On the basis of a recently discovered acetate, it would appear that Sandy, Richard, Simon, Ashley and Martin made their first attempt to record ‘A Sailor’s Life’ without either the mighty Swarb or a disgruntled Ian Matthews. Doubtless it was this first draft of ‘A Sailor’s Life’ that Matthews was alluding to when he says he “went along with … do[ing] traditional things … until it came to a point where they arranged a session to do a traditional thing, and didn’t tell me, which was going a bit far.” Though Matthews would not have to be formally asked to leave the band, jumping before he was pushed, it was, in Ashley’s words, “just resoundingly obvious that once we tackled material like that, that Ian wouldn’t fit in … Ian came from a pop background. Once we started ‘Sailor’s Life’, his days were numbered. We didn’t need to discuss it … You couldn’t go back to singing Eric Andersen songs after that.”
This first version of ‘A Sailor’s Life’ features an unfettered Thompson for the first time in the studio, pummelling his guitar all the way back to Reno, Nevada. None of the chief participants, though, seem to recall the session in question and, were it not for its inclusion on the 1993 Richard Thompson boxed-set Watching The Dark, might continue to insist it never occured. The Unhalfbricking version, recorded at a later session – an equally remarkable performance – with Dave Swarbrick sawing away in tandem with a refettered Richard, seems to have obliterated all previous attempts from the collective consciousness of bandleader, producer and engineer.
Ashley Hutchings: The memory I have of ‘Sailor’s Life’ is Olympic Studios, Dave Swarbrick, everyone sitting round, live, Sandy with a cold, one take, silence, Wow! That’s it. I really don’t know what [the other take] is. I haven’t listened to it carefully … it could possibly be a warm-up that Swarbrick sat and listened to. Maybe we played it for him, and they put the machines on.
Joe Boyd: The ‘Sailor’s Life’ that’s on the record is first take with Swarbrick – the first take that day. What we found on this acetate, which I have absolutely no memory of ever making, is clearly an attempt to record it without Swarbrick, and where we did it and when and why, I have no idea … All I remember is that day at Olympic with Swarbrick where we did ‘Si Tu Dois Partir’ and ‘Sailor’s Life’.
John Wood: ‘Sailor’s Life’ was extraordinary. Richard and Sandy came in and said, “We really think we can only do this once.” They’d already got Dave Swarbrick in to play on it … It was done in the old Olympic One, a big room. We put Sandy in a vocal booth and everybody else in a big semi-circle. When you want to cut that sort of track, it’s not easy for people to work if it’s all sectioned off, so it was very open and that was it, one take, done. No overdubs … [One] afternoon, early evening. [JI]
Swarb’s presence proved to be no hindrance. Indeed, his drafting in for this single session, has, with hindsight, become seen as indicative of a general push towards the folk nexus. And the impetus for the temporary recruitment of Swarb certainly came from within the band, presumably from Sandy, though they were slightly taken aback when Ashley asked him, “Do you like playing electric music?” and Swarb said, “No.” What the partially deaf Swarb had thought he’d said was, “Do you mind playing electric music?” In fact, Swarbrick was as bowled over by the experience as the rest of the musicians: “I thought [‘A Sailor’s Life’] was magnificent. I didn’t need persuading that this was a way to go. I’d been looking for something like this for a long time, sub-consciously.” His time would come. According to Thompson, “Ashley … was talking about a whole album of trad. material as early as Unhalfbricking – once Swarb came in, and he saw the possibilities.”
For the moment, though, the remainder of the album Fairport were recording was given over to new songs from Sandy and Richard and a slew of old Dylan ditties, a not so radical departure from the just released What We Did On Our Holidays, even as Sandy and Richard raised their songwriting to a new pitch that augured well for an all original Fairport album somewhere down the line. One of Thompson’s two contributions, ‘Genesis Hall’, suggested that he was already looking to apply traditional resonances to modern life, its opening couplet suggesting something a tad more timeless than the eviction of a bunch of squatters: “My father he rides with your sherrifs/And I know he would never mean harm.” But it was Sandy the songwriter who conveyed the album’s two strongest cuts to the sidemen.
