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

by Clinton Heylin

  However, none of Sandy’s selections that night would make Liege & Lief, even her own carefully wrought attempt to match the band’s brief.* When she arrived at Farley, she found the remainder of the band all too willing to defer to Dave Swarbrick’s vision of electric folk. Despite Ashley’s claims to academic input, and Sandy’s wide-ranging knowledge of the genre, it was the band’s newest recruit that had the largest input when it came to song selection.

  Dave Swarbrick: You could say I was the most aware of the material. Most of the songs came from me. ‘Matty Groves’, ‘Tam Lin’, ‘The Deserter’, all that stuff came from my background, and were songs I introduced to them. The bending was being done the other way … [But] Sandy knew a lot of it, and had a big input on it. ‘Matty Groves’, Sandy and I put the words together from Child. We put it to an American tune, and I supplied the instrumental tune [‘Famous Flower of the Serving Man’] at the end. ‘Tam Lin’ I wrote the tune for, based on a slip jig. I just took out all the beats till I got sevenths. ‘Reynardine’, I’d done with Bert. ‘The Deserter’, I’d done with Luke Kelly.

  Fairport had seemingly abandoned their professed intent, to place traditional verites in a folk-rock context, and were now setting about grafting a folk-rock sound to traditional songs, largely composed to be sung acapella. Joe Boyd recalls Sandy being both amused and a little bemused, “at Ashley’s fanaticism, which he came to very late in life. He was discovering things with the zeal of a new convert that she had been familiar with … for years. She had been singing songs that he would come back from Cecil Sharp House with and say, ‘I have just discovered this magnificent song.’ And she would say, ‘Well, I was singing that when I was 17!’”

  It is probably no coincidence that Sandy reserves her best performances on the ensuing album for her own composition, ‘Come All Ye’ (Ashley Hutchings notes, “I get the joint credit because I wrote a couple of verses but she [already] had the music, the first verse and the chorus”), the two Thompson ‘originals’, and the one traditional song with which Swarbrick credits her direct input (‘Matty Groves’).

  ‘Crazy Man Michael’ and ‘Farewell Farewell’, the two Thompson lyrics, the former set to a Swarbrick tune, the latter set to the hundredth Child ballad, ‘Willie o’ Winsbury’, bookend the sides of Liege & Lief with notes from a melancholic well that Sandy’s voice alone could plummet. Whether the others realised it or not – and it would take Thompson a while to admit it himself – Sandy had been pushing for something like this for some time, songs that drew their water from such traditional wellsprings, but added their own original flavour. As it is, neither Sandy’s interpretative skills nor Thompson’s lyrical distillation of weal and woe would ever be bettered:

  “Within the fire and not upon the sea, Crazy Man Michael was walking

  He met a raven with eyes as black as coal, and shortly they were a-talking …

  Michael he whistles the simplest of tunes, and asks of the four winds their pardon,

  For his true love has flown into ever flower grown,

  And he must be keeper of the garden.”

  That both songs had clearly been forged in the furnace of Thompson’s grief, to be interpreted by someone who understood each and every nuance, only made them doubly poignant (Thompson himself has never sung either song. As late as 1992, when ‘Farewell Farewell’ came up at a New York ‘request show’, he elected to sing ‘Willie o’ Winsbury’ instead). This authentic highland melody was not alone in giving Liege & Lief, an album that promised “to concentrate on … English material,” a distinctly Northern flavour, each side being dominated by an epic Scottish ballad, ‘Tam Lin’ and ‘Matty Groves’ a.k.a. ‘Little Musgrave and Lady Barnard’.* The bias would have been even more pronounced if the studio version of ‘Sir Patrick Spens’ had found a place on the album – preferably at the expense of the ‘Medley’, the first of a number of interminable instrumental jigs destined to pepper future Fairport albums.

