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

by Clinton Heylin

  By the time Sandy, and indeed her fellow ‘layabouts’, Jansch and Renbourn, came on the scene, the Singers’ halcyon days were behind it – thanks in part to Dylan’s dismissive set at the club in December 1962, on his first trip to London. Though MacColl’s ‘exclusivist’ policies may, in Jansch’s words, have “seeped through to other clubs,” its effect was never that strong. Jansch, like Sandy, wandered on down “to the Singers Club a couple of times but I didn’t like the way it was presented – it was too academic for me.”

  The eighteen-year-old Sandy must have been mystified by the academic baggage that so many of her peers carried onto the stages of these dingy clubs. Though her father had on his shelves a copy of Marjorie Kennedy Fraser’s book of highland music, a popular collection of Scottish song, he lacked any authentic ballad collections. Nor did his library extend to the six-volume Johnson’s Musical Museum, co-edited by Robert Burns, which took pride of place in Mr. MacColl’s library.

  It was the songs, not the process by which they had endured through the centuries, that held an audible fascination for Sandy. Any sense that she came at the end of hundreds of years of oral processes, in which the songs themselves had metamorphosed multiple times, crafted from within a creative tradition, was lacking in our Sandy. And yet, she was already drawing from tradition for the likes of ‘Polly Vaughan’, ‘I Once Loved a Lass’, ‘Green Grow The Laurels’ & co., even if her apathy for the folk process led her to disregard one of the most sacred conventions of the folk revival, explaining the historical background of a song to an audience.

  Karl Dallas: She’d stand up and she’d say, “I’m gonna sing so and so, and I don’t know what it’s about and I can’t remember who wrote it,” and made herself look a right idiot. I said, “Look, you can’t do that. You must research your material. You must tell them, This is a song from Kentucky, tell the story.” … Well, I never even saw her try and do that. It just wasn’t Sandy.

  Having drifted away from Singers less than impressed, and given that she was living and working down the road in Kensington, the folk nights at the Troubadour held an obvious appeal, thanks to their ‘open floor’ policy and laissez-faire attitude to source material. It was there, one Tuesday, that Sandy met another singer destined to be a lifelong friend and occasional singing partner. Linda Peters was an equally young, inexperienced folksinger, who shared her penchant for a good time, a healthy disregard for cliques, and even the odd boyfriend. Her boyfriend at the time, Paul McNeill, had already been discarded by Sandy, affording an opportunity to compare notes.

  Linda Thompson: We used to meet up at The Troubadour in Earl’s Court. She used to sing there on Tuesday nights and so did I … We had the same stage presence – rather like a stick of wood … She was always tripping over things and I always stood there petrified – so we weren’t electric performers – but when Sandy started to sing it was a completely different matter … There were audiences who would coil in horror at contemporary folk music, but Sandy never had any problem. She wasn’t known as a traditional singer by any means, [but] was accepted as a contemporary singer.

  Casting admiring glances at those already crafting their own templates from tradition, Sandy was soon mixing the songs of Alex Campbell, Tom Paxton and Dylan into her musical melting pot. Having barely made it as a floorsinger, it seemed she was already looking beyond the ‘folk process’. It was undoubtedly the contrasting experiences of playing at the three main London clubs available to the young traditionalists between 1964 and the winter of 1966, first as a floorsinger and then, quite gradually, as a billed act in her own right, that forced Sandy to focus on the type of material to which she intended to apply that remarkable voice. When she first encountered Karl Dallas, sometime folk columnist for England’s premier music weekly Melody Maker, he was of the firm opinion that she was working in the wrong field, and should concentrate on jazz.

