No More Sad Refrains: The Life and Times of Sandy Denny

by Clinton Heylin

  Sometime shortly after their weekend rendezvous, Boyd was obliged to return to the States for a few weeks, to attend the annual Newport Folk Festival. Meanwhile, Dave Cousins continued to shop the ‘finished’ Sandy & the Strawbs album around a number of UK labels. Polydor had expressed an interest, but when they heard an actual test pressing, they decided its crude production values were no longer acceptable. Cousins believes, “they wanted us to re-record it, and Sandy said, ‘Oh no’.” If the prospect of rerecording the album was unpalatable, so was Cousins’ alternative, a return to the world of budget, corner-cutting labels. Sandy passed again.*

  Dave Cousins: In the end I ended up at Major Minor, ‘cause they had the hits with the Dubliners and so on, and Major Minor said, “This is wonderful, we want to sign it,” and Sandy said “Over my dead body! I really can’t stand the idea of that lot.” Somehow she’d heard they weren’t quite what she wanted to be with. I was bitterly hurt at the time.

  Quite possibly, Sandy’s sights had been set somewhat higher by her brief taste of the world of Joe Boyd. It seems likely that a series of conversations they had upon Boyd’s return from Newport had a direct bearing on her decision to nix the release of Sandy & The Strawbs, electing to return to the boards solo.

  Joe Boyd: [Later] in that summer she handed me this white label pressing, which was different from the eventual release, the whole running order, but it was the memory of the test-pressing that led to me reconfiguring Sandy & The Strawbs [on CD] … During that summer of ‘67 I got to know Sandy, and heard her record, and we discussed at some length her questions about what she was gonna do with herself. She felt that she’d gotten as far as she could go doing the circuit of folk clubs, and she liked the idea of being in a group, but she wasn’t sure that the Strawbs were the right outfit for her. My surmise was that she was more ambitious than that. Dave thought she was great, but she was dubious. We talked about maybe I managing her, my producing a record with her. I think she asked me if I would like to produce a record of her, and I said, “Well, what’s gonna happen with this record with the Strawbs. I don’t wanna come out with a Sandy Denny record and have another Sandy Denny & the Strawbs record coming out competing. You gotta decide what you’re gonna do.”

  The Danish sessions may have been consigned to the vaults, but a tape of Sandy’s solo recording of ‘Who Knows Where The Time Goes’ found its way across the Atlantic, reaching American songstress Judy Collins, who proceeded to not only record the song for her own forthcoming album, but to make it the title track, generating a whole new level of interest in Sandy Denny the songwriter. By the time Collins’ album was released, though, in November 1968, Sandy had found the ideal setting for her song/s.

  Sandy would later insist that she longed to join a group simply because, “I wanted to do something more with my voice. Although I can play guitar adequately, I was feeling limited by it … I always had it in my mind to join a group. [When] I joined the Strawbs … I wasn’t really ready for it.” When interviewed for a feature in Melody Maker in September 1967, she was already talking about finding songs for the solo album she had discussed with Boyd, having seemingly taken one of Karl Dallas’s earlier suggestions to heart.

  Sandy Denny: I want songs that mean something to me. If they are folk songs, well okay. A lot of them are. But there are other songs that have something I want to say in them. I’m collecting material together now for my first solo album. I want it to really represent what I’m trying to do … Of course, what I really want to sing is jazz. [1967]

  There is precious little evidence in her home demos of someone who had made such a musical passage. If anything, Sandy was reimmersing herself in traditional song, recording British and Irish folk songs like ‘Seven Virgins’, ‘She Moves Through The Fair’, ‘Come All Ye Fair & Tender Ladies’ and ‘The Quiet Land of Erin’. The only vestige of her previous exposure to Frank’s contemporaries was a fine cover of Fred Neil’s ‘Little Bit of Rain’.