  Four days before they were due to publicly debut their ‘new’ material at the Royal Festival Hall, the band staged the equivalent of a dress rehearsal at Van Dyke’s in Plymouth, on September 20, 1969. Richard Lewis, who drove down to Plymouth with friends, recalls it being very hot, pretty crowded and fairly cramped, even on the stage, but that, despite such hardships, “Sandy would sometimes just step back and watch, sometimes she’d almost go off the stage and look [at the band], ‘cause she was obviously enjoying it so much.” Sandy even turned the stage over to Richard for his two Dylan ditties, and to Swarb for ‘Have You Had A Talk With Jesus’ (on which Sandy played violin, while Swarb sang). The band came off elated, after an all-new 14-song set.

  On September 24 they debuted the same show, minus the two Thompson vocals, at the Royal Festival Hall, to a sell-out audience that included what Swarb dubbed “the intelligentsia of the folk establishment,” whose attendance had been requested to give (hopefully) the venture their blessing. Richard remembers “a real intensity to the playing … it was a night when everything worked, except Swarb’s fiddle, which died at the end of the show.”

  Richard Lewis: The Festival Hall has always been a nice place for concerts, and that was wonderful, really wonderful. When the band came on, it was a lovely big stage, and they’d obviously been rehearsing. They’d got the sound right. It all came together. It was a good reaction, a really good reaction. I don’t think most people had heard anything like this, and quite a few of the important people from the folk world were there. Bert Lloyd was there certainly, and you could see that he was enjoying it. So that gave an endorsement that other people could enjoy it as well. They weren’t sure whether they were meant to or not.

  After a month and a half of rehearsals and a handful of shows, the album itself came easily enough, being recorded in seven days of sessions in the last three weeks of October. The surfeit of material worked up at Farley probably warranted a double-album but the band’s decision to record just eleven songs and release just eight left Liege & Lief a slightly skewered portrait of a highly creative period. Though the single album on display remains a landmark release, its impact undiminished by three decades, the inclusion of the likes of Richard Farina’s ‘Quiet Joys of Brotherhood’, Dylan’s ‘Open The Door Homer’ and ‘Down in the Flood’, Roger McGuinn’s ‘Ballad of Easy Rider’ and Sandy’s own ‘The Pond and The Stream’ might have made for a less alienating experience for fans of the earlier incarnations. As it is, there were those in the press who longed for the Fairport of old, a sentiment voiced most lucidly by John Mendlesohn, reviewing the delayed Unhalfbricking (favourably) and Liege & Lief (unfavourably) in Rolling Stone, and asking of the latter:

  “Where is the group’s folk-flavored rock and roll, where are the exhilirating harmonies, the sense of fun and feeling of harnessed electricity that made their first two albums together such treats? Where, essentially, is something to excite those of us who find artiness worthy enough of quiet admiration but a little boring?”

  Only in live performance did the Trad. Arr. version of Fairport have the opportunity to present a more rounded new persona, and with three months of gigs separating the live debut of Fairport Mk.4 from the release of Liege & Lief, they had ample opportunity to attune their audience to the change in direction. Though the new six-piece would play barely a dozen more gigs before shedding yet more personnel, the shows they played that autumn have acquired a mythical hue. In part, this was because, through all the line-up changes, the o’erhanging spectre of tragedy, and their quiet determination to move ever forward, Fairport had acquired, in the words of rock critic Dave Laing, a “unique position and influence in British rock … comparable only to the role of the Byrds in America.” On a number of levels, Liege & Lief was as radical a departure as the Byrds’ country-rock foray, Sweetheart of the Rodeo, going on to influence bands as diverse as Led Zeppelin reeks of continual replays of Liege & Lief), Traffic (ditto John Barleycorn) and avant-garage originators, Pere Ubu.

  As another critic, Patrick Amor
y, observed, in a lengthy essay on the early history of Fairport for American fanzine Too Fun Too Huge, “Liege and Lief was the opposite of popular music at the time: gloomy, academic, precise.” Unfortunately, just like the Parsons-era Byrds, the confluence of forces at work was as volatile as it was powerful, the Liege & Lief Fairport having at least two strong personalities too many for one band. Before they could reap the critical plaudits for going against the progressive grain in Rock, Fairport found themselves minus two survivors from the May cataclysm.

