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

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No More Sad Refrains: The Life and Times of Sandy Denny Page 3

by Clinton Heylin


  At the same time Sandy was renewing her interest in music, sharing in the mass hysteria British pop bands were inspiring, and revelling in the rebellious urges it fed. This was, after all, circa 63, the year of Beatlemania. She had taken the piano up again, having previously been “conned into playing violin for the school orchestra”, and had even advanced to the stage where she was asked to play at a school concert, a scary but rewarding experience that betrayed early signs of stage fright.

  Sandy Denny: My most terrifying experience was again at school when I had to play a solo piano piece at a special service. My fingers were shaking so much I wonder how I managed to find the notes. Afterwards this lovely teacher – the only one I really got on with – came up to me and said, “That was lovely, Alexandra,” and I felt really good. [1970]

  Sandy would never shake that initial rush of fear, though she later learnt to surpress it with alcohol. Initially, she was more addicted to the applause, and yearned to feel that good on a regular basis. Her problems at school, though, continued. According to her father, when she attempted to get a portfolio together in order to apply for a place at Kingston Art School, her teacher refused to help. When she still secured an interview, “this created a good deal of bad feeling.”

  According to Sandy, “my father [had] persuaded me to stay and take [two] A-Levels, but the more I hated it, the less I wanted to do it. I did take Art at school, but I had a bust-up with my musical mistress.” Having originally signed up for Music and Art, she quickly dropped Music to concentrate on Art. She had always taken a keen interest in drawing, and her mother was now going to evening classes at the Wimbledon College of Art. By Sandy’s own admission, “I was terrible at painting, [if] quite good at drawing.” But her “real love was sculpture. I’m not sure what form it would have taken. I really just like shapes.” Her interest in sculpture was real and enduring. Bambi Ballard remembers how, in the early 1970s, “Sandy and I used to talk about [how] we were gonna get somewhere in the country, where we’d have a big room where we could just sculpt.”

  Sandy, though, continued to resent the school system and had probably already abandoned her studies when a letter from Kingston School of Art, dated February 11, 1965, arrived at Worple Road. In her own words, “I actually left school a term early because I really couldn’t take any more.” The letter, offering her a place in the one-year, Pre-Diploma Course, commencing September 20, did not require her to complete her Art A-Level. Unconditional as the offer was, though, it still required her parents’ agreement. Sandy later admitted, “I was surprised when my father allowed me to take the art school place.”

  In all likelihood, Neil hoped he might persuade his daughter to continue with the vocational training she had recently begun, at Brompton Chest Hospital, as a state-enrolled nurse. If Sandy always considered nursing as something to tide her over until she began the art course, several friends have suggested that Neil dropped a number of hints implying he hoped she might continue nursing, even if Sandy told everyone at the hospital she was not a trainee nurse but a temporary nurse because she was going to college in September.

  Almost everybody who encountered the slow uncoiling of Sandy in those days seems to recall seeing her in her nurse’s uniform. And yet she was only ever a nurse in the months that separate her application to Kingston from the beginning of her pre-diploma course, a letter from the Ministry of Health, dated October 1966, regarding her superannuation contributions, confirming that she ceased her “employment with The Hospital for Diseases of the Chest on 24 August, 1965.” With employment came a degree of independence, just as Sandy began to experience life, and death, firsthand.

  Sandy Denny: I worked for that term at Brompton Chest Hospital, and lived in a flat in Kensington with some girl friends … The hours were very long and I appreciated what nurses must go through. Some of the things I did there really shook me. [1970]

  She would hate it when her father would drop her off at the hospital, and she would have to cut through the mortuary to get to her ward. She would go on to claim that her experiences at the hospital played their part in acquiring one unhealthy habit, “I needed to smoke to steady my nerves.” Soon enough, she was working her way through a couple of packs a day. Her father later recalled how upset Sandy would get when one of her favourite patients died.

