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

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No More Sad Refrains: The Life and Times of Sandy Denny Page 23

by Clinton Heylin


  “Tears are falling in the darkness

  Hearts are bleeding in the silence

  From the widest ocean, who would miss this smallest tear

  Then, might always be a bad time

  Then, might always last forever

  But these stormy clouds, we might see them all disappear.

  Hope,

  Has she really gone?

  Will she ever come home again, my love?”

  Sandy did not shy away from the type of self-analysis alluded to in ‘Stranger To Himself’, ever willing to see faults in herself. Nevertheless, she proved a most unwilling patient when it came to taking any necessary cures. As she had observed as far back as January 1972, “People say that if you know your faults you’re halfway to getting better, but the other half is really difficult to get across … [and] how often do you sit down and think ‘I know I’ve got these faults and I’m really going to do something about them?’” It would take Sandy three years to take that first step. When she did, shortly after penning ‘What Is True’ and ‘Stranger To Himself’, the analysis, over two pages of her notebook, showed someone all too aware of what was true:

  “Dear Sandy,

  When did it all begin? This need to hide away.

  It seems you like to stay in one place fast, and yet be everywhere else at that moment. And when everywhere else is a reality, all you can think of is home.

  Where is home to you? When you’re there you want to go, when you arrive you want to go back, when you get back, your memories are rosy of the places you seemingly hated whilst you were there.

  When you are with the one who loves you, you want to get away somewhere, yet no-one else is quite the same when you do, so you run hell for leather home to him, and swear to yourself you’ll never leave again.

  At rehearsals.

  I wish I was a real musician. I wish I could just sit and play anything going. Consequently rehearsals get me down but for millions of reasons not just that. It’s the pianos I get. I must get a Fender Rhodes. But mostly I’m lazy. I know I am.”

  Over the page Sandy then asks herself a series of questions at the heart of her predicament, for which she has answers to just three, two of them musical, the other a perennial gripe:

  “Am I happy in the country?

  Do I enjoy my job?

  Is there anything I haven’t done which is bugging me?

  Am I musically up to my own standards? NO!

  Am I in love with my husband?

  Is the business side of it all getting me down?

  Am I writing well?

  Am I writing enough?

  If anything what do I need to inspire me?

  Do I rely too much on other people?

  Am I a great singer?

  Am I talented? Yes.

  Do I need to lose weight?!? Yes.”

  Finally, in a flourish of enthusiasm, Sandy tells herself, “And guess who is going to solve all these problems. ME! ain’t I great? Yes!!!!!” By now, though, she was not even sure how to begin changing the way she was bound to go.

  12

  1975: FAREWELL FAIRPORT

  Turquoise Medusa heads sketch, by Sandy Denny.

  “If you’d taken the music away from [the 1974] Fairports, all you would have been left with was one very fucked-up band. Personalities, management, business, finance, record company, [the lot.]”

  Dave Mattacks

  Mattacks’ motives for abandoning the Fairporters to their fate at the end of 1974 did not entirely stem from distaste for their current producer. The financial precipice on which the band had been pivoting had begun to come away, and the problems were so longstanding that there seemed little prospect of a solution. Sandy admitted that they were still “paying off debts that had been incurred by ridiculous management we’d had,” a thinly veiled dig at everyone from Witchseason up to the present.

  With nary a sober business head among them, Fairport had always operated at a disadvan-tage in this department. To apply Swarb’s colour-ful turn of phrase, “It’s hard to keep tabs when you’re lying on the arse-end of the bar with a drink in your hand.” Inevitably, the fuck-ups reflected the state of “one very fucked-up band.” Swarb recalls on their Far East jaunt, back at the beginning of 1974, that “somebody botched up the travel arrangements and sent all the equipment to Tokyo excess baggage, a three and a half ton PA – fifteen thousand quid.” The solution was simple yet radical – do what even the innovative Witchseason era line-ups had failed to do: sell records.