  Perhaps Boyd’s prejudices had already wormed their way into her psyche! If so, her sounder instincts remained unimpaired. As her fellow folkie, Val Berry, notes, “She had confidence in where she wanted to go. I always got the impression she knew what she wanted to do, and where she wanted to go with it.” Those who only knew the ultra-confident young Sandy find that person hard to reconcile with the thirty-year-old Sandy, drained of all that assurance, and terrified of performing onstage. That person, though, was someway off. The twenty-year-old Sandy was prepared to learn what she could about ‘making it’ from any would-be scene-shaker, and so much the better if she could have a good time doing it.

  John Renbourn: I used to see her around Soho occasionally, hanging out with various music business types – visiting different afterhours haunts. She seemed to be trying to get her career up a few rungs of the ladder … Lot of those guys used to hang around the drinking clubs round in Soho, and there was a whole clique of them, all to do with music publishing and deals … Sandy used to [like to] hobknob with that crowd.

  In all likelihood, her interest in Boyd contained a measure of career-opportunism. Boyd himself admits as much, “She was [probably] initially intrigued to meet me because she’d probably heard about me.” On the other hand, as Boyd soon realized, Sandy the opportunist would never have been able to countermand her more pointed self and, “she was very, very sharp. She had such little tolerance for boredom and for fools [that] if she had thought to herself it would be a good career move for me to bond with so and so, and they were tedious and boring, that determination would have lasted about five minutes.” Linda Thompson concurs, “She was very ambitious, but she [really] didn’t have any kind of methodical plan.”

  And yet, Sandy the folksinger seems to have found the whole apparatus of fame just as beguiling as any teenybopper. Part of the appeal was simply, as Maddy Prior observes, that “she liked hanging out. It was better champagne with the rock [fraternity] – and she did like the champagne!” When she enjoyed a midnight tryst with Frank Zappa, over with his Mothers of Invention to film a Colour Me Pop TV special, she breathlessly telegrammed Gina Glazer.

  Gina Glazer: I had no phone, and the night she met Frank Zappa I got a telegram the next day from Sandy saying, “I’m in love, I’m in love.” But she prefaced everything I’m in love, I wasn’t supposed to take it seriously. It just meant she’d met someone, and especially since he was famous. [That] was her love-affair with Frank Zappa – about twelve hours.

  Zappa was not alone. Her many liaisons, partially indicative of the times (and Sandy’s age), suggested deeper insecurities. Given that it was those circling around the periphery of the music Biz that Sandy began to attach herself to (and detach herself from) with a certain regularity, she was bound to occasionally find herself catching her own reflection. One night, out on the town with Miranda Ward, pop correspondent and party animal, warranted an observation in her diary about “these American blokes [Miranda] dragged down with her to hear me … [who] laughed a lot at my jokes, which made me suss them out pretty quick, for someone who’s not much cop as a ‘susser’.” Still under 21, and alive to each and every new experience, her inner fears rarely bubbled to the surface.

  Joe Boyd: [Though] she looked for reassurance about her female attractiveness constantly, which led to her having brief, romantic encounters with a lot of different people … that was [also] part of her exploration of the whole music scene, having encounters. She was incredibly curious, and she wanted to know about everything.

  That curiosity only further stoked a burning desire to make a first-hand contribution to the seismic shifts rippling through popular music. After almost nine months back on the circuit, playing further and further afield without finding a dent in folk’s copper kettle, one simple twist of fate made all those dues worthwhile.

  Karl Dallas has, over the years, been happy to take credit for ‘introducing’ Sandy Denny to Fairport Convention, one of Joe Boyd’s small Witchseason roster. As he remembers it, “I had seen Fairport at t
he Middle Earth but I was quite remote from them … [and] I got this phone-call … and it said ‘Hi, this is Fairport Convention … and we’re looking for a girlsinger.’ And I said, ‘Only one name … comes immediately to mind – that’s Sandy Denny.’ And the person said, ‘That’s interesting. Because other people have made the same suggestion.’” Val Berry remembers it slightly differently. According to Berry, “Karl Dallas phoned me and said, “Val, they’re auditioning for Fairport. Go.” And I didn’t.” When it came to Sandy’s audition, Sandy gave the credit for this precious chance to her friend Heather Wood, the Young Tradition’s female singer.

