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

by Clinton Heylin

  The fact that Fairport Convention went ahead and recruited a replacement singer whilst Boyd, their ostensible manager, producer and financier, had gone on one of his ubiquitous trips to the States may not have unduly fazed him. That it was a “pig-headed, chaotically intelligent” folksinger by the name of Sandy Denny, however, set alarm bells ringing.

  Joe Boyd: I felt she was temperamentally very, very different from them … Sandy was a very loud, rather raucous person, with a broad and rather bawdy wit, sometimes a foul tongue, not known to be a cautious drinker. And Fairport at that time were very meek, polite, suburban youths and somehow I kept trying to picture Sandy with them. I was afraid that she was going to chew them up and spit them out for breakfast. [PH]

  Even Sandy seems to have considered the possibility that this would not work out, initially keeping her options open by doing the occasional solo gig. Barely two months on from her recruitment, though, she was informing Melody Maker readers of the joys of being in a band, “Once you know what can be done with six people, and like the result, the simplicity and naiveness of one voice and a guitar is rather insipid … [And there’s] no more standing alone with your thoughts on draughty railway stations. In the group van there’s always someone to talk to – or at – even if they are asleep.” Sandy was prepared to admit that she was “the one who tends to get uptight. They watch me as an element on my own. They let me blow up, then cool down.” Ashley Hutchings suggests that their approach was mostly borne of ignorance as to how to cope with a volatile, ‘emotionally unstable’ member of the opposite sex, rather than any great understanding on their part.

  Ashley Hutchings: We were a pretty young bunch, and pretty inexperienced in the big wide world. It was also a time when it was hip not to communicate – to wear dark glasses and mumble on about philosophy – and I know that affected our band. [We could all be] willfully difficult. And she just came in, like a twister, and blew us away – and probably opened us out as a band … One of the many things she did was blow away some of this intensity, knock us off our pedestals a bit … She had a temper, we didn’t have tempers … Had we been more worldly we might have been able to handle better her difficult moments. We didn’t know how to handle it, we just had to let this hurricane blow out, and then just carried on. [But] there was nothing horrific about her.

  Those close to Sandy often learnt the hard way just how intimidating this petite but feisty female powerhouse could be. Her late husband Trevor Lucas, a week before his own death, remembered Sandy as “in many ways an extreme person, who inevitably tended to get her own way most of the time. And she had an ability to put the shits into most people when they first encountered her. Most people realised almost as soon as they met Sandy that you … [must] be precise: don’t bullshit her around. She didn’t tolerate fools easily.”

  Linda Thompson concurs, whilst pointing out the historical context, “This was before it became the norm to have women in bands, so [Sandy] was unusual. If you asked the drummer to play a little faster, they’d look at you as if to say, ‘What do you know?’” Not with Sandy they didn’t. An entry in her diary, from the winter of 1969, hints at some underlying tensions, “I felt quite pleased to be pleased [sic] to finish singing. For one thing that night I’d had a ghastly row with [Fairport roadie] Harvey about the monitor which wasn’t there, and we both threw moodies all evening, but it was alright later.”

  Initially, though, her input into the Fairport set-up was undoubtedly positive. She sounded like she’d been in the band from its very first ethnic shuffle – and in less time than it took a worried Boyd to conclude his business in America, and catch a plane back to London.

  Joe Boyd: I got back [from America] and went to a rehearsal and it was obvious that it had all worked incredibly well … She may have just joined the group because she wanted a bigger vehicle for her songs, and just to learn about being in rock, and getting out of the folk world but … I definitely felt a tremendous release of energy in both Sandy and Richard. It was musical love at first sight. I think that they had an incredibly stimulating effect on each other, and the group was all involved and caught up in that process. She said to me at one point, very early on, [something] to the effect of, “Jesus Christ, what a fucking genius.” … [But] she would have grabbed him by the scruff of the neck and shaken him and said, C’mon, I want more, more, more … She was like a bomb. She wouldn’t have been prepared to settle for anything [less than his best] … [Richard] and Sandy were completely opposite personalities, and yet I think they both had huge respect, one for the other. Sandy was finally a real foil [for him].