  Neil Denny: She had some harrowing experiences. There was an American fellow, I think he was an artist – Sandy was particularly good at talking to him – and he gave her a pound to put on the Derby … and he told her what horse to put it on, and it won. We went to fetch her coming off duty and she said hang on because I’ve got to go and see Mr So and So, and tell him about his winnings, and she was there when he died – they were holding hands at each side of the bed. Sandy said [to his brother], “I’m afraid he’s gone.” … And he said, “You must be very used to this.” – to a kid of seventeen. [CD]

  However, her nursing career doesn’t seem to have inured her to the gory side of healthcare. When she later escorted her friend Linda Peters to hospital, it was Sandy who ended up needing treatment.

  Linda Thompson [née Peters]: I was having a mole removed from my back and she said, I’ll come. I know all about this, being a nurse. So off we go, and they cut the mole off my back, Sandy’s holding my hand. The next thing, she’s on the deck, and everybody in the room, doctors included, are dealing with Sandy. [I thought,] Typical Sandy attention-getting thing, but she’d actually passed out. She’d seen the blood. I’m going, Hey, I’m the one with the mole, and they’re all going [to Sandy], Are you okay?

  Sandy preferred to keep her actual duties at the chest hospital to herself, though Winnie Whittaker believes “there was a lot of pretty mundane, clean-out-the-bedpans work.” If the job held minimal appeal, above and beyond its subsistence wages, Sandy also found that she was required to put up with a degree of bitchiness and backbiting that even her experiences at Old Central had not prepared her for, something she later confided to her closest friend at Art School.

  Gina Glazer: She was at nursing school first, and that wasn’t for her. She told me how bitchy the other students were, thought they were hot shit. There were a lot of cliques. And [that was] part of her need to be famous – to get back at these people. I really believe that.

  If nursing never gave Sandy a sense of vocation, and her fellow nurses only reinforced her sense of separateness, her time at the Chest Hospital was the first time she had lived away from home. Sharing a flat in Kensington, she seems to have quickly discovered not only the Troubadour folk club, on the Old Brompton Road, but also a place called Gobbles that Philippa Clare recalls was “this amazing restaurant where you’d go downstairs, musicians used to fall in there after gigs, and you’d get the most amazing jam sessions. It was a muso’s restaurant.” The experiences she gained, living and working in west London, seems to have been central to the dramatic transformation from austere schoolgirl to the Sandy her father says he “never saw – an effing, blinding, hard-drinking girl.”

  Trevor Lucas: To understand her, I think you have to consider she’d had a very restrictive childhood, until that time when she actually broke away from home. And when she did get out, and saw there was a good time to be had out there, she was determined to have it. She started working as a nurse at the Brompton Chest Hospital, and that was really the first time she’d had any freedom at all. And, like most people who’ve been confined in that way, she was only more eager to live life to the full. [1989]

  2

  1964–65: THE BLUES RUN THE GAME

  One of Sandy’s early sketches.

  “Somehow in the back of my mind I knew I would sing eventually. When I was very small I used to sing a lot. And then when I went to my grammar school I never sang … except in a choir, very innocuously in the background. [But] then when I left school, I went to art college, Kingston Art College, and just down the road there was a little barge on the river, The Barge Folk Club, and I thought, well I can sing as well as these [folksingers]”
. [1972]

  Sandy Denny

  In fact, by the time Sandy Denny went to art college, in September 1965, she was already singing in the folk-clubs of London Town. Her version, above, of how she came to be a folksinger not only suggests a large degree of happenstance, but places her entry into the folk nexus a year after the fact. Her first appearance at the Barge was as premeditated as her choice of art school, and her motives as fully realized. Genuine as her interest in art and sculpture was, she had gradually become aware that Kingston had a very active folk scene ‘on campus’.

