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

by Clinton Heylin

  Linda Thompson: In those days [Richard] was very supportive of me. I was always terrified of singing with Sandy, and he’d say, “Now, don’t let her [intimidate you].” … And Trevor … would be very helpful with my vocal. When Sandy wasn’t around, he’d say, “Let’s nip in and do this vocal.” She was fabulous, but she was definitely competitive … [ ] … Sandy and I had a bit of a clash over who was going to sing the harmony and who was going to sing the tune [on ‘When Will I Be Loved’]. Sandy was a bit cross at first because I sang the tune, and she said but the harmonies [should be] higher, and I said, ‘Come on, you [can] sing higher than me.” … [ ] … Trevor and I did ‘Locomotion’ when Sandy and Richard were in respective loos in Island being sick. He literally couldn’t stand up … In those days we took it for granted [that] there was unlimited studio-time. We’d be in the canteen, sitting chatting to Bob Marley, and then he’d go into one studio and we’d go into another. He’d sell eighty million records, and we’d sell eight! [CH/CD/CH]

  Island (and indeed A&M’s) strategy for selling The Bunch album extended to a press release anonymously penned by some maverick, who signed him or herself simply Subjective, and called Sometimes It Pays To Be Subjective. The tangled prose insisted that, “the biggest surprise on the album … is Sandy Denny’s singing, which although not really all that much as a rock and roller [Huh!], has a hell of a lot of soul and expression. For me Sandy singing ‘That’ll Be The Day’, ‘Love’s Made A Fool Of You’, ‘Willie and the Hand Jive’ and ‘Learning The Game’, makes the album fat, rounded and complete.” Notwithstanding such subjective praise, The Bunch Rock On – an enjoyable enough curio from the days before vinyl shortage – sank like a cracked oil-tanker.

  In an attempt to add some U.S. sales, Sandy committed herself to playing a series of shows at New York’s Bitter End and L.A.’s Troubador – where she generously offered up renditions of ‘Love’s Made A Fool of You’ and ‘Learning the Game’ – almost as soon as the twenty tracks recorded had been wittled down to album-length. A brief promotional tour the previous September had barely impinged on the American psyche but A&M were pushing North Star Grassman hard enough to warrant this second assault; and the musical trio in tow was as close to Sandy’s perfect ensemble as she would come in her solo years. The ever-reliable RT was ably supported by Timi Donald and Pat Donaldson, and the shows themselves were almost universally impressive, even if Sandy’s promise in the music press, that she would “take all the new material [she had] over to the States and do it for about a month, and then come back and record it,” proved illusory.

  Perhaps Sandy was originally planning to record versions of ‘Maid of Constant Sorrow’ and ‘Bruton Town’, both classic weal and woe songs represented in the shows, and prefaced in the latter’s case by the observation that this “is about a poor lady. They all are, you know. ‘Cause men are so rotten.” Sandy seemed to be surprisingly willing to draw on the impressive traditional repertoire she had acquired over the years, even singing a sprightly ‘Matty Groves’, an acapella ‘Reynard the Fox’ and an explosive ‘Blackwaterside’, that showed just how potent the Denny-Thompson combination could be.

  One night she returned to her hotel to find Richard ensconced in a discussion with an American fan about Bert Jansch’s version of the Scottish ballad, ‘The Twa Corbies’, and when the fan admitted the meaning of the words eluded him, “Sandy sang the song … unaccompanied, sitting on the floor leaning against the bed, stopping to explain the lines here and there.” It was one more reminder that this material still held up for her. Almost the first track she cut on her return from the U.S. was another Jansch favourite from the old days, Anne Briggs’ ‘Go Your Own Way, My Love’ but Sandy once again passed over it, admitting “I’ve always thought it a lovely song, but when I think about it, I listen to Bert singing it, and I don’t know, I don’t think I’d better it somehow.”

  Refraining from trying out her new songs, save for an occasional ‘Listen, Listen’, on the small but appreciative American audiences, Sandy still returned home with at least half a dozen originals she hoped to record. There had been something of a change in her songwriting, brought on in part it appeared by the flak the lyrics on North Star Grassman had generated. Talking shortly before leaving for the States, she owned up to the need to open up more in her lyrics.

