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

by Clinton Heylin

  Philippa Clare: Trevor looked after her very well, but he would stray. But then Sandy wasn’t exactly a saint either. And they both thought the other didn’t know! … She certainly had her own excursions … [At the time of] Rendezvous, she was having a scene with Pat Donaldson. She really fell in love with Pat. I gave ‘em safe house here. [But] I think [Trevor] knew. It didn’t go on that long, but it was very intense. Pat had [already] split up from his wife.

  The notebooks suggest that Sandy’s affairs failed to bring her any peace. If the void inside was too great for Trevor alone to fill, then long-distance liasons were hardly likely to provide the necessary gerrymandering. And yet, references abound in the notebooks of someone in the U.S. who Sandy is longing to see again:

  “I’m going to call that number

  Though I don’t really mean to wake you from your slumber

  While England is asleep.

  The hotel is just like yesterday’s

  The city has no name

  It stands there in a grey haze

  My room is just the same

  I wonder how you’re keeping …

  I feel so tired and lonely

  I’m thinking of you, lover

  I wish you could console me

  But maybe when it’s over.”

  These lines were presumably directed at the same man who “stir[red] up the butterflies [that] night in New York.” In the final couplet of that previous lyric, there had even been a suggestion that Sandy’s marriage had become a form of method-acting, that the “pain in my heart/ puts a strain on the part I’ve been playing so well for so long.” Her marriage was not the only charade being played out at this point. So was the pretence that she had a handle on her career. When she penned one of those bitter invectives at [the] one who had ended it, it became as much a rant at her own expense for the way she allowed life to treat her:

  “I never thought about it much

  But still I counted on you

  And when you never got in touch

  And never left a clue

  I tried to find you, all in vain

  I should have realised

  You were out for what you’d gain

  Knowing I would not complain

  Leaving me the bare remains

  As consolation’s prize.”

  The charade itself became the subject of one of those lost lyrics that now filled her notebooks, but failed to fill out into song. At this point any sense of defeat at the prospect of another day could still be held at bay by the hope that “he’ll come tonight.” The question was, what might happen when that hope also faded to black?:

  “Another morning

  Another dreary day

  Put [on] a face, it’s not really there

  I wonder if he’ll come tonight

  I wonder what he’ll say

  I’ll make believe that I don’t really care.

  She had invited many in order to disguise

  That she only wanted him to come

  Hoping that the crowd would hide her beating heart.”

  The prospect of sessions back at Island, which held out the promise of better days, couldn’t come quickly enough for Sandy. The first set of sessions for Sandy’s fourth solo album were scheduled for the last week of April 1976, barely four months after she had quit Fairport. However much the struggle for content had brought out the old demons, the winter days had produced more than enough for an album of all original songs. As she later told a journalist, “I was writing all the time at home and [for the first time] I had virtually everything ready, including all the words, when I went into the studio.”

  And yet, Sandy was again reluctant to allow her own songs to become part of a single entity, determined to dispell the unity of mood that carried across all her home demos. On the first day of sessions, the freshly-penned ‘One Way Donkey Ride’ was paired with a Flying Burritos Brothers cover, ‘Losing Game’. Also recorded that first week was Sandy’s only ever cover of a Richard & Linda song, ‘For Shame of Doing Wrong’, as well as six of the eight songs she had previously demoed.

  In the case of ‘I’m A Dreamer’, it was cut in a single take, which John Wood believes is, “why she sings it so well. She was very much put on the spot to do it, she just had to sit down at the piano.” Lovely as the new vocal was, though, the slightly idealised self-portrait of this “schemer with an eye for a show” was again submerged ‘neath the strength of Harry Robinson’s ubiquitous strings, forsaking all the texture and tone so effortlessly captured on that simple home demo. Jerry Donahue still remembers her guide version, “’cause it was so much better than the one she chose. It seemed like she wouldn’t state the melody enough first, she would start to overdecorate immediately, whereas on the original version it was a lot simpler, you could really hear the full melody.”

