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

by Clinton Heylin

  The tapes were rolling on all four nights at the Troubador, capturing performances which with a little judicious editing could have made for a potentially strong live offering. Unfortunately, in classic Fairport fashion, having happily booked the famous Wally Heider Mobile Truck to record the shows, they found out that, in Jerry Donahue’s words, “we had run out of money and couldn’t pay for the tapes. They were held for a long time by Wally Heider’s Mobile until Island eventually bought them back.”

  By which time, the Sydney/London tapes had already been reduced down to the single album offering, Fairport Live. Though Colin Irwin’s generous review in Melody Maker, on its release in June, insisted that Sandy “has never sung better,” in truth she had rarely sung worst. Whether it was her need to prove that she could still hold her own at the ubiquitous after-gig drinking sessions or simply the fact that, in Sandy’s own words, “it’s a great strain to go right over an electric band” – something her years singing solo, and the larger venues and P.A.s combined to make into an issue – the Sydney shows and a couple of the Troubador sets audibly featured a lead singer fraying at the edges.

  Trevor Lucas confirmed as much, years later, recollecting an occasion, “at the Troubador in Los Angeles – [when] we played three shows in one night – and Sandy happened to fall off the stage. Just like that. But the audience, who were fantastic, just caught her and stood her back up. And she didn’t miss a note.” (It was presumably as a tribute of sorts that Trevor sang an arrangement of ‘Down Where The Drunkards Roll’ on the second night.) Though the final night found Sandy again struck down by ‘L.A. voice’ – hence the shattered vocal on ‘Who Know Where The Time Goes’ on the boxed-set retrospective – the residency also found Sandy playing a couple of inspired sets, culminating in some wonderful vocal and lyrical gymnastics on an extended, semi-improvised ‘Crazy Lady Blues’ and a no-holds-barred ‘John the Gun’.

  For the first time, Sandy needed to ensure that she kept her voice in the best possible shape. As she admitted to an American journalist at the end of 1974, “Playing on my own is easier on the voice. That’s the only thing I’ve got against a band … Up until now I haven’t really suffered that much from laryngitis.” Principle asset or not, Sandy continued to treat that voice in a million with scant regard. The wear and tear it had been subjected to in her solo years was as nothing to the effects of gigging night after night in front of the loudest folk-rock band in Christendom.

  Still, barely a week after the six-piece returned home, NME were reporting that Sandy Denny had officially confirmed she was rejoining Fairport Convention. It also announced a hectic schedule of dates, beginning in Scandinavia in April, onto the States through May, and then back in the U.K. for the end of June.

  Dave Pegg’s later account to biographer Patrick Humphries implies it was Sandy who was pushing to make the association permanent, “We’d done these few gigs with Sandy, she wanted to come back into the band … Nobody was sure whether it was a good idea or not, because we were quite happy as a five-piece, but there was a bit of domestic strife in their household.” Sandy, talking at the time, suggested it was she who had been asked, back in November “but I had so many commitments to fulfill [that], although personally I wanted to say yes, I couldn’t make an immediate decision. Besides, I didn’t know whether our musical ideas would clash or not” – an admission that, stylistically at least, she feared that the band and her might have grown apart in the intervening years.

  If the five-piece Fairport were content to play things by ear, Sandy had returned from America to the depressing news that Island had again pushed back the release of Like An Old Fashioned Waltz. Initially, they had offered the solace of a rush-released single of the title-track, backed by a North Star Grassman outtake she had reworked at the Waltz sessions, ‘Walking The Floor Over You’, but even this failed to transpire. By the time the album was released in June, it seemed almost like an archival release, something that reviewers like Melody Maker’s Colin Irwin found hard to accept at the time:

  “Ironic that just as she’s rejoined Fairports she comes up with easily the best thing she’s achieved since leaving them in the first place … Her vocals are better than ever, full of subtle embroidery and perfectly timed pauses. Yet it’s the material contained here that really makes this record outstanding. We always knew Sandy was a good writer when she produced ‘Who Knows Where The Time Goes’ but the songs here maintain a constantly high standard throughout.”

