The events of ‘Percy’s Song’, Dylan’s depiction of a man unjustly imprisoned for killing his passengers in a road accident – “four people lying dead/and he was at the wheel” – were now played out in real life. Harvey Braham was charged with causing death by dangerous driving and made to serve a six-month sentence (at least it wasn’t the “ninety-nine years” the mythical Percy had been given). Sandy did not find out about the calamity until the following morning, when she was called by Anthea Joseph, who had been phoned from the hospital by Simon Nicol with the details of this living nightmare.
Anthea also endeavoured to track down Joe Boyd, who had travelled to New York, to arrange Fairport’s US debut at the prestigious Newport Folk Festival and to mix and sequence Unhalfbricking. John Wood, who accompanied Boyd to New York, recalls that they, “used to use a studio in New York on 23rd Street, one down from the Chelsea Hotel. It belonged to Vanguard, and it really worked for us, we liked the sound of the echo plates.”
Ashley seems to think that “we were just recording tracks at that stage, then we had the crash … and while we were in hospital Joe said the tracks are great – I’m going to get them put out on a record,” which would explain the unfinished nature of ‘Dear Landlord’, the couple of unnecessary novelty songs, and the fact that the album took until August to reach the shops. Boyd believes he played the sequenced version of Unhalfbricking to Jim Rooney, who was on the board of the Newport Folk Festival, and that the album was the finished article.
Rather than returning to the UK to lend some moral support to the shell-shocked survivors, Boyd suggested that Sandy – who was just as neurasthenic as those who had clambered from the van – Simon and Richard come join him on the West Coast, where delicate negotiations with their US label, A&M, were afoot. Ashley continued to be confined to hospital.
Sandy’s legendary fear of flying was about to be sorely tested. As she noted in her diary, when she went down to Westminster Central to get her health card stamped, “I was hoping it would be closed, but it wasn’t and there was nothing to stop me now from going to America.” With Richard holding her hand throughout the flight, even after she emptied a drink in his lap an hour out from Heathrow, it was a relieved Sandy that finally landed at Los Angeles International Airport ten hours later. Though the week holiday provided some welcome therapy, Sandy was missing Trevor badly, and her diary of the trip is shot through with references to the unprecedented pain this physical separation was causing:
“[Wed.] I was upset to leave Trevor, and my fear of flying did not comfort me … We went to Phil Ochs’ house. I was amazed at the beautiful view, to see the whole of Los Angeles lit up like nothing else I’ve ever seen. He had a monkey and a cat and a beautiful house. It must be wonderful to have houses like that … Eventually I got through to Trevor, it was great to hear his lovely voice, but [on] the other side of the world, it seemed so strange … [Thurs.] Went to A&M … What a change it is to see studios with some imagination applied to design and cosiness. Lighting dim, and lovely colours and lovely people too … How I wish somebody could design and erect a studio like that in London. Mind you, know nothing of its recording qualities … I talked to Trevor while I was at Michael [Ethridge?]’s. He was in Plymouth, it was a bad line and eventually we got cut off. Still, I feel very lonely without Trevor … [Fri.] Flew to San Francisco, arrived about 8 p.m…. Eventually got to the Fillmore where the Steve Miller Band were playing, and was too tired to stay, so went back to the hotel. Feeling a bit depressed. Wrote a letter to Trev. and phoned him. I miss him awfully …”
Even before she experienced separation at this transatlantic distance, Sandy had penned lines that expressed an ambivalent attitude to life on the road. As Fairport’s reputation as a live band grew, along with the sheer need to maintain Witchseason’s financial equilibrium, she scribbled in one of her notebooks these lines: “I travel away from the faces I know/the place that I love/And leave behind love/Goodbye, my love, till I come home again,” before deleting each line in turn. The next verse suggested that the loneliness of long distance gigging exacerbated her drinking, “I often smile and drink wine till the morning/ in some foreign land where I think about,” and then again the pencil cuts through the second line, before Sandy abandons her line of thinking, reverting to the kind of stock image that would become a trademark, “Along the shore I did wander and dance/I sang to the full moon.”