  ‘I’m A Dreamer’ was one of three songs cut at one remarkable session, on April 25, 1976. Donahue cites, “‘I’m A Dreamer’, ‘Full Moon’ and ‘No More Sad Refrains’, those three [as being] done the same day, with the full orchestra in there, with us playing at the same time.” John Wood believes it was his idea for Sandy to sing and play live in front of a full orchestra. As he told Pam Winters, “When I started making records, that’s how people used to do it. I just thought it might be worth trying it. It creates a bit of tension. I think we did three tracks like that, and it worked very well.” Though the voice had finally lost its virginal purity, most of the control and power remained intact, and augmented by a set of musicians that included Pat Donaldson, Timi Donald, ‘Rabbit’ Bundrick and Stevie Winwood, Sandy pulled out vocals that rode the strings effortlessly.

  By the end of the first week of sessions, Sandy had recorded enough material for an album. She had only one more song, the classically conceived ‘All Our Days’, in mind to record. This, too, she wished to record live, with an orchestra. A larger studio, though, would have to be found as she also planned to record a choral version on the same day. Finally, they settled on CBS Studios.

  Jerry Donahue: She … didn’t have the rock band at all. It was just her and the orchestra, and she did that live … I remember we were invited to come along and we watched her and I guess it was Harry Robinson, and he would have to nod to her when it was time for her to start singing again. I think they did it on like the second take. It was amazing, she was kinda nervous. She dressed up in a really nice dress for the occasion, [like], ‘This is the real thing now.’

  In Sandy’s mind, though, the album still needed work. Part of her doubts seemed to stem from Trevor’s vision of where she might be heading. Perhaps he knew the subject-matter of her own songs all too well, but he continued to imagine that he could effect her transformation into a mainstream act by not so much embellishing the songs as embalming them. Rather than being content with what he had, Trevor wanted to clock up more studio time, to see what more there was, and to apply some more fur-coats.

  John Wood: I think by the time she made Rendezvous, she was not necessarily doing what she wanted … I think Sandy drifted away from some of the more, if you like, rootsier and gutsier feelings that she’d started with both in Fotheringay and in the next couple of albums. With the increasing influence of Trevor … [she] started to get a little more pandering to the middle of the road … She’d lost some of her individualism … Although some of the tunes might have been good, there are a lot of songs that are a little sugary, saccharine … [they] have a sort of sentimentality which I really shouldn’t have associated with her, knowing her as a woman. [PW]

  Sessions resumed again at the beginning of June. Whatever went down between Trevor and Sandy in the five weeks between, there had been a key transformation. Sandy’s voice had lost another notch of tonality, but more signficantly she now became even more highly strung in the studio, and Trevor’s presence only served to make her worse. Wood found himself being forced to acquire some skills as a personal counsellor.

  John Wood: By the time [of the June sessions] she’d started having
these very black moods, and it was a long time before any material came together, and her mood swings were much greater…. She wouldn’t turn up, or she’d turn up very late … She was not in control of herself. Halfway through … she turned up at 2 o’ clock in the morning where I used to live in London, virtually battering the door down in a complete state of nervous exhaustion, having drunk too much, feeling unloved, unwanted. [JI]

  The first session at Basing Street in June started promisingly enough. Sandy not only wanted another stab at a studio arrangement of ‘By The Time It Gets Dark’ but had brought a new song with her, ‘Gold Dust’. Based loosely on her and Miranda’s journey across America in the spring of 1973, the song had a subtext that suggested the golden promise of Hollywood dreams could easily turn to dust, or perhaps rather white lines of powder. Her exposure to the Laurel Canyon circuit of singer-songwriters had certainly not managed to dissuade Sandy from establishing her own direct line to Charlie.