  Sandy Denny: Heather Wood … said to me, “There’s this great group and they’re looking for a girl singer.” It was just something to do at the time. I phoned up the bloke who was in charge of them, and he said why don’t you come along and do an audition … They played to me and I played to them … They played me some of their tunes – blasting out all this electric music all over the place! But then they expected me to do something. [1972]

  Heather Wood had no real connection with Witchseason, save that Ted Lloyd, Boyd’s financial backer, was someone to whom she “was at one point married … and when Judy Dyble left, Steve Sparks came to me and said, ‘Are you interested in singing with Fairport?’ And I said, ‘Well, I like the group but I’m singing with the Young Tradition. Why don’t you ask Sandy Denny?’” Strangely enough, none of the members of Fairport Convention, even bandleader Ashley ‘Tyger’ Hutchings seems to have encountered a singing Sandy at this point, though Richard Thompson believes, “we’d … read about her in the Melody Maker.” All parties, though, are agreed that Sandy’s audition was as much of an audition for Fairport as for the brash female folksinger.

  Ashley Hutchings: I never saw Sandy once, till she walked into the pub where we were gonna have the so-called audition – which she ran. I’m pretty sure no-one had seen Sandy before – we were aware of her. It was [not] a conventional audition. Sandy’s was just for Sandy, just to try [her] out. And she breezed in like only Sandy did, probably tripped over something, the whole place came alive with this big smile and this big personality, and the first thing she wanted to do was for us to play for her. So we played her a few things, and she liked them, and then we asked her to play something and she started to sing.

  Fairport had been getting by for a year or so with a will o’ the wisp female vocalist in the form of Judy Dyble. Though the addition of a male lead, in the guise of Ian Matthews, had already added some much needed substance, the difference between Denny and Dyble was night and day.

  Sandy elected to sing ‘You Never Wanted Me’, one of her stronger songs, at the audition, and as Ashley puts it, “that was it. We didn’t have to go into a huddle, we didn’t even look at each other. There was a kind of a uniform understanding. I’m sure we didn’t ask her to go out the room.”

  Guitarist Richard Thompson was so impressed that, when he found out “that night or the next, she [had] a gig at the Fiesta [on] Fulham Road,” he “went down to hear her. She still sounded great.”

  *Nine, and then ten, songs from these Saga sessions would be collected on, firstly, It’s Sandy Denny, in 1970, and then The Original Sandy Denny in 1977, the latter subsequently being issued on CD, but only from a vinyl copy.

  *Possibly the equally-underpaid gigs at the Marquee were as part of the Strawbs.

  *Ironically, when the album was eventually released in 1973, under the title All Our Own Work, it would be on a budget label, Hallmark, for whom it apparently sold some 60,000 copies.

  5

  1968: SANDY & THE MUSWELL HILLBILLIES

  Angel woman – drawing by Sandy Denny.

  “The music suddenly leapt up 100%. She was such a classy singer, it made the rest of us sound [so] much better.” [PH]

  Richard Thompson

  Sandy Denny’s membership established at least one pattern Fairport Convention would return to with a certain reckless regularity – the knack of ensuring that the line-up who recorded an album no longer existed when said album was released. Three of the first four albums bearing the Fairport name would be released by line-ups that existed only in the past tense. Their debut album was a particularly dubious concoction – not only was there very little on the self-titled effort to suit Sandy the Singer, even less warranted the effort.

  Many a band has issued their debut album on the downturn from their early peak. Few have been offered the opportunity whilst still scrabbling up the hill backwards, unaware of their true strengths. Fairport, as in so many ways, proved just such an exception, essentially because they had been witnessed by the ever entrepreneurial Joe Boyd, whose enthusiasm for their potential, and need for a production roster, ensured a premature recording debut. It is worth remembering that Fairport had made their named debut less than a year before Sandy joined and, in the interim, had made an album and two singles, whilst passing through at least two line-up changes subsequent to its evolution out of an earlier quasi-skiffle combo, the Ethnic Shuffle Orchestra.

