It must have seemed that she was being forced to relive the Fotheringay split in real time. This time, though, when her manager, Steve O’Rourke, began to lay out the economics of a band, she summarily fired him. When a replacement management team reiterated the same arguments, she simply ignored them.
Gerry Conway: I never quite understood Sandy’s motives, why she did the things she did. She certainly would only do things on her terms. She gave managers a terrible runaround – they’d suggest that she did this and that to further her career, and if she thought it was crap, she just would not entertain it. Eventually they’d give up the ghost.
Sandy’s determination to hang onto the band this time around seems to have resulted in a couple of curious soundtrack assignments, presumably undertaken to shore up the finances. At the beginning of August she found herself recording a ten-minute suite for a short TV film entitled Pass of Arms. Though she evidently threw herself into the project, despite having to “virtually [make] up the tunes to fit the words [they] gave me on the spur of the moment … [and then] race around all sorts of really hammy studios, eventually ending up with Island at Basing Street,” she found “the film … incredibly atmospheric, especially all the effects of the wolves and the wind.” Not so, the next film job, a four-song assignment under the auspices of Manfred Mann, for a lame slap and tickle feature by the name of Swedish Fly Girls, which was purely one for the money. With words and music already supplied, and without a credit to her name, Sandy delivered surprisingly unself-conscious vocals to songs with titles like ‘Are The Judges Sane?’ and ‘What Will I Do With Tomorrow?’. Their kitsch content, though, resisted even her best endeavours.
Sandy now turned to perhaps the one person capable of the necessary acquiescence, her brother David, to help her in her weakness – management of money. A qualified civil engineer, he planned on taking a year’s sabbatical from Taylor-Woodrow to help get Sandy’s finances straight, and to put his own head back together. His marriage to a German nurse had recently run aground and, according to his father, “Sandy took him in and more or less picked him up when he was in a very low state – and [then offered to take] him into the music business.”
Neil and Edna were not exactly thrilled to lose their aspirational son to the same precarious industry as their daughter, but David’s presence on the road was a necessary adjunct to the inevitable disbandment of Sandy’s own combo, and the need to do a solo tour on the back of Sandy. It coincided with Richard Thompson coming to Sandy to tell her it was time to move on. As he remembers it, “I don’t think I gave her too much in the way of advanced notice … but I felt I was treading water and I wanted to do something a bit more for my own music.”
In a way it must have come as a relief. Soundtrack assignments and a resolution of her managerial conundrum wasn’t about to dig Sandy out of her ongoing financial black hole. The release of Sandy had only added to the pressures, with reviewers again focusing on the damage Harry Robinson’s strings had inflicted on what was basically a welcome return to form. Karl Dallas’s Folk Review review told it like it was:
“There are so many lovely things on [Sandy] that I could spend the whole of my space listing them but instead I would like to consider in what respects it falls short of being the even more superlatively excellent album [sic] it might have been … What is needed now … is for the sort of sparseness [found on certain tracks] to be applied to the overall sound of Sandy’s records … After all, her voice is rich enough without having to be lushed up with strings and brass and such. I would like to hear a whole album as restrained in its backing as ‘The Music Weaver’.”
A couple of solo radio sessions in the months leading up to her first solo tour only served to reinforce a commonly-held view that a full ensemble remained ancillary to the music weaver’s needs. At the first of these sessions, a BBC In Concert back in March, Sandy self-consciously introduced herself by saying, “As you’ve probably noticed I haven’t got my band with me tonight … I thought I’d try and do it on my own. I’d like to announce right now that I don’t know much boogie-woogie, so you’ll just have to put up with this.” Though the set starts hesitantly, with a muted ‘North Star Grassman’, the North Star Grassman material in this context begins to make sense, and the two concessions to tradition, ‘Bruton Town’ and ‘Blackwaterside’, fit comfortably alongside the likes of ‘Sweet Rosemary’ and ‘John the Gun’.*
In her mind’s eye, though, Sandy continued to associate singing solo with singing folk. Asked that September what sort of set her fans might witness, she admitted, “I haven’t got quite together what sort of things I’ll be doing on gigs in the future. What I would really like to do is go out and collect some really beautiful traditional songs to sing. You know, the way Martin Carthy goes to the ends of the earth to find exactly the right sort of material. I really admire that.” And yet, as Karl Dallas notes, “If you criticised what she was doing, and it was ‘non-traditional’, then it was because you were a boring old tradie.” The contradiction would remain, as she moved ever further away from her perceived roots, and towards the mainstream.