  If, as Miranda asserts, ‘Gold Dust’ “was the way her music was going,” it set its own price. As if almost too aware of the levy, Sandy also recorded Lowell George’s ‘Easy To Slip’ at these June sessions – “it’s so easy to slip/it’s so easy to fall …” Indeed. Sandy had been hanging out with Little Feat’s Lowell George, by this time a walking snowman, in the days before the resumption of sessions, as George’s low achievers awaited a brief U.K. stadium tour with The Who. Miranda and Lowell had had something going for a while when Sandy came up to Lowell’s hotel suite to jam with him, and hang out. Though Lowell hardly needed to introduce Sandy to cloud nine, he was happy enough to let her share the view from the self-same foggy mountain-top. Enamored of the ‘rock’ lifestyle, unhappy at home, hugely talented but largely unrecognised outside her homeland, Sandy remained particularly vunerable to the promise of perhaps not a better, but an easier life out west, previously proffered by the likes of Mama Cass, Don Henley, and Jackson Browne. Possibly, Sandy conceived of making her new album more ‘West Coast’ sounding to smooth that passage. Its working title would remain Gold Dust for a long time, and, a note jotted in one of her exercise books suggested, “Go west young woman/ you need the change … Smile and leave the losers behind.”

  West L.A. ‘76 was the last place a person like Sandy should have been. It had already eaten up the great Dusty Springfield, a stronger character and a better known property. But Sandy was already at the place where she was looking for external solutions to internal problems. When Miranda joined Lowell in Los Angeles for a few weeks that summer, she was surprised to receive a number of long distance phone-calls from Sandy who, when questioned, invariably insisted that everything was fine, and she was just phoning halfway round the world for a chat.

  Work on her album now progressed at a pace even a snail might have regarded as tardy. Vocal overdubs, and a smattering of covers – including a rerecording of ‘Silver Threads & Golden Needles’ that would finally find a place on record, brass band et al. – ate up several weeks of studio-time, aided and abetted by a tortuous series of mixing sessions. As days were given over to overdubbing a clarinet, a fiddle, a guitar solo, or new vocals on songs not even destined to make the final album, like ‘Full Moon’ and ‘By The Time It Gets Dark’, it would be the first week in August before a final sequence was approved.

  Despite the weeks of sessions in June and July, the bulk of Rendezvous would still come from that week of recordings back in April. The west coast covers would end up discarded. Of the album’s eventual contents, just ‘Silver Threads & Golden Needles’ and ‘Gold Dust’ had not been recorded in basic track form in April. All that remained now was for Island to release the record and start recouping the substantial studio bill Sandy and Trevor had been allowed to run up. Once again, though, Island placed the album on the backburner schedule they reserved for their B-list artists, and the plans Sandy had for taking herself back on the road and really promoting the album again went up in flames.

  Sandy Denny: It was finished about July … and I was supposed to go on [tour] in October with a band and everything. I had a big band lined up with a a lot of good people in it: Jerry Donahue, Rabbit, Dave Mattacks, Pat Donaldson, Andy Roberts, about eight people. I put the project to Island and they just didn’t seem to want to invest an awful lot of money to put the show on the road … The next thing I knew it was coming out in October, then November, then December, and there was always another date and another date and another date. Eventually it ended up being May 14, when I was just about to think of giving the record a birthday party. [1977]

  Forced again to put her career on hold for nigh on a year, while Island decided where they wanted her on their tired release schedule, Sandy found herself in a strange limbo, unable to tour without label support, unwilling to return to the boards solo, and without any incentive to work on her songs or her craft until Island deemed it appropriate. When Rendezvous was finally released, in late May 1977, she would find “it very difficult to talk about the record … because I’ve got to renew my original interest in the album when, quite frankly, I haven’t listened to it that much for such a long time now. I’ve got to get back into the way I felt when it was finished, which was excited.”

  The delay prompted Sandy to record a version of Elton John’s ‘Candle in the Wind’, at a session in February, something that apparently required some twenty-five takes to come out right. In a strange move, that baffled even her engineer, she then proceeded to substitute Elton’s paean to a female superstar who ran out of reasons to live for her own restless self-portrait ‘Still Waters Run Deep’, a curious move that smacked of Trevor and his diva complex.

