Dave Pegg: She always wanted a child so much – we were all aware of the fact that she would love to be a Mum. She would say to my wife, “Oh, it’s okay for you. You’ve got kids.” And we’d go, “You wanna babysit ‘em for a couple of nights.” But I think she thought that would probably make her happy and fulfilled, as a person and as a woman.
Seeing friends with their children only served to make the hole bigger. When Gina Glazer, now residing in Berkeley, Ca., last got to see Sandy, at the end of the Fairport farrago, she recalls, “She was quite thin. She just didn’t seem her old self. [But] she did tell me she wanted to have a baby.” She had admitted as much to her closest friends and family. And yet, her father remembered, when “eventually she said I’m having this child, Mummy … everyone was very annoyed, including Trevor, because it was going to upset their schedules.” On visiting her parents at this time, Sandy was uncharacteristically inspired to jot down reminiscences about her own childhood, in terms hazy with hormonal pangs:
“There are children at the school, where I used to go
They are learning things I used to know
No doubt they’ll see things just like me
Or else they’ll dream of a degree
The sun sets on the pavement squares
On which the homegoing student stares.”
Bruce Rowland recalls that Sandy “had a phase of responsibility” when she learnt she was pregnant. However, on the evidence of ‘Candle in the Wind’, it cannot have lasted long. It had certainly come to a grinding halt by the Thursday in March when she caught one of the great unwashed combos then filling the London pubs in the wake of punk’s revisionist template. Having missed that all-important window of opportunity in the autumn of 1976, Sandy was not the only Island artist now peering out on a changed musical landscape – “No Elvis, Beatles or the Rolling Stones in 1977.”
Galvanized by a cussing two-minute interview with the Sex Pistols on a local current affairs TV programme, punk’s ‘keep it simple, stupid’ credo left record company A&R divisions feeling thoroughly disoriented. The Only Ones, though, had taken the novel route of learning to play before adopting the credo and, in drummer Mike Kellie and Alan Mair, had a rhythm section fully conversant with Sixties verités. It was almost certainly Kellie, having known Sandy from his Spooky Tooth days, who invited her to come on down to the Greyhound pub in Fulham and catch one of the better examples of the new vanguard.
Sandy, who was, in guitarist John Perry’s choice phrase, “a little wobbly on her pins … like a much-loved aunt who has had a few too many,” was greatly impressed by Perry’s guitar-playing, called him “a young Richard Thompson,” and invited him to work on her next record (though, when it came to record ‘Moments’, she forgot to make the call). She returned to see the band on a couple more occasions, in the company of her well-connected coke-dealer. Unbeknownst to Sandy, his supplies were actually coming from the lead-singer of the band she was so impressed with, the shamelessly amoral Peter Perrett.
It was probably on one of these occasions, whilst the Only Ones were carving out a reputation, that Sandy called at her old landlady’s house, in Chipstead Street, no more than a hop and skip from the Greyhound. Linda Fitzgerald-Moore recalls, “she was pregnant and she was smoking, and I said, ‘You shouldn’t be smoking.’ And I think she was upset about something. She came round quite [late], about midnight.” They chatted into the night, before Sandy weaved her way back to Byfield, or perhaps crashed at Miranda’s in Barnes.
On another occasion, with Sandy clearly more than a little the worse for drink, Mike Kellie offered to take her home, perhaps not realising it involved a trip to Northamptonshire. Though he stayed a couple of days, at Trevor’s behest, all that Kellie remembers was this all-pervading sense of sadness and, as he drove him back to London, Trevor expressing his growing concern at Sandy’s drinking. No mention was made of Sandy’s pregnancy, though she would have been almost halfway through her term. Nor does John Perry remember any signs or mention of her condition, advanced as it was.