  With her A&M deal about to end, and sliding down the priority pole at Island, Sandy’s decision to reattach herself to Fairport begins to make some sense, even though she continued to talk about a show with an orchestra at the Festival Hall, to coincide with the album’s June release, a grandiose scheme that was never likely to prove financially viable. And, however expedient her decision, it was inevitable that most of the compromises were going to have come from the other five members of the band, something bound to ferment a mild dose of discord.

  Dave Pegg: [Swarb] was a bit compromised in terms of what he had to do musically. He may have felt he was pushed a bit into the background, as we all did, ‘cause it was Trevor and Sandy versus the rest of the guys. Obviously, if Sandy’s in the band you’re gonna do her songs, and you’re gonna let her sing. Which meant that there were some elements of Fairport stuff that kinda disappeared. Swarb didn’t get much of a chance to show off, and may have felt bad about that. But it wasn’t like he was gonna leave the band.

  Sandy’s contribution to the live set now solidified into a block of ten songs, of which just ‘Matty Groves’ and ‘Who Knows Where The Time Goes’ were culled from her previous stint in the band. The remaining songs all derived from her post-Fairport work and, save for ‘Quiet Joys of Brotherhood’, there was not a traditional melody in sight. Sandy also tried to conjure up some band spirit with a rousing new ditty, ‘Rising For The Moon’, a self-conscious attempt to trammel ‘Come All Ye’ territory one more time. It quickly became a feature of the spring shows.

  Talking about the songs she had begun writing at this time, Sandy confessed, “I set off by thinking I must write with Fairport in mind. I consciously tried to do that, but I often got right back into my own style, whatever that is.” At some point she gave the band three demos of songs she had written, the first of which, ‘Rising For The Moon’, was clearly written with Fairport in mind.

  The second demo, ‘The King & Queen of England’, probably began life as an attempt to write something traditional-sounding, maybe in the Nine mould, but went “right back into [Sandy’s] own style.” The demo features one of Sandy’s finest vocals, though she had returned to writing in dense allegorical code, where “the glory of what might have been/ Is all she feels,” and the song doesn’t appear to have been attempted by Fairport. The problem with certain of Sandy’s demos, much like those of her friend Pete Townshend, was that they were so precisely directed that there was very little room left to rework them. ‘The King & Queen’ was such a song.

  Dave Pegg: Nobody’s going to alter her approach to the song, really. You can maybe stick a string arrangement on top of it, but you’re not gonna change the way that she approaches music, and the way that she writes her songs. It’s a very old fashioned way. She’s not sitting there improvising a few chords, then she’s gonna put a few words to it afterwards. It comes out like a song. It always came finished. A song like ‘Rising For The Moon’ would be her sitting at the piano at Byfield and she would just set the metronome up, the Bentley Rhythm Ace. Her demos were [all] like that.

  Whether or not ‘Rising For The Moon’ and ‘The King & Queen of England’ began as songs Sandy felt obliged to write, ‘One More Chance’ was clearly a more serious proposition. It had begun life as a clarion call from some cradle of love, lambasting those who might want to cry goodnight world (its original working title):

  “Calling all olive branches and layed off doves

  There is work to do before we say goodbye

  But I can’
t see it happening for the sake of love

  Though I can hear them pleading with us, you and I.

  And I can see their troubled spirits wandering by,

  And we can feel them leaning on our shoulders to cry,

  Oh, Goodnight world

  Oh, goodnight world.”

  Though few laid-off doves seemed to respond to the call, Sandy’s driving vocal on the demo suggests hope still springs – as does the original opening to the second verse:

  “There’s a garden somewhere full of every flower there is

  Where the grains of sand are white and pure as time

  The water runs as clearly as the story of life…”

  The advent of such florid imagery seems to have coincided with the acquisition of a garden, part of a house Sandy could call home – not in London, but an hour up the A40, past Oxford’s ancestral towers, unto the Northamptonshire hamlet of Byfield, where some of the Fairport clan were now settling. Perhaps Trevor had his own agenda in making the move – as Linda Thompson puts it, he “may have been thinking … ‘she won’t get hold of drugs, or whatever’” – but it did not initially impinge on the thrill of it all.