  Sandy’s choice of song at the February session merely served to suggest that six months between sessions had failed to yielded anything in the songwriting department. The most shocking aspect, though, of her recording of Elton John’s 1973 hit single was that voice. Sandwiched between ‘Gold Dust’ and the glorious ‘Take Me Away’ on the released Rendezvous, it largely escaped notice at the time, but the voice had all but gone. Unable to sustain her notes without a tell-tale tremulous waver, her lungpower greatly dimmed, ‘A Candle in the Wind’ was precisely what that extraordinary natural gift had become.

  Doubtless Sandy told herself that her lungpower had become affected by the child she was now carrying, the child she’d longed for, and that she still hoped would turn her marriage around. Unfortunately, the grand promotional tour that was to have accompanied the release of her fourth solo album would now have to be deferred until after she had had the baby, due some time in August.

  Island still seemed determined to ensure that the album was released when even a TV appearance or radio session would have been out of the question. In fact, her label was increasingly concerned at various reports they had been hearing, presumably from A&R and studio personnel, and there was a very real danger that Sandy would be joining Fairport in a label-less limbo. At one point, during discussions about an English-style Trio album, Island’s Brian Blethyns asked Sandy’s old friend Bambi Ballard if she would consider managing their would-be diva.

  Bambi Ballard: [Sandy] was so keen on this mad idea that I had of putting her and Elkie [Brooks] and Maddy [Prior] together in a jam session. The concept was [songs like Fats Waller’s] ‘Honeysuckle Rose’ … Then I talked to Brian Blethyns and he said, “Great, Island’s for it.” But Atlantic wouldn’t let Elkie go. Island [then] asked me to manage her, again through Brian Blethyns. He came to me and said, “Would you manage her, because if you do, we think she’ll be okay.” They were seriously concerned. With hindsight, I say, “Why didn’t I?” … It was for all the wrong reasons. Brian Blethyn’s attitude was, We can’t handle Sandy anymore. Island is thinking of blowing her out because there’s too much friction, she’s baulking at certain gigs, Trevor is too much of an influence, and Sandy needs serious management … And then Sandy got pregnant, and everybody felt she wouldn’t come out of this one being quite the person she had been.

  That person had been, for most o
f a decade-long recording career, a singer of her own sorrows.

  *The Sufi, as I understand it, are very dubiously orthodox in mainstream Islamic eyes.

  14

  1977–78: NO MORE SAD REFRAINS

  Only overt reference to drugs in Sandy’s notebooks.

  “I’ll probably stop for a while one day. After all, children have to arrive eventually, don’t they – otherwise, after a while you begin to wonder what you’re here on earth for.” [1974]

  Sandy Denny

  “In many ways I really needed a break from the business. I’ve been in it up to my eyes for over ten years, virtually non-stop, though people don’t realise it because I’m not hitting the headlines every day. But when you’re out working for ten or eleven years with not much of a break you can go completely mad without realising it at the time. It’s taken me since last summer to get back to some sort of sanity – something I didn’t even realise I’d lost.” [1977]

  Sandy Denny

  On June 7, 1976, Sandy Denny recorded her last original song, ‘Gold Dust’, at a session at Basing Street Studios. Eleven months later, she returned to Basing Street to record a one-off version of a Bryn Haworth song, ‘Moments’, that she had heard him play one day in the studio, during the Rising For The Moon sessions. Eleven months after that, she would be dead. Whatever brick-wall she hit in her mind, even the formative lyrics that fill her other notebooks seem to have been all but stilled during those last twenty-two months.

  Initially, it was doubtless a conscious “break from the business,” prompted by the news, at the dawn of 1977, that she was finally pregnant (again – there had been an earlier abortion), and this time she was going to keep the child. Though Philippa Clare remembers that, “Trevor felt they should wait, and build her solo career a bit,” Sandy perhaps sensed that it was now or never. Certainly Island’s release schedule seemed to be setting aside ample time for her to sit out her pregnancy, and it was something she would talk about repeatedly as the hole inside her grew – as Philippa Clare astutely observes, it was “something from the outside to make her feel better inside.”