  Having auditioned for the vocalist slot the second week in May 1968, Sandy was playing her first gig with Fairport, at their home away from home, the Middle Earth, on the 20th and, a week later, was in the BBC’s radio studios at Maida Vale recording her first Top Gear session with her new musical bedfellows. Of course, a BBC session was nothing new to Sandy, who was already booked for a solo session a month later on My Kind of Folk (at which she sang ‘The Quiet Land of Erin’ and Alex Campbell’s ‘Been On The Road’).

  Fairport Convention had also already made appearances on John Peel’s legendary Top Gear radio show, as well as Radio One’s David Symonds Show. Peel had even felt compelled to give their debut single, the pop oddity ‘If I Had A Ribbon Bow’, a few airings. In an era when bands were expected to supplement the Musician Union’s permitted rote of ‘needle-time’ with live sessions, BBC sessions were an opportunity to try out ideas and explore new directions.

  For most bands, a new singer might have been deemed enough of an innovation for a Top Gear radio session. Not so, Fairport. The five songs they recorded the afternoon of May 28, at Maida Vale, included just one song, Joni Mitchell’s ‘I Don’t Know Where I Stand’, from the already redundant debut album Polydor planned to issue in another month’s time. It also offered a preview of what the music papers reported was to be Fairport’s next single, the Everly Brothers’ ‘Some Sweet Day’. However, it was two songs suggested by Sandy that showed the immediacy of the lady’s impact – her ‘audition’ song, Jackson Frank’s ‘You Never Wanted Me’, which had been cleverly rearranged to accomodate Sandy and Ian Matthews, both vocalists still learning when to ease themselves back into the musical flow; and one of the most mysterious of those traditional ritual songs, the truly murky ‘Nottamun Town’:

  “In Nottamun Town not a soul would look up,

  Not a soul would look up, not a soul would look down,

  Not a soul would look up, not a soul would look down,

  To show me the way to fair Nottamun Town.

  Met the king and queen, and a company more,

  Come walking behind, and riding before,

  Come a stark naked drummer a-beating his drum,

  With his hands on his bosom, come marching along.

  Sat down on a hard, cold frozen stone

  Ten thousand stood ‘round me, yet I was alone.

  Took my hat in my hands for to keep my head warm

  Ten thousand got drowndéd that never was born.”

  Quite. ‘Nottamun Town’ must have startled many a Fairport fan listening to its inaugural broadcast, the weekend of June 2. Firstly, it was the first time the band had recorded a traditional song. Secondly, it was a song whose meaning was almost entirely impenetrable. And, thirdly, the arrangement was startlingly ambitious, as if Thompson was raising the stakes on his two true rivals in folk’s guitar-God stakes, Bert Jansch and Davy Graham – both of whom he had caught at “all-nighters at Les Cousins” – by making the song almost raga-rock. Both had already tackled ‘Nottamun Town’ on memorable indeed groundbreaking albums, Davy Graham back in 1964 when, along with Shirley Collins, he had attempted a grand alliance of folk tunes and middle-eastern tunings on Folk Roots, New Routes, and Jansch on his equally innovative 1966 collection, Jack Orion. Both performances were known to the Fairport collective, as was Dylan’s ‘Masters of War’, also based on the same original template, Jean Ritchie’s
original Fifties recording. Ashley Hutchings is sure that he and Simon Nicol already knew Ritchie’s original.

  Indeed, Ashley and co. knew many of the songs Sandy now introduced to the band, “We weren’t novices when it came to any of these music forms. In many cases, we knew authentic versions from our youth.” Richard Thompson vividly recalls, at the end of the session at Maida Vale, Ashley turning to him and saying, “At last that’s something that we can be proud of.” Thompson, too, felt that “we had actually waxed something that was worthwhile – even though it was only BBC mono. It just had some real quality to it.” Ashley still remembers the feeling.

  Ashley Hutchings: I felt up until that stage we were a local group who were trying to break out, be bigger than our boots. But when Sandy came we had that stamp of authority, and I felt we could achieve anything.

  Karl Dallas, who may well have caught the first show of the new line-up, also immediately recognised how easily Sandy now slipped into her long-awaited niche.

