Having applied “the pathos and the sadness” to her own predicament, she proceeded to dissect the “methods of madness” that lead men to war, in her other major work of the summer, a song that dealt head-on with mankind’s wilful rush to destruction – ‘John the Gun’. Whether or not Sandy was directly inspired to write her own anti-war song by hearing Fairport’s epic workout, ‘Sloth’, ‘John the Gun’ remains the darker work, a lyrical evocation of the AntiChrist in the guise of the title character, a figure driven mad by the thunder of guns until he pours scorn on those whose “ideals of peace are gold/which fools have found upon the plains of war – I shall destroy them all.” The song had been debuted back in August, when Sandy and the boys recorded a session for Dutch radio, and it was evidently one of that small band of songs that made her proud. In an October press interview, she called it her personal favourite, and insisted it would definitely be going on the next album.
‘John the Gun’ was also one of five songs Fotheringay chose to preview to their listening fans on two BBC radio sessions, recorded on November 12 and 15, less than a week before sessions were due to begin on ‘that difficult second album’. It had been barely seven months since the sessions for Fotheringay, but Sandy seemed unduly anxious to make another vinyl statement, insisting that, “the next album can’t fail to be better than the first … [which] … was the preliminary effort of the group.” Not that she had a surfeit of songs to bring to the sessions. Despite the undoubted quality of ‘Late November’ and ‘John the Gun’, it would appear that Fotheringay, one album late, were now set on making a more natural successor to Liege & Lief. The other four songs debuted on the Beeb comprised two Scottish ballads (‘Gypsy Davey’ and ‘Eppy Moray’), a highland lovesong (‘Wild Mountain Thyme’), and an Australian ‘bush ballad’ (‘Bold Jack Donahue’).
The egalitarian model, tenuously maintained on the debut platter, was all but abandoned on these sessions, with Trevor’s resonant tenor confined to ‘Bold Jack Donahue’ and the opening section of ‘Eppy Moray’. Otherwise, it was to be all Sandy’s singing. The choice of which songs they planned to record also seems to have been largely hers. Aside from the two self-penned compositions, there was ‘Two Weeks Last Summer’, a Dave Cousins song she had last recorded with the Strawbs back in 1967. Also rehearsed with Fotheringay, and probably pencilled in for the second album, was a powerful arrangement of the English ballad, ‘Bruton Town’, long a personal favourite. Along with a beguiling ‘Wild Mountain Thyme’ and a broody ‘Gypsy Davey’, Fotheringay had the makings of a very strong album, albeit not the largely original work that might have been expected from its predecessor. Sandy, it seemed, again preferred reworking traditional fare to the more painful self-examination that songwriting required of her.
As it is, the situation may have been largely forced on Sandy. Quite simply, the financial footing on which Fotheringay had been conceived now required a major injection of cash if it was to retain any grip on reality. Money they could ill-afford had been squandered on a PA system designed by Trevor, which because of its scale had been christened Stonehenge. Unfortunately, as Gerry Conway recalls, “you had to stand next to it to hear anything, it didn’t really work, and the size didn’t make any difference. We had this thing built, it cost a lot of money, and … it was all on a grand scale. [Then] WEM [had] to store it, because it was so big.”
Two months of gigging had only returned Fotheringay to break-even point, and the only other obvious way of generating a significant input of cash was to get the A&M advance on the second album of Sandy’s recently-negotiated contract. Island money was seemingly already spoken for, and with Boyd’s management/production company on the verge of being sold to Island, the Witchseason weekly retainer system was also about to go by the board.
