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

by Clinton Heylin

  Part of the conflict now raging in her cranium was a by-product of being a woman in an avowedly man’s world. Joe Boyd, able to observe this effect first hand on a number of occasions, believes that “there was a lot of conflict about being a woman in that role then, and the more successful you become, the more you leave people behind, so the more you run the risk of being on your own. Sandy was afraid of being a big success. A lot of female performers from that generation had that fear.”

  Sandy was also probably already an undiagnosed alcoholic. One of the corrosive by-products of a serious drinking habit is the way it eats away at your self-esteem, one-sixth of a gill at a time. The fact that a previous dislike of travelling had solidified into something akin to a phobia should have set some alarm bells ringing. Boyd now admits it was at this time that he “first started noticing her becoming more depressed, and more down, and more worried, and more concerned, in a somewhat self-destructive way. She became very afraid of flying and travelling.”

  At the same time, it was only when it became apparent that Liege & Lief was unlikely to be a one-off project that Sandy began to plan her escape from the Fairport democracy. Ashley’s more academic, one may even say dogmatic, vision of Folk held no appeal for her and though her own songwriting, along with Richard’s, gradually undermined Ashley’s position in Fairport, he had always been, in Thompon’s words, “the moving force behind the direction and the policy, all the way into folk-rock and into the traditional revival.” That there had been murmurs since the halcyon days of Farley Chamberlayne, Ashley admits, though he continues to see the hand of Trevor in the subsequent ructions.

  Ashley Hutchings: I think everyone was totally committed to Liege & Lief, doing it. I don’t remember any dissension. Once we’d done it, that’s when problems arose. Then there was mumblings of well, maybe we should get more of Sandy’s songs, or maybe we should do some country songs … I think it came a bit later and whether it came purely from Sandy, I have my doubts. I have a feeling Trevor may have made a few suggestions about her own material, and exerting her own authority. Certainly I don’t remember at any point Sandy voicing any reservations.

  In fact, the rest of Fairport felt just as compelled as Ashley to explore an English sensibility, they just had in mind a more original style, one related if not rooted in Rock. If Thompson asserts that, “once we started we obviously had to keep going, there was no going back,” he also admits that, “there was a running argument between Ashley in one camp and Sandy and myself in the other – Ashley wanting to do more traditional material, Sandy and I wanting to do more trad-based contemporary songs.” Sandy may have come to feel that Liege & Lief was a mistake, that she was in danger of ending up back where she started. As Joe Boyd told Patrick Humphries, “She had been involved with the traditional [scene] for a long time, but always rather ambivalently. She sang traditional songs as well as her own compositions, and she had [unclear] feelings about it.”

  As it is, the other members of Fairport may have been genuinely unaware how much Sandy had been working at her songwriting in the months since the accident (though Ashley’s reference to “mumblings of … maybe we should get more of Sandy’s songs” suggests a dissatisfaction at least voiced). Despite the likes of ‘Fotheringay’, ‘Who Knows …” and ‘Autopsy”, others may have considered Sandy to be first and foremost a singer; that Richard supplied the Robbie Robertson role in Fairport well enough – given that he would always be the more prolific writer. Sandy’s reluctance to share ideas for songs with her fellow musicians would also endure long after Fairport. The drummer in her next ensemble well remembers just how tough an initial unveiling could be.

  Gerry Conway: Sandy was always quite shy about bringing a new song out. She would always be a little reluctant to play it ‘publicly’ for the first time – first times were quite nerve-wracking, just to hear the song and start working on it. It was almost like she didn’t know what she had … Deep down, Sandy wasn’t really that confident – she sought approval on things when she didn’t need to. Everybody thought she was the greatest thing since sliced bread – but there would always be that, “Is it any good?”

  Because of such bashfulness, it is all but impossible to discern how many of Sandy’s contributions to the first album with Fotheringay had already been written by the time she left Fairport. ‘The Pond and the Stream’ certainly dates from that summer. In the same notebook are also the lyrics to ‘The Sea’, a curiously apocalyptic vision of a London where the “sea flows under your doors … and all your defences are all broken down.”