  A country house had always been an enduring wish of the still-young lass, and initially she delighted in the opportunity to escape London’s oppressive environment, recording in her notebook, “I love flowers. I congratulate them often. Watson [Sandy’s Airedale] thinks I’ve cracked. I feel better in the garden. Even the weeds are ok, if you give them a wink and say, ‘Watch out, I’ve got my eye on you.’” In the original draft for ‘No More Sad Refrains’, written a few months later, Sandy would ask for, “the summer sunlight/ to shine upon the garden that I love.”

  However, as Linda observes, “it really wasn’t Sandy … it was inaccessible.” Gerry Conway also considers the move, “a mistake, ‘cause the flat at Chipstead Street was a bit like Piccadilly Circus, everybody dropped in all times of the day and night, and I think she liked that, [but] suddenly she was out in a village somewhere … wrong enviroment.” Whilst her life was full of tours, sessions and more tours, Sandy’s boredom threshold was only sporadically reached, but as isolation passed from an occasional state of mind to a mindset, so she would begin to ask herself the question at the end of the completed ‘One More Chance’ – “Is it too late to change the way we’re bound to go?” – on an almost daily basis.

  By the time it came around to recording these songs in the studio, at the end of an exhausting tour of America with Traffic, Sandy’s voice was already acquiring a layer of sandpaper. The sessions in November 1974 were the band’s first time back in the studio with Sandy and, as Dave Pegg prophetically informed NME prior to the sessions, “it can’t be a filler, everyone feels it has to be a monster.” However responsible they may have been for the temporary termination of Sandy’s solo career, Island had decided to place themselves foursquare behind a tenth Fairport studio offering, even providing the necessary funds to acquire a ‘real’ producer for the first time since Boyd took a hike. Jerry Donahue believes it was, “Swarb and myself in particular [who] wanted something [with] a little more expertise – we thought we were a band that deserved to have the very best. And Trevor agreed. It was Trevor’s idea to bring in Glyn Johns.” Johns certainly didn’t go out of his way to endear himself to his new charges.

  Bruce Rowland: One of [Glyn’]s first comments was, “Right, let’s hear what you’ve got, and I don’t want to hear any airy-fairy folk bullshit.” His brief was to make a commercial album for them. That was Blackwell’s instruction. “This album is make or break for Fairport as far as Island Records go,” that was told him in confidence, so he goes in and starts being Glyn Johns all over everybody.

  Perhaps Sandy was delighted by the choice – she may have had some input into the decision, having worked with Glyn’s brother Andy and seen him recording with The ‘Oo. Rather than responding to the new studio regime with her customary petulance, Sandy knuckled down when Johns cracked his whip.

  Sandy Denny: Working with [Johns] is incredibly easy, as he’s very strict in the studio. It took all the weight off the rest of us, especially Trevor, who’d done the last two, and was finding it really difficult to say or even suggest something without us all jumping down his throat. Glyn just put himself by the console and told everybody to shut up. [1975]

  The remaining men were not quite so responsive to their paternal taskmaster. Donahue remembers it being “a lot easier with Trevor to get him to agree to something … With Glyn you’d really have to fight hard.” There was almost immediately conflict between producer and musicians.

  Dave Pegg: There was a lot of aggravation. Glyn Johns was given the job and Glyn is an absolutely incredible producer, and he got so much out of everybody. [But] he was really vicious and really hard to everybody in the Fairport. We weren’t used to this. We’d never had to take instruction from anybody, we really weren’t used to being like whipped into some kind of shape.

  The real problem, though, as Swarbrick is prepared to admit, was that the band “didn’t really have any material … We had to get material somehow, and I think that shows.” When he rhetorically asks, “why didn’t we open a few [folk] books?” it seems clear that the answer was Glyn Johns. Johns’ preferred solution, as stated to Dave Pegg, was, “Right, I need another two songs by tomorrow. Go and write some songs,” unaware just how painstaking a ritual that could be for Sandy, and how limited the results were likely to be if the band’s other songwriters lent a hand.

