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

by Clinton Heylin

  Initially, Sandy proved reluctant to make the first release in her own name an essentially original statement. Interviewed when she was barely halfway through the sessions, she told a journalist, “There’s far too much emphasis being put on ‘writing my own material’. That’s why so many bands are making bad albums. They think it’s expected of them to compose the lot themselves, whereas quite often they haven’t the talent in that direction.” The comment was clearly directed at a self that had, as yet, failed to come up with enough songs to fill out an album, even with the additional six months the demise of Fotheringay had brought her.

  Part of the problem stemmed from the fact that Sandy still had a tendency to slip into the kind of stock imagery that came so easily to her. Asked at this time about the inspiration for her songs, she opened up enough to admit that, “when I write songs I often picture myself standing on a beach, or standing on a rock or a promenade or something. I just put myself there sometimes and, without even realising it, I find myself describing what I’m looking at.” The results, no matter how sincere and affecting, rarely placed Ms. Denny in the Wordsworth mould, forcing her self-editing side to kick in. One such example, perhaps the very one she was alluding to was a lyric called ‘The Glistening Bay’,* the second verse of which took her descriptive inclinations to the max:

  “And I do recall I took a stone and felt it with my hand

  I sat there on the high cliff top upon the incoming land

  I hid that precious stone I held inside a weathered tree

  The perfumed cedars caught the wind which blew in from the open sea

  A handful of small coloured flowers were nestling in the grass

  I tossed them to the blustery sky and watched them as they danced

  Oh the fickle sea I’ve always loved and to this very day

  I’ll see those flowers come floating down towards the glistening bay.”

  In the same notebook Sandy had also written a number of traditional song titles, and a set of lyrics to one of them, ‘Lord Bateman’, an English broadside ballad which, according to legend, was based on the exploits of Gilbert Beket, father of St. Thomas, during the Third Crusade. The other songs listed were ‘Blackwaterside’, the Irish drinking song ‘The Parting Glass’, and Scottish elegy ‘The Flowers of the Forest’, already recorded by Fairport for the Full House album. Though no record exists of the latter two being recorded by Sandy, ‘Blackwaterside’ would be the first song recorded for North Star Grassman & The Ravens, as her first solo album would be known, and ‘Lord Bateman’ would occupy a number of early sessions, without ever making the final cut.

  Even as some original songs began to come – ‘The Optimist’ and ‘Next Time Around’ were both laid down at sessions at the beginning of April – Sandy continued to cut a number of covers, unsure how many of her own strange new lyrics she wanted fixed in time. Richard Thompson recalls, “it was always hard to get Sandy to change pace in her material, so an untempo cover was sometimes attempted – which [invariably] tended to sound rather glued on.” Sandy duly ended up reviving Dylan’s ‘Down in the Flood’ from the Liege & Lief live set, Brenda Lee’s ‘Let’s Jump The Broomstick’, for which her vocal style was singularly unsuited, and Ernest Tubb’s ‘Walking The Floor Over You’. Having begun the album in early March, it would be the end of May before the final, and perhaps oddest, original of the lot – the title-track – was added to the master-reel.

  Containing some of her most difficult lyrics, North Star Grassman was never going to come out as an easy listening experience. At the time, not surprisingly, Sandy proved slightly defensive about the material, insisting that the original songs on the album “are biographical, [though only] about ten people can understand them. I just take a story and whittle it down to essentials … I wouldn’t write songs if they didn’t mean something to me, but I’m not prepared to tell everyone about my private life, like Joni Mitchell does. I like to be a bit more elusive than that.”