  Trevor Lucas: It’s about how London has lived on the point of flood all the time and … [Sandy envisaged a] London [that] was really coming down and falling around itself because of the sea.

  ‘Nothing More’, the opening track on Sandy’s next band’s eponymous debut album Fotheringay, may also have been penned that autumn, though Richard Thompson says she never played it to him, even though he spent many a weekend at Chipstead Street at the time, perhaps because its subject-matter was someone known to the narrator knows who has “suffered, although you are still young.” It was one in a long line of portraits of those Sandy loved best, albeit in code. When asked about the focus for her songs, in 1972, Sandy initially sidestepped the question, “I can’t tell you about my songs. They’re so strange,” but then allowed herself to confess, “They’re about people. I don’t know why they are – they just come out like that.” As her father fondly recalled, “She had a most remarkable facility for working people out…. [There would be] somebody 20 yards away in a room, and she’d say, ‘That girl has just told that fellow to get lost’.” In the case of ‘Nothing More’, perhaps no-one has summarised Thompson better, in any number of pages, than Sandy in these three lines:

  “For you are like the others, he said,

  I never can be sure

  That you wish to see the pearls and nothing more.”

  If there was anyone aware of how much writing Sandy was now doing, it was Trevor Lucas. His recollection, twenty years later, was of someone openly telling him that she, “didn’t want to sing Farmer Jones songs for the rest of her life. She had a huge amount of her own material, was writing very prolifically, and she could see that the band had less and less place for that.” As her cheerleader and taskmaster rolled into one, Trevor doubtless voiced an opinion as to the direction the band was heading in. As it is, she would come to believe that “it was only when I left [Fairport] that I realized I could [write more].” Others believe it was inevitable that Sandy and Trevor would end up working together.

  Richard Thompson: We were backstage at I think Newcastle University, and Sandy was in Eclection’s dressing room next door. We could hear Sandy singing ‘A Sailor’s Life’ through the wall, and Trevor was adding a terrific bass part to it, and we looked at each other, as if to say, that sounds a bit too good…. One way or another, I think we expected Sandy and Trevor to be in a band together at some point … It was hard for them to be working on the road separately … she needed to be with Trevor.

  Forming a band with Trevor was also a way for Sandy to be simultaneously self-effacing and artistically assertive. Initially, she doesn’t seem to have realised what a hot property she had become as a solo artist. Joe Boyd promptly set her straight, perhaps exacerbating those fears of fame. As he prepared to fly to America to negotiate a solo contract from Sandy’s American label, A&M, he was stunned to find that Sandy was talking about assembling another band to hide behind, within which would be her “would-be dream love of a lifetime,” and his Eclection sidekick, Gerry Conway.

  Joe Boyd: [When] Sandy had failed to make the flight [to Copenhagen], I ended up going round to her house and having a long chat with her … Sandy was nervous that if she did leave the group she wouldn’t get a recording deal. I said, you must be joking … I think during that conversation she also expressed her reservations about doing a solo record, and said she might form a group … [ ] … [But] A&M loved Sandy. They signed Fairport b
ecause they wanted Sandy. They would have preferred to have Sandy without Fairport. And I knew that. She was always worried about money, she never had much, and I said, I can go and get you a big advance – Chris Blackwell agreed that we would pass the whole advance through the system … and we would work it out down the line. I told her all of this. I was also aware of a political situation at the time, which I knew I could exploit. Abe Summer, this [American] lawyer … was negotiating with Capitol to launch the Island label [in the U.S.] through Capitol, which would by default have had any Island artist not placed with other American labels. [He] was also representing A&M. He knew that if we didn’t do a deal quickly for Sandy with A&M, that A&M would lose her to the Island label, and that his conflict of interest would be cruelly exposed. She had talked to me about forming a group with Trevor, and I said, Please, don’t … Trevor liked the trappings, he liked the good life. Fairport were down to earth, get a decent place to rehearse, get a van that’ll get you from A to B, and think about the music. They weren’t interested in hanging out at the Scotch of St. James…. What Sandy and Trevor had in mind was [professional musician] guys who were not going to join a collective, and wait and see what came in the door. They were gonna need salaries. I said, “Sandy, listen you can put together a great band to go on the road after we make a solo record. We’ll pay them to go on the road with you, we’ll pay them to do the recording with you, but don’t put them on salary. It’s a false collective.” [PH/CH]