  Ashley Hutchings: The Ethnic Shuffle Orchestra was a bunch of cronies from London, not necessarily Muswell Hill, and Simon Nicol was one of the [original] members. He had a 12-string at that time. It was just a fun group. There was a kazoo, acoustic guitar, washboard, upright bass. The Ethnic Shuffle Orchestra was kinda rag-time things and bluesy things. We seemed to practice more than anything else, in the front room of my house. Through that group, another group, which pulled in Richard [Thompson] and Judy Dyble, did a few gigs. We didn’t really have a name. We did one or two gigs under stupid names … There was probably an Exploding Something as a name. That was a bit more melodic – and folky. Changing into this group, it was more song-oriented. It was a little bit of Bob Dylan, some of the singer-songwriters, as well as folk songs, traditional folksongs – probably traditional American – [We’d do] the occasional pub gig or folk club floor spot but nothing more than that … We got a drummer, Sean Frater, who did one or two gigs with us. The St. Michael’s Hall Golders Green [gig on May 28, 1967] was the first gig we did under the name Fairport Convention, and Martin Lamble was in the very small audience. He was very precocious, and came up at the end and said, “I think I’m better than your drummer,” and we actually took him at his word and gave him an audition. I felt we had a good group – it was now obviously rockier, and we were now doing quite strong Dylan numbers, and maybe even at that stage we might have been doing [Paul Butterfield’s] ‘East/West’. At that point I gave up my job, specifically to help push the band. For a time it was very tough. We were getting the odd third support at The Speakeasy, going on at three in the morning. And then Joe Boyd ‘discovered’ us. I think he heard a band that was away from the norm. Most people were doing extended, wanky kinda things. With one or two exceptions, we were performing short, very musical, densely lyrical songs, with proper solos and good singing.

  Soon enough, Fairport acquired the tag of England’s answer to Jefferson Airplane. And in some senses they were – resembling the pre-Grace Slick band that recorded a patchy but impressive debut album, Takes Off, rather than the more famous Surrealistic Pillows line-up. Like that early Airplane, the early Convention lacked two things – a really strong singer and apposite material.

  Initially, they were doing mostly covers of American singer-songwriters like Joni Mitchell, whose early demos Joe Boyd had acquired through his publishing contacts, Eric Andersen, Phil Ochs, Richard Farina &c. Drawing from the collections of two early friends of Fairport, Kingsley Abbott and Richard Lewis, bassist Ashley Hutchings recalls that, “we built up a repertoire which was pretty unique in that psychedelic period.” And these were interesting times. In the days when imports were hard to come by, songwriters were often known by those who covered their songs rather than by their own interpretations. Such was the climate in which Fairport established an underground following.

  Richard Lewis: There was a shop called One Stop in South Molton Street, and that got the new imports in. So I would
get the new Phil Ochs or the new Eric Andersen from there. In fact, [with] the first Band LP, they only imported two copies and I bought one of those first two copies. I would have thought that the first place [Fairport] would have heard it would have been my copy. Ashley and Simon would come to my house in East Side Avenue and listen to my records, and I’d take my records round there and play them at Fairport.

  Taken under Boyd’s Witchseason wing, Fairport were immediately pushed into becoming “stronger and heavier.” In the summer of 1967, Richard Lewis went to the States for a six-week period. On returning, with a whole chest of new albums from which to cull songs, he found that “they were already starting to transform themselves. They were already becoming much more polished.”

  If his memory serves him well, Boyd had an agenda from the off: to badger and cajole guitarist Richard Thompson into accepting more of the limelight; to bolster the band vocally; and to encourage them to rely more on their own resources. Despite the recruitment of Ian Matthews, from a rapidly imploding Trapeze, on vocals, and a number of earnest, early efforts from the pens of Richard and Ashley, the amalgam of styles made for a very disjointed debut album. And vocalist Judy Dyble remained an intractable problem.

  The band may have visually benefited from a pretty, fey female but musically Dyble was way out of her depth and by April 1968, when Fairport flew to Europe to play a festival in Italy and perform three songs for French TV’s Bouton Rouge, the cracks in the band’s shopwindow had become all too apparent. Dyble’s singing was sucking the air out of songs, no matter how much Thompson and co. pumped into them. On their return, the male members made their feelings known.