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

by Clinton Heylin

  In the space of a few months, in the summer of 1967, Rodd would release two budget-priced albums featuring the “pretty girl with nice knees.” Sandy and Johnny, recorded April 26, 1967, featured a good colour shot of the knees on the cover, and gave Sandy top billing. The sleeve-notes, pure sixties’ kitsch, reported that: “Sandy Denny is twenty years old, very pretty and sings as beautifully as anyone we have heard for a very long time. She hates being compared with any other folk singer.” And yet, save for powerful renderings of Frank’s ‘Milk and Honey’ and Alex Campbell’s anti-war anthem ‘Been On The Road’, Sandy does very little to distinguish herself from “any other folk singer[s]” brought up on a staple diet of ‘Bobby and Baez’. Her takes on ‘Make Me a Pallet On The Floor’ and ‘Pretty Polly’ certainly forsake feeling for a hammy exuberance.

  Sandy and Johnny, though, was not Sandy’s only contribution to Mr. Rodd’s money-making ventures. Recorded a month earlier, on March 22, and released a couple of months ahead of Sandy and Johnny was a hootenanny-style album, sold using the name of Alex Campbell And Friends. Designed to compliment a TV series, it afforded Sandy a greater opportunity to shine, even though she was allocated a mere three songs. Save for an embarrassingly hearty ‘This Train’, she succeeded in shaking the Silvo ensemble, proceedimg to lay down the best of her Jackson Frank covers, ‘You Never Wanted Me’, and another song possibly once sung by her grandmother, ‘The False Bride’ (a.k.a. ‘I Once Loved A Lass’). Adopting authentic Scotch, as well as the persona of a heartbroken Scottish male, Sandy steps beyond the simple tale of infidelity, hinting at the depths alluded to in one of folk’s most oblique codas:

  “All men in yon forest they ask unto me

  How many strawberries grow in the salt sea

  And I answer them with a tear in my e’e

  How many ships sail in the forest?”

  For the first time, the voice glides effortlessly above the understated accompaniment, warranting a share of the hyperbole offered in the sleeve-notes, penned by Sandy’s then-manager Sandy Glennon, which, needless to say, placed her at the forefront of some abstract revival, “reckoned by her fellow singers to be the girl of the year.” Though Sandy wouldn’t even get an arrangement credit for her songs (which went to Theo Johnson from the Barge, the main impetus behind the project), and was paid single session fees (of fifteen and fifty pounds, respectively) for her time, the albums must have increased her profile, especially in the provinces.*

  Commission statements from Glennon confirm Sandy’s expanding horizons, and earning power, in these months. In February, she ventured out to Norwich, Orpington and Manchester; March and April brought Brighton, Leicester, Great Yarmouth, Lowestoft, Norwich again, Coventry and even a four-day trip to the Lowlands of Scotland. Her monthly earnings also rose from forty-five pounds in January to a hundred and twenty in April (excluding session fees), as she began to command between twelve and fifteen pounds an appearance, compared with the five to seven pounds she had received just six months earlier. Not surprisingly, a single girl travelling late at night brought its own set of dangers, even if they were unlikely to faze “an effing, blinding, hard-drinking girl”.

  Neil Denny: She travelled considerable distances. I remember once she phoned up and said she was coming into King’s Cross at two in the morning, and would I meet her. So I get out of bed and get the car up to King’s Cross and she said it was always a rough passage, coming home sitting on her own in a train like that. She had a guitar case, of course, and there’s always a rough type saying, “Give us a tune, love” and that nasty sort of thing. She must have had to adopt some sort of armour. [JI]

  Sandy continued to frequent the clubs of Soho and West London, even playing the fabled Marquee club on three occasions – as well as regularly performing as the billed artist at the various folk clubs on London’s outer perimeter, in Surbiton and Hounslow, Norbury and East Ham, Addlestone and Twickenham. However, she never took to the life of the road, nor the solitude of travelling solo. Talking about this period in 1970, shortly after quitting Fairport partially because of the rigours of their touring schedule, she revealed an early yearning for the joys of the hearth.