  Sandy Denny: If I wrote blatantly about something it would be going against my character … I don’t like people to know what’s happening in my head. And this is a fault … My songs are a bit devious, and perhaps weird … I like doing little clever things in songs, with funny chords … [But] I [do] want to write songs which make people understand what I mean, without having to lead them on. [1972]

  One of the results of the rethink was a set of lyrics, in Sandy’s handwriting, included in the next album centrefold. Another was some of her most accessible songs – ‘Sweet Rosemary’, ‘The Music Weaver’, ‘The Lady’, ‘Listen, Listen’ – and, perhaps inevitably, one of her most oblique, ‘For Nobody To Hear’, a song listed on the studio track-sheets either as ‘Brahms’ or ‘The Ballad of Brahms’, evidently a reference to the Brahms symphony that prompted the song:

  “A symphony I learnt at school,

  In pigeonholes so clear,

  It made me for to write no songs,

  For nobody to hear.”

  Having bedded the band in, Sandy decided to return to the Manor to complete the album begun at Island’s London studios, back in November. The producer was again Trevor Lucas, who saw Sandy’s second album as the perfect opportunity to present his own credentials as sympathetic-man-at-the-helm, but who in Thompson’s view, now “pushed the records a little towards pop, with the danger of losing [Sandy’s] uniqueness.” John Wood was again called in for engineering duties.

  With none of the usual time-pressures of a session at Basing Street or Sound Techniques, sessions at the Manor, scheduled for two, unerringly started at five or six, and the side of Sandy that, “in the studio … could be lackadaisical,” came to the fore. There were also technical problems Wood simply did not encounter at the London studios (Thompson recalls, “it was not a great sounding room [even after] John Wood hung a few blankets around”).

  John Wood: [Sandy] was started one way and then a lot of it scrapped and then we made it quite quickly … We went to The Manor to do it, and we had a great deal of technical difficulty, and it was basically a total waste of time. Sandy wasn’t a disciplined worker. At least when you went into a studio in London you went in at a set time and you got on with the job and everybody was there to do the job at a specific time … There wasn’t an urgency to get on with anything … There wasn’t the discipline of getting on with it. So not much was achieved. [PW]

  Despite Sandy’s familiarity with her musicians, a whole week in March yielded just two usable cuts, ‘Bushes and Briars’ and ‘Sweet Rosemary’, the former of which Sandy wrote at the Manor, inspired by an empty church she chanced upon on a Sunday stroll. The other six songs attempted that week were left in various states of disrepair, some just as backing tracks, some as solo performances by Sandy. ‘After Halloween’ and ‘Go Your Own Way, My Love’ would be left firmly at the wayside, whilst the others awaited the Sound Techniques touch.

  Asked about the experience the following month, Trevor Lucas insisted, “it’s good for a producer to know someone so well that they see them as both a person and as an artist. Sandy tends to be fairly introverted and sensitive in her writing and lyrics, so it is easier for me [than most] to understand what they are about.” That introverted side, though rarely seen in public, made Sandy prone to bouts of uncertainty in the studio, for which Trevor was the ideal counsellor, even if sometimes his presence became a key factor in the negative energy emanating from the studio.

  John Wood: Sometimes you’d get nowhere. She did have mood swings, to put it mildly. Sometimes, if Trevor was in the studio, she’d be so uptight it would end up in some domestic fracas. A lot of it was a lack of self-confidence whi
ch is very common in people who bluster, which she was very good at. She certainly had black moods, where she would drink a lot. She really needed to be the centre of attention. She was larger than life, but … more than once … she’d be doing an overdub and couldn’t get it right, and would completely go to pieces and run out of the room. [JI]

  There had evidently been some form of altercation involving Sandy at Sound Techniques, back in March 1971, at the start of the North Star Grassman sessions, which had prompted her to look further afield for the right sound. However, on her return to 46a Old Church Street in early April 1972, she was forced to admit, “I put these two vocal tracks down the other night, and there’s just no comparison with anywhere else.” The remaining seven songs, aided and abetted by a couple of Manor backing-tracks, were completed in a handful of Sound Techniques sessions through April and May, intersected by a dozen or so dates on the college circuit, to keep the coffers intact.

