If the tensions in the studio impinged on the band, everyone save Sandy (and presumably Trevor) remained blithely unaware of the precarious financial precipice on which they were balancing. Gerry Conway recalls, “feel[ing] somewhat intimidated by the political side of it – my intuition was saying, ‘I don’t think everybody wants this’.” However, he knew Sandy well enough to know that, “having decided to do it, [she] was gonna stick with it and see it through, regardless of how everybody else felt about it.”
When Richard Williams concluded, in Melody Maker, that “‘Banks of the Nile’ is probably the best rock arrangement I’ve ever heard, simple as that, and the rest of the album isn’t far behind … this is the way that British music must go,” it must have seemed Sandy had been fully vindicated in her decision to form Fotheringay. The first tour, which concluded at the Royal Festival Hall on March 31, six months after Fairport’s triumph, was also well-received and though the album, on its June release, only hovered nervously around the lower twenties on the charts, the foundations seemed to be in place for a sustained assault on the record-buying public.
Of course, the album may have fared somewhat better if Fotheringay had toured to support it – rather than three months prior to its release. It must have seemed to some at Island (and Witchseason) that, after the brief flurry of excitement that came with something new, Fotheringay had all but disappeared off the radar by the time of the album’s release. There was certainly some whispered resentments expressed by Sandy’s old band, for whom Fotheringay represented a draining of resources at their expense.
Dave Pegg: I used to get pissed off about Fotheringay because we’d be doing about 200 gigs a year, the Fairports, we all got paid from the Witchseason office. We all got the same [but] when Fotheringay got put together, they seemed to us to do nothing at all. I think they only did about six gigs, but we knew they were getting paid the same as we were getting. And they’d got a better PA system than us. There was a bit of rivalry, mainly because of Trevor. Trevor always had these huge, grandiose plans but he usually pulled them off, or he’d get somebody to fund it, and we’d be like, “Bloody Trevor, seen what they’ve got!” They’re driving around in chauffeur-driven cars and we’re stuck in the back of a transit. It was a very smooth, slick production … whereas Fairports it was like, “We’ll do the vocal when we get back from the pub.”
Slightly embroidered as Pegg’s recollections may be, it is true that between April 23 – when Fotheringay, Fairport Convention and Matthew’s Southern Comfort shared a unique bill at the Roundhouse – and October 2, when Fotheringay headlined, over Elton John, at the Royal Albert Hall, Fairport toured America twice, as well as playing their own mini-tour of the UK, to promote their first post-Sandy offering, the superb Full House. Fotheringay, on the other hand, played nothing more than the occasional European festival date.
Sandy’s distaste for the road, and craving for companionship, instead resulted in a happy summer spent in a farmhouse in Wittering, near Chichester, on the Sussex coast. Chaffinches Farm, which journalist Michael Watts described as “a neat brick building with a grove of shrubs and trees on its right,” seemed like a quite deliberate recreation on Sandy’s behalf, part Farley Chamberlayne, part summers in North Wales with her cousins. Replicating the Farley methodology, time passed slowly, as Fotheringay reinvented itself in Liege & Lief mode. Even if Donahue recollects that “we didn’t get a lot of work done,” he felt that the time at Chaffinches Farm allowed him to find “a way inbetween” the band’s country influences and “the Celtic goings-on.”
Pat Donaldson: We spent a long time playing through most of the songs. It was a good band from that point of view. We were always arranging songs – it was a pleasant thing to do because everybody was in the same frame of mind, nobody wanted to be the ‘superstar’ of the group. [CD]
Fotheringay could be an insular outfit. When Shirley Collins and Ashley Hutchings came to visit one day, they found the quintet off-hand, wrapped up in their own world. Still, their occasional forays into the real world, to play the Holland Pop Festival, the National Jazz & Blues Festival or the Yorkshire Folk, Blues and Jazz Festival, reminded fans of the band’s strengths and, whatever the economic wisdom of this hiatus, the months of splendid isolation turned Fotheringay from a gauche outfit, unsure of their place in Pop, into the sort of solid, dependable musical backbone needed by England’s finest female singer.
