, Davendra Banhart and Joanna Newsom sing its praises; Denny's signature song is a continued reminder and reaffirmation of its bewitching charms, its immortality and invincibility.