  On November 2, 1969, less than six months on from the crash, Fairport returned to Mothers in Birmingham, to play a quite different set to the one they played that fateful evening (in the audience was bassist Dave Pegg, who remembers being mightily impressed by the Fairport rhythm section, unaware that he was about to be Ashley’s replacement). After the show, the entire band elected to return to London. During that journey Simon Nicol found himself required to console an especially emotional Sandy, “who spent most of the journey in tears, [talking] about how she loved the band, and how she loved Trevor so much, how she didn’t want to go to America, how she didn’t even want to go to Denmark for a week.”

  The imminent prospect of an American tour, to promote the A&M release of Liege & Lief, had convinced Sandy that she did not want to put herself through a separation from Trevor even more prolonged than the one she had suffered that summer. Nor was her outburst an idle remonstration. When the car arrived, a few days later, to take her to the airport for a scheduled appearance on Danish television, she was nowhere to be found, and the band ended up flying to Copenhagen without her.

  Ashley Hutchings: During the trip over to Denmark, we talked about the future as well as that current situation we had to tackle, and it threw up quite a lot of things about the future; which way the band might go, about whether this behaviour could be tolerated … and I think I had made up my mind that it was going to go a certain way … that we would get a traditional singer in and push it further [that] way … [ ] … Then we got there, and whipped up a sense of cameraderie, “It’s gonna be alright, you can sing that bit, I can sing that bit,” and we’re actually onstage at the theatre, some kind of rehearsal, and Anthea rang to say she’d tracked Sandy down, and she was gonna be on the next plane. And suddenly I felt, “This isn’t how it should be.” It was like a letdown that she would be on the next plane. [PH/CH]

  However much Sandy’s no-show rankled with Fairport, the rest of the band remained thoroughly out of sync with Ashley’s suggestion “that we … get a traditional singer in.” Simon Nicol believes that, somewhere between Chipstead Road and Heathrow, Ashley actually proposed Bert Lloyd should join the band, “a concept I couldn’t cope with, and I think the others found hard to cope with.” Like everyone in the band, he knew Sandy could be difficult. But a Fairport without Sandy at this stage seemed quite unimaginable. Meantime, as Island publicist David Sandison confirms, Anthea Joseph had done “a bit of detective work and finally tracked Sandy down, very drunk and belligerent, sobered her up and frogmarched her onto the next flight. Of course, as soon as she got on the plane Sandy clicked her fingers and ordered more booze. When they arrived, Sandy was completely drunk again.”

  Ever nervous of flying, Sandy became convinced, on the flight over, that this was not for her and, though her three vocals on the Danish TV broadcast suggest no dip in commitment to the Liege & Lief material, she had decided to plough her own furrow. Unbeknownst to her, Ashley had arrived at a similar juncture, aided as much by the rigours of the return flight as Sandy had been by the outward. Just as word of mouth was suggesting that the new album would be Fairport’s long-awaited commercial breakthrough – made on their own terms – these two critical components were reaching for their parachutes.

  Ashley Hutchings: We did the gig, we flew back, and it was the worst flight I’ve ever had. It was a thunderstorm, and internally I was freaking out. I promised myself that if I got down again a) I wouldn’t ever go up in an aeroplane again, and I didn’t for another ten years, and b) that there was going to have to be a change. And very shortly after flying back I just said, I’m gonna leave, guys. I didn’t know what I was doing. I hadn’t planned anything. I just had a vague idea that I wanted to play traditional music.

  *Ashley does recall Fairport playing ‘The Pond and the Stream’ at selected shows that autumn.

  *Though the latter exists as a seventeenth-century English broadside, a Scottish ms. predates its printed form.

  7

  1969–70: A NEW LEAF

  Fotheringay programme cover

  “There was no reason why, with hindsight, we couldn’t have carried on for years, incorporating all the needs of all the members. But what was at work at that time was the after-effects of the crash – a delayed reaction. Sandy and I were unsettled in our outlook. We were still coming to grips with the tragedy. We bounced back so quickly we didn’t have time to grieve. Joe wasn’t the kind of father-figure who would say, Listen guys … I think I would have stayed, and Sandy would have stayed, had we not been wrestling with something else which made us behave a bit irrationally … If we hadn’t had such liberal management, if there’s someone reading the riot act, “C’mon pull yourself together. You wanna talk about the material, we’ll have a meeting.” [Joe’s] liberality allowed the whole thing to fall apart.”