Romantic as their relationship would remain, for some time yet, part of the pangs Sandy experienced in America were borne of a suspicion turned to fear, that Trevor, in the original words of ‘Now and Then’, “long[ed] to be free.” However much Sandy wanted to believe in Trevor’s love, she knew his reputation as a womanizer even before putting her hands to the flame. As Joe Boyd concisely put it, “She knew Trevor. I think that was the fundamental problem all along.” Again, she reserved her inner doubts for her notebook. One abandoned lyric from the period certainly reads like an unposted letter from America:
“Do you love me now I’m gone
Does it matter that I’m far away
I did not leave you very long ago
Although I know it was not yesterday …
There are many who would love you too
And they wait until I am not there
But the love you have for me is true
I like to think.”
Even with all of her concerns, Sandy had become firmly entrenched in her relationship with Trevor. Their need to be together had even been allowed to come between her and her oldest friend, ‘Wimbledon’ Winnie. At some point, Trevor had become a permanent fixture at the flat in Stanhope Gardens that Sandy shared with Winnie. Shortly afterwards, Trevor became the blunt Australian long enough to suggest to Winnie, “There’s one too many people in this flat, and it’s you.” Winnie took the hint and, though she bore Trevor no malice, she and Sandy were never as close again.
In fact, the lease on Stanhope Gardens was about to expire and upon Sandy’s return from the US she and Trevor began searching for a new home. Word of mouth was probably all it took for them to arrive at 92 Chipstead Street, the home of Linda Fitzgerald-Moore. Having worked behind the bar at the Troubadour, and dated Tony Hooper of the Strawbs for a period of time, Linda knew both Sandy and Trevor well enough. As such, when the upstairs flat in her house came vacant with the departure of Stefan Grossman and his wife, the couple were able to move in without delay. The informal arrangement reached on the spacious flat suited all parties, and Sandy and Trevor would spend their happiest years together in the flat in Parson’s Green, residing there until the early months of 1974.
Unfortunately for Sandy, Linda was one of a number of women whose morality remained firmly rooted in the ‘free love’ ethos of the Sixties. Though she remains convinced that Sandy never knew of the sexual favours she occasionally dispensed to her other tenant, Linda was assuredly one of those “who would love you too/And … wait until I am not there.”
Linda Fitzgerald-Moore: My recollection of Trevor is of an easy-going guy, a slut … I mean, I slept with Trevor. But I’d slept with him before. It was just like a fun fuck. It was like, What the hell? Sometimes if Sandy was away, he’d come down and say, Go on. It wasn’t hurting anybody … It wasn’t like he was really being unfaithful. In those days it wasn’t a big deal … it never came up between her and me.
It was at Chipstead Street that the Fairport foursome convened, shortly after their return from the States, to decide on their future path. As Ashley puts it, “things were happening, but we didn’t really have a working band … We had a meeting at Trevor’s flat … [and] we made a decision that we were going to reform.” Among the things now happening was a surprise appearance in the singles chart with the curio 45 ‘Si Tu Dois Partir’, their French language pastiche of ‘If You Gotta Go, Go Now’. Given that it had already been a big hit for Manfred Mann, back in 1965; that the one thing the song had going for it was some mildly ribald lyrics, now lost to the French language; and that Dylan had neve
r deemed it worthy of release, the song did not have Hit obviously stamped across it, having been issued primarily as promotional fodder for the forthcoming album.
The unexpected nature of its success seems to have caused a degree of embarrassment. Here, after all, was a band John Wood remembers as “artistically arrogant … there were lots of thing they wouldn’t do, they were very fussy … they did go out of their way to be a bit precious.” Nevertheless, a barely reconstituted Fairport was now cajoled into appearing on the decidedly mainstream Top of the Pops, the BBC’s sole weekly concession to Pop on national TV. Though no video remains of their one and only TOTP appearance, on August 14, 1969, the extant photographic stills beam self-consciousness. It seems unlikely that the majority of the TV audience realised the berets and stripey t-shirts, stand-up bass, accordion and fiddle were meant to parody the song’s Cajun schtick, or that neither drummer Dave Mattacks or fiddle-player Dave Swarbrick had been a part of the band that had recorded the single.