Joe Boyd: A lot of the issues to do with Fotheringay were financial. Technically, according to the contracts, the deal was always cross-collateralized. If I’d gone crazy and spent $100,000 making a John and Beverly record, which had been unrecouped and Fairport had had a big success, theoretically Island would have been in a position to recoup the money that I’d spent on the [former] from the income that was coming in from the [latter]. In practice, [Blackwell]’d give me whatever I needed to pay the artists what they were entitled to individually, so that the crunch never came. But there was never really that much of a credit for anyone … When Witchseason was [being] sold to Island, there was a big toting up and there was a position arrived at for every individual signed to Witchseason, and the idea was that everyone would do a new deal with Island directly, and their account balance would be transferred … The only reason [Fotheringay] had any financial solidity as an entity was the advance that was due on delivery of the second record from A&M, which wasn’t as much as $40,000. So they weren’t even gonna have as much as they’d had the first time [around].
If the atmosphere at the sessions for the first album had been a little strained, it was as nothing to the vibe that permeated the sessions in November and December. Boyd had agreed to produce the album, despite being, in his own words, “under tremendous pressure to get all these projects finalised before I left for California. Sound Techniques studio was block-booked, I was there every day, working with Fairport, Nick Drake, Mike Heron and Chris McGregor.” Juggling Fotheringay sessions in the sliver of time he’d allotted himself before taking up a job at Warner Brothers, he seemed quite unwilling to give’s ban the benefit of the doubt.
Joe Boyd: I probably shouldn’t have been producing the [second] record. My lack of respect for the group was clear, and couldn’t have helped the atmosphere. We’d put out a record that had sold disappointingly, A&M was unhappy. Sandy’s tracks on the first record are among the best things she ever did – the rest of it, who cares? And the artwork, Trevor’s sister, was terrible. It would have been one thing if I’d been unhappy with it and it sold, and the group was working all the time, making money, but that wasn’t the case … I knew what Sandy was capable of, and it was very upsetting to me.
Boyd has given a number of accounts over the years as to his role in the break-up of Fotheringay, and it is to his credit that even now he is prepared to expose his version of events to a sceptical biographer. However, this version is not borne out by the memories of the other participants, nor by something as historically irrefutable as the studio log-sheets. According to Boyd, the culmination of his personal despair at the way the album sessions were going “came on the 42nd take of a basic track for a tune, where I ended up standing in the middle of the studio with a baton, trying to keep the rhythm section in time.” He thinks the song in question was ‘John the Gun’. The track sheets for the sessions that still reside in the Universal/Island vaults find no evidence to support Boyd’s recollection. According to the files, ‘John the Gun’ was recorded in three takes. The other original Sandy title seems to have been cut in a single take, something Gerry Conway distinctly recollects.
Gerry Conway: The first thing we went in and did was ‘Late November’ … it was either a first or second take – that was it! – so we started on an up. Everybody was a lot more confident. That very first session went very well, and we all felt that we’d improved. I don’t think the band had any idea about what was going on behind [the scenes].
Assuming that this is the ‘New Title 1’ listed on a Sound Techniques reel, dated December 18,* ‘Late November’ was indeed cut in a single take. Sandy alluded to the same sensation as Conway in a later interview, “[we] put one track down, and … we did it in two takes (sic). It was a song we’d been playing for about a week, and it was really great. I suddenly remember getting up from the piano and thinking ‘Wow, that was really great,’ and when we listened back to it, it was. Then we broke up about a week later.”
Jerry Donahue also remembers feeling “that the second album was going better than the first. It was gonna sound much more unified, probably would have been a much more interesting album. [We were] loving the direction, and we were all playing much tight
er as a unit.” On the evidence of the tape logs, Fotheringay worked through at least six songs, two thirds of an album, in just three days’ worth of sessions. Hardly tardy. And yet, Joe Boyd, in correspondence with the Hokey Pokey fanzine in 1989, insisted he was not alone in his despair at the way things were going.