  Sandy Denny: It’s a very independent kind of life being a folk singer [but], although I felt I was more my own master, I always really wanted the comforts of home … I also had a mews cottage in Kensington, where I lived with two very good friends, and I began to get very homesick for it whenever I was away for any length of time. [1970]

  One option open to the lonely, long distance folkie was to join a band. Unfortunately, the economics of band-membership were rarely attractive unless they came with the prospect of a record and/or management deal. Though Sandy’s brief association with Johnny Silvo’s little set-up had hardly worked wonders for her music, when approached by Dave Cousins of the Strawberry Hill Boys one night at the Troubadour, she proved surprisingly receptive to the idea of making the Strawberry Hill Boys a unisex outfit.

  Dave Cousins: It was downstairs at the Troubadour that I first heard Sandy Denny. She looked startlingly attractive in a white dress and hat, and she sang like an angel. I thought she was the best thing I’d ever seen and immediately after she’d finished her couple of songs, I asked her if she fancied joining a group. I was quite surprised when she said yes, although we did have a fair reputation on the folk scene by then. We cut some demo tapes with Sandy after rehearsing with her for a couple of weeks … at Cecil Sharp House.

  The Strawberry Hill Boys at this point comprised guitarists Dave Cousins and Tony Hooper, and Ron Chesterman on stand-up bass. Having been pounding the boards for a couple of years or more, they needed a focal point and, vocally, neither Cousins nor Hooper stood out from the crowd. Dating that night at the Troubadour, though, proves difficult. Sandy’s association with the Strawbs had begun by October 1966, when Peter Kennedy wrote to ‘Sandy and the Strawbs’, at Sandy’s parents, asking them to attend a recording for Folk Song Cellar on December 2, adding as an asterisk, “check that they [i.e. the Strawbs] can come on that day, to accompany please.”

  As it happens, both Sandy and the Strawbs did appear at the December session, though independently. However, they had probably already started playing the occasional gig, as photographer Ray Stevenson snapped them at the Troubadour around this time and, according to her agent, Sandy’s only documented appearance at her old haunt between October 1966 and April 1967 was on December 20, 1966, when she was paid just five pounds, barely half her usual rate for a night’s work.*

  Not that Sandy was foolish enough to discontinue her solo status until such a time as she and the Strawbs had successfully gelled as a unit. Perhaps joining the Strawbs was only ever meant as a metaphorical raised digit to some old friends who had recently formed their own folk combo, without even auditioning Sandy for the role of lead singer. Given that Pentangle included one ex-boyfriend, her current boyfriend and one of her oldest musician friends, in Bert Jansch, Danny Thompson and John Renbourn respectively, and that they had sprung from one of her favourite watering holes, the Horseshoe Tavern on Tottenham Court Road, she was entitled to be a bit hurt when not asked to be in the new band.

  Gina Glazer: They felt it was too big a voice. They wanted somebody that blended in … She knew she was a good singer, she had no doubts about her talent … She had high hopes. I think, even then, she was not as devoted to traditional folk as I am. I already felt Sandy was a little bit bored with that. She wanted more recognition than just being in folk was going to give you. That was part of the appeal [of joining the Strawbs] … that’s when she learned to sing with a group. That’s when she stopped doing straight ‘Gina’ stuff, and started experimented musically. And I think her singing became much more interesting from then [on].

  In fact, Pentangle’s manager, Jo Lustig, at some point in 1967 came to the conclusion that Pentangle’s chosen female vocalist, Jacqui McShee, “wasn’t commercial enough,” and in the months before Sandy joined Fairport was angling for her to join Penta
ngle. According to McShee, what finally convinced Lustig to let the matter drop, aside from Renbourn threatening to quit, was when “he found out [just] how much Sandy drank.” By this point, Sandy and Danny Thompson had ceased to be an item (though they remained close). However, the ructions in their relationship had enabled all the other members of the band to observe first-hand what a handful Ms. Denny could be, and the idea of a Sandy-led Pentangle was allowed to die a natural death.