Determined to remain precious, Fairport’s TOTP appearance coincided with a long news story in that week’s NME, in which these silly French-type people proclaimed that “the next album is going to be completely different; it will be based around traditional British folk music,” erecting a gulf between their natural audience of progressive music fans and the mass audience this innocuous single had reached that would never be breached again. As if to further emphasize a band content to return to their side of the great divide, Sandy told the NME reporter, “We’re not making it pop … In fact, it will be almost straight [folk]; only electric. What [will] it sound like? Heavy traditional folk music.”
The decision to make an album of “heavy traditional folk music” had prompted Fairport to send an emissary to convince Dave Swarbrick to become a full-time member. Like Sandy before him, Swarbrick had been earning quite a chunk of change playing the folk circuit, and the economics of a rock band came as quite a shock to him, “I was in the top [folk] outfit in the country at the time. Martin [Carthy] and I worked seven nights a week. I dropped to twenty pounds a week to join Fairport. I was earning at least twenty pounds a night, a lot of money for those years. And I’d got a wife and kid.” Joe Boyd promised the usual untold riches further down the line but in truth Swarbrick, like Sandy, had tired of folk’s false conformity, and was willing to embrace the direction laid out by ‘A Sailor’s Life’, having, in his own words, “a fair idea [of] where it was gonna go to next.”
During subsequent ructions, it would be claimed that Fairport’s future direction had been decided at the single meeting at Trevor’s, and that the band’s reinvention of itself as pioneers of English folk-rock was absolute. However Swarbrick believes that originally, “they had the idea of doing a concept album of English traditional stuff, and they got me in to do [just that].” This corresponds with what Simon Nicol told NME in August, that this album of “heavy traditional folk music” was “a conscious project. We’ll just explore it for a while … It’s another form that hasn’t been explored, in the same way as the Americans have with their music recently … We want to concentrate on an album of English material … [But] we’ll be making another LP of the sort of things we’ve done in the past, [though] it will be impressed by the other, and probably come out more English.” What Richard Thompson proceeded to tell Rolling Stone suggested that Fairport were attempting to reverse what they saw as a trend towards the ‘Americanization’ of popular music:
Richard Thompson: We feel as if we have a commitment to English music, that we have to follow the direction we’re taking, to carry it over to people. Practically nobody here who listens to music is aware of their British heritage.
Between the producer and engineer of Liege and Lief, the impression has been given that the influence of one Ametican band, The Band, overarched all of Fairport’s attempts at an original statement. Boyd puts much of the credit on the Band’s first album, Music From Big Pink, which in his words, “kinda said, ‘Forget it, you’re not American, you’re never even gonna come close to understanding this music.’” Presumably, he had forgotten that everyone in The Band, save drummer Levon Helm, was Canadian! In his History of Fairport Convention notes, John Wood proceeds to credit “the harder, heavier sound [on Liege & Lief], particularly about Richard’s playing,” to the second Band album, an album released after the Liege & Lief material had been debuted. Thompson himself attributes an influence, but as much for what they didn’t do as what they did, “We admired The Band for their rootsiness, at a time of heavy drug-induced noodling. They had short haircuts, knew how to swing, blended styles from various traditions, and generally flew in the face of marketing common sense.”
If any example provided by The Band informed the making of Liege & Lief, it was the informal set-up at Big Pink, the garish house in Woodstock where they lived and recorded, that had resulted not only in their debut album but in the legendary ‘basement tapes’ they recorded with Dylan, a copy of which Boyd had acquired back in 1968, and from which Fairport continued to cherry-pick songs. ‘Down in the Flood’ and ‘Open the Door Homer’ were two basement tape ditties they would work up as part of their “commitment to English music”. Dogma still played no part in the Fairport folk-rock process.