The more upbeat material and beguiling melodies on Sandy again made the disturbing spectre of commercial success hove into view. When Radio One’s daytime darling, DJ Tony Blackburn, picked ‘Listen, Listen’ as his single of the week, in September 1972, it seemed a chart entry was assured. Sandy’s reaction to the prospect was typical of the times, “I remember the feeling of panic – thinking ‘What on earth am I going to do if I get in the charts? I mean, how could I go on Top of the Pops?’ … Anyway, the single got nowhere and the panic passed.” And yet, on another occasion, at the Speakeasy with Island’s PR man David Sandison, she responded to Carly Simon’s ‘You’re So Vain’ coming on the sound system by telling Sandison, “God! I hate that, I really hate that.” When he asked her why, she freely admitted, “‘Cause it’s so fucking good. I wish it was my record.”
As Linda Thompson observed to Jim Lloyd, during a 1988 Radio Two tribute to Sandy, “I think in a way she had a bit of a self-defeating clause built into her contract, as it were … We were very snobbish. We’d look at Top of the Pops and think it’s gruesome. Nobody made singles in those days, it was the days of albums. Who would want to be popular? We were arty.” Sandy’s feelings were considerably more ambivalent than she might have been prepared to admit: yes, she wanted success, but on her terms, and saw no reason why that hadn’t, or shouldn’t, happen. When it didn’t happen, even with an album as strong as Sandy, she began to fear that her time had passed, something that began to gnaw away at the foundations of her artistic instincts. Old friends found it increasingly hard to find ‘the old Sandy’ in this confused soul.
Heather Wood: Sandy was not a secure person, she didn’t seem to trust her own genius and I think she was frequently a very unhappy person. She obviously had a drive to write and to perform but it never really seemed to give her what she wanted.
John Renbourn: She seemed to be quite determined to be famous … In the early stages I didn’t notice that in her, but it became pretty intense later on … [But then] when I did run into her … she seemed to be getting progressively more miserable … It hurt to see her sometimes.
Unfortunately, Sandy’s perception that she had something unattainable to live upto continued to feed into her performances, queering her self-confidence and letting in the ghost of previous stage-fright. The greater the burden of expectation, the more likely he would come a-knockin’. Not surprisingly, most of her more erratic performances were in London, on nights when friends and reviewers were on hand to remind her of her ‘destiny’. Her solo debut at the Queen Elizabeth Hall, on September 6, was one such occasion.
Sandy Denny: I feel really bad about the Queen Elizabeth Hall concert … I could feel that the audience were staying with me and I hate putting people through that drama … sitting on the edge of their seats, thinking is she going to make it … Audiences like to be entertained as well as listening to the music, b
ut I’m the same person offstage as I am on. I’m not an actress. [1972]
Actually, it was Sandy’s determination to keep that offstage person at bay that created that initial infusion of fear – what she labelled, “this whole ‘oh God, am I going to be able to play?’ thing.” The irony is that, as Gina Glazer remembers the wily ol’ manager Herb Cohen observing to her back in 1968, “You know, I like her singing but what I would love to see is her personality injected into her singing.”
The upbeat personality evidenced in some of the Sandy songs was only rarely allowed out at the shows, as if Sandy had forgotten how endearing that “off-hand, off the cuff” singer who “maintain[ed] a dialogue with the audience,” could be. Solo, the voice could now be heard in all its resonating purity, driven by an unerring instinct, but the secret Sandy remained a deeply unhappy person, for whom the songs remained her only release.
*‘Bruton Town’ appears on the boxed-set, the remainder of the set opens the deleted BBC Sessions 1971–73 CD.
