Laurence Sandfield

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Laurence “Sandy” Sandfield, 5th, was a British fan active in the 1950s. An early UK filker, he wrote the filk songbook Songs from Space.

Archie Mercer, writing in Excelsior #3 described Sandfield's performance at Cytricon III in 1957:

Sandy ... is a London Circleite who digs trad jazz and plays guitar in espresso bars and places. Sings, too. Eric Jones recorded an hourlong concert of his playing one of the three nights – I forget which – and when it was played back later I stood glued to the tape-recorder until it was finished – although I'd heard the original. Sandy specialises in blues and folk-songs generally, usually with a Transatlantic bias – a style of playing that is very popular in this country these days, and for which we have borrowed the term "skiffle" to describe it. Sandy, being an sf fan, has attempted to adapt the medium to sf-based themes, such as spacemen's songs of home and the like, with varying success depending on how starry the listener's eyes can get. Personally, I prefer his 'London Circle Woman' with a bright twelve-bar chorus for virtually every one of the Globe Tavern's regular female denizens of a Thursday evening – and I can think of a dozen or so more off hand, so he's plenty of material to choose from.

He appeared in costume at the London Eastercon in 1960 as Rhysling, the bard from Robert A. Heinlein’s “The Green Hills of Earth.”

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