Just as Dylan had hunkered down in Woodstock with his backing Band after his own lil’ two-wheeled accident, paying the rent on Big Pink and retaining the then-Hawks’ services in order to make some music in quiet isolation, so Witchseason found the funds to rent the reconstituted six-piece Fairport a delightful country retreat just outside Winchester, where the process of their recuperation could coincide with some music-making. In much the same way as Dylan had tapped into the vaults of Americana to heal his psychic wounds, Sandy and the boys now steeped themselves in an essentially British sensibility, from the centuries.
Ashley Hutchings: We had a big house in Hampshire. Farley Chamberlayne – that’s the name of the village – about eleven miles outside Winchester. Joe got the place for us to recuperate and rehearse. That was a very happy period for me – a very exciting period … There was a lot of heart-searching going on. It was hard work to actually put these things into the rock format but it was exhilarating and magical in the most profound sense … [ ] … [It was] two months maybe. Certainly wasn’t very long. Not for such amazing material. There’s a whole sequence of photos [which] just tell the story. There’s the room, big room, us sitting around playing, working on this material, Sandy holding a mike. Everything was set up, and in the morning we’d go down. Also there’re photos of me and Swarbrick’s dog, a couple of the guys playing football in the garden. You don’t need captions. We played a bit, intensely, then we went out in the garden and we came back refreshed, and did it again. Incredibly exciting to be doing something that you know no-one has done before. [PH/CH]
Not only were Fairport “doing something that … no-one ha[d] done before,” using an entirely original fusion of sound, but they were doing it with two new recruits. If Swarbrick had been an obvious enough candidate, the replacement for Martin Lamble required a whole series of auditions, until they chanced upon Dave Mattacks, a.k.a. ‘DM’. Mattacks had played all kinds of music in his five years as a professional, though never folk. And yet he found himself invited down to Farley after a single audition. After a further twenty-four hours, Ashley asked him if he would like to join the band. Mattacks’ response was not the most conventional way of saying yes please.
Dave Mattacks: I said, “Yes, but I must tell you I haven’t a fucking clue of what you’re on about. I don’t know anything about the music, I don’t understand it … I can’t tell one tune from another, they all sound the same … But if you really want me to join the group, fine, because … I’m enjoying myself musically.”
Initially, it would appear, Fairport intended to strike the same balance of original material to covers as on previous outings. Simon Nicol even claimed to the press that, “Tyger is writing some interesting stuff in the style of English ballads but without the diale
ct or language problem, and without the archaic imagery which makes them unsingable in an electric context. And Sandy’s still writing, better than ever, and so is Richard.” In fact, Ashley had become so immersed in the folk process that he all but forgot to apply the brush of originality. As he freely admits, “I [was] the academic in the band, so what was natural to me was to go to Cecil Sharp House and pour over the books and listen to the old recordings … In some cases it wasn’t needed because Sandy and Swarb – particularly Swarb – [already] had a repertoire in their head.”
For Sandy, it was a question of reimmersing herself in the type of songs she had previously reserved for the dressing-room or van, or the occasional ‘solo appearance’. An indication of what she had in mind for Farley came, late on the second day of August, when she played an unbilled set at her old haunt, Les Cousins. Interestingly, it was an almost exclusively English vision of folk she adopted that night. ‘Nottamun Town’, ‘Green Grow The Laurels’, ‘Bruton Town’, ‘Newlyn Town’ and ‘Come All Ye Fair and Tender Ladies’ suggested the enduring influence of figures like Bert Jansch, Bert Lloyd, Martin Carthy and Gina Glazer. Sandy also debuted a song from her own pen, the gorgeous ‘The Pond and the Stream’, a pastoral tribute to the eccentric Anne Briggs, that lived up to Nicol’s billing, “in the style of English ballads, but without the dialect or language problem, and without the archaic imagery.”
No More Sad Refrains: The Life and Times of Sandy Denny Page 12