That Sandy was blatantly disregarding every word of advice about reducing her intake of substances in her pregnant state has been affirmed by just about all her close friends. Having asked Linda Thompson if she thought cocaine was bad for the baby, she nevertheless continued acquiring it from both her coke-dealing friend, and a close friend of hers whom he was also supplying (both of whom belived that they were supplying Sandy exclusively). However badly the drugs affected the physiology of her forming foetus, they were certainly seriously debilitating Sandy. The only reference to ‘4/4 Drugs’ in her later notebooks, written in a crazed, capital-letter pen-stabbing style, came with a responsibility-denying question to cap it:
“You bring the deadening of the senses
The saddening [lacklustre] of the eyes
The meaningless of the tenses
The amateur of the sighs.
But why choose me?”
Townshend remembers, at this time, that “when she visited the studios she often arrived drunk, but she had the capacity to sober up suddenly. Maybe she was doing cocaine … Keith Moon always carried it.” Sandy and Keith were by now old hands at matching each other’s excesses. Neither would live to see their thirty-second birthdays.
Sandy’s new-found capacity to drink and drink, and still be standing – the classic trait of a cokehead – was no longer threatening only her well-being. In early July, with an album to promote and a career to revive, she found out the baby she had so long desired was on the verge of arriving, two months premature. Rushed to a hospital in Oxford that specialised in premature births, it was decided that the safest way to introduce the baby to the world was a Caesarian. On July 12, 1977, Alexandra Elene MacLean Lucas gave birth to Georgia Rose Lucas at the John Radcliffe Hospital. Whilst her baby daughter was immediately placed in an incubator, the doctors found Sandy equally in need of serious medical care.
Philippa Clare: When Georgia was born, Sandy was pacing up and down. The baby was premature, and she was in withdrawals and Trevor was doing the alcoholic partner number, defending the alcoholic, “Oh well, she has a few glasses of wine.” … These doctors didn’t know. Trevor [finally] decided to tell them [the truth:] Smack, coke, dope, serious drinking: pernod, absinthe – that was what she did when she was pregnant. Once the doctors had that information, they could start taking care of business. But it gives you an idea of how bad Sandy was because there she is, pregnant, with a baby she really wanted, and yet she was doing all this self-abuse stuff … She was in such a state – no booze, no drugs, no nothing, her body’s in complete shock [with] heavy, heavy withdrawals.
Only now were the physical and psychological scars of Sandy’s addictive passage through child-birth manifest for all to see. Linda Thompson travelled down to Oxford almost as soon as Georgia was born, to find that “even when she’d just had this baby, she was thinking, ‘I’ve had a Caesarian,’ she was more thinking of her[self]. It was part of her illness.” Trevor must have been equally stunned at the scope of her withdrawal symptoms, and appalled at the way she had endangered the life of his first-born. He may even have begun to realise the depths to which his wife had sunk, though without factoring in his own absenteeism.
Bambi Ballard: Sandy would ring me from the hospital and say she hadn’t seen Trevor for three days. The baby was premature, and she was in the hospital for three weeks, and Trevor was hardly there, and she was ringing everybody up ‘cause she was lonely … My reading of that – having heard on the circuit that there was another woman – was that Trevor was taking advantage of Sandy being immobilised.
If Trevor still hoped that having a daughter could turn Sandy around, he soon became overly possessive about Georgia, which may itself have been a factor in Sandy’s failure to bond with her child. As Miranda Ward says, “there was the whole thing of the baby staying in hospital and her being discharged, and there must have been a hell of a guilt trip laid on her by Trevor. I think that Sandy couldn’t cope.�
�� Meanwhile, Trevor had gone out and bought a pedigree Airedale puppy in order that Watson, in Miranda’s words, “had a baby to play with, so that he wouldn’t be jealous of the baby. So what happens, Watson gets jealous of both.”
Despite millennia of mothering instincts in her genes and years of longing in her loins, Sandy was simply not ready to have a child. Discharged from hospital herself, she was obliged to make the daily thirty-five mile round trip to John Radcliffe to breast-feed Georgia, who remained on a respirator for a number of weeks. Finally, Georgia was ready to come home, providing Sandy with somebody as needy and demanding as herself, a twenty-four hours a day headache. Initially, though, Sandy’s joy was as boundless as the world at large, prompting one of her last poems, a sincere six-liner of maternal love:
“Georgia, though you sleep so soundly now,
When autumn leaves are falling to the ground
You’ll reach to catch them with your tiny hands
and gaze in wonderment as only babies can.
