Anthea Joseph’s description of the Witchseason office, to Patrick Humphries, shortly before her death – “It was one of those Georgian houses, you went up a rickety staircase, you came to our floor. Joe had an office … I had an office, then we had a sort of open-space bit which people congregated in … there was very little furniture, and everything came off the back of a lorry … People spent a great deal of time sitting on the floor” – reflected the slightly ramshackle nature of Witchseason itself, which had grown from a production company into a production/publishing company into a management company, almost by default. Indeed, rather against it’s instigator’s intentions.
Joe Boyd: I just wanted to be a record producer. And then I found myself continually in the trap – I recorded [the Incredible String Band] for Elektra, and it became clear that there was no-one in Britain who saw their potential … When I left Elektra, the first thing I was gonna do was [the] UFO [club], which was gonna give me some cashflow. And then the ISB asked me to manage them. The same thing happened with Fairport. In the end, Witchseason took over the management, and I hired Anthea Joseph … Management, my deal was I took 25% of profit[s only], which there never was much, but on recordings the original deal was that we split 50-50 the recording income. And the publishing was the same, which by todays standards is hard cheese on the artists. The fundamental problem was that the records didn’t sell. Taking Fairport, and Sandy, everybody got a weekly salary, and all the money came into a pot, and when the pot had more money in it, we’d increase the weekly salary, and then when windfalls came in, there would be bonuses, and that system worked fine for a while. As long as the group was full of nice, well brought up, middle-class people, there was never really any problem with it.
The precarious juggling act of a set-up at Witchseason was doubtless a factor in Fairport being quite so many records in these years. Post-Pepper, many bands had begun to baulk at the two-albums-a-year demands of record labels. How could Artists be expected to work under such constraints! For Fairport, and Witchseason, however, each album continued to be made relatively cheaply and, because the band’s contract was with Witchseason Productions, not Polydor (for the first album) or Island (for subsequent albums), each album generated its own advance from the record company, as well as having the potential to crack the charts.
The fundamental problem, as Boyd points out, is that the records didn’t sell. This would only become a problem in the fullness of time, when the Island record company began to refuse albums, or delay their release. As of the late sixties, Chris Blackwell’s fledgling label was more than happy to put out all that Witchseason had to offer, particularly as Boyd had cross-collateralized the artists on his roster so that the losses of the Fairports and Nick Drakes were effectively subsidized by the success of the Incredible String Band.
Having been left to “get on with the music”, Fairport’s direction was increasingly propelled by a duel force. Sandy’s inclinations had quickly moved into alignment with guitar-prodigy Richard Thompson’s. The result was a whole set of songs from Thompson’s pen that seemed tailored to Sandy’s demands. Ashley ‘Tyger’ Hutchings, the ostensible leader and founder of Fairport was initially delighted by the new energy, and still remembers “the turnover of material at that period, 1968. [It] was incredible. I mean, we would learn new songs and perform them on stage almost weekly. I have never been in a band since that has done that.”
Subtly, but surely, Sandy’s folk bias was warping the band’s heretofore American leanings, the singer-songwritery aspects of their sets gradually being superceded by original songs and/or material culled from these fayre isles. Aside from ‘Nottamun Town’, the band quickly worked up an arrangement of ‘She Moved Through The Fair’, a quasi-traditional song (the words being penned by Padraic Colum) that had been a perennial in Sandy’s solo repertoire, having probably been acquired via her father from the famous Irish tenor John McCormack, who had made the song popular in the Forties. In the November 1968 issue of Beat Instrumental, Richard Thompson was keen to distance the band from any previous tag:
Richard Thompson: There are similarities [between Fairport & West Coast bands] … but there’s one big and basic difference. They all seem to be doing a sort of cross between rock and soul – look at Big Brother, Country Joe and Jefferson Airplane – it’s not all that far from the sock-it-to-me thing, and very American. We think of ourselves as a folk-based band. This is even more pronounced now that Sandy Denny is with us … She really knows what the folk tradition is all about.