10
1972–73: ALONE AGAIN, NATURALLY
Naked piano playing woman, as drawn by Sandy.
“All I know is that things aren’t going as well as I feel they should be. That’s as far as I’ll admit it’s going wrong – the fact that it isn’t going right. But I don’t know how right I want it to go.” [1973]
Sandy Denny
“She is more than just a singer. In a far more interesting sense than rock stars like Carole King or Carly Simon, she is a songwriter – her gift for language is unmistakeable. That so marked a gift can become a casualty seems to me a fundamental problem. Is it just that the rock audience can’t tell chalk from cheese, and so discourages those who can from going on caring about the difference? Or is it that the beautiful singer, lacking limitations, is turned aside from art by having no obstacles to overcome.”
Clive James, Let It Rock 3/74.
Clive James’ piece in Let It Rock, published when Sandy’s solo career had again been placed in suspended animation, in the winter of 1974, accused Ms. Denny of “content[ing] yourself with merely becoming a British rock queen, instead of nurturing a world-class songwriting talent into the revolutionary force it once bade fair to be.” Damning with faint praise a woman whose “open-space, low-volume, high intensity vocal style” afforded Fairport’s “spellbinding electro-folk sound” the opportunity “to develop into a new rock idiom,” she had apparently almost single-handledly allowed “that special rock idiom [to] now show signs of regressing, of once again becoming solely a folk style.”
James’ article hit a number of targets but missed the point – Sandy was no longer interested in recrafting any folk style into a rock idiom. Denied a gesture as iconoclastic as Dylan going electric at Newport, and forced back into playing solo, Sandy’s increasingly personal work found itself compartmentalized by critics whose vocabulary floundered in the face of such uncompromising individuality, even as she was insisting that she, “wouldn’t like to mislead the folkies by saying [Sandy] was a folk album, and I wouldn’t mislead rock fans by saying it was a rock album.”
Sandy had been everything critics had insisted was required for the lady’s commercial potential to be realised. The problem, as Stephen Holden suggested in his glowing Rolling Stone review of the album was that, “a fine solo album [like] North Star Grassman … didn’t get anywhere,” and though he hoped, “the fate of Sandy will be different … if this can’t do it for her, nothing can.” Sandy concluded that only a clean break from her traditional roots, coinciding with a daring raid on a new audience, was likely to achieve what Sandy had not. In the interviews on Sandy’s release she asserted a new agenda, “I like romantic songs. I’m a romantic at heart.”
The album Sandy would begin recording in the spring of 1973 would be her first collection of songs from the heart, but it would be all but discarded by her record label, and the moment would not come again. The album in question, Like An Old Fashioned Waltz, would be described by Sandy, at the time of its completion, as “simpler and more romantic than the last … more direct … it’s pure romance,” and in concert notes to a mini-tour of Japan she expressed the hope that, “the feeling of some of these songs … will evoke some of the romance of the Thirties, for these are also time[s] when a touch of the romantic may be just what we need.” In fact, Sandy’s jotted thoughts on each of the seven originals that make up the bulk of the album, in the same Japanese programme, make it clear that the overriding theme of the album was loneliness, set against a backdrop of frayed love:
“Solo – A song which depicts that knowledge we all have inside, which is, that nobody can live your life for you….
Like An Old Fashioned Waltz – … Two dancers alone in an enormous deserted ballroom. But where does the orchestra hide?
Friends – This is about some people I know and love – even with their faults and all.
Carnival – … When the summer is gone, and all the laughter and frivolities which go with the summer have mellowed, all at once the autumn is with us …
Dark the Night – About lost love perhaps, and being alone with your memories, wishing that things may have been different, if you had your time again.