Her fellow Fairporters seem not to have known about ‘Who Knows Where The Time Goes’ until the news filtered down that it was about to become the title-track on Judy Collins’ latest platter. Richard Thompson says, “Sandy played me [the song] up at her flat on the top floor in Gloucester Road. I’d never heard the Strawbs version. This must be 1968.” Absent from all the many radio sessions in 1968, it is only with the Top Gear debut of the five-piece Fairport on February 4, 1969, that the song received a documented outing. Duly convinced of its merits, the boys temporarily tethered Sandy’s mock worldliness to its most appropriate arrangement, courtesy of Thompson’s intercession between singer and song.
Legend also allows RT credit for transposing Sandy’s ‘Autopsy’ from 4/4 to 5/4 time. In fact, Sandy herself had made a habit of transposing songs into 5/4 time (as she had for Alex Campbell’s ‘Been On The Road So Long’ for a BBC session). The acoustic demo she recorded of ‘Autopsy’, as a guide for the band, also finds itself outside common-time, on what is a startlingly original piece of penmanship, dissecting a relationship whilst its cadaver remains warm, even as the song lurches into a contradistinct signature:
Doodle found in Sandy’s journal on the page facing the lyrics to ‘Now and Then’ that may contain a coded message in the top right-hand corner.
“When you look at me
Don’t think you’re owning what you see,
For remember that you’re free
And that’s what you want to be.
So just lend your time to me.”
Sandy’s demo, on first hearing, smacks into one’s ears. The whole vocal has a bite lacking on Unhalfbricking. Showing a side rarely heard, ‘Autopsy’ illustrated a woman capable of great bitterness. The song’s subject remains a mystery, though her father said it was “about a girl that was always telling her troubles.” It stands in marked contrast to the other demo Sandy recorded for the band’s consideration on the penultimate day of 1968. Her search in her personal life for something solid enough to consign previous liasons, and the insecurities they unlocked, to the memory banks now came out in the form of ‘Now and Then’.
As it appears originally in her notebook, it seems clear that ‘Now and Then’ was intended to be some kind of ‘Parting Glass’/‘Restless Farewell’. Though the song begins and ends by looking at how past affairs impinge on her current feelings, the bridge ended up being significantly reworked. In the rewriting process, the portrait of the man Now in her life, “smiling as no lips can do,” has been carefully refined, and some old doubts – “let me know when it is that you must go” – coaxed into the first-person:
[draft lyrics]
“They’ve past me by – many years,
And I did stand well away,
To give and lose love,
And still no word had I to say,
Not to anyone…. [final version of bridge]
And I see
Now I could hold you to me
But when you’re gone
Perhaps you long to be free.
Let me know when it is that you must go.
For you can think of love
Smiling as no lips can do
And of my warm heart
Wishing well, always loving you. Now I see
How I could speak honestly
But when you’re gone
Perhaps you’ll long to be free.
I do know when it is that I must go
For you can think of love
Wandering far from you
Or of my warm heart
Wishing well and loving you.
I do believe I’m learning how to liv
e.
For I have loved many, as you have too,
All with the strength of the young,
But they serve as memories –
They are the words which I’ve sung.”
Chronology – and the character of the man in the song, one who has “loved many … with the strength of the young” – suggests a quite personal plea to the new love of Sandy’s life, Trevor Lucas. However traumatic had been the experiences of Jackson Frank returning to America, and Danny Thompson returning to his then-wife (having knowingly entered an affair with a married man, Sandy ignored her mother’s barely concealed approbation), these affairs had evidently failed to dissuade Sandy from falling for another ladies’ man, and the draft lyrics to ‘Now and Then’ show that she knew it.
A large, cocksure Australian, all six foot-two of Trevor Lucas had arrived from Australia with his first wife, Cheryl, back in 1964. Almost immediately upon landing in London, he had transferred his affections to the first of his UK conquests, a girl on the London folk scene. By the end of their relationship, having learnt his way around town and made some useful contacts, Trevor was now free to introduce himself to as many women of London Town as the times allowed. A man known to enjoy a good time, and with a wild rover for an eye, Lucas is remembered affectionately by most fellow folkies. Dave Swarbrick’s endearing image of Trevor is of someone who revelled in opportunities to pull legs and rattle chains.
