Sandy Denny, UK folk singer

Information or media available	Supplied by
The official website www.sandydenny.co.uk for biography, gallery, lyrics, discography, CDs, Books.	online at The Official Website
In depth review / analysis of Sandy Denny - The lady she had a silver tongue : Sandy Denny as singer-songwriter Written 2005/2006 by Philip M Ward	Philip M Ward - the writer's own website
May 2005 saw the re-release of Denny's four solo albums, augmented with an array of bonus tracks, and contextualised via sleeve notes that make the case for her promotion to the part of musical history reserved for accredited pioneers.	Read that week's Guardian Newspaper friday arts review on Sandy's career Live fast, die young by John Harris
www.myspace.com/sandydenny is a comprehensive website, clearly a labour of love, and it will play you a Sandy Denny track as soon as you open the page. The blog refers (amongst other things) to..... Independent Newspaper article: Return of the folk queen ; 2-CD set -The Music Weaver: Sandy Denny Remembered ; CD - Sandy Denny: The best of the BBC recordings ; Review in The Independent Newspaper Monday, April 28, 2008 Tribute Concert at the Troubadour, Sunday, 20 April 2008	online at MySpace Music
Yahoo Group - Sandy Denny List. A fan meeting place (currently about 400 members)	on line at Yahoo Groups
MySpace Group - Sandy Denny Fans. Another fan meeting place (currently about 100 members)	on line at MySpace Groups
Extensive information at Reinhard Zierke's folk site.	Reinhard Zierke's webpages
Here are a few You Tube offerings. Check out the member who supplied the clip as he/she will often have many more
Sandy Denny - Who Knows Where The Time Goes (solo acoustic) (no video) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xag3vLtsO-k	from You Tube member Ubiquitan
Sandy Denny Interview BBC (no video) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6i9z0ofaVwE&feature=related	from You Tube member Ubiquitan
(RARE AUDIO) SANDY DENNY It'll Take a Long Time (solo acoustic) (no video) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3pxY1PSVx70&feature=related	from You Tube member dullsville
Fotheringay Gypsy Davey-1970 (video) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4JlJMI8T57g&feature=related	from You Tube member ekp34
Sandy Denny (video) Solo The North Star Grassman and the Ravens, Late November (piano) and Crazy Lady Blues (guitar) and The sea (piano) BBC TV - Excellent picture quality http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Rd_gMrmf6g	from You Tube member mogtwitch2000
Sandy Denny - Solo Piano (1974 amateur video) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p-Fz2MaX0nk	from You Tube member patzu

Newspaper article (Guardian? By John Harris?) prior to the re-release of the four Sandy Denny solo albums.

The life, death and reputation of Sandy Denny are a perfect case in point. Equipped with an incredible voice and an immense songwriting talent, she was none the less plagued by the chronic insecurities that led her into excess. Her drinking partners included the late Keith Moon and John Bonham; the folk-tinged milieu from which she came also included Nick Drake. She died aged 31, in 1978 - but whereas lesser talents have been posthumously feted, she remains a decidedly cult interest.

For some, that's a sign of her singular talent. "The thing that always amazed me about Sandy," says her friend and contemporary Linda Thompson, "was that she thought she actually could appeal to the masses. Of course she couldn't - and who would want to? If you're writing songs that people can shoot themselves to, you know you're not going to be in the charts. Sandy's music was uncomfortable. It demanded too much."

Alexandra Denny was born in 1947, and raised in Wimbledon. Her early adulthood found her working as a nurse and then putting in time at art school, while immersing herself in a nocturnal world centred around the kind of London clubs - the Troubadour in Earl's Court, Cousins in Soho - where candles burned into the small hours, and aspiring musicians split their attentions between self-written songs and traditional folk music. Her vocal abilities took in both a seductive gentleness and strident power; away from the stage, according to one of her acquaintances, "she was incredibly funny, with a very quick mind ... a chaotic intelligence just poured out".

In the spring of 1968, Denny auditioned for the job of vocalist with Fairport Convention, then fond of cover versions by Bob Dylan and Joni Mitchell, and attempting to somehow align themselves with the music drifting into the UK from the American west coast. "It was in a room attached to a pub in west London," recalls Ashley Hutchings, the band's then bass player. "We thought we were auditioning her, and she took over. She told us what she would like us to play for her. But she had the strong presence that we needed on stage. She had a wonderful voice. And we immediately liked her."

Denny stayed with the group for three albums. She was instrumental in nudging them towards the melding of old and new elements that would mark their effective invention of British folk rock. Equally importantly, her time with the band saw her take her first decisive steps as a songwriter. What We Did On Our Holidays from 1969 contained Fotheringay, a evocation of Mary, Queen of Scots that now sounds rather gauche, but served notice of both her talent and ambition; the same year's Unhalfbricking featured Who Knows Where the Time Goes, so brimming with poise and insight that it hardly sounded like something authored by a 22-year-old.

Linda Thompson (née Peters), was a close friend of Denny, another fantastically talented singer, and an associate of the group who would soon marry their guitarist, Richard Thompson. "I can remember Sandy saying to me, 'I'm going to try to write some songs,'" she says. "And I thought to myself, 'That's ridiculous. She won't be able to do that.' We were young, and there weren't many women writing songs. And she played Who Knows Where the Time Goes, and I nearly fell off my chair.'

Accounts of her life suggest that Denny was well aware of how good she was, though her confidence and ambition could never offset her seemingly innate insecurity. "I don't think she was ever truly comfortable," says Ashley Hutchings. "She was a restless soul. And very nervous: nervous about performing, nervous about travelling - particularly flying. I think she probably needed the props of drink and drugs. And she needed people around her, who she trusted and loved, to keep her going; to tell her how good she was. The question, of course, is how could you be that insecure when you have so much talent? But she was."

Denny's fragile self-esteem was rattled by a particularly cruel part of the 1960s pop whirl. One early Melody Maker profile of the band blithely described Denny as "plump"; according to those who knew her, the fact that she didn't quite match up with a skinny, mini-skirted archetype caused her no end of unease.

"She had this amazing talent, this incredible voice - but she always wanted to be pretty and fanciable," says Linda Thompson. "And she was! But she never thought she was, because she wasn't conventionally pretty. And these were the 60s, when no one ate anything and they were all stick thin. She'd go on these daft diets - we were all on slimming pills, and God knows what - and she'd get thinner, but she'd put it on again. And she never quite got over that. It was so ridiculous: we were all slaves to it, but it was a real burden for her.

"But some of the things people said were unbelievable. They'd say things like, 'her sweet, chubby face'. I think that was very hard indeed. But also, she could always leave the room with the most interesting guy around - if he had a brain. Because not only was she attractive, she was so smart and so talented. I think she had decided long before that she was more witty and talented than any of these dolly birds. And that's how she wowed men. She had a thing with Frank Zappa, whenever he was in London. She went out with some pretty remarkable people."

Denny left Fairport Convention in late 1969. Her exit, in later accounts, seems to have been prompted by two factors: her unease with the band's increasing tilt towards folky orthodoxy, and the fact that touring led to long spells away from her future husband. Trevor Lucas was an Australian-born folk musician (variously described as "another alpha male in her life" and "a real ladies' man") who quickly joined her in the short-lived band they named Fotheringay. In contravention of the rigid sexual politics of the time, he was happy enough to allow Denny the starring role.

By 1971, with Lucas's encouragement, she had reluctantly gone solo, commencing a run of four albums: that year's The North Star Grassman and the Ravens, Sandy (1972), Like an Old Fashioned Waltz (1974) and Rendezvous (1977). The first and second, home to songs as accomplished as Late November, John the Gun and the wondrous It'll Take a Long, Long Time, frequently crystallised her talent to marvellous effect; thanks partly to her background in traditional music, she could make her songs sound as if they were rooted in a wisdom that was palpably timeless. From thereon in, though she could still scrape incredible heights, she was rather hampered by soupy arrangements (she was particularly partial to the string sections she described as her "fur coat"), and, on her last album, the fact that her voice was showing the strain that came from her fondness for drink and drugs.

Commercial success consistently eluded her, though a fleeting place in the mass market was assured by her appearance on Led Zeppelin IV, on which she was invited by Led Zeppelin to duet with Robert Plant on The Battle of Evermore. "She used to hang out with Led Zeppelin," recalls Linda Thompson. "Robert and Jimmy [Page], and John Bonham and Keith Moon - they all knew how fantastic she was. Robert Plant was the loudest singer on the planet at the time, and Sandy could blow him off the stage. You'd have to hold on to the furniture when Sandy was singing. So these guys knew what a star she was. And like a lot of girls who are unhappy about the way they look, she became one of the boys. You had to go some to drink with John Bonham. You couldn't keep up with those guys. But Sandy could."

Inevitably, this was not all the stuff of rock'n'roll high jinks. Her propensity for excess eventually turned pathological; worse still, her appetites extended way beyond what was available in the off licence. In 1977, she became pregnant; it was then that her closest friends began to feel truly anxious. "I was worried when she was pregnant, because I knew she was doing drugs and drinking," says Linda Thompson. "And later on, she was crashing the car and leaving the baby in the pub and all sorts of stuff. And that was worrying. I've said it before about Nick Drake: these days, we might have done an intervention or something. But back then, you thought people would grow out of it.