  Jacqui McShee: Sandy used to come along quite a lot on the Sunday evenings and do floor spots [at the Horseshoe]. It was basically a rehearsal place for us, we’d rehearse in the afternoon, and do the gig in the evening … A lot of people came under Danny’s spell, ‘cause he was always the loudest and the jokiest. People used to come along, pre-gig, then everyone would start drinking, and Danny would be sitting there holding court, if you like. And Sandy was there a lot. But Sandy and I would sit aside and moan about men in general. She seemed to me quite a lonely person. She always said she had a rotten taste in men … She used to come to gigs with us sometimes in the van, and there would be rows [with Danny]. It was quite volatile at times. She would often cry on my shoulder about it … She was quite hard to handle, even then … She had a lot of self-doubts. She used to unburden herself on me. Maybe she thought I’d be telling Danny the way she felt.

  Whilst the Pentangle ‘experiment’ went from strength to strength that winter, thanks to the unique opportunity afforded by the weekly Horseshoe residency, there were few such avenues open for Sandy and the Strawbs. Just when the association seemed destined to fritter away to naught, they were invited to record some songs for the BBC World Service at a session on February 21. The five songs recorded that day comprised three from Cousins’ pen and two from Sandy’s repertoire, Frank’s familiar ‘Blues Run The Game’ and the ubiquitous ‘Pretty Polly’, a song Sandy had already sung with the Johnny Silvo Folk Four(!). As a result of this BBC session, the foursome suddenly found themselves being asked to fly over to Denmark to make some recordings for a small-time operation in Copenhagen.

  Dave Cousins: At that time Tom Browne, who is now a BBC DJ, was doing folk programmes on Danish radio, and he took the tapes over to Copenhagen, in order to fix us up with a couple of weeks’ work at Tivoli. He also played the tapes to Karl Knudsen at Sonet Records, who said he’d like to record us and, since no one in England wanted to, we agreed.

  Nobody seems too clear what exactly the deal with Knudsen involved, but it was evidently little better than the one previously offered to Sandy by Marcel Rodd. The carrot was the prospect of some record-label interest, or so the effusive Knudsen assured them.

  Ascertaining when exactly Sandy and the boys travelled to Tivoli, for the two-week residency and recording sessions – problematic enough in itself – is not helped by the claim on the rear-sleeve of the 1973 album of these sessions that they were recorded in August 1968, three months after Sandy had joined Fairport Convention. Joe Boyd insists that he heard an acetate of these recordings the third week in May 1967, shortly before the release of Sgt. Pepper. Perhaps the sessions occupied the first two weeks in May, when Sandy’s sole commitment was a booking at the Horseshoe. By the time Sandy was in Glasgow, in August, being recorded by Alex Campbell at his home in Rupert Street, Saga’s Sandy & Johnny was already in the shops, complete with notes referring to Sandy playing Tivoli Gardens “on behalf of British Folk Week.”

  The songs they planned to record in Denmark were hardly the kind of fare with which Sandy had made her reputation. Rather than performing singer-songwriter material interspersed with traditional fare, the Strawbs preferred to rely upon Dave Cousins’ lightweight confections for what was intended as a pop album. Not that Knudsen was exactly pulling out all the stops, production-wise, the recording studio being in fact the soundstage of a cinema. Cousins later painted a picture to ZigZag of just how primitive the set-up was, “There was no masking for sound, it was just straight down onto tape. I realised at that time we really needed a drummer – on that album we used a Danish drummer … the mastering machine was three-track and sprocket-driven.”

  Though singing duties largely devolved to Sandy, she was content to utilise that ‘pretty voice’ with which she had first mounted a stage – save for a single performance where she sang, solo, words of her own making, ensuring that an album of anodyne pop ditties would warrant at least a footnote in the history of popular song.