On September 19, 1970, the day after Jimi Hendrix choked to death on his own bilious vomit, Sandy even found her paramount position being recognised in the most prestigious of the various annual readers’ polls run by the English music weeklies. Unexpectedly voted the Top Female Singer in the Melody Maker poll, Sandy then found her name attached to a leader in that tabloid favourite The Sun, which announced that ‘Unknown’ Sandy is our top of the pops’. It may have seemed newsworthy that a singer like Sandy could supplant the likes of Lulu, Cilla Black and Sandie Shaw, let alone Dusty Springfield, but it also proved that the increasingly album-oriented readers of the music weeklies shared almost no common ground with single-buying teenyboppers or TV-guided parents.
Though the gap in musical tastes had been growing for some time, to put the result in context, the previous year’s winner of the MM poll had been Chicken Shack’s Christine Perfect and, sandwiched between Lulu and Cilla Black, at six, had been one Sandy Denny. And it wasn’t like Sandy had actually won the International Section for Top Female Singer, which had been won, for the second year running, by the raw-nerved Janis Joplin. Though Sandy would surely have voted for Dusty Springfield, whose early 45 ‘Silver Threads & Golden Needles’ occupied a prime position in the Fotheringay live set, she equally aspired to emulate Janis, at least vocally, something she had admitted to herself in that surprisingly confessional excerpt from her 1969 diary where she “had decided to experiment with [a mixture of gin and Southern Comfort] to see if I, too, could produce the shattered effects which Janis Joplin seems to acquire as a result of drinking it.” The posed photos of Sandy taken at Fotheringay’s inception, by Linda Fitzgerald-Moore, also seemed to suggest a persona quite consciously modelled on Janis’s.
That the silver-tongued Sandy sought to replicate “the shattered effects” of Janis Joplin’s vocals seems to beggar belief but, in keeping with many aspects of herself, Sandy didn’t want what she had – this 100% pure vocal tone – she wanted the stripped-raw rasp of a boozy blues singer. What Sandy could not have known at the time was just how alike the two of them were. Nor can she have imagined, the day she attended the MM shindig to collect her award, and be photographed with her male equivalent, Led Zep’s Robert Plant, that Janis was just a couple of weeks away from the sordid finale of a life spent looking for love in all the wrong places.
David Sandison: The parallels between her and Janis are quite interesting. Janis was absolutely convinced she looked like a dog but she could be luminously beautiful. She’d get on stage and grow six inches. She was incredibly self-demeaning, she just thought she was worthless. Sandy … was just desperate to please her parents all the time. She always thought she was less than she was. I just found parallels with Janis, having known them both. This business of drinking the same cocktails as she’d read Janis had; the immersion in the rock thing – making friends with [Pete] Townshend and Don Henley and Zappa – she wanted to be a rock singer, and Trevor was never going to let her do that ‘cause Trevor didn’t know that world.
Three weeks after Janis was found dead in a New York hotel room, having chased one dragon too many, Sandy was being asked about her own influences in Melody Maker. Leavened with her usual self-deprecating wit, Sandy gave a surprisingly forthright insight into how she saw herself, “My influences? Alcohol – no, not really[sic]. I tried to model myself on Twiggy but that didn’t work. I’m basically a coward and people are very important to me. I really like to be with people and if I find myself alone in the flat, I won’t stay there, I’ll go out and visit someone.”
On her return to L
ondon, after a summer on the coast, Sandy immediately threw herself back onto the circuit of afterhours Soho clubs then catering to West End party animals. The Speakeasy, where Mario the maitre d’ could be relied on to keep her stash of brandy at the ready, the Mandrake, the Buxton, the Colony, and the Scotch had now definitively supplanted the Cousins (now closed) and the Horseshoe Tavern as homes away from home.
Sandy, it seemed, was determined to reinvent herself as a hard-drinkin’ rock chick, all the while preparing to make her headlining debut at the Royal Albert Hall, fronting the gentle folk-rock of Fotheringay. Sandy on the brandy at The Colony, though, was destined to remain a quite different lady from her stage-trippin’ alter-ego.