  The songs Sandy was now penning were more than a little elusive. If ‘Next Time Around’, which had the even more cryptic working title of ‘Only Just Impossible’, was ‘about’ Jackson Frank, and ‘Crazy Lady Blues’ was apparently written for the soon-to-be Linda Thompson, each and every song on North Star seemed borne of personal experience (when ‘Crazy Lady Blues’ acquired an extra verse in February 1974, it was directed back upon itself: “Now give her a chance to sing, and she’ll give you anything … even ‘Matty Groves’, as you come here in your droves.”). Talking at the distance of another, more successful album, she admitted that the results were not entirely satisfactory:

  Sandy Denny: I think I was a bit depressed at the time, and the songs tended to be very introverted. In fact they got so turned in on each other that sometimes I had difficulty finding out what they meant myself … I thought, “God! I’ve got to do this album,” and I started rushing all these melancholy songs out. [1972]

  Feeling compelled to make her first solo album without adequate respite, Sandy’s biggest problem proved to be not so much the songs as the sound. Having known only the light touch of Joe Boyd as producer, she craved a similarly sympathetic taskmaster. Asked about possible candidates at the time of Fotheringay’s final concert, her only comment was, “I think I’ll have to work with someone on the album that I know and respect musically.” Fortunately Richard Thompson, who had released himself from the relentless treadmill of gigging that had been Fairport’s post-Sandy lot, was more than happy to provide input, though he found that “she couldn’t quite face up to the idea of selecting a producer, so we rolled into the studio with Andy Johns engineering, and recorded a few things in a haphazard manner. It needed a little more direction, so we brought in John Wood … but there still wasn’t a firm hand on the tiller, and I think that reflects in the final production.”

  John Wood had worked on most of the sessions produced by Boyd, and knew the studio Sandy well. His technical capabilities, and ear for music, were second to none. However, he had been obliged to choose engineering as a more realistic alternative to the diplomatic corp. As Gerry Conway says of him, “If he’s got something to say, then he’ll say it.” With Sandy, some foreign office experience might have come in handy.

  Philippa Clare: John Wood used to have Sandy in tears a lot … He was difficult in the studio, very bad socially. John didn’t nurture. “Wrong, do it again.” [Not] “Lovely, Sandy, it was wonderful, can we try it one more time.” … She was always nervous in the studio … I don’t think you ever get Sandy really great on record, and of course John Wood was [always] engineering, so she was always on edge … She would get very tearful when she’d feel insecure … There was once when we went around and we collected seventeen lit cigarettes. She even put a burn in John Wood’s fridge.

  If (wo)man-management was not John Wood’s strong point, his instincts as to the type of instrumentation that suited Sandy were equally out of kilter. Sound Techniques, Wood’s studio, had an enviable reputation for its tonal quality when it came to strings, indeed acoustic sounds in general. This reputation led him to forge a relationship with a film-score arranger named Harry Robinson, whose services he sometimes recommended to his clients. Sure enough, he advocated adding some strings to ‘Next Time Around’ and ‘Wretched Wilbur’. The results were truly wretched. Though Sandy would accuse Wood of being “a terrible string freak” who “if I leave it just to him to mix [the album] it’ll come back swamped with strings,” she was as fascinated by Robinson’s arrangement ideas as her erstwhile producer, and Harry would become a regular fixture on her remaining albums, often to the detriment of her songs’ simple purity.

  As it is, the released North Star Grassman sounds like an odds’n’sods collection culled from a number of unfinished projects – an alternate Liege & Lief (‘Down in the Flood’ as a duet with Richard), the aborted Fotheringay album (‘Late November’ is the Fotheringay take with guitar/vocal overdubs), an album of traditional songs (‘Blackwaterside’) and a string-drenched di
va’s debut, to name a few – bearing out Thompson’s assessment that, “there [really] wasn’t any producer.”

  Richard Thompson: She’d do anything she could to avoid recording. Talk mostly. She’d give really half-hearted performances, and then come along to the mix and say, “That’s a terrible vocal,” and … someone would say, “Well, fix it,” and because it was the last chance, she’d do a good one. Always postponing the real performance until the absolute eleventh hour. [JI]

  Even the sequence, which with its powerful one-two opening volley of ‘Late November’ and ‘Blackwaterside’ promised so much, was a last minute decision. The reviewers could not hide their disappointment, Derek Brimstone asking pointedly in the newly formed Folk Review, “What’s the good of laying down such lovely words if you have to strain to hear them?” Satisfying neither her mainstream fans nor the folkies, North Star Grassman failed to chart, a commercial failure that was thrown into even sharper relief by Sandy’s second consecutive win in the Melody Maker readers’ poll, seemingly on the back of a single vocal duet on a certain chart-topping album.