  Karl Dallas: I saw her first at Bruce Dunnet’s Scots Hoose on Cambridge Circus … What was later to become an engaging gaucheness was at that time sheer, wooden amateurism. But that voice, even then, before maturity had conferred the understanding that was to make her a superlative interpreter of her own and other people’s lyrics, stood out in the crowd … When I heard [her], I knew, I absolutely knew, that this was something else. And I thought she was in totally the wrong place – I thought this woman will never be a folk singer, she’s greater than anything like that. I thought that she should be a jazz singer … because I could hear the vocal control, she had a way with a melody even in her very earliest days that was unique in the folk-scene … and I told her that. I said, “Listen to Billie Holliday, listen to Ella Fitzgerald. Listen to these people, ‘cause you got the voice, what you need is the technique.” She wanted material, because she was doing things like ‘The 3.10 To Yuma’, which were songs I didn’t know and couldn’t see the point in singing … She was a very pretty little girl, [though] overweight, as she was all her life, real puppy fat. She was a nurse at that time, and [had] this incredible voice. I really wanted her not to get locked into the folk scene. So I sort of took Sandy under my wing. I gave her a lot of very bad advice.

  If Dallas’s initial interest in this “pretty little girl” was bound as much by amorous intentions as career guidance, he was quickly rebuffed by a Sandy already inured to older men, and their predatory inclinations. However, she was also shrewd enough to let him down gently, aware that he occupied a position of some importance on the scene, such as it was, being one of the few outlets to a wider-ranging media. Dallas continued, on occasions, to drive Sandy back to Wimbledon, when Sandy felt the need to return home.

  The evening Dallas had caught Sandy at the Scots Hoose had almost certainly been the one night of the week when this steadfastly traditional club – under the gruff captaincy of another stereotypical Scot, Bruce Dunnett – allowed itself to metamorphose into The Young Tradition, in order for it to be invaded by heir apparents of the grand tradition.

  Heather Wood: Basically Bruce had started a club called The Grand Tradition, with people like Joe Healy, Margaret Barry and Michael Gorman, but they kept not turning up. The only people that turned up were the young kids like Pete [Bellamy] and Royston [Wood] who came along to hear ‘em. So Bruce, being something of an entrepreneur, said, “Well, we’ll just call it the Young Tradition” … It was one night a week at the Scots Hoose. The Young Tradition club didn’t last too long, [as] Bruce was too mean to pay anything more than ten bob a night.

  For Sandy – thirsty for experience, personal and musical – the weekly rounds of the Barge, the Troubadour and the Young Tradition helped to fuel her need for applause. Only later – when the Scots Hoose keeled over from the deadweight of Dunnet’s penny-pinching ways, and the Barge lost its initial allure – did it seem like the opportunities for singers of a folk bent had visibly contracted, just at a time when a whole new generation wished “to strike another match, go start anew.”

  There was a brief residency at the Deane Arms in South Ruslip but little else, save nursing, to occupy Sandy’s raging mind, or libido, that summer. Some welcome diversion came when a handful of regulars from the Young Tradition established their own quasi-commune on Somali Road in Hampstead, one of whom was her old friend John Renbourn. It was here that Sandy probably first spent any time with an American singer-songwriter, by the name of Jackson C. Frank, then just ‘passing through’.

  Heather Wood: All of us used to hang out together and visited each other’s houses and sing in an assortment of combinations of groups … We weren’t very deep in those days. We were into making music and getting laid. [Sandy] was very much going between contemporary singer-songwriters and a few of the more popular traditional songs, trying to find what she wanted to sing … The Young Tradition had an apartment with a guy called Dave, and upstairs was Bert Jansch and John Renbourn, and everybody came through. We had the key on a piece of string behind the letterbox, so you’d fish through the letterbox, pull the key out, open the door and walk in. And the
re were usually two or three odd bodies lying around the floor. All the visiting Americans came through, either upstairs or down … Jackson came through, Roy Harper was a regular, Donovan used to drop in a lot.

  Whilst it is not clear when (or if) Sandy gave up her flat in Kensington, the Somali Road commune certainly served as an occasional respite from the conformity that awaited her in Wimbledon. For a short while, Sandy even maintained her double life, as her parents continued to cling to the belief that this New Self was just a passing phase. Karl Dallas, as someone with a ‘proper’ job, was one of only a handful of her new friends Sandy deemed safe to introduce to her parents, though John Renbourn remembers one time when, “Alex Campbell played in the area, and Sandy took him home to meet the parents, to show [them] that it was possible for somebody to sing folk music and actually make a living at it!” Campbell evidently failed to convince Neil and Edna of the golden opportunities about to unfurl.