Linda Thompson: We went to the Speakeasy together. She had these rock friends, like Pete Townshend and Frank Zappa. She had this life away from folk music, which I didn’t. She was earning reasonable money, and she was incredibly generous. “I can’t go to the Speakeasy, the drinks are seven shillings.” “Don’t worry about that. I’ll pay.” She also used to go to Muriel’s place, The Colony in Soho, a between hours and afterhours drinking place. Lucien Freud, Jeffrey Bernard, Peter O’Toole, all these people. I went once, and it wasn’t my cup of tea. It was for serious drinkers. Sandy could drink people under the table, but I didn’t last at The Colony … She used to hang out with [the likes of] Keith Moon, serious wild people. She was years ahead of her time. She wasn’t an apologist for feminism. She just was it. She didn’t make any diffentiation between her and the boys. And she didn’t put up with any shit.
Part Two
THE SOLO YEARS
8
1970–71: FAREWELL FOTHERINGAY
Outtake from the North Star cover photo sessions.
“We’d reached a peak in our careers at that time. Joe Boyd decided that Sandy should break into a solo career, so he aborted the second [Fotheringay] album when we were about halfway through recording it. No-one really agreed with him that it was the right time for it, including Sandy herself. She was in tears when she told us. She’d never been happier. The way things were going, the second album was likely to do even better than the first. It was all so sudden and there were no warning signs … When you see what happened in retrospect, it greatly affected all our careers, and Sandy’s probably more than most. It didn’t enhance her career as Joe had said that it would.” [CD]
Jerry Donahue
“You can have all the abstract conversations about finances you want, and [Sandy]’s not hearing it because she’s got another agenda. But a year later, the money’s running out and Roy Guest is explaining it to her, ‘When this next advance comes in, all it’s going to do is wipe out your debts.’ The whole issue of what was said to whom is a red herring.”
Joe Boyd
On October 2, 1970, Fotheringay resumed touring activities, with a show at London’s most cavernous emporium of sound, the Royal Albert Hall. Having departed from received wisdom by prefacing their autumn tour, not climaxing it, with their London date, the new songs they had in mind to debut were still in their embryonic state. Nor was the circular acoustics of the venue suited to Fotheringay’s type of amplified gentility. When Sandy attempted a heartfelt ‘Wild Mountain Thyme’, dedicated to her attendant father, it was all but lost to the rafters. Compounding these problems was the support act that night, Elton John, on the verge of great things and newly chartbound (with ‘Your Song’). Sandy’s band were ill-suited successors to Elton’s boisterous trio.
Jerry Donahue: That was a terrible miscast. It was our fault. He asked if [he] could do it. Actually Pat, Gerry and I had to talk Sandy and Trevor into [it]. Elton, Pat, Gerry, I, and Linda Peters were all enlisted by Joe Boyd to go in and do fourteen tunes in one day. We did all the backing tracks, and Linda and Elton stayed on to do vocals after that. We’d done these [publishing] demos and the way he was playing – he was a wonderful piano player – [we thought] he was sensitive enough. We knew very little about his stage-show. We thought he’d be a really good opener for us. But we had no idea what he had in mind, that he was going to do the most incredible rock & roll show ever. He pretty much blew us off the stage before we even got on the stage. [And] unfortunately it was not one of our best gigs. Both Sandy and Trevor were very, very nervous.
Inevitably, the reviews chose to contrast Fotheringay’s perceived failure of nerve with Elton’s new-found edge. Suddenly the tour on which the band was about to embark was overshadowed by a series of post-mortems in the media. A usually taciturn Pat Donaldson was prompted to snap back, “It [has been] made into such a big thing, that Albert Hall gig. That one gig [has been] made into like the end of the group.”
Whatever forces were at work to dissolve Sandy’s happy band of musical recluses had indeed taken the slightly shambolic nature of this single set as their cue. Trevor Lucas, happy enough coming offstage – “I felt that the group had actually played very well” – found that “a day later people started saying blah blah blah and I was a bit taken aback, because I didn’t really understand it.” It was Sandy, though, who bore the brunt of renewed pressures imposed by those determined to upset the band’s precious equilibrium.