  The main stumbling block, band politics aside, was that, as Dave Pegg recalls, “there was such a backlog of outstanding things that had gone wrong that nobody who came in and tried to sort things out [could] … [and] it was getting to a dodgy state in the music business, where people realised that we were never going to be big, and they were being very careful.” Nevertheless, the band had been alloted another bite of the corporate cherry, just as soon as they had enough songs to finish the album they’d started before Christmas.

  Dave Pegg: It was [to be] our seventh tour. It was make or break. We did do a record for Glyn and we had supposedly got the record company their support. And they did spend a lot of money on it … It was like a good final attempt … We had a pretty good crack at it. It was the hardest we ever worked. Everybody got stuck in 100%. [PH]

  Work began almost immediately, on their return from a bizarre, drummerless stint in the Low Countries. Auditioning a drummer did not come easily to these veterans of the stay loose School of Musicology. Not that Sandy was helping matters. Her distaste for rehearsals, voiced in her notebook a couple of weeks earlier, was as nothing to her distaste for auditions. Never known to suffer fools gladly, and intolerant of the slightest discordancy, the auditions became as much about how the drummers dealt with Sandy as how well they sat on the beat.

  Dave Pegg: We [must have] auditioned about thirty drummers in London, which was one of the worst weeks of my life. Some of them were good, but the group was so untogether … It was mainly Sandy who was at fault … She was getting difficult to work with at the time … Nobody had any sympathy for Trevor. It must have been very difficult for him.

  Finally, Glyn Johns suggested they use a session drummer with a suitable pedigree, and that they make this work as the sessions were imminent. Bruce Rowland had, in fact, all but retired from gigging. Turning up with a pair of drumsticks and a clear conscience, he was quite unprepared for the amount of psychological baggage that accompanied each and every card-carrying member of this ramshackle collective still passing for a band.

  Bruce Rowland: I wasn’t aware of who was in the band, and what they were doing. The first thing I did was I went to a rehearsal at Island studios, just to get the feel of what was happening. Glyn set it up, and then didn’t show up. I walked into an atmosphere you could cut with a knife. Peggy is trying to keep everybody’s spirits up, and putting his foot in it, time after time. I couldn’t figure out why. They had been to some record company thing and had stayed overnight at the Cunard Hotel. Sandy and Trevor had [by this point] what you might call an open relationship, and Sandy’s paramour was [their road manager] – with Trevor’s approval, all very civilized. There’s a burglary in the hotel, and the hotel is crawling with police at four in the morning. Trevor was out on the town, Roger was in with Sandy, and the police knocked on the door and said, “Mr Lucas.” “No.” … Trevor came back at five in the morning, and walked into all this, and for some reason, as he did from time to time, took umbrage. So they’d had a terrible row. That’s what I walked into, waiting for Sandy and Trevor to show up, which eventually they did, Sandy all in tears, and Trevor like, “G’day, sport. Nice to meet you. Shall we do something.”

  The fact that he was seemingly unfazed by these shennanigans probably counted as much in Bruce’s favour as his dependable, on-the-beat drumming, and he was officially in, for the forthcoming sessions at least (after which, they planned to work on him some more). If Sandy in the studio could be as temperamental as any
Mediterranean diva, Rowland was relieved to find that Glyn Johns’ working methods kept the in extremis side of Sandy largely in check.

  Bruce Rowland: Sandy was fine [in the studio] ‘cause she wasn’t doing live vocals. I could see she was a prima donna, but through the rehearsal and first day of recording she got me in the frame of mind where I would have forgiven her anything – some of those long notes! … [Johns] could be incredibly spiteful, but he got performances out of Sandy that beggared belief. He really knew how to do it, [and] he always worked at Olympic.

  The need for songs, though, had become pressing, as Johns continued to keep the band firmly focused on original material. His request for overnight songs had yielded the lamentable ‘Let It Go’ and the risible ‘Night-time Girl’, but nothing to match the intensity of ‘What Is True?’ or the sheer dynamics of ‘Stranger To Himself’. Turning to her discards, Sandy revived the 1972 outtake ‘After Halloween’, to give Johns a sporting chance of sequencing a strong album.