  Karl Dallas: [Her parents] weren’t into it at all … [that] was my impression. They never [actually] said anything. She introduced me to them. They were quite hospitable and friendly, but I got a feeling, “She’ll grow out of this rubbish soon. She’s a nurse, that’s what she is, that’s a career.”

  Her father’s state of denial would not come to an end with Sandy’s departure from home. Even after her tragically premature death, still clutching at diminishing days that brought no rest, he would accuse Joe Boyd, who accurately portrayed the Soho Sandy as this “effing, blinding, drinking girl,” of “blackening her character”. Neil continued to insist, even after the fact, that he and his wife “never saw it.” This set of blinkers, to which Neil and Edna took increasing recourse, would play a crucial part in their daughter’s demise.

  Not that Sandy didn’t go out of her way to maintain the façade, at least in these years of financial dependence. One incident, sometime shortly after Sandy became her own wicked twin, illustrates the lengths to which she would sometimes go in order to present herself as the dutiful daughter, even as she passed beyond her parents’ command, not to say their ken. A girl who one minute had been in suicidal despair, at a particularly painful breakup with a fellow folkie, upon realizing where she was bound, transformed herself in a matter of minutes into the respectful, self-composed daughter of Neil and Edna Denny.

  Al Stewart: She seemed to be attempting to play dodge with the taxis in Cambridge Circus, obviously a bit the worse for wear, so I just basically grabbed her, and instead of letting her run in front of one, I waved it down and put her in it, and took her back to Wimbledon … She [had been] saying she wanted to end it all … [But] during the course of the drive back to Wimbledon she went from being totally manic to being totally self-possessed, and when we arrived at her parent’s house in Wimbledon, she looked at me and said, “Do you realise how much this [is going] cost?”

  The conflict, though, was bound to be an uneven one. The New Sandy was already discarding her adolescent chrysalis. Once she began to bounce between Somali Road, Judith Pieppe’s house in the East End and an all-night club in a basement on Soho’s Greek Street, the return trips to Wimbledon became more and more occasional, and the sight of a “totally self-possessed” Sandy decidedly rare.

  3

  1965–67: ALL HER OWN WORK

  A poster for Swindon Folk Ballads and Blues Club from 1966.

  “Everybody used to go down the Cousins when it was open all night and everyone would be on – Martin [Carthy] and Swarb and all kinds of people like Alexis Korner would do an overnight thing, and Bert Jansch and John Renbourn would be there, and the Watersons and Les Bridger. Davy Graham would do the all nighters as well. Those were really good days. John Martyn used to do it too, and Jackson Frank. There were so many visiting American people. Paul Simon used to go down there, then there was Mike Seeger, Tom Paxton.” [1973]

  Sandy Denny

  The Cousins, as all but the uninitiated came to call the basement club at 49 Greek Street, smack in the heart of London’s Soho, officially opened its doors on April 16, 1965, and closed them in the winter of 1970 (fittingly, Sandy was one of the last acts to play the club, making her unbilled post-Fairport debut). In the interim, it would welcome every one from a Them-less Van Morrison to an in-Experienced Jimi Hendrix. Its early habitues, though, were largely the detritus from Scots Hoose, and initially it served more as a place to share thoughts and contraband than the centre of London’s fragmented folk domain.

  Bert Jansch: It was run by Andy Matthews, but he didn’t do anything … his parents, who ran the restaurant upstairs … did most of the work. They were beautiful people. Every wayfaring folksinger would always get fed. That’s why his business went down … the food was superb but he used to feed any folkies that wandered in, which put all the ordinary customers off … Cousins was much more of a meeting place. The Scots Hoose was my thing. It was just me and occasional friends, like Sandy Denny, who dropped by … [and] you could play for three hours if you wanted to.