The force was now with Sandy, as she pushed the band in a more “folk-based” direction. Aside from Thompson, whose musical tastes remained admirably eclectic, Simon Nicol, by his own admission, “used to go up to the Saturday night folk evenings at Cecil Sharp House and see people like Alex Campbell, Shirley Collins, Ewan MacColl, real stalwarts … before – even in the most vague terms – I was thinking of myself as a musician, just soaking up live music.” Hutchings, too, had doused himself in the same pool, venturing down to the Cousins “one memorable night [when] there was Paul Simon, Phil Ochs, Danny Kalb, Bert Jansch all getting up one after another.” Just as willing to immerse himself in the real thing, having been for a time a regular at Ewan MacColl’s Singers Club, Ashley insists that, even though “people think we discovered traditional folk music [in 1969], it wasn’t true, we went back to it.”
The passing of Fairport into the folk camp clearly appalled some of those for whom Dylan’s 1966 electric tour had not been a necessary apotheosis. One unregenerate ‘Tradie’ wrote a bitter letter to Melody Maker complaining at the addition of Fairport to a ‘folk concert’ bill in July, sharing the bill with Julie Felix:
“I would like to express my horror of the Folk Concert put on at the Central Hall, Westminster by the commitee of Human Rights Year. We were subjected to a neo-pop group called Fairport Convention. In the second half there were people walking out, and a group [that] gave us twenty minutes of just noise.” – R.E. Browne, MM 3/8/68.
Also sharing the bill that night was Al Stewart, who remembers coming off after his own set and going “into the dressing-room, [where] they were all sitting around, physically working out a new song that they’d (sic) just written, which it turned out was ‘Fotheringay’.” Sandy’s first contribution to the pool of original songs, ‘Fotheringay’, was one of a number of songs she had previously penned for a possible solo album. However, it had taken her a couple of months to muster the nerve to throw one of her own hoops into the ring, and compete with the songs of Richard and, at the time, Ashley. ‘Fotheringay’ itself is a masterful reworking of her earlier ‘Boxful of Treasures’, centering upon the imprisonment of Mary, Queen of Scots. However, knowledge of its historical setting and/or subject-matter is hardly required to respond to this song of permanent exile, from its oppressive opening:
“How often she has gazed from castle walls o’er,
And watched the daylight passing, within her captive wall,
With no-one to heed her call.”
to that evocative final verse:
“Tomorrow at this hour she will be far away,
Much farther than these islands,
Or the lonely Fotheringay.”
And yet, despite the originality of her themes and the musicality of her melodies, Sandy proved a reluctant contributor to the repertoire. Never one to pen her own throwaway street puzzle, Sandy worked long and hard on the songs she wrote and, as Dave Swarbrick recalls, “she did many, many rewrites before she’d let it out.”
Ashley Hutchings: Sandy wrote very few songs in the time that we were working together and when she did write a song, she would lock herself away for a day or two, not answer the phone, not doing anything. I remember Anthea saying, “Oh, you can’t get her at the moment, she’s in the throes of the muse.” Which meant you couldn’t ring her up for the next two days. But she probably found it very painful to write.
By the time Sandy had overcome an innate self-consciousness about presenting
herself as a songwriter, the sessions for her debut platter with Fairport were all but over. Though ‘Fotheringay’ would announce the album on its release, she would have to wait until the next album to bring more hidden pearls to the surface.
The album Fairport were recording that summer was quite different from the shows and radio sessions they had been performing, for which Joe Boyd says he is prepared “to take part of the blame.” As he confessed, in his own notes to the official release of Hutchings’ Heyday compilation of BBC tapes, “I felt the Fairport should use their considerable talents in developing their own material and becoming as, well, English as possible. Thus I discouraged committing most of [these] songs to vinyl back in … 1968.” Ashley has a different take on why so many staples from their live/radio repertoire failed to be recorded in the studio.