At The End of The Day – Anyone who has ever been away from home for a long time, and has felt a little homesick, will understand the sentiment behind this song …
No End – The story of two friends, one a person who loved to travel and the other one to paint. They persuade each other back into their respective vocations. A strange song perhaps, but we all lose our zest for life at times, don’t we? …”
That sense of aloneness largely stemmed from the fact that, for the first time since they had moved into Chipstead Road together, Sandy and Trevor found themselves leading increasingly separate existences. Ironically, this had come about because Trevor had recently joined that endlessly evolving outfit, Fairport Convention. Seemingly on its last legs in the summer of 1972, retaining just two members from the groundbreaking Full House line-up – the two Daves, Pegg and Swarbrick – and not a single original member, Fairport found itself putting an album together at the same time as Trevor was wrapping up the Sandy album. In their haste to co-opt Sandy and her musicians onto their own album, Swarb and Pegg found out Trevor had ambitions of his own. The resultant album, Rosie, was cobbled together using the talents of Timi Donald, Gerry Conway, Richard Thompson and Sandy herself, but then Island expected ‘Fairport’ to tour on the back of it. So it was that Trevor Lucas, Jerry Donahue (Trevor’s suggestion), Dave Pegg, Dave Swarbrick and a reconciled Dave Mattacks took to the road in the winter of 1973, with a schedule to play and an album to sell.
Perhaps Trevor was looking for respite from the role of Sandy’s Other Half, a demanding job at the best of times. Not that he was looking to end the relationship, just that, as Philippa Clare recalls, “Sandy’s mood swings were incredible, [and though] Trevor had amazing patience … he’d get to a point where the steel bolt down the spine would lock, and it’d be like Enough. And that’s usually when Sandy would go off the rails, just to punish him … I think she would have been completely off the rails if Trevor hadn’t been around. There were times when he was absolutely magical with her, when I’ve seen her in a complete state and Trevor would calm her down.”
One such instance came the following summer when, in a rare respite from the road for the pair of them, Sandy and Trevor decided to check out that year’s annual Cambridge Folk Festival. Not surprisingly, Sandy’s presence generated a certain interest verging, in one case, on the voyeuristic.
Karl Dallas: Cambridge Folk Festival, mile-long queue to the toilet, Sandy decides she’s gonna take a pee under the hedge. While Sandy’s doing this, somebody takes a photograph of her. And she was absolutely distraught. She was in a terrible state, “Oh Karl, how could people do such a thing?” She was in tears, and we were all gathered around her, “There, there, point out the person” – we’d bought into her hysteria – and Trevor turns up, and he goes, “What’s the
trouble?” She told him and he [just] laughed. He said, “People are sick, aren’t they?” And in five minutes he had her laughing about it. And I thought this was a relationship made in hell but it works, because he understands her better than any of us … Sandy was a very difficult woman … When I heard about problems between her and Trevor, I always assumed it was her fault just because I knew her, and I knew she [could be] a stroppy, very emotional person.
Trevor felt he had something of musical worth to contribute to Fairport, and his voice certainly lent some much needed texture to the vocal mix. But others tend to take a more cynical view of Mr. Lucas, extending to his motives for taking up with Sandy in the first place. Heather Wood remains firmly convinced that, “he wanted to be a star. Why he took up with [Sandy] I don’t know, ‘cause somebody who really, really wants to be a star, taking up with somebody who is a star, [does so for] one of two reasons, either you think that they can make you a star, or you’re happy just to bask in their presence. But then what he seemed to delight in was putting her down.” Others who knew both Sandy and Trevor concur with Heather Wood’s assessment.
David Sandison: [Trevor was] an extremely amenable and completely untrustworthy man. I think he was a chancer. I think he was a man of some ability, not much, an adequate musician, and I think he was very ambitious … I don’t know about the productions he did with Sandy because wisely he got some of the best players, and some of the best arrangers … [But] I just found him too slick. There was something about Trevor that was sneaky … He was a master at subtly putting her down. I was with her one night at the Speakeasy, and she asked Mario, who was the MD there, for her bottle of brandy and he brought it out, and she held it up to the light, and she called Mario back, she said, “It’s down.” He said, “Oh, Trevor was at it.” She said, “Fucking Trevor, he knows he’s not allowed to touch my fucking brandy.” She was really uptight.
No More Sad Refrains: The Life and Times of Sandy Denny Page 19