"When I went to see her in the hospital after she'd had the baby, I was terribly worried. The baby was premature. She'd abused herself during pregnancy - and she said, 'They're giving me such a hard time, telling me off. What about me?' And I thought, 'God, that's so peculiar.' When you've just had a baby, you don't think about yourself at all. By that time, I thought it was a little bit psychotic."

In March 1978, Denny and her newborn daughter Georgia took a holiday with her parents in Cornish cottage. She fell down a flight of stairs, and subsequently complained of severe headaches, for which she was prescribed a painkiller called Distalgesic. If mixed with alcohol they can be fatal. A month later, she was dead, thanks to what the coroner later called a "traumatic mid-brain haemorrhage". It is one of the more tragic aspects of her death that when she fell into a terminal coma, her husband and baby were elsewhere; fearing for his daughter's safety, Trevor Lucas had travelled with Georgia to his native Australia. As with so many musicians' stories, the tale is more a matter of grinding dysfunction than of any hedonistic romance.

This month sees the re-release of Denny's four solo albums, augmented with an array of bonus tracks, and contextualised via sleeve notes that make the case for her promotion to the part of musical history reserved for accredited pioneers. "She's been namechecked by some high-profile people," considers Ashley Hutchings. "But she needs to be re-evaluated. She wrote a kind of song that's very rarely written now - emotional, musically interesting, sung really well - serious songwriting. She was head and shoulders above the rest. And she remains so."

The Independant Newspaper previews the BBC broadcast of Tuesday, 22 April 2008 (Radio 2)
By Jonathan Brown Monday, 21 April 2008
Sandy Denny was the unlikeliest of pop stars. A little overweight, uncompromisingly tomboyish, notoriously clumsy, she was crippled by doubts both on and off the stage – fears she sought to quell through the copious consumption of drink and drugs. Her phobia of flying severely limited her ability to tour, as did her reluctance to be separated from her husband, a notorious womaniser.

Yet Denny, through the sheer power and beauty of her haunting vocal style became, alongside Dusty Springfield, the most acclaimed British singer of her generation. When she died, 30 years ago at the tragically young age of 31, the world was robbed of one of its brightest talents.

But unlike contemporaries such as Nick Drake and Tim Buckley, whose untimely deaths spawned cult followings that ev-entually blossomed into posthumous widespread critical and popular success, the singer has been largely overlooked by the musical world beyond folk.

Now, on the anniversary of her demise, former colleagues, friends and fans are hoping that the general public will finally wake up to the legacy of the woman dubbed "Britain's Joni Mitchell" – a legacy which has inspired stars from Kate Bush to Led Zeppelin.

A new BBC documentary due to be broadcast tomorrow states the case for Denny, bringing together tributes from one-time collaborators and present-day admirers. Written, produced and presented by friend and former flatmate Bob Harris, Who Knows Where the Time Goes? – The Sandy Denny Story, charts the arc of her success from student singer to feted star. It explores the still- unexplained circumstances of her death, which followed a fall at a Cornish cottage at a time when she had been abandoned by her husband, Trevor Lucas, who had left for Australia with the couple's baby, Georgia.

According to Harris, Denny struggled to survive as a woman in the macho environment of the time. "There wasn't a template for solo female singers in the late Sixties-early Seventies – they were breaking new ground in a male-dominated industry," he says. "But despite the fact she died far too young, the strength of Sandy's legacy is growing all the time. There is more interest in her music now than at any time since she died 30 years ago."

Richard Thompson, the musical powerhouse behind Fairport Convention, the band with whom Denny made her name, remembers a character capable of dominating a room full of pop stars but also one racked with anxiety over her looks, which were deeply at odds with the glamorous, stick-thin style of the day.

"I think she was insecure about her appearance sometimes. I think that she felt she wasn't beautiful – and she wasn't beautiful, but she was pretty and attractive to a lot of people but that wasn't enough for her. She could change in a moment from confident to not confident," he recalls.

Though she enjoyed a string of lovers, among them Frank Zappa, she was particularly stung by one music paper which referred to her as "plump", a jibe which helped consign her to a lifetime of yo-yo dieting.

Joe Boyd, the American producer and impresario who introduced Denny to Fairport, as well as discovering Pink Floyd, Nick Drake and John Martin, believes it is high time for a reappraisal. "In some ways she was the greatest of them all. The most talented, bursting forth even with her limitations – and the limitations were never musical," he says.

Denny grew up in south-west London after the war and despite coming from a largely non-musical household – a few 78s and Fats Waller notwithstanding – she developed a powerful obsession with the young Bob Dylan.

She studied at art college and trained as a nurse. Having taught herself the guitar – badly – she made her nervous debut performing at The Barge folk club in Kingston upon Thames, before graduating to the more fashionable The Troubadour in Earls Court, where she came to the attention of Dave Cousins of The Strawbs. But it was with Fairport Convention, who singlehandedly invented the British folk-rock scene of the late Sixties, that she will forever be associated. Denny sang on four studio albums with the band, three of which were released in 1969, the same tumultuous year that a fatal car crash claimed one member of the group and the girlfriend of Richard Thompson.

Among that year's output was Liege And Lief, recently voted the most popular folk album of all time and last year performed in its entirety, with Chris While standing in for Denny, to a sell-out 25,000 crowd at Fairport's annual Cropredy festival. The previous album Unhalfbricking, contained her masterpiece, "Who Knows Where The Time Goes?"

After deciding to leave the band she collaborated with her future husband in the short-lived Fotheringay, before recording as a solo artist with only occasional returns to Fairport.

In 1970 she came to the attention of Led Zeppelin's Robert Plant when they won the Melody Maker best male and female vocalist awards and she was the natural choice when it came to recording the female part in the band's "The Battle Of Evermore" on Led Zeppelin IV.

"It was one of those great moments when you have written something and someone takes it beyond to a place where it isn't some cheesy thing about a medieval battle, it is a beautiful exchange of two vocalists – really quite evocative," Plant recalls. "It was a spectacular moment for us. Our worlds joined, we had a great moment or two and disap-peared to wave across crowded rooms as years went by."

She was also a willing drinking buddy of Led Zeppelin's drummer John Bonham, another rocker who died young, and by the mid-Seventies drink, drugs and cigarettes were affecting her voice. Her failure to achieve mainstream success – despite recording pop standards such as "Candle in the Wind" – had left her disillusioned.

Despite the birth of her daughter, Denny's personal life was unravelling and her marriage crumbled. The drinking and drug taking had continued throughout the pregnancy, to the alarm of friends. She suffered three catastrophic falls in the weeks before her death, collapsing a month later and slipping into a coma from which she never recovered. The cause of death was a brain haemorrhage but it was clear that her life had been in serious disarray, something those close to her sought to cover up. Lucas died of heart failure in 1989.

Recent years have seen a slew of releases of archive material, including last year's Live at the BBC, a four CD set of previously-unheard work including extracts from her private journals.

The internet has been fertile ground for fans to celebrate her life and push her name. Some border on the ghoulish – a website dedicated to her Putney grave attracts thousands of hits each week. Others tour the landmarks of her life in the unremarkable suburban hinterland of south-west London. Cyberspace also provides platforms for fans to perform poetry and songs dedicated to Denny, and swap rare scraps of surviving film footage.

A comprehensive biography appeared in 2000, while her music was revived this year by Dutch singer songwriter Linde Nijland, who records and tours her work to much acclaim.

"For her it must have been so frustrating – she was promised something that wasn't coming – the fame she wanted. But when you see nowadays how much she still means to people, I think she accomplished a lot. She is still very much alive: they want to hear her songs and they want to sing along. She means so much to a lot of people," she says.

But Richard Thompson still likens Denny to Drake. "The sheer quality of Nick's music has finally surfaced. It took a long time and a couple of VW commercials to get it out there but there is a whole generation that swoons to Nick Drake and is influenced by him. I'm surprised it hasn't happened to Sandy."

The time, however, might finally have come for Sandy Denny.

'Who Knows Where The Time Goes? – The Sandy Denny Story', will be broadcast on BBC Radio 2 tomorrow at 10.30pm

Monday, April 28, 2008 Troubadour Tribute: review in The Independent
By Tim Cumming Tuesday, 22 April 2008

This evening's tribute show at the Troubadour, as Joe Boyd later points out, should really be filling the country's biggest halls, Sandy Denny was that great. But it does make sense. Denny started singing here in 1967, travelling up from Kingston art college to perform her own songs, and virtually everyone in music has passed through the venue's doors. It's the Rick's Bar of folk and Sixties rock: Tim Buckley, Rod Stewart, Plant and Page, Joni Mitchell, Bob Dylan and Paul Simon have all performed here. And those are just the really famous ones.

The night opens with the Flemish singer Linde Nijland, who learnt Denny's songs from her father's records, and her opening, a cappella "A Sailor's Life" is smooth and intimate. She goes unplugged for Denny's signature song, "Who Knows Where the Time Goes" (the second tune she ever wrote, and the first she showed to anyone), and though Nijland's voice doesn't carry the way Denny's could, you get that prickly, intimate sense, sans mic, of the singer sharing the same air as the rest of us.

A three-way conversation between Denny's producer Boyd, fellow singer Linda Thompson and the poet Karl Dallas kicks off with Thompson puncturing any resident male pomposity by remembering "being down here and saying to Sandy, 'I'm going out with that Joe Boyd,' and she said: 'That's funny, so am I...' We both found it hysterically funny."

