The Guardian Unlimited says of Judee Sill: “Brilliant and bewitching, she could have been the most famous singer-songwriter of the Seventies. But Judee Sill was different from her Californian peers … For the first time, Barney Hoskyns reveals the story of death, drugs, Bach and bisexuality behind an unjustly neglected talent.”

‘Out of the mud a lotus grows …’ Judee Sill liked to talk in flowery metaphors, often with a veiled religious tinge to them. Visiting England in the spring of 1972, she offered the mud/lotus image to a New Musical Express reporter as a way of explaining how beauty could stem from deep squalor.

Squalor she certainly knew about. Presented by David Geffen’s Asylum label as the archetypal singer-songwriter of the period - all flaxen hair and acoustic guitar - Sill’s background differed markedly from those of her navel-gazing peers.

While Joni Mitchell and her willowy sisters worked their way round the folk circuits of Greenwich Village, Judee was in reform school in Ventura, California. While Joni was warbling of Chelsea mornings in Manhattan, Judee was being arrested for stick-up jobs in the corner stores of LA’s San Fernando Valley, driven to such desperate measures by a $150-a-day heroin habit.
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