  Karl Dallas: The first concert where I saw her and Ian Matthews, they stood on opposite sides of the stage – and Ashley Hutchings was wearing his ‘gaters – and it just blew me away … I realized that I’d been right and wrong – right that singing solo in a folk club was not where [Sandy] was destined for, but wrong in thinking that it would be as a jazz singer.

  Boyd, too, began to get excited about a band that had previously seemed almost a token addition to the Witchseason roster. Having signed a band destined to make pleasant records, “but [was] not actually going anywhere,” he found “Richard writing new songs, in a way probably stimulated and challenged by Sandy, [as well as] the first steps in various directions … real interesting steps, rather than just lack of direction.” Fairport’s reinvention also presented Boyd with a conundrum. He simply did not have the time to handle the daily travails of this newly-energized unit. Turning to another old friend from the Troubadour days, he asked her to hold some hands.

  David Sandison: Anthea [Joseph] was working for EMI in Dublin and Joe called her and said, “Look, I need help at Witchseason. I’ve taken on Fairport Convention, and I need some help.” So he flew her over from Dublin and when she arrived, she discovered that Sandy was the lead singer and nearly backed out … because Sandy, when she’d last seen her, was fairly lightweight, artistically anyway, and she said, “Oh God, this is not going to work.” She’d seen early Fairport with Judy Dyble … [But] they were a revelation, and Sandy was a revelation. In the [period] since she’d last seen her, Sandy had just become Sandy – she wasn’t trying to be anybody else, she wasn’t trying to copy anyone else, she was just doing what she wanted, her way. I think [Anthea] saw them at the UFO Club, and at the end of it, she said to Joe, “Right, I’m on.”

  Hutchings’ assessment, that Sandy “probably opened us out as a band,” qualifies as something of an understatement. Thompson, in particular, now found himself ushered into the limelight. In the early days, journalist Colin Irwin recalls, “He’d be standing right at the back, in the shadows, and often would even be playing into the side. This amazing guitar solo would come in, [and it’d be] who’s doing that? You’d suddenly see this shadowy figure at the back.” Sandy also dispensed with the self-conscious introductions that had been Simon Nicol’s sorry task. Richard Lewis, who had seen all the band’s sea-changes first hand, noticed immediately that, “on stage they were much more confident … When Sandy came along, here was someone who not only was happy to introduce, but would crack jokes as well, or collapse laughing in the middle of an introduction. When everybody saw that this was okay, and you could do this, everyone became [much] more relaxed.”

  Just a single four-song set at the Festival Hall in September, and a five-song performance on Dutch TV from the same month, provide audio documentation of the six-piece Fairport in full flight. On both, though, there is an edge lacking from the early Top Gear shows and first album. Fairport’s extraordinary rearrangement of Leonard Cohen’s ‘Suzanne’, ebbing and flowing right upto the moment Lamble’s stacatto drumming turns the tide, was first performed for the BBC that August, but the song really came into its own at the Festival Hall, as did a nine-minute ‘Reno Nevada’. On the same bill was Joni Mitchell, on her first trip to the UK. If Fairport wisely refrained from interpreting any of Joni’s songs that night, the contrast between Joni’s stage persona and Sandy’s could not have been starker.

  Joe Boyd: [Sandy] was a real handful, [but] her manner on stage was a fumbling with her guitar strings, and tripping over wires and laughing at her own clumsiness, and making off-hand, off the cuff, very funny one-liners, and making mistakes but laughing about them [while] maintaining a dialogue with the audience. She certainly wasn’t somebody who got up there on stage [with] her long hair hanging over her face, and didn’t look at the audience. That just wasn’t Sandy at all.

  Having such a big personality fronting the band, though, was bound to have its downside, and even in the early days it occasionally manifested itself in performance. As Hutchings suggests, “She was the drinker in the band and that occasionally led to erratic performances. If she was under the weather, [the voice] would suffer.” Bernard Doherty remembers one show at the Roundhouse, with bottles of brandy visible on the piano, when she was clearly the worse for wear.