  At least half a dozen of the new songs were debuted at these shows, as Sandy revelled in the opportunity to play with the closest she had come to a standing band since Fotheringay. That sense of celebrating song carried over onto the album, where ‘For Nobody To Hear’, ‘The Lady’ and ‘The Music Weaver’ all placed music at the centre of the singer’s soul. The forces of nature also reappeared, on ‘It’ll Take A Long Time’, ‘Quiet Joys of Brotherhood’, ‘Listen, Listen’ and ‘Bushes and Briars’, harnessed to the same joyous sound. Sandy even tried, for the first time since Fotheringay, to write in a consciously traditional style, perhaps inspired by the songs Richard was now writing for Henry the Human Fly. The results – ‘Sweet Rosemary’ and ‘It Suits Me Well’ – fell easily on the ears. ‘It Suits Me Well’ was a particularly successful evocation of departed values, Sandy adopting three male personae for whom “the living it is hard/ oh, but it suits me well.” Interviewed about the album on its release, Sandy put her finger on a key transition.

  Sandy Denny: It’s a much more forthright album than North Star Grassman and the Ravens, because I was just in a completely different frame of mind. My [new] songs are much more positive. They are more like statements than the withdrawn, tentative things [on the previous album] … I’m quite pleased with the record as a compilation … it encompasses a lot of the things which have influenced me. [1972]

  For her most honest album to date, Alexandra Elene MacLean picked her most straightforward title – simply Sandy. Given the opportunity to tour with the same band on the album’s release, the possibility of good radio airplay for the first single, and the sort of album reviewers could at last respond to, it seemed that England’s maid of constant sorrow could yet get a mass audience to listen, listen. Island seemed as enthused as Sandy and suggested a simple portrait to go with the terse title, all parties agreeing that the olde worlde feel of the North Star Grassman cover had not worked. Sandy, though, remained desperately self-conscious about her looks.

  Pete Townshend: Her appearance was a problem for her. We shared this. I remember telling her I couldn’t understand how I’d managed to marry one of the most beautiful women from my school days, and she told me I was beautiful. She obviously meant it. When I returned the compliment, I could see she felt I was horse-trading. But I found her quite lovely.

  A line-drawn self-portrait, nude at her favourite piano, from one of her notebooks, shows both a mordant wit – the halo and jug ears (presumably intended to illustrate her musical ear) – and, in its typically exaggerated depiction of her girth, the sagging self that Sandy believed she saw in the mirror. Even when a photographer was willing to prove otherwise, capturing the glaring beauty inside, she would immediately want to reach for the dimmer. When Linda Fitzgerald-Moore took a series of portraits in the winter of 1970, the transition from frumpy wallflower to irridescent flower-child (and back again) was quite startling.

  Sandy’s mindlock was such that the better the portrait, the greater the sense of misrepresentation. As she admitted, at the time of her most memorable portrait, “If it’s a good one I think ‘Oh God, everyone’ll think I’m prettier than I really am,’ and if it’s a bad one I think ‘how can they print those awful things’ – it’s incredible, incurable paranoid.” When the opportunity came for her to be photographed by the world famous David Bailey, for her album cover, Sandy took refuge at her friend, designer Bambi Ballard’s, for the couple of days it took to work herself into the state of calm necessary for Bailey to do his job.

  Bambi Ballard: I was living two doors away from David Bailey and so she came to stay. And she was very funny about him, too. She liked him. [But] I think she was slightly disappointed that he didn’t make a pass at her. He was really nice to her. She got a buzz out of being photographed by Bailey. [It] gave her an enormous fillip.