  Bruce Rowland, who was allowed to attend the final mix sessions, felt that Johns had done an impressive job. The seven Denny vocal tracks even suggested that this might be some kind of grand return, including as they did the likes of ‘One More Chance’ and ‘Stranger To Himself’, songs as strong as anything on Liege & Lief, though uniquely Sandy in conception. The remaining four songs, though, defined filler as, yet again, the politics of Fairport was allowed to triumph over the common good, even as band members sought to suggest a unity of purpose.

  Trevor Lucas: The group is moving towards Sandy all the time, and she toward us. You don’t just take two acts who have been writing and performing separately and put them together without any problems … Our music alters, changes as we go along, that’s the way Fairport grows, we always change a little with every change of personnel, and we always have a few problems of transition … [But] we’re getting farther away from more traditional music … We’re getting more into soft rock. In a way, the Fotheringay side of the line up is coming out stronger. [1975]

  In fact, the band was wrenching itself apart, torn by the same divisions that had prompted Sandy’s departure back in 1969. The week after the tenth Fairport album hit the shops, Sandy was informing those planning to come to a show on their forthcoming tour that they might be “very disappointed when they come along and find that, although the musicianship is better than ever, we’re not going to do the same kind of stuff, the old songs they’ve been expecting us to do … We did ‘Matty Groves’ until quite recently. [But] I got so sick of the actual story. I know it’s a marvellous one, but I know what happens at the end – everybody knows what happens at the end – [Yet] they still want to hear it.”

  Certainly, what traditional elements remained in the two-hour plus set at the Royal Albert Hall on June 10, 1975, the day of Rising For The Moon’s release, were conducted without Sandy’s participation, save for an abbreviated version of ‘Tam Lin’. She reserved her own dulcet tones for her three strongest offerings on the new album, four familiar faves – ‘Quiet Joys of Brotherhood’, ‘It’ll Take A Long Time’, ‘John the Gun’ and ‘Who Knows Where The Time Goes’ – and three one-off performances: one from Fairport’s past, a spirited ‘Mr Lacey’; one from Sandy’s past, a faithful ‘Listen, Listen’; and from the immediate present, a brand new song dedicated to her father, and introduced as ‘I Won’t Be Singing Any More Sad Refrains’. After a ripple of laughter from her disbelieving fans, she asks, “Can you believe that?” before sitting at the piano and inducing a suitably mesmeric state. The crowd response suggested they were with her, even if what she had written was another song “right back in … my own style.”

  The response to the new album in the press, though, was less laudatory. Colin Irwin’s review, in Melody Maker, set the tone:

  “Occasionally, just occasionally, listening to this album, I’m tempted to search for extravagant words like ‘brilliant’ and ‘masterpiece’. There are also times when ‘jaded’ and ‘unimaginative’ spring more readily to mind, and in between it’s just okay: pleasant, cosy and predictable. It certainly falls short of the promise of A Major Work muttered from the Fairport camp … [Sandy’s] presence has injected the band with some of their old spirit, but it’s too Denny-oriented for it’s own good and it would be easy to mistake the whole thing as a record of Sandy Denny with backing musicians.”

  Irwin found himself in the rare position of learning exactly what Ms. Denny thought of perceptions like this album was “too Denny-oriented for its own good,” the day his review was published.

  Colin Irwin: Rising For The Moon … was very much her baby, and I think she had high hopes for that album – kinda her renaissance, and the band’s renaissance, supposedly – and I had this interview arranged with her through Island … and [MM] got me to review the album that week, and I actually didn’t like it. It was a huge disappointment. So I slagged it off. Anyway, I turn up for this interview [with Sandy], and the paper’d come out that day and she’d arrived at Island and while she was waiting for me to come she read my review and threw a wobbler, just stormed out. I went in, saw Lon [Goddard] and he said, “Er, you just missed her” … She did [later] explain [to me] that it had been an album that was important to her, personally, and a lot of the songs were quite personal to her.