Dave Swarbrick: I saw [Trevor] the first week he was here, and we took to each other. Physically he was huge, one of the funniest men I’ve known, but he had a lot more finesse than most [Australians]. Fine food, fine wine. Great lust for life. The best mein host you could come across … But he was a gentleman. He was brought up to look after women, open the door for them, take care of them … [ ] … For a time, Trevor had this house up in Hampstead and he once brought a hearse to go around in. He’d bought it for about thirty quid and for another ten bob the undertaker had thrown in a coffin. The starter on this hearse was duff and I used to have to push this thing to get it going in the mornings – it was quite a sight! We just used to drive around London in it and have fun. One of our most successful missions was when we drove it up to Cecil Sharp House. We took the coffin out and took it upstairs to the shop, where we put it on the counter and told the poor girl at the desk that it was a two-man dulcimer they’d ordered. [CH/JI]
In many ways, it is surprising that Sandy and Trevor had not gone for each other in her pre-Fairport years. Trevor had shared a bill with Sandy as far back as 1966; was a regular at ‘the Cousins’; shared many a mutual acquaintance; and had even lent a percussive hand (literally, on the back of a guitar-case) when she was cutting demos at Cecil Sharp House with the Strawbs. So their paths had crossed often enough. And yet only as 1968 turned to 1969 did Sandy and Trevor seem to become synonymous.
At the same time, Sandy seemed to sense that this new affair was something different. Gina Glazer remembers that it was an endless incantation from an ecstatic Sandy, “I’m in love, I’m in love. This is it.” Gina very quickly began to see a lot of them together, and recalls a Trevor who, “was very devoted to her. From what I could see, he adored Sandy.” Sandy seems to have felt positively redeemed by the love she now felt for Trevor. In a series of drawings, in the same notebook as her drafts for ‘Now and Then’ and ‘Autopsy’, an idealised Trevor is pictured naked in the grass, smelling the flowers, whilst a slimmed-down, Sandy-like figure has acquired the wings of an angel.
Work on Sandy’s second album with Fairport was also proceeding apace, now that Ian Matthews had taken the hint (after a single duet on Dylan’s ‘Percy’s Song’). If the band felt it “couldn’t go back to singing Eric Andersen songs after” ‘A Sailor’s Life’, a smattering of Dylan songs remained de rigeur and they proceeded to record a Cajun rendition of ‘If You Gotta Go, Go Now’, an equally rambunctious ‘Million Dollar Bash’, and a non-arrangement of ‘Dear Landlord’. None came close to their compelling take on ‘Percy’s Song’, though Sandy gave her all on ‘Dear Landlord’ (for which she painstakingly transcribed the words in one of her notebooks). Passing over the last of these, Boyd still felt that Fairport had an album with the jump on its predecessor, and that mixing and sequencing should begin – just as soon as they came up with an album cover and title.
The title came easily enough, a non-word Sandy came up with during a word-game called Super Ghosts, usually attributed to the famous Algonquin circle of wits, played to wile away another journey home from a gig. If Unhalfbricking was an odd title, the cover was positively otherworldy. In the foreground stand an unsmiling, uncomfortably formal couple, guardians of a gate that leads into a quintessentially English world of church spires, spacious gardens and afternoon teas. Through the lattice the five-piece Fairport can just be made out, sipping from china cups. The cover evidently so disturbed their American label that they replaced the image with one of trampolining elephants, presumably in the process of unhalfbricking.
That couple gracing the English cover was none other than Neil and Edna Denny, it having been Sandy who suggested to photographer Eric Hayes that they go round to her parents’ home in search of a photo ‘op’. If the eventual cover was adopted because it was something out of the ordinary – and therefore in keeping with the inclinations of the photographer, the Island art department, and the band – Sandy later confessed to a friend a more disturbing agenda of her own.