  Sandy had begun to feel increasingly drawn to a form of music that – in the wake of Dylan’s chart entry in May of 1964, with his second album, Freewheelin’, and a sell-out show at the Royal Festival Hall – had acquired an extraordinary resonance for the young beatniks of suburbia dream. Winnie shared Sandy’s love of music, and was an early acolyte of the sandpapered chords of Robert Zimmerman a.k.a. Bob Dylan.

  If Sandy’s father betrayed an immediate and abiding distaste for that “horrible, grating voice”, Sandy was entranced by Dylan and, like many a would-be ‘folkie’, was moved to pick up “an old guitar my mother had bought,” not for Sandy but for brother David. She quickly acquired from her elder sibling the few rustic chords necessary to pass for an authentic balladeer. Her previous musical training and genetically-engineered ear ensured that she was a quick learner, and soon enough she was wheedling away at her father to buy her her very own guitar. Her ambitions already lay higher than her brother’s mangy old soundbox.

  Neil Denny: David was the one who egged her on to play the guitar. He played a little bit, he got the idea but then he threw it over to Sandy and said, “Here, you have a go.” He [already] had a guitar and then Sandy wanted a guitar. There was a guitar for sale at Tattenham Corner, Epsom Downs, advertised as a Gibson guitar … Sandy said, “That’s a nice guitar, Daddy.” So I said, “Let’s go and have a look.” She was very clever. We got to this house and he produced the guitar, and Sandy was very non-commital. I don’t know if it was settled there and then but when we got out of the house, she said, “Daddy, what a wonderful guitar.” [CD]

  Her friend Winnie, who “was already starting to think that Dylan was a bit old hat because everybody else in the class was starting to like him,” was soon extending her interest beyond Dylan’s skewering of tradition, back to the music he later described as “the only true, valid death you can feel today.” Initially, it would appear, Sandy’s own tastes were less developed than her friend’s and so, for the moment at least, she remained the pupil, and Winnie her guide. Sandy, though, would never abandon her love of Dylan. On her very first home demos, she would attempt ‘It Ain’t Me Babe’ and, in 1971, told a journalist, “He’s as near as I would get to worshipping anyone.” It was presumably via Dylan that she arrived at the largely-traditional albums of his then-current paramour, Joan Baez.

  Soon enough, Sandy found a haven all her own, where aspiring troubadors would gather to play guitar and sing, in the convivial surroundings of a local pub.

  John Renbourn: I was [at Kingston Art School] in 1964 and that’s when I used to see her. The main guys that were actually playing publicly in the clubs were people like Alex Campbell and Steve Benbow. Early on, Sandy was playing much the same repertoire as those guys … A bunch of us from Kingston Art School used to meet at a pub in Wimbledon – the Prince of Wales Feathers – and play our guitars. Sandy used to come along – still in her nurse’s outfit – and join in. She became the girlfriend of my musical buddy, Derek, so I got to see rather a lot of her, often having to do the talking for him when he stood her up. She had a nice husky voice and an easy going manner. I didn’t realize then that she was kind of ambitious … Most of us were on the skids, as it were, and it seemed rather entertaining that Sandy should have this nice family … In fact, I think Sandy really got the idea she wanted to go to the Art School because there was such a good folk scene going on there. I don’t think she did it ‘cause she wanted to be an artist. In fact, I’m sure she didn’t. It was like the hub for all that music.

  Without any audible documentation, and with thirty-odd years of overloaded memory banks separating Sandy’s contemporaries from total recall, establishing Sandy’s early repertoire has proved a tad problematic. A couple of early friends remember her doing Dylan’s ‘Ballad of Hollis Brown’, itself set to the tune of the traditional ‘Pretty Polly’, but little else. In general terms, they remember a lot of songs derived from the Dylan/Baez axis, and little from the tradition whence they came.

  John Renbourn: I don’t remember Sandy playing very much guitar at that early stage, I think she used to come down and sing mainly standard folk-club kinda fare but I remember that all of us had our sights set on going up to play in London, at some of the clubs there – the Ballads & Blues was one in Rathbone Place – and I think even at that stage she really wanted to stop nursing and be a singer.