Ashley Hutchings: We did a lot of radio sessions and we didn’t want to repeat ourselves, so we’d just go in and do different songs, maybe songs we’d just do for radio and never do ‘em again – it doesn’t happen nowdays. I … put together the Heyday tape because I was proud of the stuff.
From their endlessly evolving live set, Fairport would use just two non-originals on What We Did On Our Holidays: a quietly understated cover of Dylan’s ‘I’ll Keep It With Mine’, that showed the twin towers of Denny and Thompson at their interpretative bests, retaining none of Nico’s discordancy; and another of Joni’s word-schemes, ‘Eastern Rain’. Superceding the likes of ‘Reno Nevada’, ‘Bird On The Wire’ and ‘Morning Glory’ were some five Thompson originals – including Fairport’s come-all-ye anthem ‘Meet On The Ledge’, which was issued as a single, as well as being featured on Island various artists sampler, You Can All Join In. Along with the remorselessly bitter ‘Tale In Hard Time’ and three more examples of Thompson’s die-cut doom & gloom, Ashley’s stomping ‘Mr Lacey’, Sandy’s one example of penmanship, and the two samples of ‘tradition’, they had a beguilingly different take on the direction Rock might take from other members of Island’s soft centre of excellence.
Though engineer John Wood remembers “the atmosphere at the beginning of the record [being] a little easier than it was at the end,” and that, “it was very much the band in transition,” What We Did On Our Holidays was an audacious advance on Fairport Convention. Boyd remembers a sense of quiet camaraderie, “We were all in it together, and everybody had their say. A very egalitarian atmosphere.” The album, finished in mid-October, would not be released until the new year, by which time the band would have undergone another change in line-up. Meanwhile, it gave enough hints as to their potential on a number of fronts – notably Thompson’s richly detailed songwriting and Sandy’s seemingly effortless singing.
And yet, such was the pace with which Fairport were developing that the album version of ‘Mr Lacey’ sounds like little more than a demo when contrasted with the blistering roustabout of a performance on a December 1968 BBC session (later included on the Richard Thompson double-album anthology, Guitar/Vocal). The few flaws in What We Did On Our Holidays may well stem from that “egalitarian atmosphere,” and could be what Wood is alluding to when he hints at problems towards the end of the sessions. The weaker songs, the weaker arrangements were being made to rest on Ian Matthews, not because he was a weak singer, as Dyble had been, but because the songs that suited him vocally reflected a Fairport Convention the remainder of the band no longer seemed intent on preserving (‘The Book Song’, Matthews’ one co-credit on the album, being a case in point). With Sandy’s growth as a singer and personality, Matthews’ role was accordingly reduced. He was also the one personality in the band less than enamored by the passage into a “folk-based band.” All but sidelined, he was about to be sidestepped.
6
1969: COME ALL YE ROVING MINSTRELS
Lucas lookalike in long grass – drawing by Sandy Denny.
“There was a feeling in the industry in general, and in Britain in particular, in the rock group world, that long, extended tracks were kind of an indulgence and that they disqualified you from getting played on the radio. The Pink Floyd used to do a version of ‘Arnold Layne’ that went on for ten minutes, but when we recorded it, we did a three minute version. Most songs were like that … There was definitely a feeling at the time that recordings were supposed to be compact. That if you’d heard a track with Richard playing five choruses as a solo, you would then go into the studio and record him compressing the best ideas from those five choruses into one … [Part of] the artistic success of Unhalfbricking is that it started to occupy the space on record that the group occupied live.”
Joe Boyd
However much What We Did On Our Holidays advanced on Fairport Convention, it remained as unrepresentative of the band’s live performances as Piper at the Gates of Dawn. The difference was that Floyd had at least attempted to place their key extemporisation, ‘Interstellar Overdrive’, in studio captivity, signalling an increasingly beguiling direction. How much the ideas behind a song like ‘Interstellar Overdrive’ inspired the rookies from Muswell Hill, who shared many a ‘67 bill at the UFO with the now commercially consolidated Floyd, has never been documented. The Floyd’s audible evolution from a simple blues band to psychedelia’s cutting-edge, bound up with that one song, surely affected the fledgling Fairporters, even if Thompson says, “What Floyd did was beyond us.”