  If the ‘clean’ copy in one of her early notebooks represents an early draft, ‘Who Knows Where The Time Goes’ originally had a more apposite title, ‘Ballad of Time’. Where exactly it was written, no-one seems too sure. Neil Denny thought it was written when Sandy “was living in a flat in Kensington with a Canadian girl, whose father was a professor of art at the Tate.” Gina Glazer insists that Sandy, “unhappy in a love affair – it was Danny – had come and stayed the night at my house, and she had started it, and she asked me what I thought.” Sandy herself insisted that she finished the song in Denmark, where she self-consciously unveiled it to Cousins and Hooper. They agreed to include it alongside their own songs, from which it stood out like a diamond in a coal mine. That wistful quality Sandy had been reaching for on ‘The Tender Years’ and ‘Boxful of Treasures’ was effortlessly realised in that first verse:

  “Across the distant sky, all the birds are leaving,

  But how can they know it’s time for them to go?

  Before the winter fire, I will still be dreaming,

  I have no thought of time.

  For who knows where the time goes.”

  As the lyrics are buffeted by that minor-key melody, the narrator turns to face the future with a new assurance – “So come the storms of winter, and then the birds in spring again/ I have no fear of time,” at least “while my love surrounds me.” That enveloping love, though modified in performance to “while my love is near,” would continue to demand nourishment. The performance that day in Denmark – best heard on the 1973 vinyl original (the CD reissue has a mawkish fiddle warbling away in one’s woofers) – has a sense of stillness even the Fairport rerecording couldn’t rekindle. As Australian journalist Shane Danielson recognized, in a posthumous tribute in RAM, there is something almost otherworldly about this recording:

  “Her voice is pure, effortless, perfect; she will never again possess quite this quality of tone. The tremelo will deepen, the range narrow ever so slightly. It will become the voice of a mortal rather than a goddess – yet all the more gorgeous for that.”

  Sandy’s ballad of time would come to haunt the songwriter – when asked about the song by a journalist six years later, she would snap, “I just wish people would listen to some of the other ones” – but at the time she knew it represented some kind of breakthrough. When she played the song for Alex Campbell at his Glasgow house in August, her pride in it was audible. The rest of the album she was not so sure about. It might have been some kind of statement for the Strawberry Hill boys, but not for the Wimbledon Green girl. And yet, she did play Joe Boyd an acetate of the album as originally configured, he believes the third weekend in May.

  Joe Boyd: One Friday evening in May 1967, when I was running the UFO Club, I’d stopped in at Cousins and Sandy was there, and we just got to talking, a few drinks, and I invited her to come over to UFO. And we spent the whole weekend hanging out and talking about music … That’s the first time I ever heard Sgt. Pepper – we went to her house and her brother had taped the record off of Radio Luxembourg, who’d gotten hold of a copy and played it a week before its release. We had to keep the volume down so it wouldn’t wake her parents – it was like 5 am.

  Having come over to London to run Elektra’s UK division in the summer of 1966, Boyd had managed in a single year to become quite the entrepreneur. The Incredible String Band had been an early discovery, and he had quickly taken upon himself both production and management duties. Setting up the UFO Club, he was the first man to take The Pink Floyd into the studio, and was responsible for producing their grou
ndbreaking debut 45, ‘Arnold Layne/ Candy & A Currant Bun’. When he first met Sandy, he was therefore an alluring example of commercial and critical success, as well as tall, attractive, opinionated and twentysomething. Sandy was something else, and Boyd was not quite sure what that else was.

  Joe Boyd: She was incredibly funny, with a very quick mind, jumping from one subject to another, dropping in comments obliquely, interrupting herself with footnotes – a chaotic intelligence just poured out. [JI]

  Smitten by this earthy, exuberant, pretty young thing, Boyd forced himself to push aside his own set of attendant prejudices.

  Joe Boyd: At that time, I had an aversion to American style singer-songwriters … the Jackson Franks. I’d come to England to get away from that sort of thing … I think I’d seen her at Cousins and had rather grudgingly acknowledged that she was pretty good, even though I didn’t really approve [that] she was singing something like ‘Blues Run The Game’ … I hadn’t really heard her that much on stage, and usually in those very short sets at Cousins, where you got up and sang three songs. [But] she was pretty pig-headed about what she wanted to do. I think there was definitely a frustration in her against the folk scene as such, and she had a certain contempt for a lot of the prejudices and schisms that pertained within it.