  The disparity between critics’ expectations and those of the fans who filled the halls and bought the albums was further highlighted at Sandy’s London concert debut as a solo artist. The show at the suitably intimate Queen Elizabeth Hall was scheduled for September 10, coinciding with the album’s release, unavoidably forcing her to forsake the powerhouse trio who had been by her side in the studio, i.e. the Fotheringay rhythm-section behind, Richard Thompson leading from the front. When Sandy had debuted eight of the songs at an almost impromptu set at the Lincoln Festival in July, she had been able to rely on Richard and Gerry Conway to not only recall the songs in situ but, in the former’s case, to open out the likes of ‘Blackwaterside’ and ‘John the Gun’ with some trademark licks.

  Unfortunately, the September London show coincided with a fit of other commitments on the parts of Thompson, Donaldson and Conway. The result was an unscheduled bout of Fotheringport confusion, the Fairport rhythm section and Jerry Donahue being drafted in to play a set of songs they knew not. The concert began in a classically disastrous way, and rarely returned to an even keel.

  Philippa Clare: Sandy’s first solo gig … she [usually] used to wear t-shirts and jeans, and she and Trevor had gone out and bought what I call the Mermaid Dress, it was this pale blue, sequined job, long, with sleeves that [hung down]. She’s absolutely scared rigid, she comes up the steps, trips over the dress, puts her hand on the piano, knocks a glass on the floor, and then she trips over a wire, finally gets to the microphone, she puts her guitar over [the dress] and with the long sleeves she can’t play it. She [goes,] “Trevor.” Went off. Comes back on, jeans and t-shirt. Standing ovation.

  Though the audience stayed with Sandy throughout the hour long set, the media proved less forgiving, Melody Maker’s Michael Watts complaining that, “She had difficulty adjusting to the piano, there was a period of several minutes when she was unable to find a guitar in the right key, and she generally could not establish any great rapport with her three backup musicians. This amateurishness had a charming naivety about it at first, but after a while became irritating.” Other, more discerning critics, whilst giving Sandy the benefit of the doubt, agreed that “the lack of rehearsals often sounded painfully obvious,” and that her “troubles were due, in the main, to lack of cohesion between the rhythm section, as a result of [too] few rehearsals.”

  The show only took off when Sandy and Jerry Donahue revived their arrangement of ‘Wild Mountain Thyme’ as the final song, and when Sandy returned for an encore alone, confessing to the audience, “We are so unrehearsed I’ll just have to sing you a song unaccompanied, ‘cause we don’t know anything else.” The resulting ‘Lowlands of Holland’ finally lifted the rafters, and perhaps suggested that an album as devoted to traditional material as originals should have remained the preferred option. It also implied that she might have been better advised to leave the band in the studio, and put the sole in solo. Two sessions for the BBC, one for TV (the only TV footage extant), one for radio, in August and October, confirmed as much. Sandy, though, was determined to persevere with perming a band of musicians from the remnants of two interchangeable surrogate families, even fronting an extended Fotheringport Confusion on her next recorded work.

  *It was not the first session, which had been at least a month earlier.

  *This is possibly the song listed on November 1971 session reels as ‘Sitting On The Cliff.

  9

  1972: MAID OF CONSTANT SORROW

  HP agreement Sandy received from Steinway & Sons.

  “There’s a lot of money coming in and going out, so I’m constantly grabbing onto a bit, and then having to give it away again … If I was on my own, I would be rich.” [1972]

  Sandy Denny

  Hankering for some of that old rapport she had had with Fairport and Fotheringay, Sandy took to the road in October 1971 with her old friend Richard Thompson and a pick-up rhythm section, to promote North Star Grassman & The Ravens. Though Timi Donald was a light-handed drummer, and Thompson remained a sympathetic wizard, her stage-fright was only exacerbated by the pressures of fronting a band. The tour, which certainly had its moments, concluded with another of those nights when, in the words of MM journalist Colin Irwin, “all her nerve ends [would be] showing … [and] it got worse and worse, ‘cause she knew she was doing badly, and that made her even more nervous. Everyone was sitting on the edge of their seats. I really felt for her.” Unfortunately, it came again in London, at University College.