  The cover-shot to Sandy presents a classically beautiful portrait, even if none of Sandy’s real spirit is captured. There is not even a trace of a smile on her lips, or that twinkle that came into her eyes at her most rambunctious. But it presented, to Sandy herself, as much as to her perceived audience, a necessary affirmation that she could be that sculptured face. That she could both despise the surface beauty of others, and envy those to whom it came easily, was something that prompted some of her most pointed barbs.

  Bruce Rowland: Sandy had a wicked sense of humour. [She] had a coat made like a Gladstone bag, out of carpet, which weighed a ton. She and Trevor went to a party somewhere, and just inside the door was a sofa, and on this sofa was this ‘model’ – matchstick girl, very, very pretty, with long, straight blonde hair. Sandy sweeps through the door, and takes this coat off and just drops it over this girl, who collapses under the weight of it. Trevor lifts it off, and Sandy says, “Oh, I’m so sorry. I thought you were a pile of coats.”

  The night of Bailey’s session, with the pictures developed, and her relief clearly visible, Sandy returned to Bambi’s, who was allowed to see the image crack. Bambi, who designed stagewear for the stars, had been introduced to Sandy by Anthea Joseph, perhaps in an attempt to spruce up her ‘country barmaid’ image. Initially, Bambi admits, she was intimidated by Sandy’s presence, “My first impression of Sandy was that she was so confident that I felt completely crushed by her. It wasn’t until I got to know her better that I realised that actually 40% of the job of being a friend of Sandy’s was to prop [her up].”

  The aura of assurance Bailey caught so effortlessly began to fall away as Bambi and Sandy uncorked their way through a fine selection of wines but in its place was a Sandy eager to please, and receptive to that state of ‘emotional recall’ (Al Stewart had a similar experience, around the same time, having “invited her for lunch … [and] made the mistake of offering her a cup of tea. She looked very wistfully at a bottle of wine on the top of my fridge, and said, ‘Can we have that instead?’ and proceeded to drink it, then play[ed] my piano for a couple of hours”). As a result, Bambi was offered a wholly unique preview of an album that finally made Sandy proud.

  Bambi Ballard: Of course, we got pissed [that night], and at one in the morning she said, “I’d love to play [the album] to you.” I said, “Let’s go to the Howff. They’ve got a piano.” “Oh, you’re not gonna want to hear my music.” “Of course I am.” I drag her down the road. Roy Guest is just leaving and says, “Just slam the door when you leave,” and then she sat down and she started to play, and then she said, “You don’t want to hear this. It’s not very good.” But finally she played me the whole album. It was sublime. I had tears running down my face. I was the one member of the audience and she sang them for me. But between every song, “You don’t want to hear anymore, do you?” And you’d have to build [her up]. “But of course. I loved that one.” “You did? Really?” There was nothing false about that. She so needed the praise.

  Unbeknownst to Sandy, her little one-woman preview of the new songs also christened a new solo persona. Through the summer, as Island readied Sandy for release, the real Sandy was subjected to a number of pressures to drop her band. It would be autumn before
another UK tour would be viable. Also, Richard Thompson had just about finished his own statement of intent, the deeply English Henry the Human Fly, and was angling to tour with his feisty new partner and fiancee, Linda Peters.

  An insistent Sandy told more than one journalist, “I really like having a band. I’ve said this so many times, it sounds like I’m going over old ground. But people don’t believe me … I could be making a lot of money if I was working on my own. I can understand their point of view, but I really like to be with a band.” When Karl Dallas came to call, to discuss the new album, he found the conversation constantly returning to the question of ‘the band’.

  As Dallas wrote as the time, “I began to realise that her need to have them with her was a human as well as a musical thing, and her determination not to have them taken away from her was rooted as much in what happened before she performed as in what actually occurs on stage … But somewhere, some time soon, someone is going to start polishing that Rolls Royce for her. And though it’s got acres more space than a Ford Escort, there’s not going to be room in it for her band. A pity, but it’s inevitable.” Sandy fiercely resented Dallas’s inference. Though she never admitted it to him, Dallas now suspects that “the violence of her reaction against what I was saying might have indicated that it made more impact on her than she was saying.”