  Sandy admits to another occasion in her diary, when her desire to emulate one of her heroes went a little far, “I was feeling a bit strained … probably on account of the mixture of gin and Southern Comfort which I’d decided to experiment with to see if I too could produce the shattered effects which Janis Joplin seems to acquire as a result of drinking it. No, I really must say I didn’t like it. I thought it tasted like apricot brandy, and I had only about three or so, just to make sure I didn’t like it, but I did have a few gins and a couple of glasses of wine.” This was prodigious consumption by anyone’s standards, least of all a physically slight, twenty-one-year-old gal. In the early days, though, Fairport had someone on hand who knew exactly how to handle the high-strung singer.

  David Sandison: Anthea had to pour black coffee down her throat on more than one occasion … Anthea was the only person who ever told her she was being a complete prick and a selfish brat, and Sandy knew that. So Sandy would be chastened and would straighten herself out for a couple of days, and then get naughty again. She adored Anthea.

  Anthea was the subject of one of Sandy’s earliest efforts for Fairport. The song in question evolved out of some scribblings about someone (Anthea’s name has been visibly scratched out) whose “smile is beautiful” and whose “tears will make me cry as well.” The narrator “dreamed she met a wonderful man called Neddy, although I know his name is Pat and he lives in Ireland.” Soon enough, she had penned three verses that, in spirit and style, would lead on to the more realized ‘Pond and the Stream’ (also sketched out in the same notebook):

  “How does she bear to have no phone

  To dig the garden all stone

  And smile, although she’s on her own

  I know she loves someone who lives in Ireland.

  When she smiles she’s beautiful

  And when she cries, I cry as well

  To see her sad is so unusual

  I know she thinks of one who lives in Ireland.

  She lives within the city boundaries

  And walks for miles alone among the trees

  I often wonder what she sees

  Perhaps the quiet land of Ireland.”

  In its original draft, Sandy ponders why, “She works so often and so hard/ I wonder that she never tires/ and also how she finds the patience/ to deal with a motley bunch of scruffs like us.” The dreadful insecurities that were to increasingly plague Sandy were often held in check by Anthea Joseph, whose size and demeanour was usually enough to cowe Ms. Denny.

  Being a good girl did not always come easily. As Linda Thompson confirms, Sandy would never allow her sex to make her into a lesser citizen, “She wouldn’t let the boys dominate her. She could be difficult herself.
She could really take over. Then the next minute she’d display a total lack of self-confidence.” That sudden pressure drop in confidence has been commented on by many, and may already suggest the rapid mood swings alcohol was wont to engender. It was usually only after the exhilaration of performing that the crash came, but when it came, her mood-swing would be visible to all.

  Richard Lewis: However she was feeling, you could tell [immediately]. When she was happy, she was happy. When she wasn’t happy, she let you know it, and everyone else know it, so you knew when to be there. Or not. If I ever went backstage to Middle Earth, and you could see that Sandy wasn’t happy, it wasn’t a good place to be. But when she was happy, everything was fantastic. She was such an exuberant personality. When you heard her laugh, you really knew here was somebody laughing … Sometimes she was sure that she could do everything, but sometimes she didn’t believe in herself [at all].

  Ensuring that the times when Sandy was “sure that she could do everything” outnumbered the times when “she didn’t believe in herself” was Anthea’s role on the road, and Joe Boyd’s in the studio. But everybody in the Witchseason ‘family’ played their part in keeping the ship on course. In joining Fairport, Sandy was the most obvious beneficiary of a ‘hands-on’ management team. It was a unique set-up, and though it may have ultimately proved financially disastrous, it was the perfect artistic environment for a set of young, naive musicians looking to conquer the world by stealth.

  Ashley Hutchings: I don’t think we asked [Joe] a single question about money in the first year or two we worked together, which later in life was a cause of great disruption and bad feeling. [But] we didn’t care. We were young and we were making the music we wanted, and as long as we got our ten pound a week we were quite happy. So we did put a lot of trust in Joe. And he looked after us. He took care of all that, and let us get on with the music … Though we were making it up as we went along, that is the way to do it. Joe took all that off our hands. He would offer opinions, in the studio in particular, but he didn’t interfere, even as producer of the records. His style of production was just to create the right atmosphere in the studio and very, very occasionally gently suggest [something], here and there. And then [to use] very simple, natural sounds, make sure the vocals were nice and clear … We needed a little bit of time to find our own way. We didn’t take long.