  It was a perhaps unconscious longing for the days of Fairport that led Sandy to begin work on her next album, just a fortnight after the college tour ended, with a song discarded from Liege & Lief. ‘The Quiet Joys of Brotherhood’ was a Richard Farina lyric she now set to the Irish lovesong, ‘My Lagan Love’. Recorded by Fairport in four takes, it took considerably more work to create a whole series of multi-tracked Denny vocals set to the stark accompaniment of Dave Swarbrick’s violin. The results, though, put the lush in luscious.

  Eight days later, Sandy (and Richard) joined Swarb and the remaining Fairporters for an extended encore at the legendary Rainbow Theatre in London’s Finsbury Park, and found herself remembering just how good familiarity felt. The encore took on truly epic proportions as Sandy and the boys worked their way through the likes of ‘The Weight’, ‘Silver Threads & Golden Needles’, ‘Country Pie’, ‘Blues In The Bottle’, ‘High School Confidential’ and ‘Sweet Little Rock & Roller’. It took Trevor Lucas, standing in the wings, to realise that an album which captured the spirit of that encore could yet turn the Fairport family’s slightly po-faced reputation on its head, and even turn a career or two around.

  Trevor Lucas: I saw Fairport doing a gig at the Rainbow … and Sandy and Richard got up, and did some rock & roll things. And I thought it would be a nice idea to get that down on record – things that groups play that knock audiences out but never get recorded. So [that was how] we had the idea of doing The Bunch. And that was the first thing I did as a producer. [1972]

  The bluegrass/country flavour of the original encore was largely jettisoned in favour of something more suited to a three-piece rhythm-section comprising Pat Donaldson, Dave Mattacks and Gerry Conway. The ensuing album, attributed to The Bunch, was appositely named Rock On! The line-up, almost a who’s who of folk-rock, on closer inspection most resembled a list of callers at Chipstead Street. For the first time on record, Sandy got to sing with Linda Peters, Richard got to sing Hank Williams and Dion songs, and ‘Tyger’ Hutchings took his finger out of his ear long enough to give Chuck Berry’s ‘Nadine’ a good stomping.

  If The Bunch album was planned as a party record, the sessions became a party unto themselves. Having managed to persuade Island to fund such an indulgent venture, Trevor had secured the recently-constructed Manor Studios, the first studio venture from Richard Branson’s Virgin label, for a couple of weeks at a cut-price rate, this being a dry
-run for the studio’s facilities. Dry, though, the sessions themselves were never likely to be.

  Philippa Clare: God, that was bad behaviour. We had a ball! That was a great party. There was creaking floorboards everywhere. Branson wanted somebody to come along, and just try it out, and get all the glitches out. In the control room, they were drinking Fosters, and Trevor made a complete steel curtain with these [pull] rings. When he sang ‘Don’t Be Cruel’ he was lying flat on the floor. Everyone was so stoned!

  At the time, The Manor was unique. Set in picturesque Cotswolds countryside, it was a live-in studio, offering full board. The logic was that, rather than recording on an ad hoc basis at London studios, as and when time allowed, bands could block book the Manor and, two weeks later, return to the record company with the ‘multis’ for a new album. Needless to say, the sheer novelty and the combination of personalities comprising The Bunch meant that work gave way to play more often than not.

  Linda Thompson: It was a startling concept, you were staying there and sleeping there, and having your food there. It was absolutely fantastic. And we were young. Because it was a big house, there was loads and loads of bedroom hopping. It was like the Duke and Duchess of Fonfon’s weekend party. These were pre-herpes, pre-AIDS days, [so if] somebody said, “That was quite a good vocal,” you thought, “I think I’ll sleep with you. That’s a very nice thing to say.”

  Not surprisingly, Sandy wanted to sing everything, from ‘Peggy Sue Got Married’ to ‘The Locomotion’, and occasional subterfuge on Trevor’s part was required if his concept was going to be preserved. Thankfully, Sandy’s proclivity for partying hardest gave him enough downtime to slip on a vocal overdub or two from the then-Linda Peters. Even so, the Manor sessions were never going to result in a finished record, and a whole bunch (sic) of overdubs were needed back at Island studios. Not that the return to London seems to have unduly impinged on the party-mood.