  The band idea, according to drummer Gerry Conway, had originally come up as a result of “a [long] conversation with Trevor and Sandy … chatting about musicians and music, and out of that, by the end of the night, it was [like,] ‘Let’s form a band’ – we decided that we would all like to do something together … Sandy liked to have people around her – people that she liked, people she respected, and once she had that she would go to extraordinary ends to keep it like that.” These extraordinary ends included shooting herself in the foot financially.

  Sandy herself said, at the time, that she had “decided against going solo because I would have had to work with a backing group. I knew that relationship would have been no good … I like to be part of a group.” Part of the impetus for this ‘realisation’ was apparently the experience of seeing Judy Collins perform at a recent London show. Out in the audience a feeling came over Sandy that here was someone who “was definitely a solo singer, who just happened to have a very good backing group. But that’s all they were – a backing group. I suddenly thought, If you’re playing together on a stage you might as well be TOGETHER.”

  Already her desire for companionship was clouding her judgement. As she told a journalist, barely two months after her new band Fotheringay’s formation, “If I had gone solo I would have been involved more with the business side … that side doesn’t interest me at all – I’m happy to leave it to other people.” Perhaps the last other person she should have left it to was her boyfriend. For every old friend of Trevor who recalls his good nature, there’s another who cannot surpress a wry grin at all the hare-brained ideas and grandiose schemes that came from Trevor’s fertile imagination. As long as it was some record company or unsuspecting man of means that bought into his antipodean verbal hogwash, it remained a source of anecdotal amusement, Trevor as a Fulham Broadway Danny Rose. However, when Boyd returned from L.A. with a deal that could have put Sandy on a secure financial footing for the forseeable, Trevor was the man to ensure it would not.

  Joe Boyd: A&M eventually came up with a $40,000 advance figure – twice what they paid for Fairport Convention albums – and an immense amount of money in 1970. [But] by the time I returned from California with this offer, Sandy had already begun rehearsals with Albert Lee, Pat Donaldson, Gerry Conway and Trevor … [and] said she was absolutely committed to the idea of this band. I said to her at the time, I’m not going to manage this band. I don’t think it’s a good idea. It’s financial suicide. Whatever you call the band is not going to sell as many copies on the day of release as your name would. A&M is gonna be disappointed. No-one wants this. You’re swimming upstream. At the bottom of it all, as I think we know, it was all about Trevor … She wanted Trevor in the band, with her, 24 hours a day, and the only way to ensure that was to make him an equal partner. She understood that that was the only way that she could have at least the semblance of a balanced, professional relationship with Trevor. I believe we kept the money in the Witchseason account, and Roy Guest became the manager, and was able to draw on money that was in the account. [But] Roy was not the sort of person to say No, and so absolutely every one of my worst fears was realized – they bought a Bentley, they bought [a huge PA they christened] Stonehenge, everything that Fairport would never dream of doing.

  Boyd, for all his endeavours on Sandy’s behalf, knew he had returned to a fait accomplis. He also knew she had a streak of stubborness as wide as Wimbledon Common, aligned to an inner determination to prove him (and others) wrong. Initially at least, she did just that. Less than three months after she had abandoned her solo plans, formed a band called Tiger’s Eye, replaced the guitarist, rechristened it Fotheringay, rehearsed a whole new set, and recorded the bulk of a quietly impressive sleeper of a debut album, she was on the road with her new five-piece. As the new band toured the UK reviews spoke of “Fotheringay ma[king] the kind of debut artists usually only dream about,” playing to “tremendous acclaim,” and referring to Sandy’s own new numbers as “excellent.”