Sandy Denny: We really get heavies laid on us. You wouldn’t believe the things that I went through after the Albert Hall concert. I kept getting approached by people who were telling me things about this member of the group and that member of the group, and like you’d do much better without him and him, and why don’t you do this or that … Listen, you could be a superstar! … I don’t even want it. In the end I said to people that I was just one member of a group, and if they wanted me without the group then they could piss off. [1970]
Nothing if not audacious, Fotheringay had elected to assign as much of the set to songs they had been working on over the summer as the now-familiar Fotheringay fare. Fronted by a notoriously unpredictable performer, and with anything upto three guitars to integrate into the mix, Fotheringay were bound to occasionally flounder. But by the time they closed out their autumn tour, at Oxford Town Hall, two months to the day after the Royal Albert Hall disaster, they had again achieved a remarkable makeover, the new songs and arrangements having successfully taken on lives of their own. Most notable were two new songs from Sandy’s pen that showed a new allusive quality she was now bringing to her lyrics.
The more personal, and therefore more lyrically oblique, of the pair was called ‘Late November’, seemingly a reference to the time when Sandy decided to leave Fairport, though its original point of reference was a dream “all about the tall brown people/ [and] the sacred young herd/ on the phosphorous sand.” This was the same dream in which she had seen herself hurtling along an icy road with Fairport roadie Harvey Bramham at the wheel. The prose version in her commonplace book, dated February 21, 1969, contained both ‘the tall brown people and the sacred herd’:
“Before long we stopped, although I don’t know why, beside a beach. I got out of the van and wandered along the water’s edge among a heard [sic] of cows. Also on the sea shore I found many strange objects (apart from the cows – I seemed to accept the presence of those). These things resembled parts of internal organs of some animal, but they were dry and salted, sort of preserved by the sea. I poked one of them to verify my first thoughts of what they were, and then stood up and asked one of the cows about these strange things. “They are all that is left of the human race as it was many years ago, and this is a place of sanctity,” said the cow in reply, but he seemed kind. I said “Oh” and went to walk away but that feeling of “somebody behind you” crept up my spine, and I turned suddenly. In front of me were two very tall people; I’d never seen the like of them before. They dwarfed me incredibly. There [sic] skins were light brown, their hair vaguely fuzzy like a negros, but not so tight, and it was brown. Grey eyes, wide open. There [sic] robes were brown. They were both male, and I thought they could have been brothers – they looked so similar. They seem surprised to see me but concealed it better than I did, for I felt myself trembling. “Wh
ere do you come from,” said one of these two. “Wimbledon!” I blurted out….”
Brought to the place “where they lived” – presumably the temple that, in ‘Late November’, was “filled with the strangest of creatures” – Sandy found herself being “walked up stairs, passing many similarly clad people, all with the same kind of features as my two escorts. Many paused on the stairway, and stared at me, but turned away as if they realised it was impolite to stare. I came to the conclusion that, to them, I was some kind of freak.” The dream, and its import, remained a mystery, even with it occupying eight pages of one of her notebooks. However, as Rolling Stone’s Steve Morse was informed a couple of years later:
“Several months after the dream [Sandy] was coming back from St. Andrew’s in Scotland when she stopped to walk her Airedale, Watson. They went out to a beach which she realized, walking along, was the same one as was in the dream. A jet pilot suddenly came out of nowhere and began swooping down to the water and climbing back up. She watched him idly for a while until she realised that it was not the dream and he was in some danger, flying so low. About the time that became clear, the pilot disappeared.”
The moment on the beach at St. Andrews evidently marked some kind of epiphany. The dream-like Sandy seems to be disregarding information about the fate of others, seemingly part of the song’s initial concerns, in order to come to terms with her own “ill-fated day” (surely a reference to the M1 accident). The vision of “the pilot [who] flew all across the sky and woke me” in the final verse brings back the previous vision, which in turn reminds her that she must move on, even if it must be at the expense of “the insane and wise.”
No More Sad Refrains: The Life and Times of Sandy Denny Page 15