Alas, Thompson isn't singing, although her youngest daughter Kamila takes the last set of the night with her three-piece band. Martin Carthy delivers a superb four-song set of traditional songs, featuring the likes of "The Deserter" and "Sir Patrick Spens". He not only has an encyclopaedic knowledge of all this stuff, but such a weird sense of time and phrasing in the interplay between voice and guitar that each song sounds fresh minted.

Vikki Clayton has built a career out of Denny's repertoire, and picks three of her big solo numbers, including the intense "Solo" and the skipping rhythms of "Like an Old-Fashioned Waltz", but the ears and the tail must go to Lisa Knapp, the young London-based singer who gives thrilling performances of "Blackwaterside" and a heartstopping "The Quiet Joys of Brotherhood", one of those big songs you can almost walk around. Denny would have stubbed out her fag for that one.

Monday, March 31, 2008 New Release: The Music Weaver: Sandy Denny Remembered

The 2disc set contains 36 songs including rare demos, album tracks and live BBC recordings. ’The Music Weaver - Sandy Denny Remembered’ is the first ever definitive cross-label anthology celebrating the work of Sandy Denny and it is timed to coincide with the 30th anniversary of Sandy’s untimely death. As well as containing the cream of Sandy’s solo work there are choice cuts from when she fronted Fairport Convention and Fotheringay and her collaborations with Led Zeppelin (on the Battle of Evermore from Led Zeppelin IV) and The Strawbs.

Disc 1

The North Star Grassman And The Ravens 
Banks Of The Nile 
I’m A Dreamer 
Solo 
She Moves Through The Fair 
My Ramblin’ Boy 
Stranger To Himself 
The Pond And The Stream 
At The End Of The Day 
The Deserter 
Sweet Rosemary (Demo) 
Blackwaterside 
One More Chance 
White Dress 
Moments 
Fhir A’ Bhata (BBC - Folk Song Cellar) 
Who Knows Where The Time Goes?

 Disc 2

Nothing More 
Farewell, Farewell 
Late November 
No End (Solo Piano Version) 
Fotheringay 
Next Time Around 
Quiet Joys Of Brotherhood 
The Battle Of Evermore 
Full Moon 
Autopsy (Demo) 
You Never Wanted Me 
Bushes And Briars (BBC Session - Bob Harris 25/10/72) 
Whispering Grass (BBC Session - Bob Harris 14/11/73) 
John The Gun 
Genesis Hall 
I Wish I Was A Fool For You (For Shame For Doing Wrong) Live Royalty Theatre 1977  
After Halloween Demo 
The Lady (BBC In Concert - Paris Theatre 16/3/72) 
The Music Weaver

Wednesday, March 19, 2008
Sandy Denny: The best of the BBC recordings CD

The Sandy Denny: Live at the BBC boxset has been such a success that the decision was taken to release a 1 disc highlights edition for the more casual listener. I compiled the disc to represent the cream of Sandy’s BBC output; (keep an eye out for the Fairport Convention BBC highlights disc later in the year.)

Tracklisting:

LateNovember5.08                                                                                          
Crazy Lady Blues 2.17
Bob Harris 24/8/71 Transmitted 6/9/71

Northstar Grassman 3.47                                                 
The Lady 3.45                                          
Bruton town 4.45                                                                
Next Time Around 4.46      
John The Gun 3.56                                          
Paris Theatre, London 16.3.72.

Blackwaterside3.36                                                                                        
Sounds On Sunday 14/11/72
  
The Music Weaver 3.08                                                      
Bushes And Briars 2.35                                          
It’ll Take A Long Time 4.02
’Bob Harris’ - Recorded 25.10.72. Transmitted 20.11.72.
   
Like An Old-Fashioned Waltz 3.31      
Who Knows Where The Time Goes? 5.35                  
’John Peel’ - Recorded 11.9.73.Transmitted 25.9.73.

Dark The Night 4.07                              
Solo 4.28                              
’Bob Harris’ - Recorded 14.11.73. Transmitted 17.12.73.

'The lady she had a silver tongue': Sandy Denny as singer-songwriter (2005)

1 Introduction

You see, I realise what an important medium it is, being able to record my own songs on records and have people buy them and listen to the words. And one day I hope I shall be able to really produce something worthwhile which might radically change an individual’s point of view. I don’t quite know how it’ll happen...

Thanks to Clinton Heylin’s biography, published in 2000, we now know everything we could want to know about the British singer-songwriter Sandy Denny, ‘first lady of folk-rock’. Indeed, we probably know more than we want to know. Revelations about her refusal to shape up to her addictions during pregnancy, about her difficulties in coping with motherhood and her new-born, and more besides, test the loyalty of all who saw her on stage or who cherish the recordings she made in a productive decade between 1967 and 1977. ‘Slapstick Tragedies’ was the working title of one of her LPs (Coleman 1971); the phrase was not retained but it is a sadly apt epitaph for a career cut short at the age of 31 when, after a serious fall, she succumbed to a brain haemorrhage.

Falling down is the stuff of knockabout comedy, but not here. ‘Slapstick tragedies’ - also implicit in the phrase is the contrast, which even those who never saw her in concert can reconstruct from live recordings, between the comedic brightness of her onstage patter (‘looning about’, to use one of her phrases) and the solemn intensity of her own compositions in performance. Paradox was likewise a theme of Melody Maker’s thoughtful obituary (Irwin 1978), which pondered why this conflicted artist had had enough ambition to launch herself into the London folk scene in the 1960s but not enough determination, or self-belief, to carry her as far as her talent could, and should, have taken her.

In recent years Denny’s star has started to rise again. ‘Sandy Denny was the greatest female singer-songwriter this country has produced’, the Sunday Express trumpeted in an article marking the twenty-fifth anniversary of the singer’s death (Humphries 2003). You would expect, if this claim were true – and I happen to think it is – that hers would be a household name. That it is not points to a deficit in public appreciation of this magnificent, complex and highly subtle artist. No one who has heard her doubts that she was a great singer. As an interpreter of traditional material and of songs by contemporaries like Bob Dylan, Richard Thompson and Joni Mitchell, she was peerless. What appears less secure is the status of her own songwriting and how she projected those songs in the role of ‘singer-songwriter’: to this day there are still critics (like Greig 2004) who regret her ‘drift’ away from traditional music towards the ‘singer-songwriter zone’. This article will make a case for her seriousness of purpose as a songwriter, mainly through a close reading of her lyrics, but also argue that it matters who is singing them. There is authority in authorship.

2 The singer

In the beginning was the voice. As a child she was taken for an audition at the Royal College of Music, where the professors admitted it was a ‘nice little voice’ but, with singular prescience, advised her mother to ‘let her sing naturally’ (Heylin 2000, p. 18). When we get our first chance to hear it, there is still a little-girl sweetness about the voice. The earliest known recordings, home demos made in 1966 on her parents’ reel-to-reel tape recorder, show someone all too anxious to please. The ambitious choice of material, culled from the repertoire of the South London folk clubs she was now frequenting, sometimes defeats her. Bert Jansch’s ‘Soho’, already committed to disc in a gruff vocal by its composer, requires qualities other than the decorum which is all she can so far muster; likewise, ‘Blues Run the Game’, learned from an early boyfriend, Jackson C Frank, where we need to believe the world-weariness of the lyric but somehow don’t. Dylan, who was ‘as near as I would get to worshipping anyone’ (Coleman 1971), is represented on these early tapes by ‘It Ain’t Me Babe’, a mellifluous treatment surely owing a debt to Joan Baez’s version but curiously underpowered in comparison with Denny’s later readings of ‘Percy’s Song’, ‘Down in the Flood’ and ‘Tomorrow Is A Long Time’.

The voice evolves through her earliest professional recordings, made variously with Alex Campbell and Johnny Silvo. Her recording with The Strawbs in May 1967 of ‘Who Knows Where the Time Goes’, the first of her many versions of the song and the one that inspired Judy Collins to record it also, is utterly distinctive. By the time she joined Fairport Convention in 1968, the characteristics are well established. ‘Fotheringay’, the opening track on What We Did On Our Holidays, displays the legato phrasing without trace of vibrato, the seemingly effortless breath control, the sense of a great power available to be unleashed but usually held back. For the next three or four years, many would say, her voice was at its peak, managing paradoxically to sound at once other-worldly and firmly grounded in the here-and-now, mournful yet inspiring. After that it acquired a ‘smokiness’ – literally, from a heavy habit – but most of its quality survives to the final concert, as we can hear by comparing ‘The Lady’, delivered solo with piano in 1977, with the studio recording of the song from 1972.

She said of her vocal technique:

I used to think when I was a lot younger that just a beautiful sounding voice was all you needed, but I realise now that isn’t particularly where it’s at. It’s just the instrument – like you can have a beautiful sounding Martin guitar, but still not know how to play it – and that’s what I mean about a voice. At one point I was so hung up on producing a beautiful sound that I forgot what singing was really all about. The whole point of singing is to tell the story of the song – what’s the point of singing words if they don’t mean anything? (Peacock 1972a) At another point she admits that beautification is another form of evasion. Perhaps mindful of the rawness of ‘authentic’ folk singers, she opens up another front for self-defeat:

I do dishonest things when I’m singing. I use my voice in a way that I know sounds good – so I do it. Yes, and I know you could call that technique, but to me it’s being a bit deceitful. The problem is, how far can you go with honesty? (Nightingale 1971) Denny was known to admire Janis Joplin. As early as 1968 she was experimenting with a mixture of gin and Southern Comfort, as she recorded in a notebook, to ‘see if I too could produce the shattered effects which Janis Joplin seems to acquire as a result of drinking it’ (Heylin 2000, p. 78). The question this raises is: did Joplin’s ‘shattered effects’ represent a musical challenge, an anti-beauty the emulation of which would stretch Denny’s own technique, or were they the visceral self-expression of a white blues singer delivered with an honesty that both fascinated and frightened this English singer who did not like people to know what she was thinking? Had Joplin gone ‘too far’ with honesty?