  Of course, barely eighteen years old, with only a few months of guitar self-tuition under her plastic belt, Sandy was still some way off playing the West End clubs. But she placed herself quite readily on the self-same learning curve as her friend John Renbourn, attending each and every folk club, north and south of the river, wherever on the spectrum of tradition they might choose to lay, even the farther flung clubs like producer Bert Leader’s El Torro, on the Finchley Road, which Gill Cooke recalls her attending when she was “claiming to be a nurse.”

  Sandy Denny: I used to go to folk clubs when I was quite young … listening to people singing there, and learning how they presented their stuff. It all rubs off on you. [1974]

  Anthea Joseph, who ran the Troubadour on the Old Brompton Road, a gentle lob away from the chest hospital, also recalled Sandy the nurse attending most Tuesday nights, soaking the whole vibe up, even though in those days she was so self-conscious that she wouldn’t even join in on the communal jam session at the end of the evening.

  Singing at the Barge came easier. It was indeed a barge, docked at Richmond, and the folk club was run by one Theo Johnson. It was in this less intimidating atmosphere that Sandy first sang to a paying audience, albeit not an audience that had paid to see her – this was, after all, the era of floor singers and it was as a floor singer, between booked acts, that all fledgling folkies began their careers. As Heather Wood of the Young Tradition concisely put it, “the way you got into folk clubs was you learned a couple of songs and you sang from the floor, and that way you got into clubs for free.” Despite the subdued level of expectation that greeted this young lass, stage fright showed its face again, until she opened her lungs and cast him to the wind.

  Sandy Denny: The first time … I ever stood up on my own … my mouth went all dry and I could hardly sing, but when I came off and they all applauded, I knew that although it was a great effort, I’d always want to do it. [1972]

  Though no record exists of that unbilled performance, it evidently took place when Sandy had just begun nursing. Judith Pieppe, one of the mother hens of the folk revival in Britain, first caught Sandy at The Barge, singing a song that would have made her paternal grandmother proud.

  Judith Pieppe: She had a lovely voice, and was a nice, bright girl. She was still doing nursing, but not for long. I first saw her at a club on a boat, and I thought she was [just] lovely … The only song I remember her singing was about a bloke who accidentally shot a girl, it went something like “she’d her apron all about her/ and I took her for a swan.”

  ‘Polly Vaughan’, or ‘The Shooting of His Dear’ as it is better known, remains one of a small number of ballads of metampsychosis, based upon an idea later appropriated by Richard Thompson for ‘Crazy Man Michael’ – that the girl in the song spent a partial existence as a bird, during which she was accidentally murdered by her lover. First published back in 1806, and assuredly Celtic in origin, it suggests that by the time Sandy began singing at the Barge, she had begun to incorporate purely traditional material into her repertoire.

  In an era when fo
lk-singing has reverted to a cyclical subtext to popular sounds it is hard to conceive of a time, just three decades ago, when, in Sandy’s own words, “there was a folk club on virtually every corner … like there was the Scots Hoos, the John Snow, there was Cousins … You could go up there any night and you’d be sure of finding the little crowd like John Renbourn and Bert [Jansch] and Jackson Frank and Annie Briggs … It used to be a fantastic little community.”

  As the young nurse immersed herself in this “fantastic little community” she witnessed the aftershocks of a number of fractious divisions. Bound as much by the socialist bent of its instigators as more musicological concerns, the English folk revival required any wouldbe folkie to declare their position on a spectrum capable of encompassing everything from unaccompanied, indigenous traditional singing, a la Mary MacLean, to the self-conscious songwriting of a whole host of New Dylans. Though Sandy later insisted, “I was never in the traditional clan – I was in the layabout section with Bert Jansch and John Renbourn,” she did initially venture down to the Singers Club, run by Peggy Seeger and her husband, Ewan MacColl, a fiery Scottish bigot of the old school.

 

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