Stills and Collins: Everybody Knows (Sony)

In 1985 Julie Burchill, the brief champion of British punk, wrote a withering attack on the Eurythmics in Time Out.

She skewered the duo of Dave Stewart and Annie Lennox as hippies, and beige people who bleached out black artists.

She reserved her particular venom for Lennox who was “one minute insisting that sisters were doing it for themselves, the next collapsing into a heap of well-publicised tears and telling the world how much she relied on Her Man”.

Burchill also took task with Lennox's voice “always spoken of with crypto-religious reverence. People remark on its 'purity and 'clarity' – but really, who wants purity and clarity from a monster as big and brassy and beautiful as pop music? Clarity and purity are what you look for when you're shopping for olive oil. Someone who cried when [folk legend] Sandy Denny dies – that's the sort of person who likes Annie Lennox's voice.

“There are two main schools of chanteuserie: pure and dirty”.

Under her “pure” list was Lennox, Joan Baez, Joni Mitchell . . . and Judy Collins.

“These pure voices are much loved by wimps for the simple reason that they are so unthreatening, they are the voice of the female eunuch.”

And yes, there is no denying people frequently refer to the voice of Judy Collins – who sang traditional folk, had hits with Mitchell's Both Sides Now and Chelsea Morning, and had had a very long career since the Sixties – as pure.

That she should pair up with her former partner Stephen Stills is hardly a surprise. He wrote Suite: Judy Blue Eyes about her and it was a cornerstone song for Crosby Stills and Nash, a band admired for the purity of their harmonies.

It has taken a while for this to come around – both are now in their Seventies, she five years older than him – but the story of their lives is unfortunately more interesting than this album which came about through crowd funding.

We leave it over to the waspish Ms Burchill to note it isn't like these two people were broke.

The song choices are odd: the Wilburys' Handle With Care which doesn't really work but nudges her towards “rock”; Leonard Cohen and Sharon Robinson's Everybody Knows which lacks the apocalyptic tone Cohen brought to it; Tim Hardin's Reason to Believe which is melody by the numbers and quite passionless, and Dylan's Girl from the North Country which has been sung much better by many others.

Then there are their paeans to each other: him to her on Judy (originally written back in the late Sixties) and her to him on Houses (written by her in '75) which is perhaps the high point here with its lovey arrangement, alongside the gentle So Begins the Task.

Stills – one of the great rock guitarists – is sometimes let off the leash in a polite way.

In fact this sounds way too polite, although to expect something other than that might be a mistake.

It's a nice album.

Oh, and also here is Who Knows Where the Time Goes, written by another woman with a pure voice and the target of Burchill's wrath, Sandy Denny.

It – along with her own River of Gold – gets a very lovely treatment by Collins.

Pure you might say.