How I long to see you wake and smile
My beautiful, most precious child.”
Unfortunately, as Sandy’s grasp on this world began to slacken, so did her awareness of her child’s needs. All too quickly, she lost the thread that connected her to her offspring. Karl Dallas came to interview her at her home in Byfield, shortly after Georgia came home, and his impression of the new mother was that, “she was very happy … but she was a bit like a schoolgirl with a new doll, she was so happy having this plaything. It was almost juvenile. She was over the moon about the child but not perhaps in a very mature way.” Dealing with the practicalities of life had never been one of Sandy’s strong points. As Miranda observes, “If Sandy was writing a song and Watson wanted to go out, he could pee, shit or whatever on the carpet and she wouldn’t notice … It was exactly the same with Georgia. Suddenly, the muse would hit her and everything else went out of the window.”
Whatever and wherever that muse was, it was having a hard time breaking through the psychological barriers erected by an increasingly maudlin lady. The euphoria Karl Dallas witnessed did not last long. Bruce Rowland remembers that second, fleeting “phase of responsibility” when “Sandy had something to focus on, that was bringing her a lot of attention, and the fact that everything was slipping away from her was pushed to the background,” but he was also around when “the novelty of the baby wore off.” As part of the Banbury band of Fairporters, he saw a great deal of Sandy in the months after the pregnancy and he is in no doubts that a lot of what happened “was to do with [her] post-natal depression; and Trevor trying but not delivering, and not being consistent; and people starting to back off from her … [But] there was no question it was post-natal depression.”
Others are not so sure Sandy’s state of mind qualified as clinical post-partum depression, something now known to strike upward of one in ten of all mothers, but all are agreed that, to quote Richard Thompson, “Sandy was having a very hard time being a mother … she would think the baby had stopped breathing, or was dying instead of teething.” That downward spiral was gathering pace.
Philippa Clare: She was very down then. She used to come round to see me a lot, very drunk. I’d arrive home and she’d be sitting on the stairs in floods of tears…. I think she was disappointed that the baby didn’t turn her life around and make everything alright … Sandy was incredibly depressed, whether it was post-natal or not. The trouble with Sandy is she had so many mood swings, either chemically-influenced or not, I couldn’t sit down and say she had post-natal depression. But she was very depressed, which was why the drinking accelerated.
With that sensitivity for which record companies are renowned, Island Records felt that this was a suitably opportune time to inform their finest female singer that they were no longer interested in releasing her records. Thanks largely to the label itself, Rendezvous had come out at just the wrong time, as the Sex Pistols’ ‘God Save The Queen’ became the mystery number one that dare not be named, and battlelines were formed. Island found themselves stranded far from this teenage wasteland, as the punk first division were snapped up by the Richard Bransons of this world. Even the Only Ones, courted by Blackwell in person, preferred to attach the CBS label to their vinyl outings. The economics of music-making were also changing, and the Fairport family were out of phase. Fairport had hobbled onto Phonogram, Richard and Linda were about to make the jump to Chrysalis. There was a way back, but it was a time for scaling down operations – meaning all Trevor Lucasstyle productions.
Dave Pegg: When Island started up it was a bunch of guys, they were all into the music, they’d do anything for Fairport. They were really good to us, though nobody else in the band would say that. They never ever recouped … [But] all of a sudden you had to justify the fact that you were spending so much making records, and nobody was buying them. The music industry suddenly became a business, and people like Sandy … felt really bad about that. It was another insecurity. It was another thing for her to be depressed about.