  Ashley Hutchings

  Ashley’s assessment makes a lot of sense, not only applied to the seemingly irrational departures of Sandy and Ashley, but also Richard Thompson’s a year later. All three were making decisions from a broken perspective, still living the aftershocks of the accident. At the time it must have seemed, to Sandy in particular, that the pressures just kept piling up until something, or somebody, was bound to blow. Joe Boyd has no doubts about the primary motive for Sandy bailing out.

  Joe Boyd: I believe what it was about was Trevor. Here she was living with this guy, who she adored, who was the first sort of sensible domestic relationship she’d probably ever had. Although he was a rather mediocre musician, he had a big enough ego that he could handle being Mr. Sandy Denny, being the male half of this partnership with this incredibly talented, dynamic, ever-more-famous person. But part of that sense of self and ego, which enabled him to balance Sandy, came from his being a womanizer! He was a handsome, debonair guy that women liked. And so Sandy felt, either out of paranoia or out of reality, that every time she left town he would be shagging whatever he met at the folk club. Which probably wasn’t far wrong. [PW]

  The domestic situation with Trevor had certainly became a factor in band politics by the time of the Danish debacle, even if conflicts were inevitable with a frontsperson as insecure as Sandy. Never in her writing, though, is there a sense that she would forsake all in pursuit of her muse. In that sense her choice of Trevor as a lifetime companion remains a baffling one. In fact, if one of her closest friends has a correct take on the relationship, then no matter how much Sandy idealised (or demonised) their love in song, Trevor-as-the- specific-object-of-her-love did not provide the essence of her deepest cravings.

  Linda Thompson: I thought [Trevor] was a nice guy, and he was very overawed by her talent, there was an element of that in their relationship. [But] I think he did pretty well by her … [If] neither of them were particularly faithful to each other – this was the Sixties or Seventies. She loved Trevor, but the people that she really adored were people where the relationship was never consummated. She adored Richard, and whatever he told her to do, she’d do. She didn’t have tremendous respect for many people because she was in a different stratosphere. Trevor was like her anchor. I don’t think she was head over heels in love with him. She loved him, but it wasn’t the fierce thing even that she had for Danny.

  Whether Sandy would have admitted as much to herself is another question. As Simon Nicol notes, “Sandy was a person who needed a lot of affection and attention. [But] she could [also] see the band getting bigger, and we were talking about going to the States for the first time.”
Nicol is quite right to connect the two, Sandy’s need for “a lot of affection and attention” and the possibility (some would say likelihood) of “the band getting bigger.” It would be unwise to underestimate the part Sandy’s very real fear of success played in her act of commercial hari-kari.

  Ever-ambivalent about fame, she would later talk about what she called “a success neurosis,” qualifying it by insisting that what she was “terrified of [is] what happens to people when they become really famous.” As early as the week of her appearance on Top of the Pops, Sandy assured a journalist that she was “quite happy just ambling along towards the big success, but when the big success is suddenly there at the other end of the street and getting closer, it is a bit frightening.” She was not alone in desiring a certain kind of fame, fame on her own terms, that could be switched off at will. The most honest appraisal she ever gave of the spectre of success came in an interview with Karl Dallas, whilst working on her first solo album, when the prospect of fame was once again rapping at her door:

  Sandy Denny: I do appreciate being slightly well-known, because I’ve got a bit of an ego. But I never want to reach the top. It’s such a long way down. I’d rather hover about near the top, and never actually reach the height. [1971]

  Sandy would never come to terms with her status, would never recognize how respected by fellow musicians she was. A mass of contradictions, if ever, she loved the hobknobbing aspects of being Somebody, but her fragile sense of identity was such that self-deprecation was never too far away in her mode of conversation. Though she had found someone who treated her as someone special, she would never be entirely convinced.