Honesty, like sincerity, was a quality valued in the folk clubs, and Denny was always ambivalent about the ‘folk’ movement. In the mid-1960s, it attracted her as a place to develop her art, as both vocalist and songwriter. She knew that she did not fit the pop industry’s image of the ‘girl singer’ (a frequent theme in interviews) and, although the folk revival had thrown up its own female stereotype - that of the sensitive ballad-singer modelled on the young Joan Baez -, it ‘was at least an active one’ (Laing et al 1975, p. 80). Alone on stage with a guitar, the female singer was in control of her material and of the audience’s response to that material. Folk clubs were also the only outlet for the rising generation of ‘singer-songwriters’, male and female, unless they could cross over into the mainstream, as some did successfully in the 1970s. In such venues, sometimes, Denny confessed to being ‘frowned on by the ethnics’ (the term then in use for adherents of the unadulterated tradition - Laing et al 1975, pp. 158, 160): she sang accompanied; she mixed traditional repertoire with modern ‘folk’ songs by Bob Dylan, Tom Paxton and Jackson Frank; she even, horribile dictu, slipped in one or two of her own early compositions. But by 1968 she had decided that ‘the simplicity and naiveness of one voice and a guitar is rather insipid […] I wanted to do something more with my voice’ (Wilson 1968). In joining Fairport she doubtless hoped to develop her songwriting as well as her voice. When she discovered that Liege and Lief (1969) was to be, not a one-off experiment in electrifying traditional material, but a template for the band’s future work, this restless individual bailed out.

Hers was not the temperament of the traditionalist. She was too easily bored. If she had to sing ‘Matty Groves’ again, she quipped on the eve of her final tour, she would throw herself out of a window (Irwin 1977). Whereas the traditionalist emphasised the transmission of a folk canon, she was attracted to the songs qua songs. Apart from the pleasure she took in the music, there was the chance they offered to ventriloquise her private concerns free of the fear of self-disclosure which, as we shall see, constrained her own songwriting. In an interesting article on ‘Female Identity and the Woman Songwriter’, Charlotte Greig (1997) quotes the great folk song ‘Gathering Rushes in the Month of May’, a song memorably revived in the 1960s by Anne Briggs. As Greig observes, this is a song which addresses its difficult subject matter – illicit sex, unmarried motherhood, the battle of wills between father and daughter – with a directness that no contemporary pop song could possibly match. ‘Gathering Rushes’ was not in Denny’s folk repertoire, but she was attached to another tale of faithless men and too-trusting women she learned from Briggs, probably via Bert Jansch – ‘Blackwaterside’. Performing the song at the Lincoln Folk Festival in 1971, she introduced it with her characteristic mixture of chirpy self-deprecation and bumbling optimism:

This is called ‘Blackwaterside’. It’s about this poor lady who got led astray by some bloke and found she was in a lot of trouble. But I’m sure she survived. We all do, you know.

This is a travesty of a folk song ‘intro’. Folk singers, according to the ‘traddies’, were supposed to tell you facts like who collected the song and how long it had been in the tradition. Denny will have none of this; she homes in without ceremony on the content, describing it with an explicitness she would never apply to her own writing, and audibly identifying with it. ‘Blackwaterside’ has become her song. In the project to reclaim folk music, how was the listener to hear the personal behind the fustily archetypal? The answer lay in the conviction, the intensity, with which the singer delivered her material, thereby personalising it. Thus the voice had to do even more work.

‘The way I sing is a bit folky’, she conceded, but ‘it’s a style rather than a definition of what folk music is’ (Gilbert 1973, p. 23). One lingering residue of that style, which I have nowhere seen remarked upon, is that she continues to sing in her own accent, long after most other ‘folk’ elements have disappeared from her music. Whereas, then as now, every aspiring British pop artist - like the young Elton John who ‘supported’ (i.e. spectacularly upstaged) her band Fotheringay at a Royal Albert Hall gig in 1970 – would assume a fake ‘American’ (or ‘mid-Atlantic’?) accent for performance, she stuck solidly to the southern English accent of her upbringing. Only when the song demanded it – like the rock’n’roll standards she recorded on The Bunch album – was an ‘American’ accent put on.

3 The songs

This article will try to penetrate the arcanum of Denny’s art, the mystery which she was so reluctant to discuss, the ‘meaning’ of the songs. First, some caveats. There are Denny fans who assert that they never listen to the words; they find her voice so compellingly siren-like that she could be singing from the telephone directory for all they care. Then again, the lyrics are, at a certain level, private; specificities are concealed or buried, thus wrongfooting the investigator, even thirty years after the event, who feels ashamed and minded to back off, all the more so when he discovers how defensive her friends and fellow musicians still are of her reputation. We should resist the univocal interpretation of her lyrics; often, in her lifetime, several people in her circle thought that a particular song was ‘about’ them, and our individual response is all the richer if the listener can feel personal ‘ownership’ of a song: after all, if a particular lyric is ‘about’ Richard Thompson, can it still be about me, or you, or us? One senses that her lyrics are most obscure when she was being most specific, carrying the risk that as she piled elaboration upon elaboration she lost sight of what she was trying to say. In her very best work, however, definable ‘meanings’ coexist with a ‘poetic’ ambiguity. A song like ‘The Pond and the Stream’ manages to be highly specific without denying the potential for generality which enables it to speak beyond its proximate cause. Finally, we must remember that everything she wrote was written for her voice. Her close attention to rhyme – not only end-rhyme on long vowels but frequent internal rhyming as well – perfectly suits her legato phrasing and signifies a controlling artistic instinct. ‘I can’t ryme [sic] when I’m upset’, she confesses in one notebook. Inevitably, on occasion, a word is chosen for its sound not its meaning, and the interpreter must beware of becoming the over-interpreter.

As if to proof her songs against such prying impertinence, Denny’s favourite form is the cryptogram. The songs are ‘biographical’, she told an interviewer; only ‘about ten people can understand them’ (Denselow 1971). Her most obscure lyrics are constructed like sets of crossword clues, with the difference that, whereas cryptic crosswords are meant to be soluble by any addict, Denny’s lyric clues, containing so much personal reference, were only to be understood by ‘ten people’. She delivered a whole series of portraits in song: few attempts have been made to decode them, beyond the simple observation that a particular song is ‘about’ someone. Take the song ‘Next Time Around’ (recently covered by Emiliana Torrini). One of the most striking numbers on The North Star Grassman and the Ravens, this, we are told (and it is all we are told), is ‘about’ Jackson C Frank. From the obscure piano vamp that opens the song, circling around G minor, we detect no stylistic connection to the American troubadour who made such an impact on the London folk scene of the mid ’sixties and became Denny’s first ‘serious’ boyfriend. But a close examination of the lyric reveals how Frank – and Denny herself – are firmly embedded in it. The first line introduces a ‘question […] about time’: this may be the question posed in Denny’s signature song, ‘Who Knows Where the Time Goes?’ or it may be some overdue question posed by one lover to the other (in the colloquial sense of ‘about time too’). Lines 3 and 4 are a riddle: ‘The house it was built by some man in a rhyme, / But whatever came of his talented son?’ The ‘man in a rhyme’ is ‘Jack’ (‘The House That Jack Built’); add the next line and we have ‘Jack’s son’ or ‘Jackson’. The next two lines allude to Frank’s song ‘Dialogue’ and its first line, ‘I want to be alone’. Frank did indeed come from Buffalo (mentioned in the last line of verse 1). The ‘stories about God and you’ may refer to Frank’s nervous breakdown after he returned to the US, which was accompanied by delusional episodes. As a child Frank had been caught up in a serious fire at his school in which half of his classmates lost their lives. As well as carrying physical scars for the rest of his life, Frank was traumatised by the incident (which may have contributed to his later schizophrenia). Denny’s second verse seems to allude to these events. An official US inquiry blamed the disaster on the bad design of the school buildings: in the song, the buildings fall down ‘because of the architect’ and the children (‘seeds’) are ‘smothered or drowned’. In the final lines of verse two Denny wishes she were elsewhere, ‘maybe the ocean next time around’. This not only links the song to the whole series of water metaphors in other lyrics but may also allegorize whatever differences led to their break-up. In the rather pretentious sleevenotes that Frank supplied for the sole LP of his career, he wrote: ‘I am afraid of the ocean as much as the possibility it is really my mother’. The third verse, with its references to ‘dusty black windows’, ‘dark stairs’ and ‘candles all gnarled in the musty air’, surely takes us to The Barge, the Kingston folk club located on an old Dutch sailing barge, where both Frank and Denny performed in 1965. The performing space at The Barge was below decks, reached by a flight of stairs lit by the only windows in the place, where resident singers and guests were dependent on intermittent generator power and candlelight – a health and safety nightmare by modern standards and surely an ordeal for the fire-damaged Frank. One regular in the audience recalls that the barge had the smell of ‘musty air’ common to all timber vessels.1 The club’s driving force was one Theo Johnson, an ex-merchant seaman with a taste for bawdy, who appears in the song like some figure of folklore as ‘Theo the sailor who sings in his lair’. Johnson, who played (or tried to play) an enabling role in the early careers of both Denny and her contemporary John Martyn, did indeed ‘sing in his lair’. His confident voice can be heard on the album Hootenanny at The Barge (1965) and, according to a flyer preserved among Denny’s papers, he shared the bill with his protegee at a folk concert in Porchester Hall, London, on 25 November 1966.

