Sandy Denny Tribute, The Troubadour, London

This evening's tribute show at the Troubadour, as Joe Boyd later points out, should really be filling the country's biggest halls, Sandy Denny was that great. But it does make sense. Denny started singing here in 1967, travelling up from Kingston art college to perform her own songs, and virtually everyone in music has passed through the venue's doors. It's the Rick's Bar of folk and Sixties rock: Tim Buckley, Rod Stewart, Plant and Page, Joni Mitchell, Bob Dylan and Paul Simon have all performed here. And those are just the really famous ones.

The night opens with the Flemish singer Linde Nijland, who learnt Denny's songs from her father's records, and her opening, a cappella "A Sailor's Life" is smooth and intimate. She goes unplugged for Denny's signature song, "Who Knows Where the Time Goes" (the second tune she ever wrote, and the first she showed to anyone), and though Nijland's voice doesn't carry the way Denny's could, you get that prickly, intimate sense, sans mic, of the singer sharing the same air as the rest of us.

A three-way conversation between Denny's producer Boyd, fellow singer Linda Thompson and the poet Karl Dallas kicks off with Thompson puncturing any resident male pomposity by remembering "being down here and saying to Sandy, 'I'm going out with that Joe Boyd,' and she said: 'That's funny, so am I...' We both found it hysterically funny."

Alas, Thompson isn't singing, although her youngest daughter Kamila takes the last set of the night with her three-piece band. Martin Carthy delivers a superb four-song set of traditional songs, featuring the likes of "The Deserter" and "Sir Patrick Spens". He not only has an encyclopaedic knowledge of all this stuff, but such a weird sense of time and phrasing in the interplay between voice and guitar that each song sounds fresh minted.

Vikki Clayton has built a career out of Denny's repertoire, and picks three of her big solo numbers, including the intense "Solo" and the skipping rhythms of "Like an Old-Fashioned Waltz", but the ears and the tail must go to Lisa Knapp, the young London-based singer who gives thrilling performances of "Blackwaterside" and a heartstopping "The Quiet Joys of Brotherhood", one of those big songs you can almost walk around. Denny would have stubbed out her fag for that one.

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