Chris Blackwell apparently felt bad enough about his decision to make paying off the cottage in Byfield part of Sandy’s Island severance package, having been guarantor on the loan in the first place. Linda remembers when she and Richard got the same brush-off, at almost exactly the same time, and that Blackwell in person “came to us at a party and said, ‘I love you guys but I’m gonna have to let you go.’ And we thought, ‘That’s fair enough.’ But I think it really hit Sandy … I honestly don’t know how aware she was that her voice was going. Trevor always made her feel that she was incredible, that she was special.”
If Sandy was genuinely unaware “that her voice was going,” the reality was brought home to her in November, when she arranged her own brief tour of the U.K., fronting a six-piece band that comprised three-fifths of Fotheringay, augmented by DM on drums, Phil Palmer and Rob Hendry on guitars, and Pete Wilshire on pedal-steel. It was a quite ambitious gesture, to front a band like this after two years off the road, and the venues on the eleven-date tour were theatres of a sufficient status to represent something of a gamble for promoter Roy Guest. The tour began and ended in the comfortable surrounds of London’s Royalty Theatre, the idea being that, come tour’s end, the results would be worth capturing on the Island mobile truck – not for Island Records, but for a label as yet unformed, overseen by the first man to have recorded Sandy Denny in the studio, Marcel Rodd of Saga Records.
Karl Dallas: Marcel Rodd was the reason why Sandy’s last concert was recorded … He [had] approached me, [saying], “We were in at the beginning and we let [folk music] go, and I think that was a mistake. Then it was very easy to find out who we should record. Now I have no idea. So, if we pay you some money, can you mastermind some folk recordings for us?” I said you should reissue the Jackson C. Frank record, and then Sandy was on tour, and I’d gone to Edinburgh to see the opening concert, and it was very impressive. I mean, the band was a great band. It was a bit loose in Edinburgh, and I don’t think it got much better, [but] I thought it would. So I said to Marcel, “Let’s record Sandy.” … So we hired the Island mobile and [got] John Woods to engineer it, and went to the Royalty Theatre and recorded the whole concert. Somewhere there was a whistle right across all the tracks. John was totally mystified. He didn’t hear it when he was monitoring the recording. And Marcel said, “You have saddled me with incompetence, Karl,” and that severed our relationship. He refused to pay. How it was all sorted out, I don’t know. But she didn’t have a deal at the time … That last recording, she was not well. Trevor moved heaven and earth to stop it ever being released – it’s one of the reasons he got Island to buy it. Actually, in retrospect, she’s not singing as badly as I remembered … [but] she shouldn’t have done that concert.
Representing her most satisfactory cross-section of material, the sixteen-song sets, all originals save for Dylan’s ‘Tomorrow Is A Long Time’ and Thompson’s ‘For Shame of Doing Wrong’, and a distinctly Fotheringay flavour to the arrangements,
made for an audacious series of concerts. But she was pushing herself through some songs she could no longer fully handle, willed on by the disappointing crowds. ‘North Star Grassman’, ‘It’ll Take a Long Time’, ‘Wretched Wilbur’ and ‘Take Me Away’ are audibly drained of drama on the couple of audience tapes extant from the shows preceding that final London concert. By the time Sandy returned to the Royalty, a week after the ‘real’ tour ended in Bristol, she could no longer control her demons.
Colin Irwin: I saw her beforehand, and she was just pacing up and down, an absolute nervous wreck, shaking, just marching up and down. She was in a terrible state … There were people around, but we were just [pretending to] ignore her. When I first saw her with Fairport, she seemed totally in control, she was holding the stage, but she’d actually dissolved into this wreck.
What was to be Sandy Denny’s final show – save for a brief benefit at her village hall the following April – certainly had its moments, simply because that unerring vocal control had never left her, and the band was as sympathetic to the import of the occasion as any. Opening with a fierce ‘Solo’, the show was extended, for this night only, to a two-song encore that completed another circle, from the youthful promise of ‘Who Knows Where The Time Goes’ to the shattering poignancy of ‘No More Sad Refrains’.*
No More Sad Refrains: The Life and Times of Sandy Denny Page 27