Bambi Ballard: I never met [her parents] but I knew about them … [She talked about them] all the time – in a kind of jokey way, “Oh, my mother wouldn’t approve of this.” I remember seeing that [Unhalfbricking] cover, and I said, “God, what a lovely thought, to do that.” She said, “No, I did it to placate them.” And I said, “Well, what about.” And she said, “Just because. I couldn’t have gone on if I’d not done that.” Almost saying, I threw a piece of meat to the lion so I could walk past while it’s chewing it.
However safe Sandy and the boys felt inside that garden, the rough and tumble of their hurly- burly schedule was about to catch up with them, in a quite shattering way. With an album’s worth of songs in the can, and the front-cover now captured, Fairport were booked to play at Mothers in Birmingham, on May 11, 1969.
Regulars at the club, which was a favourite haunt for most bands on ‘the circuit’, Sandy was particularly happy to be back, sharing another bill with Eclection. Founded by Trevor Lucas, Kerrilee Male, Mike Rosen, and Georg Hultgren back in 1967, Eclection had issued a single album on Elektra which, in Trevor’s words, “never reflected what the group did musically.” Further line-up changes, designed to add something original, had only served to unsettle the sound. But they were friendly, Sandy could keep an eye on Trevor, and in Doris Henderson they now had a female singer as ebullient and hard-drinking as Fairport’s own.
After the show, Sandy was offered a lift by Trevor in one of those less-than-reliable Daimlers he had a habit of acquiring on loan from one particular nefarious connection, and elected to take it. Perhaps, at the back of a troubled mind, she had become a little scared about driving long distances in the group was Fairport roadie Harvey Bramham, whom Richard Thompson recalls, “made her learn about the workings of the internal combustion engine, so that normal sounds wouldn’t terrify her,” had appeared in one of Sandy’s dreams back in February, the details of which she had written into her diary (taking up eight pages in the process). It began:
“I was in the group van, and we were driving along hazardous roads, it seems that it had been snowing, much the same as it has been at this present time. Harvey was fixing some kind of amplifier so that we could have some kind of sounds in the van while we were traveling. I was driving down a very steep hill and I was rather scared of what the consequences might be, as we were going very fast, so I handed the wheel to Harvey. Soon we came to a clear stretch of road, still dangerously icy. On the right hand side of the road was the sea and we were driving along the edge. The sea was black and choppy. The sky was stormy grey …”
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br /> Harvey Bramham was again assigned driving duties when the other Fairporters, along with Thompson’s new American girlfriend, Jeannie Franklyn (known to one and all as Jeannie the Taylor), travelled back to London after the Mothers’ gig, in the band’s 35 cwt transit van. Bramham was not feeling so good. Less than ten miles from the end of the M1, he fell asleep at the wheel and, as the van careered towards the central reservation, a now wide-awake Thompson grabbed the steering-wheel, only to over-correct, sending the van cartwheeling over the verge.
Simon Nicol: [Harvey] wasn’t well. Although he did stop at Watford Gap for a cup of tea, [he] proceeded to London in a really rough state … I remember waking up while the van was actually somersaulting, just by Scratchwood Services … When I woke up I was the only one in the vehicle. Everyone else had gone through windows and doors … I flagged down a truck, and the driver sprinted across to the services to get help … I could see Martin was not moving; Harvey went through the windscreen and ended up ninety-one feet away, lying in the dark, moaning, both legs broken … Richard and Hutch were wandering about. Hutch couldn’t see, ‘cause he had so much blood on his face. [PH]
Jeannie Franklyn had been killed, instantly. The survivors were rushed to the Royal Orthopaedic Hospital in Stanmore, where the staff wrestled unsuccessfully to save Martin Lamble’s life. As for the others, Ashley was smashed up pretty badly, but was not on the critical list. Simon and Richard had survived relatively unscathed, at least physically. The psychological effect on the survivors, especially Richard, whose songs of the period are shot through with an all-consuming guilt, can only be imagined. Nearly three decades later, talking to his biographer, Patrick Humphries, Thompson still found it hard to articulate the long-term impact of the crash, “I felt in a state of shock for a couple of years – it was very hard to put stuff into perspective. It broke my perspective for a while – I couldn’t get an overall picture of something, it was like being on a drug – seeing the world piecemeal, instead of as a whole thing.”
No More Sad Refrains: The Life and Times of Sandy Denny Page 11