  And yet it was Jansch who helped establish Cousins with a weekly Thursday night residency, starting in May 1965, at a time when the club was one of London’s best-kept secrets. Al Stewart recalls catching one of Jansch’s early sets, and estimates the attendance at no more than nine wandering souls. Of those, doubtless more than half were itinerant folkies awaiting a floor spot to sing, and/or a floor to sleep.

  Val Berry, who was about to be ousted from her slot as the singer in The Young Tradition, recalls a period pre-Jansch, pre-Davy Graham, when the unnamed club was emptier still, “There was hardly anybody going down there. We used to just meet there. It was basically a couple of people we knew asking, ‘Come and do a couple of songs, help us out, we’re trying to get something going.’ I don’t know how we all drifted in there, but we did … The Cousins didn’t really get off until it got this all-night thing. [Initially] it was just yet another coffee-bar trying to become a folk club, not much different from Bunjies.”

  The policy by the time Al Stewart became M.C., in the summer of 1965, was simple, “They’d book one main guest, and they relied on people coming off the street to sing, and everybody could sing three songs.” The result, in time, would be “people like Cat Stevens getting up and doing floor spots.” Though it never secured a liquor license, only the hardy and the wasted frequented its portals in the early days, thus ensuring a fond if slightly miasmic hue to people’s memories of those times.

  Dave Swarbrick: We all used to hang out at … the Cousins – I been carried out feet first a few times – it never started until you were incapable. Everybody seemed to go down there, all the late night bingers. [The owner’s] father used to own the Greek restaurant, and his father indulged him by letting him have the cellars.

  Sandy seems to have picked up this blip on the Soho radar very early on. Val Berry thinks that the first time she saw the young nurse down there, she was accompanied by one of her parents, possibly her mother in pushy stagemother guise. Berry would later be “amazed that she ended up singing all that traditional stuff with Fairport ‘cause that [really] wasn’t her [thing] at the time.” At a time when “we were all influenced by the Joan Baez bit,” Sandy seemed particularly prone to emulating the million-selling soprano with a top-end that could perforate a bat’s eardrums.

  The snobbery that had surrounded Singers played no part in this new, younger scene. Berry felt part of a new breed, “people like me and Jacqui [McShee], who were doing traditional stuff but loved the other stuff anyway … the people that did their own singer-songwriter things, or other people’s material, all the time.” The Cousins would be the centre not of a new tradition, or even another folk revival, but of a bevy of singer-songwriters initially mollycoddled by the folk scene, now looking to add their voices to those coming from the other side of the pond – the spawn of Dylan. A number of these American souls – Arlo Guthrie, Danny Kalb, ‘Spider’ John Koerner, Derroll Adams among them – gave the Cousins the kind of once-over that helped it to achieve its own makeover. The Cousins also wr
apped its tendrils more firmly around a couple of American singer-songwriters with no such reputations to consider.

  Paul Simon and Jackson C. Frank may even have imagined they might turn the Cousins into London’s answer to New York’s Gerdes Folk City. Simon certainly seemed determined to remove himself from Dylan’s shadow, geographically and psychologically, writing some of his finest songs in his ‘English period’. Frank’s decision to settle in London seemed far more casual, and his attitude to his ‘art’ equally lackadaisical. In the opening verse of his most famous song, ‘Blues Run The Game’, he concisely outlined his fatalistic approach to life and love:

  “Catch a boat to England,

  Maybe to Spain,

  Wherever I have gone,

  Wherever I’ve been and gone,

  Wherever I have gone

  The blues are all the same.”

  And yet it was Frank’s songs, and not Simon’s, that prompted the likes of Bert Jansch to attach the epithet “a genius … an absolute genius.” Jackson, though, was already damaged goods by the time he landed in Southampton in the early months of 1965. Born in Buffalo, New York in 1943, Jackson Carey Frank had been caught up in a serious school-fire at the age of eleven. Though he was not amongst the eighteen fatalities, the physical and psychological scars were permanent, and even if he would not be diagnosed with schizophrenia until the end of the 1960s, the signs of a fragmented personality were already on display, in person and in his songs (in a postcard he was to send to Sandy in 1972, he would sign himself “the may wind”).