Joe Boyd: With Fotheringay it was very frustrating, we were getting nowhere fast and nobody was very happy with what was being recorded … Sandy, Trevor, and I think Pat Donaldson and I, ended up having a meal in the pub opposite Sound Techniques the week before Christmas … We hadn’t finished our target for that day’s recording. We sat there eating our lamb chops, chips and peas. Sandy was very upset. She was despairing of what they were going to do. The record wasn’t going well, it was taking longer so it was costing more, and the group was running out of money. Sandy was saying, “What do you think I should do?” I replied that she should do what I said in the first place: disband the group and be a solo artiste. Sandy said, “If I [was to do] that would you stay in Britain?” This is the most contentious microsecond of the whole story. I recall that I said I’d already sold the company, and been appointed director of music services at Warner Brothers, [but] if there was anything that could make me want to undo those steps, it was what she’d just said. The next morning I got a call from Roy Guest, Sandy’s manager, asking me to a meeting with Sandy. When I arrived, she said, “I did it. I’ve broken up the group.” I said I thought that was good and that I would try and arrange to come back and produce her record if she wanted me to. We could do part of the record in London and part in Los Angeles. Sandy said, “You mean you’re not going to stay?” I said I would love to record an album with her, but I couldn’t unsell Witchseason.
Again the evidence is against Boyd. The December 18 session yielded finished takes of two new titles, one in a single take, the other in nine. Possibly there was a bad day in the studio, where nothing had got done (a December 29 session is listed in the Island records, though no tape has been located). Jerry Donahue thinks not: “We’d been to a Christmas party only a few nights before Sandy broke the news to us, and she’d been really enjoying herself and saying how well things were going.”
Not surprisingly, the Boyd version that seems to fit the facts closest comes from an interview given before the long-term consequences of the decision on Sandy’s well-being had become apparent. Back in March 1973, he admitted in Rolling Stone that he “did pressure [Sandy] into that breakup, and then I left her with the results of that breakup … We had long, emotional meetings; I told Sandy she should break up the group … During one of the meetings I said if she would break up the group I would think about staying in London to produce her. The next day I told her I couldn’t; that I had to go to L.A., and she shouldn’t base her decision on me. The amount of time spent under that rash commitment of mine was about twelve hours.”
Certainly the other members of Fotheringay are of the opinion that Boyd had committed himself to Sandy’s future. As Donahue recalls it, “Sandy [told] us that Joe Boyd had been offered a big job with Warners, and that he’d turn it down if she’d go solo … she finally thought that if he had that much faith in her, then she ought to go along with his plans.” Conway thinks that Boyd was there in the studio when Sandy announced the breaking up of the band.
Gerry Conway: It was another day in the studio – everyone was there except Sandy and Joe, and then Sandy turned up with Joe and they announced, That was it! … She was very upset. After the announcement was made, it was [a question] as to whether we would carry on as a band without Sandy. I know that my reply was fairly instant.
However much Sandy may have misconstrued Boyd’s offer, what she saw as his desertion – when he took the job at Warners – shook her to the core. Donahue remembers a Sandy who “was very bitter … afterwards.” Even four years after the fact, when interviewed about the break-up, her bitterness could still break through, “The management … just didn’t want to know about us really, and they made life totally unbearable, and in the end we just broke up. [I] couldn’t take it anymore.” She would continue to resent the idea of fronting her own band all the time it took for her to rejoin a hybrid Fotheringay/ Fairport in 1974.
Though Trevor’s role in the decision process seems to have been minimal to non-existent, Boyd prefers to believe that the break-up of Fotheringay was a combination of financial realities imploding and “this … conflict and torment [on the part] of Sandy, [who] on the one hand was this emotional, needy female who had this normal desire to make a go of her relationship; but the other side of the coin was a fantastically intelligent, tasteful, brilliant musician who knew perfectly well how mediocre a musician Trevor was, who knew that what I was saying to her was right … She saw, in my departure, that she was gonna be alone with these doubts and these fears, and as she was facing the reality that I was leaving … she panicked … [and] leapt on an opportunity to get herself out of this mess.” Trevor refrained from commenting on the fateful decision at the time but some years later, when Steeleye Span’s Maddy Prior was on the verge of going solo, he advised her, “Stay in front of the band. Don’t start getting into all that thing of it being shared. Just get stuck out front and be done with it.”