The riddle, such as she employs in ‘Next Time Around’, is a form with deep roots in English culture; it is found in Anglo-Saxon literature, as well as in folk songs like ‘Nottamun Town’. Another time-honoured trope is the reverse personification, in which people acquire non-human characteristics:

My songs are usually written from experience; they’re my experiences of people.Like sometimes those kinds of metaphorical things about rivers and streams might be referring to a particular person […] Some people are very easily described in natural terms, in atmospheres, and the way I feel always comes out in some kind of description of some kind of natural force (BBC 1972).

This implies that songs which sounded to their first listeners like vaguely realised Blakeian evocations of ‘England’s pleasant pastures’ trodden by ‘feet in ancient time’ may, in fact, be tightly coded and more artful than we realised, if we have the key to the cipher. ‘The Pond and the Stream’ opens with the lines: ‘Annie wanders on the land. / She loves the freedom of the air’. ‘Annie’ has been identified as the folk singer Anne Briggs, ‘the best girl singer of traditional music’, as Denny told Roy Shipston (1970), albeit ‘a really weird chick’. Thanks to this knowledge, the lyric certainly becomes richer. In Denny’s eyes, Anne Briggs represented the ‘real’ folk singer: a ‘traddie’ who sang unaccompanied, not part of the ‘layabout section’ in which Denny classed herself (with guitarists Bert Jansch and John Renbourn (Irwin 1977)). Briggs led an itinerant life, relishing the ‘freedom of the air’; Denny was a reluctant traveller with an unashamed attachment to home comforts. Briggs epitomises all Denny’s equivocal feelings about the folk revival movement and, within its field of view, the song includes the songwriter, who is placed in relation to the subject (‘they’re my experiences of people’). ‘But I live in the city / And imagine country scenes’, she sings. Self-divided as ever, romantically envious of the wandering minstrel yet unable to subscribe fully to either the lifestyle or the concomitant musical style, Denny continues to ‘live behind the screen’.

It is possible that symbols retain quite fixed meanings for her. Whether they open out into anything like the elaborate symbology that Ian MacDonald (2003) uncovered in Nick Drake’s lyrics is another matter. There is assuredly no poverty of ambition in Denny’s tackling of philosophical themes. From her notebooks we know that Denny’s most famous song – ‘Who Knows Where the Time Goes?’ – was originally called ‘Ballad of Time’. There is aptness in her first choice of title, and foresight, for so many of her later songs are ‘ballads of time’. A close examination of the lyrics of ‘Who Knows…’ reveals that in what is surely one of her earliest compositions her lifelong thematic preoccupations are already established. At the outset she sets up an opposition between the ungovernable passage of time (who knows where it goes?) and her own indifference to it (‘I have no thought of time’). In photographs Denny is rarely seen wearing a watch. Love is a defence against both the passing of time and the horror of loneliness: while her love is near her she is ‘not alone’ and has ‘no fear of time’. When she is alone (and unpartnered) thoughts of time can only be banished by day-dreaming (‘Before the winter fire, I will still be dreaming’). Time is also measured in this song by the migration of birds (‘how can they know it’s time for them to go?’) and the succession of seasons (the ‘storms of winter and then the birds in spring again’). Birds are actuated by some biological clock that the singer does not pretend to understand, but their greatest asset is the power of flight. Flight was to become a recurrent theme in Denny’s lyrics, both in the sense of aerial adventure and that of escape. The birds are escaping an English winter by flying south, leaving behind them a ‘sad, deserted shore’. And the singer herself ‘will still be here’; she has ‘no thought of leaving’. We may imagine her left behind on the shore, which would be appropriate, since the margin between water and land is a critical site in many of her songs, as we shall see.

We can now follow how these themes pan out in subsequent lyrics, beginning with time itself. On occasions such as she describes in ‘Who Knows…’ time can seem oceanically unending. More often, it manifests itself as the constraint of clock-time: ‘Time – what is that? I’ve no time to care’, she sings in ‘The Sea’. On her demo tape of ‘Rising for the Moon’, a metronome audibly ticks in the background: musical time measured out in bar lines, a curiosity this, for some of her most memorable recordings, folk songs over a drone or languid guitar arpeggio (‘The Quiet Joys of Brotherhood’ in the version recorded with Fairport, ‘The Banks of the Nile’), embody rhythmic freedom, musical open-endedness. Her contemporary Nick Drake apparently believed that the world was heading for some geopolitical Armageddon around 1980 (Humphries 1997, p. 184); for Richard Thompson, 1975 was going to be the ‘apocalypse year’ (Hinton and Wall 2002, p. 63). Denny, by contrast, appears to have given little thought to the future: ‘The future is like the next minute and the minute after. We don’t know what will happen between now and eight o’clock tonight. I can’t think of a week ahead’ (Nightingale 1971). As a result, her actions seem to have been governed by a naïve optimism, the optimism of one who supposes, for example, that having a baby will turn a life – and a failing marriage - around. She did not have plans - she had dreams. In contrast to her contemporaries’ Cold War fears for the 1980s, Denny’s future is a dreamscape of ‘tall brown people’ who will puzzle over Donovan’s albums in centuries to come (‘Late November’). Where she lived was the present, a present more intensely felt than most of our presents and suffused by an emotionally recalled past.

Time present is routinized into cycles, of which two are important, the annual and the diurnal. The annual cycle of the seasons is a recurrent concern, autumn and winter being especially favoured. With so many references in the songs to falling leaves – invoked as an image of freedom in ‘By the Time It Gets Dark’ (‘Got to be free as the leaves in autumn’) - we are left with the impression that this was ‘her’ time of year, albeit an emotionally testing one because it brought longer nights. Song titles point the same way: ‘Late November’, ‘After Halloween’. In one of Denny’s most ambitious works, ‘All Our Days’, which her arranger Harry Robinson elaborated into a seven-minute orchestral fantasy complete with ingenious allusions to the English pastoral style of Delius and Vaughan Williams, she devotes one verse each to autumn and winter but forces spring and summer to share a verse.

Within the cycle of the solar year is contained the microcycle of day and night, and this provides her with another rich thematic complex: day – dusk – night – dawn – day. Denny seems never to have overcome a childhood fear of the dark. As she confides in a notebook: ‘I never really want to sleep at night if I’m not with my man or if I’m all alone. It’s a different thing when the dawn arrives and I know I’m OK.’ By the mid 1970s she was relying increasingly on sleeping pills. ‘By the Time It Gets Dark’, a song written for Rendezvous but omitted from the final record, is that rare thing in her canon, a happy song – happy, because it imagines her childhood fear vanquished:

And maybe by the evening we’ll be laughing Just wait and see All the changes there'll be By the time it gets dark. Fear of the dark equates with a fear of being alone and the anguish of loneliness. Like Time’s winged chariot, it can be chased away by companionship or conjugality. When in August 1969 Fairport Convention moved into a country house at Farley Chamberlayne, Hampshire, to start work on what would become the seminal Liege and Lief album, band member Simon Nicol was surprised on their first night by a knock at his door. As he recalled later: ‘It was terribly dark in the whole area, and she was a bit spooked by this, so she asked me if I would sleep with her, in her room’ (Winters).2 Night marks the border between yesterday and today: if you cannot get to sleep how do you know when yesterday ‘ends’? ‘By the Time It Gets Dark’ addresses this problem confidently:

Yesterday is gone and will be forgotten And today is where every new day starts But in one of her subtlest lyrics, ‘Dawn’ (a rare collaborative song – Jerry Donahue supplied the music), insomnia is the inevitable consequence of a day that outstays its welcome:

But yesterday was such a long time,
Yesterday may last forever,
From the barren land
Yesterday might always arise.

Sleep, will we ever sleep.
Oh to sleep in peace once again,
My love.

Sleeplessly awaiting the dawn of the title, when she knows she will be ‘OK’, the singer assures herself that ‘From the blackest night / Must come the morning sky’.

Dawn is also employed as a controlling image in one of Denny’s cryptogram songs, ‘The Lady’. Like all her songs, it has an autobiographical root. ‘The Lady’ was her husband Trevor Lucas’s nickname for his wife; these two words were chosen by him as the sole epitaph on her gravestone in Putney Vale Cemetery. The lyric invokes the restorative power of music, which it equates with sunrise and daybreak (‘Wait for the dawn and we will have that song’), an effect underlined in the music as, in the last verse, the melody rises to its highest point on the phrase ‘the sun did arise’, then crests the summit and falls back into luminous harmony on the words ‘beautiful morning’. But on another level the song may allude to Denny’s admiration for a great predecessor. The temporal references throughout the song are to the coming of day. Add text to title and we have ‘Lady Day’, the nickname of Billie Holiday.

The night is always darkest before the dawn, in proverbial wisdom. This adage seems to underlie another lyric, ‘Dark the Night’. Between the darkness of night and the dim morning light ‘how can we not see the simple melody of sorrow’. Whereas in ‘The Lady’ music’s effect was restorative or curative, here music can no longer palliate (‘my weary tune has lost its pleasure’) but only transmit the pain of separation from a loved one.