Ashley may have defined early Fairport sets as comprising “short, very musical, densely lyrical songs, with proper solos and good singing,” but at the UFO they were also prone to working their way through their own take on Paul Butterfield’s epic ‘East/West’, until it evolved into something called ‘Ghetto’. Fairport also had, in its backpocket, an increasingly outlandish ten-minute take on Richard Farina’s ‘Reno Nevada’ that survived the Sandy transition, flowering in the hot-room of Thompson’s burgeoning self-confidence. So it was to prove with another song Sandy brought to the welcome table, early in the new year of ‘69. ‘A Sailor’s Life’, though, wasa folk song, and folk songs were surely not instruments of change, but of stasis.
Ashley Hutchings: Sandy sang folksongs in dressing rooms, and that’s specifically how ‘Sailor’s Life’ came about. She would sing songs and we might just come pick up our instruments and join in. A good example is ‘She Moves Through The Fair’. Exactly the same as how we ended up doing ‘A Sailor’s Life’ – except ‘Sailor’s Life’ developed more. It came like a bolt out of the blue for most people but if you logically trace it, it can be traced to those [earlier improvised] things. It was surprisingly easy for us to fall into. It sounded right. Otherwise we wouldn’t have gone onstage and done it …[ ] … We were at Southampton University waiting to go on stage and Sandy was playing around in the dressing room and picked up the guitar, and … sang ‘A Sailor’s Life’ … we picked up our instruments and joined in. We had a little tuner amp in the dressing room and we busked along and then, when it came time to go on stage, we made an instant decision [to play it]. [CH/PH]
‘A Sailor’s Life’ entered modern consciousness with its inclusion – from an 1899 East Sussex transcription – in the original 1959 edition of the hugely successful Penguin Book of English Folk Songs, certainly one of the gospels of the English folk revival, if not its very Bible. An offshoot of the ubiquitous ‘Died For Love’, it had already been memorably captured by Martin Carthy on his second Topic album, and it was presumably this template that Sandy sang that night in Southampton. Unlike the likes of ‘Nottamun Town’ and ‘She Moves Through The Fair’, though, ‘Sailor’s Life’ lent itself to a more brooding, elastic arrangement. Even in the university dressing room the tragic tale began to take on grander proportions.
As Sandy herself later observed, “the actual story, the sea, and the turbulence of both were perfect for that medium. You can’t do that with everything … It begins to pall after a while.” What Fairport came up with that night, and refined over the ensuing weeks, was an approach unique in folk circles, that gave a musical momentum to the inevitable balladic f
ate of the two lovers, something not previously attempted within folk or rock. The results convinced five-sixths of the band that this could be their new direction home, and one member that it was time to ride.
Ian Matthews: The first time we did ‘A Sailor’s Life’ onstage, I remember they worked it up in the dressing-room, and I had never worked up in the dressing room in my life, it had always been done at rehearsal. That was my first foray into it, and it didn’t appeal to me at all. I think it became increasingly clear that there was really no place for me in a band playing that type of music. [PH]
The remainder of Fairport clearly recognised the import of what they had unveiled, evidenced by the fact that they uncharacteristically summoned their manager-cum-producer to a gig in Bristol to hear the results.
Joe Boyd: Before my trip down to Bristol, they told me that there was a new tune that they wanted me to hear. I drove down with Beverly Martyn and I sat in the balcony and they did ‘A Sailor’s Life’. I went back to the dressing room afterwards and told them I thought it was fantastic, let’s record it. And then at some point … they came to me and said, “We’d like to try it with a violin, something like a Dave Swarbrick.” I said, “[Fine,] I’ll call him up.”
No More Sad Refrains: The Life and Times of Sandy Denny Page 10