  The original Chipstead Street conversation, involving Trevor and Gerry Conway, had come about in part because the days of their own band, Eclection, were numbered. Trevor had for some time been trying, in Conway’s words, “to keep together something that didn’t want to be together.” If Sandy now acquired the Dorris Henderson role in the new collective, she asked Thompson’s opinion as to the best guitarist around (present company excepted) and went along with his recommendation, recruiting Albert Lee and, via him, Pat Donaldson on bass, with whom Lee was playing in the short-lived Country Fever.

  This line-up lasted long enough to be profiled in the music press, and photographed at the common near Sandy and Trevor’s flat by their landlady-turned-photographer Linda Fitzgerald-Moore. Albert Lee may have been happy enough with the Gordon Lightfoot and Bob Dylan covers but when it came to the Fotheringay originals his way of picking did not gell all that well with those folky time-signatures. After a fortnight, the others began to observe a certain taciturnity bordering on disinterest.

  Gerry Conway: Eventually Trevor said, “I don’t know if Albert’s happy, we’ll have to tackle him.” … So we asked him and he said, “Well, I’ve been meaning to say …”

  If rehearsals with Albert Lee occupied much of January 1970, rehearsing with his replacement, Jerry Donahue, recording the results for Island and playing a five-date tour, occupied February, March and April. Donahue, a New Yorker by birth, had come to England in 1961 with his parents, where he joined a band called the Zephyrs, though, according to Fotheringay’s program notes, “it was not until he joined Poet and the One Man Band that Jerry came to prominence.” No Richard Thompson, he was nevertheless a versatile guitarist and team-player. If Donahue believes Fotheringay “wasn’t enough of a vehicle for” Lee, it suited him just fine.

  The pretence of a democracy within the band had been maintained by the simple expedient of giving Trevor a couple of favourite covers to add to his own ‘Ballad of Ned Kelly’. Sandy had enough songs up her sleeve to concentrate on her own material, though she reserved her finest vocal on Fotheringay for the one and only traditional song in their early repertoire. ‘The Banks of the Nile’, like the equally epic ‘Bonny Bunch of Roses’ currently being performed by Sandy’s previous ensemble, was another of those long litanies on the Napoleonic wars that filled the English broadsheets in the early nineteenth century. In her hands, though, it became the second act in the trials and tribulations of military sweethearts, as poignant as ‘A Sailor’s Life’, though not as easily caught. Indeed, when
it came time to record the song, it stood in stark contrast to the studious arrangements that occupied the remaining session-time.

  Gerry Conway: We [had been] rehearsing in the music-room at Chipstead Street, and as far as I can recollect, we just went straight in the studio … [Sandy] had songs that she had written, and I think what she really wanted to do was perform her own songs. Nobody in the Fotheringay line-up even questioned that. She would guide if she didn’t think [an arrangement] was right, and encourage if it was. She knew what she didn’t like … Things like ‘[The] Pond and the Stream’, we rehearsed it and that’s how we played it on the record, [Most] songs were like that. [But] ‘Banks of the Nile’ was different – we rehearsed it but it never really settled, and when we got the studio it was still in a state of flux. We came to record the song and did quite a few takes of it, and it wasn’t happening. It was a long song, a lot of verses. We finally got to the point where it was getting a bit frustrating, so we went to the pub and in a conversation we decided that we were just gonna go in and busk it. And that’s exactly what happened. It was a first take, everybody doing what they felt, and that became [the album cut].

  Despite Boyd’s antipathy towards the Fotheringay collective, he proceeded to produce their self-titled debut, by his own admission applying himself when he felt the songs merited the effort, believing ‘The Sea’ and ‘The Pond and the Stream’ to be “two of the most unbelievable, fantastic songs.” But his memory is that, “they weren’t a tight band. With Fotheringay everything was a struggle.” Jerry Donahue reaffirms that Boyd “clearly didn’t take a personal interest in it. We were pretty much left to get on with the job ourselves.” Recorded in just seven days of sessions, and with most songs barely blooded on the road, Fotheringay was a surprisingly strong album. Even Trevor’s contributions more than held their own.