The first verse of ‘Dark the Night’ uses another image of separation which reaches right back to ‘Who Knows Where the Time Goes?’: ‘How can the river flow without you / Warming like the sand upon the land’. Water imagery is everywhere in Denny’s songs. Here, as in many songs, she seems to figure herself as the element of water, in this case the river. In ‘The Pond and the Stream’ the song title, which employs imagery found nowhere in the lyric, shows the referential function of those ‘metaphorical things about rivers and streams’ (BBC 1972). I assume that the ‘stream’ refers to Anne Briggs, unstoppable, ‘free’, and the ‘pond’ to Denny, stagnant, confined to the city. Denny’s favourite Psalm, read at her funeral in 1978, was the 23rd (Heylin 2000, p. 246): ‘He leadeth me beside the still waters’. ‘Still waters’ provide the central image of her most unforgiving self-portrait, recorded for the Rendezvous album but not included on the original release: ‘Still Waters Run Deep’. Here Denny is the ‘mystery woman’, an insomniac (‘the lady does not sleep’) with a ‘thorn in her side’ and a ‘chip on her shoulder’ who spells ‘trouble for you / So don’t get in her way’. Again, as in ‘The Pond and the Stream’, the contrast is between water in motion outside herself (‘the river flows’) and the arrested movement of her own subjectivity, which may conceal profundity - or just betray an irksome inscrutability (‘still waters still run deep’).

Her favourite water image, flowing through her writings over ten years, is that of the sea:

When I write songs I often picture myself standing on a beach or standing on a rock or a promenade or something. I just put myself there sometimes and without even realising it I find myself describing what I’m looking at and often it’s the sea (Gilbert 1973). In another interview she recalls sitting on a beach in Wales, ‘late at night, rather sad, a long time ago when I was about 18’. The sea entices her with thoughts of extinction, the chance to submerge her personality in a greater ‘mind’ even as the waters close over her head:

I began to think how powerful the sea was, and I even got a little morbid, thinking about what it would be like to swim out and just drown. The sea seemed to become a sort of person, like a mind (Dallas 1970). Reynolds and Press (1995, p. 285), in one of the few attempts ever made to ‘read’ Denny’s imagery, understand her as a ‘female wanderer who identifies with the sea because both of them follow their wayward impulses wherever they like in defiance of male expectations’. This is supported by the last verse of one of her most haunting songs, ‘The Sea’, where inundation breaks down sea walls (‘all your defences’) and the singer, by a ‘sleight of hand’, is left ‘waiting for the land’. Hers is the last laugh; she is a ‘a joker, a deceiver’. ‘The Sea’, a teasingly ambiguous lyric, functions at two levels. Written shortly before construction began on the Thames Barrier, when the flood threat to London was much in the news, on the surface the song appears to be about a future where the river breaks its banks and ‘sea flows under your doors in London town’. This is the interpretation that Denny encouraged in a BBC concert with Fotheringay when she playfully tried to divert the listener’s attention from the words:

This is called ‘The Sea’, and I suppose it’s a bit frightening really in aspect, but it’s a nice enough tune, so if you just want to relax and listen, that’s all right. But how then to explain the first verse (‘And you think that I’m hiding from the island’) or the last (‘And I’m waiting for the land’)? Assuming her self-identification with the sea, the lyric then becomes another treatment of interpersonal relations, the second actor being the ‘land’ or ‘island’. It follows from this that the site of encounter, in particular between man and woman, will be the littoral, the margin between water and land, the beach, the river bank, the reedbed. Gathering rushes (‘down by yonder spring’, for example, in the song ‘Gathering Rushes in the Month of May’) was traditionally associated in folk song with sexual encounter (Greig 1997, p. 170). Is it too fanciful to suppose that Denny carried this collocation over into her own work? One conduit was the song ‘Blackwaterside’, very much part of her early repertory, where the singer lies half the night ‘in sport and play’ with an ‘Irish lad’ – ‘down by Blackwaterside’. In ‘The Banks of the Nile’, arguably Denny’s greatest folk song recording, the cross-dressing heroine promises her lover that ‘we’ll comfort one another on the banks of the Nile’. These associations seem to run through her surreal lyric for ‘Late November’: ‘One played it by ear on the banks of the sea’. The song originates in a dream, recorded in her notebook in February 1969. Denny is travelling in the Fairport group van. They stop by a beach and she is walking along the water’s edge among a herd of cows. The shoreline is scattered with animal remains, which she later discovers to be ‘all that is left of the human race’, preserved in ‘a place of sanctity’. Here the shoreline has become sinister, truly a ‘terminal beach’ in J.G. Ballard’s phrase, no longer a place of individual encounter and procreation but of mass extinction. A few months after the dream she was travelling back from Scotland and stopped to exercise her dog on a beach, which she realised was the ‘same’ as the one in the dream (Heylin 2000, p. 129). Here she witnessed a low-flying exercise, which is duly recorded in ‘Late November’:

The pilot he flew all across the sky and woke me. He flew solo on the mercury sea. The pun is significant. On the recording the listener hears both ‘he flew so low’ and ‘he flew solo’. Both are apt, for they represent twin images of peril. The beach is now a theatre for the rehearsal of many of Denny’s anxieties. The sea, normally reassuring, a force to identify with, is injurious (‘mercury’ surely connoting a poison as well as a colour?) while the display of aerobatics is ambiguous. In life she was apparently terrified of flying (in an aeroplane); yet the flight of birds, like those which desert the shore in ‘Who Knows…’, was endlessly appealing – the singer in ‘Sweet Rosemary’ wishes she were a ‘little bird / With wings that I could fly’.

Add to all this the fact that the pilot flies ‘solo’. In a song with the title ‘Solo’, written probably in 1973, at the peak of her solo career, Denny ironically quotes what she imagines others to be saying about her:

What a wonderful way to live,
She's travelling all over the world.
Why, the fame and all the golden
Opportunities unfurled.

Solo performance, which many saw as her greatest musical strength, is negatively associated with being alone, and its corollary, loneliness:

We’ve all gone solo.
We all play solo
Ain't life a solo?

The distinction between being lonely and merely being alone is developed in another lyric, ‘After Halloween’. Here she writes about the difficulty of separation from a loved one and wonders whether he too experiences a sensation so familiar to her: ‘You may be lonely, you may be just on your own’. But the speculative mode she enters is not so much that of wonder as of dream, or a conflation of the two in the realm of ‘Wonderland’. Throughout, the song oscillates between the lived and the dreamed. The sea appears in female personification (‘I love her too’), but it may be a literal presence as well, perhaps the Atlantic, dividing her from the sound of her lover’s laughter. Later she concedes the sea could be real, but only ‘as real as you and I’, and she has already called into doubt who she is and whether ‘we really live these days at all’. These are the shifting sands of (day-)dream – in the last line she is surprised that she needs to explain that. Behind ‘After Halloween’ I see the spirit of Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass, books familiar to every middle-class child of her background (and reinterpreted for the ’sixties generation in Jonathan Miller’s celebrated TV adaptation). An imaginative child sitting ‘on the bank’ (where else! Carroll 1971, p. 11) lapses into a ‘curious dream’ (ibid., p. 130) where her identity is forever being questioned, by the Caterpillar (‘Who are you?’ p. 48), by the Fawn in the wood of no names (p. 181), by Alice herself (‘Who in the world am I?’ pp. 22, 181), above all by Tweedledum, who roundly informs her that she is not real, merely a figment of Tweedledee’s dream, and neither are her tears real (p. 195). In ‘After Halloween’ Denny is moved to tears by the sea, but reflects that ‘tears are only made of salt and water’, the constituents of sea-water. The association of ideas again recalls Carroll’s Alice, who, stranded in Wonderland, weeps a pool of tears which she later mistakes for the sea (p. 24).3

4 The songs - contd

When we feel stranded and alone, sometimes we turn to God. At first glance there is little evidence to suggest that Denny was ‘religious’, other than her flirtation with the Church of Scientology in the mid ’seventies (Heylin 2000, pp. 209-10). An entry in a notebook paints her as a sceptic (Heylin 2000, p. 210), as does the song ‘Bushes and Briars’. Written probably in March 1972 when she was recording at The Manor Studios in the Cotswolds and chanced upon an empty church during a Sunday stroll (Heylin 2000, pp. 148-9), the song is a bleakly Larkinesque meditation on reasons for non-attendance. Inside, a vicar (‘the clergy’s chosen man’) communes with a non-existent congregation, perhaps the spirits of the dead (‘all those souls at rest’), consoled by ‘the book in his hand’. Denny, outside, in the churchyard, recalls a time when those buried there (‘all those people beneath my shoes’) were fortified by Christian doctrine, but though she sees ‘the path which led to the door’ of the church, she cannot take it. The song consistently identifies the living with ‘bushes and briars’, the dead with ‘thistles and thorns’, bringing the two metaphors neatly together for the first time in the final verse. Best appreciated in the stripped-down solo version with guitar on a BBC radio recording, ‘Bushes and Briars’ demonstrates how she could ‘take a story and whittle it down to essentials’ (her practice, as she told Robin Denselow in 1971), convincingly marrying a realised situation to a controlled use of metaphor and metonymy.