  The compositions brought to those first set of sessions speak for themselves. Trevor’s pair of offerings, ‘Tears’ and ‘Restless’, were retreads from a familiar mould. The co-composed ‘White Dress’, penned by Swarb and Ralph McTell, and ‘Dawn’, by Jerry Donahue (with the help of Sandy), were songs specifically written as vehicles for Sandy’s voice. Only on ‘One More Chance’ do those sonorous vocal chords really reach for the sky, as Johns pushed her to do it again and again. As Pegg notes, “You can hear her on the verge of losing it. She’s so emotional in the studio [anyway,] and he’s making her do it again.” This solitary example of vocal jet-propulsion again hinted at a latent greatness awaiting regular channeling in the studio. Before Johns could hone it further, though, the sessions came to a premature end, when the dependably solid Dave Mattacks took umbrage at Johns’ working methods and told him what he could do with them.

  Bruce Rowland: Glyn Johns is a pedant. If it went to a third take, he’d say, “Look here, I didn’t come here to listen to you rehearse.” … And you had to do it his way, or not at all. Which was both the making of him and his downfall. Where he understood what was happening, and took control, nine times out of ten you got it right … [But] if he met anybody head on, as he [had apparently] done at the first set of Rising For The Moon sessions, then it was hell on earth … The performance of DM on the title-track … was masterful, and beautifully recorded, and absolutely right, but it wasn’t what DM went into the studio with. DM made a few caustic comments, did it, and left the band.

  It was probably just as well that DM’s departure, and the onset of the holiday season, curtailed work on the album as, one suspects, Swarb would not have been far behind DM in reaching for his coat. As he caustically observes, Johns “didn’t know bugger all about the tradition, that’s for sure. He wanted Mattacks to play like a country and western drummer, nice off-beat rim shots.” The hiatus also gave Sandy the opportunity to add some songs worthy of her name to the album. Whoever Johns expected to write songs overnight, it was never going to be Sandy. They never came easy, even when she had a subject in mind.

  As it is, the subject-matter of the first song Sandy elected to write in this respite was none other than Swarb, a man she now described in song as a ‘Stranger To Himself’. Placing herself in the third person, she insisted “she loved him, loved him like a lover should,” even as she deconstructs his penny-pinching (“his money was his health”), covetousness (“richer was the other man’s land”), and fear of c
hange (“run for cover like a frightened hare”). The tempestuous nature of their relationship, particularly when placed in close proximity, disguised the fact that, as Dave Pegg’s wife Chris notes, “they were very similar in many ways,” and parts of ‘Stranger To Himself’ could as easily have been rewritten as ‘Stranger To Herself’.

  The other song Sandy demoed for the band that winter offered no pretence of detachment, being directed at a very personal quest to find ‘What Is True?’ Even the confessional interjection, “Oh please, my darling, do not make me sad,” has the ring of authentic experience, as Sandy writes into the night, hoping to “find the one and only thing I’ve never had,” articulated in the final verse as:

  “What is true,

  Even though it only ever whispers

  Part of what it knows,

  And it’s never ventured

  Through the locks

  Where the brazen river flows.

  It’s the fingerprint

  Which is never made.

  It’s the perfume of a rose.”

  Again, it was the demo that captured the essence of the quest, leaving the Fairport arrangement to scrabble for shards of the same inspiration. The song was the first to allude to the presence of Trevor at the moment of composition, pushing her to write. A looseleaf in the back of the notebook containing the drafts of ‘Stranger To Himself’, ‘What Is True?’ and ‘One More Chance’ suggested that the nights were increasingly being given up to tears, as the proximity of her husband stood in stark contrast to her physical distance from old friends. The metaphorical rainbow alluded to in ‘One More Chance’, still a feature of her songs, had become one in a series of question-marks: