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

by Clinton Heylin

  I hear the sighing of the wind/ like a murmur of regret

  And as I close my eyes/ I see a face I will never forget.

  I see you running with the dawn/ but that was many years ago

  When you had seen the tender years/ the only years you were to know.

  I knew a time when you and I/ ran through trees of green and gold

  And gazed at clouds of feather grey / I never dreamt we would ever grow old.

  But time has passed, my mind will dim/ the hands will turn away my days

  But you remain a timeless smile/ who’d just begun life’s tangled ways.

  Though the young songwriter cannot avoid slipping into clichés in that third verse, thematically and structurally ‘The Tender Years’ was both original and ambitious. The listener only realises that the lost youth in the song is dead with the final line of the second verse. The remainder of the song almost basks in the romanticism of an early death. It was evidently based on a real incident. According to her father, “she had an experience at school where a boy hurt his knee on the Friday, got blood poisoning and was dead on the Monday. She was a pal and she wrote this little song for him, a sad little song … it was a memory that stayed with her.”

  Drawing on incidents from her past for inspiration became something of a pattern in Sandy’s songwriting. She also regularly turned portraits of people into vignettes-in-song, all the while disguising the songs’ autobiographical elements. At the same time as displaying a remarkable ability to draw upon prior experience, she found she was able to actually rewind emotionally. One close friend recalls several examples of this ‘emotional recall’.

  Miranda Ward: Sandy had … 100% emotional recall. If something happened that upset her, and it comes up in conversation five years later, laughing about it, by the time you’ve finished talking [it] through Sandy’s as upset as when it first happened … One classic case, she flew into Heathrow, and Trevor [Lucas] wasn’t there to meet her and she was in an absolute state. She got a cab to my place. She was a wreck, and felt totally betrayed by Trevor. The asshole had run out of petrol driving to the airport. But Sandy would talk about it a year and a half later and she’d be back in the same state. Which [also] made the strong emotive thing in her music when she was writing it. Sandy didn’t have control [of it] but something would happen to her, and she would go back into that emotional state, and out of that would come the song. She wrote the songs with 100% emotion, even though the emotion was something that she’d remembered. She didn’t write them in the depths of despair or the heights of elation.

  This capacity to recall emotions, vividly and with immediacy, had a downside – an inability to consign such incidents to the past tense. The incident that prompted ‘The Tender Years’ Sandy revisited again three years later, at the time of Unhalfbricking, offering an unprecedented glimpse into the process, as it unravels on the page. Reaching for the inspiration that drew out the original song, one senses, reading it, that she was hoping to find a better way to express the same sentiments:

  “When I lie awake and sometimes catch the sounds of the wind in the branches of a tree,

  I am reminded of a song I wrote when I was young,

  About a little boy I knew at school

  About my friend

  Who cut his knee …

  We used to run around the waste land

  It was a sad song, it was meant to be that way

  I never sang it

  No-one heard it because I used to be quite shy

  But I sang its tangled words just now and then for [myself and for] my friend

  I cried sometimes because I felt remorse about

  It was something which I kept to tell myself I really cared.

  And now I want to sing it well for [line blank].

  His name was David and he died when he was young,

  and I cried for him a long time ago.

  The hands will steal away your time before you know.

  When I sing I look as though I’m crying …

  The tangled words I wrote for him, they did not scan, they did not ryme [sic].

  But now the time is late

  They meant so much then

  They mean as much again

  But I did not realise, and tears came to my eyes

  + then I did not care, my thoughts were there.”

  ‘The Tender Years’ is not the only one of Sandy’s early efforts to recall a lost period of innocence. On the demo tapes she made on her parents’ reel-to-reel recorder in 1966–67 is another song, called ‘Boxful of Treasures’. Already the obtuseness that will make some of her work impenetrable has found a home in song, as the lyrics dance between images of childlike wonder and an unmentioned hurt, from which the narrator seeks to rescue the song’s subject. As with ‘The Tender Years’, there is a delicate melancholia to the melody, and though Sandy would abandon the words in time, she would save the melody for one of her finest works, ‘Fotheringay’:

  A boxful of treasures, and a golden comb

  I was surely give to you when the moon is [young]

  And Christmas is in June.

  I will paint an evening of which there will be few

  When the sky is water, and the sun is blue

  And all this is just for you.

  A handkerchief of silver to brush away your tear,

  A sword of finest leather to match your paper spear

  For when the day draws near.

  When I will write these words in languages unknown

  I’ll be the one to tell you your heart is made of stone

  And Christmas will never be in June.

  It is difficult to know when Sandy wrote these two songs, or how many others she penned in her first year as a professional folksinger because, as she herself wrote in 1969, “I used to be quite shy, I [only] sang [such] tangled words just now and then for [myself].” Other originals were treated with a similar scant regard. One song certainly lost to us was a number she wrote with fellow folkie Wendy Hamilton, ‘There’s a Red Light In Your Eyes’, which Al Stewart thinks she played once or twice at Leducé.

  In the face of such rectitude, one is entirely reliant on the various home tapes that predate Sandy’s membership of Fairport to form a picture of her songwriting. Among the twenty-four songs on these tapes can be found half a dozen originals, of which only ‘Who Knows Where The Time Goes’ would feature among her pre-Fairport recordings. The likes of ‘Nowhere You Can Go’(?), ‘They Don’t Seem To Know You’(?) and an early ‘Carnival’ (which shares a single line with its 1973 kin), show a songwriter hovering on the verge of an original voice. In the final verse of this ‘Carnival’ she allows natural forces to finally envelop her:

  I can see all of the country from the mound on which I stand

  The autumn leaves still driftin’ to the bosom of the land

  Wind is roaring wildly, and the fury of the wintry sky

  Beats down upon me, and I have no need to cry.

  ‘Carnival’ appears – on one of two early demo tapes, totalling ten songs, the only audio documents of Sandy Denny prior to her Folk Song Cellar appearance at the end of 1966* – alongside two traditional English folksongs, ‘I Love My True Love’ and a song usually listed as ‘Let No Man Steal Your Thyme’ but more appositely entitled, in its original 1766 broadside incarnation, The Maid’s Lament for the Loss of Her Maidenhead.

  ‘Carnival’ is probably the weakest of her early compositions, vocally and lyrically, but she handles the two traditional songs with a certain assurance. The other demo-tape – undoubtedly earlier – suggests a Sandy yet to transcend her more obvious influences, with two songs by Jackson Frank, one by Dylan, Bert Jansch’s ‘Soho’ (presumably learnt first-hand); whilst the familiar Scottish ballad ‘Geordie’ and that American perennial ‘East Virginia’ suggest Gina Glazer’s continuing input. Only ‘The Tender Years’ lends an original tone.

  On these two sets of demos the listener catches only glimpses of the Sandy to come. The voice on t
hese tapes is as innocent as ‘The Tender Years’, the ‘lovely’, ‘pretty’ voice that everyone remembers, but the edge that separates the technically accomplished from the genuinely original interpreter is soon come. Indeed, the home demo of ‘Blues Run The Game’ almost sounds like a guide-vocal when A-B’d alongside the version Sandy recorded for the BBC in March 1967. The suddenly acquired undertow to that voice came on in a matter of months when she was leaving both ends of her candles burning, prompting more than an occasional comment about this walking contradiction.

  Philippa Clare: Sandy was extremely insecure about her singing … I remember Luke Kelly from the Dubliners, one night when she was here on the floor, just kicking her and going, “You stupid bitch. You sing like a fucking angel. Now behave like one.” She was heavily admired, and a lot of her insecure behaviour was tolerated because she was so good … [But] I never saw Sandy comfortable in her own skin, she was always on edge, waiting for an attack … [But then I had] my [own] insecurities in those days, I always thought I was the wrong shape, wrong colour, wrong accent.

  Not that Sandy had been exactly holding back since first tasting freedom as an auxiliary nurse. Linda Thompson believes “she got used to the drink and drugs thing as a nurse … ‘cause I knew her when she was working in the hospitals, and she always used to have pills ‘n’ stuff around.” Perhaps Jackson Frank had managed to keep her penchant for excess in check. If so, when he caught a boat to New York, and she began to work her way through a series of folk-musician boyfriends who were as game for a good time as their personal Bodicea, a hedonistic Sandy burst forth and, for the time being, she was the life of the party. Lady-like, though, she was not.

  Al Stewart: The Troubadour was run by Martin Windsor and Red Sullivan, and Sandy came down [one time], and she was in full steam, and it was like a tide of people opening as she steamed through, pushing her way through a whole roomful of people. She’d obviously come down to sing; and I remember Martin Windsor yelling across this sea of heads, “Sandy Denny, you’re a girl, not a tank!”

  Many of her part-time paramours from this time remember the tank-girl fondly, tinged with a touch of nostalgia for the times themselves. Marc Ellington paints a portrait that accords with the person Al Stewart once transported back to Wimbledon in a cab, “She was a mixture of straight-laced schoolteacher and someone who made Janis Joplin look like Mother Theresa, completely out of control. Not within an hour, within the same sentence.” Dave Swarbrick, with whom Sandy had a brief fling after meeting him at John Martyn’s place in Hampstead, remembers the teenage Sandy as “wonderfully scatter-brained and giggly. In those days we were [all] intent upon having a good time, and if she was feisty she was only feisty in short bursts. Rest of the time was given over to hilarity.”

  Danny Thompson, who would become Sandy’s most serious boyfriend in the years that separate Jackson Frank from Trevor Lucas, concurs with Swarb, depicting Sandy in slightly rose-tinted terms, as a girl simply bent on good times.

  Danny Thompson: She was learning piano. I was with Pentangle at the time and she came up to me and said would I help her with her music. I said, “I’m not a teacher.” … I met her at the Horseshoe in Tottenham Court Road. Pentangle had only been going five minutes. I fell for her immediately. She had an amazing chuckle, great sense of humour, just a great bird to be with … [One time] we’d clear[ed] off to Scotland, we stayed at this Castle Hotel, we went to the Edinburgh Festival. Our room was in the corner of one of those conical towers. We were locked out. I had to get her up the fire escape – give her a bunk up. She never complained about anything like that. None of this “Oh, don’t” or “You mustn’t.” She was [always] up for a laugh … She wouldn’t stand any pomposity, or let anyone put her on a pedestal … [But, even then,] I would keep her off the brandy and feed her towards the gin and whiskey … Brandy made her belicose. [JI]

  Fellow member of Pentangle, Jacqui McShee, who witnessed ‘Sandy on the brandy’ on a number of occasions, remembers that “she [also] drank a fierce amount of whisky, and she could [really] drink! … That became her character, ‘Oh that’s Sandy. Good ol’ Sandy, drunk again.’ They expected her to be like that. But everybody drank. It was part of being who you were and where you were. I don’t think I knew anybody who didn’t drink. Danny, John and Bert were legendary.” In the company of such prodigious drinkers, it didn’t take much to get Sandy in a party mood. However, her late husband Trevor Lucas noticed some warning signs, at their early assignations, which suggested that her relationship with alcohol might be an unhealthy one.

  Trevor Lucas: Sandy drank, yes. She liked to drink. She liked the effect of alcohol, the feeling of being drunk – which is always dangerous. [But] she was one of those people whose bodies don’t metabolise alcohol very well, so the first drink really had the [same] effect as the last one. [1989]

  As a key participant in a serious drinking culture – the world of folk – Sandy wasn’t looking to establish some illusory common bond with the drinking classes, it was simply the cheapest, most accessible way to get out of oneself and, in her case, to effect a necessary transformation. Underneath the bravado, the boys’r’us laddishness, and the sheer spunkiness of the young Sandy was someone deeply uncertain of herself in some fundamental, deep-rooted way. Bert Jansch, a man of few words, had known her from her early days at the Scots Hoose and seems to be the only one of her early boyfriends still prepared to allude to that darkness within.

  Bert Jansch: She certainly liked to enjoy herself [even then]. [But] I [always] got the impression that she was looking for something, and not getting it. She always seemed a very disturbed person to me.

  Beneath the bubbly exterior lived someone absolutely convinced of her abilities, but wracked with self-doubt about her worth. Sandy’s laddish behaviour, designed perhaps to compensate for such feelings, only served to divert attention away from her growing skills as a singer and interpreter. Dave Swarbrick insists, “she knew how good she was, she didn’t just belt off songs. She certainly knew what caliber of singer she was.” Jansch recalls someone who “just wanted somebody to actually take her seriously as a singer.” Because of her route to this world, she was always uncertain of her place in the folk pantheon. Even in the early days, she chose not to confine herself to the same ol’ three club circuit. Willing to ply her wares when and wherever she could, the results were sometimes hilarious.

  John Renbourn: I can still remember standing outside Cousins wondering where my next meal was coming from when Sandy came along [and] bought me a big plate of spaghetti, and then took me down to a place where she had a gig. It was a basement gay bar, and Sandy thought it was screamingly funny to be up on stage, singing and playing as the clientele smooched around in couples.

  By the end of 1966, Sandy had some kind of agenda, but it seems to have been one she kept hid from most everyone, even the folk musicians who shared her bed and booze.

  *They can be found on volumes three and four of the Attix Tracks fan club-only cassettes.

  4

  1967–68: BALLAD OF TIME

  Original lyrics to ‘Who Knows Where The Time Goes’

  “When I was doing the folk clubs, I got the impression that it was a dying trade almost … I’m probably putting it down … [but] the actual incentive to become a folk singer has totally disappeared.” [1977]

  Sandy Denny

  Sandy’s first significant plaudits in the music press came at the beginning of 1967, when she was introduced by the obliging Karl Dallas to the readers of Melody Maker, as “a girl singer who scored a big success at a recent Vietnam concert in London,” i.e. a concert by The Folksingers Committee For Peace in Vietnam at St Pancras Town Hall, held the week before Christmas 1966. She took the opportunity to bemoan the lack of professionalism on the circuit – “from the point of view of the folk scene, it would naturally suit the singers if things were arranged in a more businesslike way” – even as she had begun to put things on a sound business footing, taking on Sandy Glennon as
her manager some time around September 1966.

  Aside from expanding her circle of gigs beyond the home counties for the first time, the autumn of 1966 and winter of 1967 also saw Sandy make a number of appearances on radio and TV. The most significant of these would be her appearance on Peter Kennedy’s Folk Song Cellar series for the BBC World Service. Allowed to sing her own selections, she acknowledged her family roots by performing her late grandmother’s favourite, ‘Fhir A Bhata’. The series of 37 programmes was an important landmark in folk broadcasting; and Sandy was recommended for the programme by two friends who were about to play their own key role in her story. Dave Cousins and Tony Hooper had been pounding the boards as a bluegrass duo/trio (with Ron Chesterman) for some time, under the as-yet-unabbreviated moniker of the Strawberry Hill Boys.

  For the time being, Sandy was content to be a part-time constituent of another trio, puffed up to a quartet for BBC radio. It was as singer in The Johnny Silvo Folk Four that she would make her first entrees onto BBC radio, and into the world of the recording studio. With Roger Evans on lead guitar and David Moses on double-bass, Sandy and Johnny would swop songs (and identities, Sandy once being introduced as Johnny Silvo on the radio, when he had a dose of the flu). Though songs like ‘This Train’ and ‘Make Me a Pallet on the Floor’ were presumably imposed on her, and it was sometimes hard to appreciate her vocals over Silvo’s fake skiffle accompaniment, the radio shows seem to have prompted one would-be entrepreneur to take a chance on the folk revival, giving the two stars of the ‘Johnny Silvo Folk Four’ their own album.

  Karl Dallas: The man who ran Saga [Records], Marcel Rodd, was an entrepreneur. He saw there was a market for folk-music [and] that he could make lots of money if he hardly paid the artists anything, and sold the records very, very cheap. He was into classical music – he didn’t understand folk music, wasn’t interested in folk music … He had these people just in, would pay them peanuts, probably no royalty deal. He did the same thing in other areas … He was behind Trojan Records, so he recorded all the reggae … That’s why he recorded Sandy – y’know, pretty girl with nice knees.