Yet, sceptic or no, the liturgical fossils of an Anglican upbringing are embedded in the lyrics she wrote as an adult. In ‘One Way Donkey Ride’ she ends each verse with a variation on the formula of the Beatitudes (‘Blessed are the poor in spirit: for theirs is the kingdom of heaven’ etc, Matt 5:3):

God bless the poor ones who have none though they have tried…
God bless the poor ones who want some but are denied...
God bless the poor ones whose patience never died...

The final variation identifies the ‘poor’ with Christ’s triumphal entry into Jerusalem (Matt 21: 6-9): ‘God bless the poor ones on that one-way donkey ride’. Freud, in his sceptical treatment of religion The Future of an Illusion, conceded that religion consoles us by supplying what he called an ‘oceanic’ feeling, as if we are ‘one with the external world as a whole’ (quoted in Storr 1989, p. 92). ‘One Way Donkey Ride’, over an undulating barcarolle rhythm, explicitly links religious sentiments to Denny’s all-pervasive water imagery:

Is it ocean or stream, this love in my blood,
Bringer of joy or of sorrow?

Preceding the ‘beatitude’ conclusion of each verse is a recurrent invocation of ‘oasis of love, sweet water of life’. The end of life’s ‘journey’ will ‘soon be in sight’. We are like birds of passage gliding over the water, for – and this is perhaps the most beautiful and disturbing image of the whole song – ‘birth is the start of the swansong’. This whole lyric suggests a pantheism beyond Christian denominations, beyond Christianity indeed, rooted in a reverence of the natural world. It comes as no surprise to learn that Denny’s music is nowadays much prized among adherents of Wicca, the ‘old religion’, who find in songs like ‘Rising for the Moon’ an instinctive Neo-Paganism making them appropriate for use in ‘Esbat’ (the rites associated with the Full Moon) and other ceremonies.4

So her thoughts ran from private quasi-religious sentiments (‘One Way Donkey Ride’) to institutional religion (‘Bushes and Briars’). This is important, lest we get the impression that all her writing is about the inner life. Several songs attempt to address public concerns – the public concern of her time, the peace movement. Of her three anti-war numbers – ‘Peace in the End’, ‘John the Gun’ and ‘One More Chance’ – the first, a collaboration with Trevor Lucas (her words, his melody) is negligible, but the other two are fine songs. ‘John the Gun’ features, by Denny’s standards, an unusually angular melodic line, as if seeking a macho equivalent for its subject, a demonic warrior who plays ‘the game of war / In moonshine or in sun’. Evidence perhaps of a mutual influence between Denny and Richard Thompson at the time when he was playing in her backing band The Happy Blunderers and edging towards his first solo project Henry the Human Fly, this is the one Denny song that Thompson has performed since her death. In ‘John the Gun’ the tradition of folk personification (as in ‘John Barleycorn’) is revived. By contrast, ‘One More Chance’, the highlight of Fairport’s Rising for the Moon album, is a slow rock ballad starting in her customarily indirect style, which then builds towards a tremendous middle eight where the inevitability of war is roundly called into question: ‘Is it too late to change the way we’re bound to go?’ From one of her notebooks (the same one that contains the 1969 dream) we know of a further assault on public issues, a curious lyric titled ‘Requiem’ which incorporates lightly versified quotations from Martin Luther King’s famous Memphis speech of 3 April 1968 (‘I have seen the promised land’, etc). Addressing a man she refers to sometimes as ‘the prophet’, sometimes as ‘Luther’, the singer wonders ‘if the life you gave for peace was all in vain’.

Unachieved, possibly uncompleted, ‘Requiem’ is hardly vintage Denny (though, of course, we know nothing of how she was going to set the text to music). Nonetheless, it shows her alertness to events across the Atlantic. There is biographical evidence that in 1976, when she was at work on her final studio album Rendezvous, Denny was seriously thinking of relocating to the US. Her career had stalled in her homeland, and she had many musical friends and admirers on the West Coast (Heylin 2000, p. 217). While Miranda Ward insists that this was Lucas’s idea, not Denny’s, and points to her friend’s susceptibility to ‘LA throat’ whenever she visited, the notebooks from this period show the singer’s thoughts turning to escape:


But there's nobody listening, what chance is there
they all like it here anyway,
though they don't say.
Those porcelain beauties with no need to breathe air
with no reason to rise till the end of the day.
Take me away.

By the time this draft had evolved into the song ‘Take Me Away’, its frustration at the inhibitions of Englishness (‘How can I really believe this is my land?’) and the effortless poise of models (‘porcelain beauties’ perhaps recalling the ‘dolly birds’ and mini-skirted ‘cutesy-poos’ who had drawn her fire in earlier years)5 had been replaced by a more generic wish to be taken out of herself, expressed in characteristic aquatic imagery: ‘We’ll find the rain clouds, and the rivers will flow’. Her thoughts on America crystallised in what was long intended to be the album’s title track, ‘Gold Dust’. This song, almost certainly written in 1976 and audibly striving for a much ‘funkier’ sound than her previous work, specifically evokes events from Denny’s solo tour of the States in 1973. She travelled from coast to coast, a fact neatly encapsulated in the metonymic phrase ‘from Liberty to redwood trees’. Miranda Ward, who accompanied her friend on this tour, believes that she is specifically commemorated at several points: the ‘good companion’ who ‘tried her very best’ would position herself backstage ‘in time to hear my final song’, cigarette ready lit. When the two women met up with Fairport Convention, also on tour, in Los Angeles, Ward was thrown into the hotel pool after a bout of serious drinking:

It's never very formal how you dress
For oysters by the swimming pool
.

Earlier in the tour there was a day off and the tour promoter took them into the Rockies:

Then slip away into the mountainside Like the man in the Lazy E. Ward’s London flat had always been a hideaway for Denny when the pressures of career and relationships grew too much: You have a simple mansion underground Without address or telephone. But it is the song’s elliptical chorus which suggests the questionable allure of the West Coast, as if events of three years earlier were being vividly called to mind: Golden, Where are you? Sold on gold dust. Here is the California Gold Rush conflated with ‘precious’ memories, word associations with the old mining town of Golden, Colorado (which Ward thinks they may have visited), perhaps a reminiscence of the idealistic chorus of Joni Mitchell’s ‘Woodstock’ (‘We are stardust / We are golden’). Whether or not Denny was ‘sold on’ the idea of emigration, it never happened. Another couplet of ‘Gold Dust’ suggests that America may have held other attractions for the singer: He stores away the moments of her smiles As if they were rare butterflies While Denny’s travelling companion now insists that the two lines following these, which speak of stalking prey and bartering for merchandise, recall Ward’s efforts to track down an Ovation guitar for Lucas’s use in LA, this couplet by its choice of image seems to allude to a love affair from a later American visit. A possible draft lyric for another song refers to ‘the night in New York you stayed with me when I was lonely’, with the consequence that ‘stage fright and thoughts of you stir up the butterflies – just those two’. As with many opaque allusions in her songs, it is difficult to know whether the resonance of these lines would be amplified if we knew more of their biographical background. Consider the song ‘Nothing More’, which, it has been suggested, is about Richard Thompson (Heylin 2000, p. 115). Certainly, the portrait of a reticent, fiercely talented individual – cast here in the folk song form of a dialogue - is recognisable, even if not intended. The speaker (let us call her S) offers help to a friend (let us call him R). R rejects S’s help, preferring to overcome ‘hard times’ on his own. S retorts that R holds beautiful ‘pearls’ in his hand but will not show them to anyone, not even S. R, ever suspicious, cannot be sure that S wants only to see the pearls ‘and nothing more’. This smacks of a highly allegorized treatment of what could have passed between these two creative talents. ‘Everybody knows that she was mad about Richard and couldn’t get Richard’, Linda Thompson told Denny’s first biographer (Winters).6 S wants something more; R wants ‘nothing more’: any narrower interpretation would be invidious. When pressed on this song by an interviewer, Denny avoided discussion of the subject-matter, drawing attention instead to its economy of musical means:

‘Nothing More’ is a kind of insistent song… I wrote it to be an insistent song. It has only three chords and they change from one half of the chorus to the next (Shipston 1970).

The difficulty of tying down her portraits in music to any one individual is illustrated by another song, ‘Friends’. This, her published biographer confidently asserts, is about Denny’s relationship with Pete Townshend, a claim based on a candid interview in which Townshend spoke of a night when they ‘nearly slept together… [Later] she rang and told me she’d written me a song’ (Heylin 2000, p. 164). The lyric suggests the anger of a would-be lover spurned (‘Do me a favour, stay away from my door’; ‘But you waste my time now…’). The absence of her partner, Trevor Lucas, is clearly indicated: ‘My love is not here, my love is away. / You’ve caught me alone but you’ve nothing to say’. There is apparent support for this identification. Joe Boyd recalls Denny telling him that ‘Friends’ was about Townshend: ‘It’s a real attack… ’Cause he used to come hit on her when Trevor was away’ (Winters). However, the problem is that, when shown this lyric thirty years later, Townshend rejects the idea that this song could be ‘about’ him. He says in no way does it describe the very cordial relations between them: on the night in question ‘they didn’t argue’.7 Her wish that, if he wanted to touch her, he must stay all night seems in retrospect to belong to the pattern of loneliness and fear of the dark that she wrote about so often. Whoever it was she wanted to stay away from her door, it was not Townshend. The interpretative options remaining are that the song is ‘about’ someone else altogether (this is Townshend’s own suggestion); that it combines elements of several of her unfulfilled extramarital dalliances including Townshend; that her reading of the night in question was so different from his that they might as well have been at opposite ends of Parsons Green (always a danger in male-female relations); or that, wishing not to give herself away, she wrapped up the shared experience to the point where it becomes unrecognisable to the participants.