On January 30, 1971, Fotheringay officially said farewell at the Queen Elizabeth Hall in London. The show – which included three brand new originals, as well as ‘Eppy Moray’, ‘Gypsy Davey’, ‘Bold Jack Donahue’, five Fotheringay favourites, guest appearances by Long John Baldry, Martin Carthy and Ashley Hutchings, and even a version of ‘Let It Be’ sung by Sandy at the piano – was certainly a fitting epilogue.
The same afternoon, a Radio One special related the story of Fotheringay and rebroadcast a number of the songs performed at the November BBC sessions, songs from an album that was no more. It was a very emotional farewell and though Sandy would work with each and every musician in the band on a regular basis, the unique chemistry that could in the fullness of time have made financial imperatives moot was suffocated, if not at birth, then before it could put on its walking shoes. It would take Sandy a long time to fully come to terms with the significance of her decision. Though she told one journalist she envisaged making a record “and see[ing] how that goes for a couple of months,” she later summed up how she really felt, to the trusted Karl Dallas, “I was very dead in a lot of ways. I felt almost defeated in a strange sort of way.”
That feeling of defeat would last some time. Sandy’s first solo album contains a number of lyrical chronicles from a vanquished soul. ‘Wretched Wilbur’ seems to have been composed in the weeks after the decision to break up Fotheringay. It was certainly debuted at their final show, and the lyrics suggest another example of Sandy writing about a traumatic personal event – this time the break-up of Fotheringay – in code:
“Misers mise [sic] and compromise,
I know what I have seen,
The wanderers are in the east,
That’s where I should have been.
But I did not go there,
I couldn’t find the way,
I do believe I made a try,
But I couldn’t really say.”
In the battles that were to come, Sandy would look back on the hazy days of Fotheringay with a sense of regret that would not go away. She had lost another surrogate family, and been thrown back upon her own resources at a time when she felt particularly vunerable.
The seeming surety with which she was being feted as the ‘next big thing’ was only reinforced by her first post-Fotheringay studio activity. The biggest rock band in the world wanted Sandy to duet on a ballad they had composed for their fourth vinyl outing, destined to become one of the biggest-selling albums of all time. Jimmy Page and Robert Plant were both huge fans of Fairport Convention, Page even going on record, in an interview in Zigzag, as saying Liege & Lief was for him the best album of 1969. When the pair of them penned a typically Zeppelinesque surrogate stab at tradition, ‘The Ballad of Evermore’, they decided it lent itself to the call/
response mode of traditional expression, and requested Sandy lend her soaring tones to the experiment.
Sandy was now being pushed into coming up with more songs of her own, both by the powers-that-be and by her ever-persistent partner. The prospect of a solo album by a singer-songwriter in 1971 was generally perceived as some kind of artistic statement in the first person. The aborted Fotheringay album had offered slim pickings from her own pen. Trevor, in particular, knew Sandy well enough to know that songwriting did not come easy to her, and that given the choice between a night on the town and an evening spent in self-absorption at the piano, the fight would always be an uneven one. He also knew what she was capable of, and was not prepared to settle for second best. Unfortunately, his not-so-gentle proddings caused their own resentments on Sandy’s part which, after a glass or two, could bubble to the surface.
Bambi Ballard: I remember going over to their house one time and Trevor was going somewhere, and I think I stayed the night. Trevor said to me, “She’s got to sit and write some songs tomorrow,” and he said it in front of her. In other words, she is not self-determining, she will use you as an excuse not to do it. You only do that if you have absolutely no sensitivity … He might as well have said, “She’s got to do the washing-up before she goes to bed.” … And Sandy was terribly upset. And she said, “I get five thousand pounds a year retainer for writing these songs, and I’m keeping him. That’s the money that pays the bills, ‘cause that’s the one that comes in not because we’re doing a gig or because we’re doing an album, that’s the hardcore of our bank account.” She was the breadwinner, and was very, very conscious of it and the minute she got drunk and starting talking about Trevor, that’s what she’d talk about.
No More Sad Refrains: The Life and Times of Sandy Denny Page 16