  By the time Karl Dallas got to offer his thrupennyworth, in August’s Let It Rock, he was obliged to note that “the buzzards have started collecting around this album, suggesting that its occasional weaknesses indicate a band past its peak and running out of steam,” whilst lamenting what he perceived to be Sandy not having “someone a bit tougher to fight against, artistically, as she did in the days of the old band.” Fatally compromised, Rising For The Moon dipped into the charts at midnight and was out by dawn. Half a good album at this stage was never going to be enough. Its lukewarm reception only served to further loosen the stitches.

  Dave Pegg: There were a lot of personality problems in the band then … When the three of them [Swarb, Trevor and Sandy] got going, they could get fairly wound up … There were times when it got very difficult and there was the occasional punch-up, and people went storming off, disappearing.

  It is impossible, at this distance, to discern how much the disappointment at Rising For The Moon‘s reception, and sales, ate into Sandy’s eroding artistic assurance but her uncharacteristic action at the Island office suggested it bit deep. The fact that Island had committed significant resources to one last assault on a mass audience failed to help much. Sandy perhaps sensed the futility of it all long before she called it a day, hoping against hope that “it might just have sparked off like it did in the old days, which it was quite capable of doing.” In fact, what happened is “most of the time we were so bloody worried about everything – and you lose a lot of enjoyment from that.”

  Her behaviour at the shows that came shortly before the album’s release, on another antipodean tour, suggests that she was becoming increasingly self-destructive, even if it hadn’t as yet destroyed her performing capabilities. Bruce Rowland recalls her being “pie-eyed for about three gigs on the trot, and it edged her performance. I thought it was riveting. There was an element of something unexpected in her demeanour.” Nor did either of the men with whom she was having relations seem to know how to keep her on an even keel.

  Bruce Rowland: [Sandy] was remarkable, a pathetic figure but with enormous balls at the same time. [With] everybody else, there was a lot of water under the bridge. Swarb used to lose his temper with her for being pissed and objectionable. All she was looking for was somebody to confront her. Nobody knew quite how to do it without at least two days of grief for everybody. When she was up, she was up, when she was down she was appalling. Trevor would just fire off one-liners at her. Trevor just wanted to have a good time … I think Sandy was a little bit overwhelmed by the [psychic] energy of the band. I was very much finding my way so I wasn’t gonna [push] it … It was for them to sort out [their relationships], but it [just] seemed to be [crea
ting] too many ripples.

  The few tapes from the months after the Albert Hall show bear out the sheer unpredictability of Sandy’s performances. One night in Chicago, on another support-slot September stint Stateside, her voice sounds shot, a boozy blur all but overtaken by laryngitis, and yet she forces herself through two sets, without regard for the long-term consequences. Archivist Ed Haber remembers another occasion when her determination to push herself through a New York show ended with her being rushed to hospital. Other nights, the voice could still torch up the night and puncture the stars, though only after her now nightly stage-fright threatened to envelop the entire backstage throng.

  Dave Pegg: She’d have dodgy nights when she was playing a gig, and she did sometimes get a little over-refreshed, [but] we were all very guilty [of that] in the Fairports. When Sandy eventually rejoined the band again, there were no people who went to bed straight away after the gig. It was like a boy’s club that she joined. Not that there was any problem with Sandy having any fun. She’d be the first person at the bar at the end of the night … She would play badly some nights and sometimes she’d wet herself, she would have hysterics ‘cause she’d played this really bad note, but the next night if it happened, we’d all have a snigger, and she’d throw a wobbler. You never really knew where you stood. One minute she was like a bundle of joy, the next minute she could be really depressed and really down.

  As Chris Pegg observes, “Trevor [continued to] act as a buffer zone between Sandy and the outside world … [Though] there were one or two screaming matches backstage before gigs, after which Trevor and Sandy would take to the stage wearing fixed smiles, they remained devoted to each other. But damage was being done – insidious, corrosive damage that would eventually prove disastrous.” No matter how much their wedding vows had become a two-way sham, Trevor – and only Trevor – could and would subject himself to the nightly ritual of coaxing an increasingly debilitated Sandy onstage.

 

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