Scribbled on a loose sheet among her notebooks are these words:

Secret is thy prisoner. If thou let it go thou art a prisoner to it. We ought to be as careful in keeping a secret as an officer in keeping his prisoner, who makes himself a prisoner by letting his prisoner go.

Identifiable as a (slightly truncated) quotation from the seventeenth-century naturalist and antiquarian John Ray, this could stand as a motto for Denny’s portraits in song of friends and lovers.8 As she reflected in 1972,

Everything's so metaphorical now, especially my own songwriting - it's a bit evasive, to say the least. But it's very difficult for me because I'm an evasive person. I never really want people to know exactly what I'm thinking (Peacock 1972a).

Stung by criticisms of her earlier albums, she told interviewers in the early ’seventies that she was going to write in a more direct way, an intention that extended beyond lyrics to her musical language. What she admitted to, the ‘doomy, metaphorical phrases, minor keys, weird chords’ (Peacock 1972a), were under notice, even if they were integral to her fragile ego stability. In Denny’s work verbal and harmonic language follow one another in the sense that, when the lyric tends to obscurity, so also does the harmony. At these times the characteristics of her musical style are most marked: a penchant for descending bass lines (‘Solo’), chromatic chord changes, bass pedals with chromatically shifting harmonies on top (‘After Halloween’), tritone intervals created by her use (certainly not derived from English folk music) of the lydian mode9 (‘Bushes and Briars’, ‘Wretched Wilbur’), and a taste for major seventh harmonies, especially at the peak of a rising melodic phrase (‘One More Chance’, ‘The Lady’). In seeking to simplify her lyrics, she restricts the musical vocabulary to the point where a certain middle-of-the-road blandness threatens to set in. An example is the self-consciously nostalgic ‘Like An Old Fashioned Waltz’ – yet even here the five simple chords which comprise its harmonic lexicon are disposed in an unusual extended phrasal structure which shows that the singer’s innate musicality has not been submerged. ‘Like An Old Fashioned Waltz’ is one of Denny’s few songs in 3/4 time and as such invites comparison with another triple-time piece, ‘The King and Queen of England’. This song was apparently written with Fairport in mind, when she rejoined the group in 1974, but it shows how much effort of will was required for her to write in an accessible vein. Never recorded by the band and known only through a beautiful solo demo recording, ‘The King and Queen of England’ catches Denny relapsing into habitual opaque allegory – ‘In the folds which begin every ending, / I wish I forever could lie’ - and the arrestingly chromatic harmony that went with it. Though the song is nominally in the key of G major, the verse endings slide down through A, G, F# and E, to land on the tonally unrelated chord of C# major.

An attachment to (dorian) modal harmony is one of the lingering survivals of her origins in the British folk revival. By the time Like An Old Fashioned Waltz was released in 1973 she had certainly purged much of the folk diction from her lyrics, retaining from her folk music origins only an attachment to strophic verse forms, which means that the ear, denied the variations afforded by chorus or middle eight, must be content with her decoration of the basic melody. In the famous recordings of traditional material earlier in her career (‘A Sailor’s Life’, ‘Matty Groves’, etc), there was this and more: there was the forward drive of narrative. This impulsion is sometimes lacking in her own songs. However, there is an advance. Despite the grandiloquent orchestral overlay (what Denny called their ‘fur coats’), the later songs achieve a colloquial directness of utterance. ‘No End’ is a case in point. Describing an encounter in one of her preferred wintry landscapes between a ‘traveller’ and a ‘painter’, both of whom seem to have characteristics of Denny herself even if the pronouns are always masculine, the song opens matter-of-factly:

They said that it was snowing
in astounded tones upon the news.
I wonder why they're always so surprised
'cos every year it snows.

Only the awkward use of ‘upon’ in the second line to supply an extra syllable disturbs the idiomatically modern flow. As we have seen, a new directness, slightly unnerving to those used to her periphrases, is seen in another song on Like An Old Fashioned Waltz, ‘Friends’. As if to compensate for such indiscretion, she balances ‘Friends’ on Side Two with ‘At the End of the Day’, her most cloying ode to the lanky Australian she married in 1973 - a tiny little song, a four-chord trick, improbably bulked out to 6 minutes 28 seconds with a ‘fur coat’ thick enough to smother it.

The frustrating aspect of Denny’s songwriting is that someone capable of writing so well was also capable of writing so badly. Thirty years ago, in the short-lived journal Let It Rock, Clive James (1974) published an article about Denny which was structured around this contradiction. It remains one of the very few seriously evaluative pieces ever to appear on her songwriting. James’s argument was that, within the ‘folk-rock’ idiom of the time, ‘with the important exception of Richard Thompson’ (and how right he has been proved there), Denny was the one person ‘capable of writing a contemporary language’. He instances successful lyrics from early songs – including her most famous, ‘Who Knows Where the Time Goes’ – and contrasts them with the (in his view) obscure and evasive lyrics, so vitiated by folksy archaisms, schoolgirl poetasting and random plunderings of the myth-kitty, that fill her albums of the early ’seventies. The problem, as he saw it, was that by the time she left Fairport Convention at the end of 1969, her voice, that supremely expressive instrument, had started ‘to do its own writing, and the writing has begun the destructive process of turning into a mere pretext for exercising the pipes’. What James saw was that her ‘gift for language’ was ‘unmistakable’ – empowering her to do ‘that dangerous something extra, taking the full resources of contemporary speech and turning them into song’ - but somewhere along the way it had become a ‘casualty’.

That ‘gift for language’ is well-documented. Word games were obviously a pleasure – it was one such that produced from her the nonsense title of her second album with Fairport, Unhalfbricking. When Anne Nightingale met her in 1971, she was in the middle of a game of Scrabble. Heylin reproduces written work both from schooldays and later that shows a lively mind channelling itself through a wide vocabulary. However, James’s criticism has validity. Some of the obscurities in her lyrics are audibly the result of the search for a rhyme, a vowel sound or an extra syllable, the triumph of sound over meaning. Her penchant for internal rhyme produces the meaningless: ‘Misers mise and compromise’ (‘Wretched Wilbur’). Misfiring poeticism leads to archaism: ‘the bridge which distraught us’ (‘Late November’ - OED has ‘distraught’ as an obsolete past tense of ‘distract’, meaning ‘pulled apart’). And malapropism is an ever-present danger when metrical considerations are uppermost: ‘To you I’ve purposefully never been cruel’, she writes in ‘Friends’, where the sense demands ‘purposely’ (i.e. on purpose). Of course, the advantage for the singer-songwriter is that she can use her authorial presence to neutralise such criticisms, to the point where they no longer seem to matter.

5 Singer-songwriter

1971 was a good year for a woman to launch herself as a singer-songwriter. Highlights of that year included Carole King’s massively successful Tapestry and Joni Mitchell’s most confessional album to date, Blue. Denny’s first solo album appeared in this receptive climate. Although there were fine things on it, there was nothing to match the aggressive piano chords that announce King’s ‘I Feel the Earth Move’ (the first track on Tapestry). Holding Denny back, maybe, was an English reticence (though her own piano style, clearly heard on the solo recordings, was very assertive).10 Holding her back, certainly, was an ambivalence towards going solo. ‘Everyone keeps accusing me of being a solo artist’, she complained (Peacock 1972b). Why should it be an ‘accusation’? To the producer Joe Boyd, who had been trying to persuade her down this path ever since he first saw her in the London folk clubs of the ’sixties, it was her destiny, and he backed his conviction by securing a $40,000 advance on her solo albums from A&M Records in the US (Heylin 2000, p. 117). The answer lies in her complex psychology, which made the exposed position of the singer-songwriter anguishing for her. In the late 1960s, as folk-rock moved from the ideological to the biographical, from politics to introspection, opening up a space for the woman singer-songwriter (Whiteley 2000, p. 75), Denny equivocated over whether to occupy that space.

Much as she admired Joni Mitchell, she could not identify with the confessional nature of Mitchell’s lyrics: ‘I’m not prepared to tell everyone about my private life like Joni Mitchell does… I like to be a bit more elusive than that’ (Denselow 1971). Though Denny set out to write something personal, she concealed her identity behind a set of tropes – mostly carried over from folk song. The modern singer-songwriter tradition, as exemplified by Joni Mitchell, showed that a lyric, though rooted in individual experience and mediated through modern mass communication, could approach the immediacy of folk song, a collective form of expression born within a given community. Denny’s problem was that in seeking to insinuate the received tropes of folk song into the matrix created by the new women songwriters, a matrix ready to contain autobiographical insights, she risked ending up with something that was neither fish nor fowl. Drawing on ballads of the sea especially, she was adept at reanimating stock figures by turning them to metaphorical use. The opening proposition of ‘It’ll Take A Long, Long Time’, for example, ‘Oh, it’s like a storm at sea’, harbours a promise that the song to follow will not be ‘about’ shipwrecked sailors, so much as the turbulence of the emotional life (and her life, in particular) figured through the dramatis personae of folk song. However, when, after the chorus, the lyric drifts into rather tired imagery of ‘rules’ and ‘games’, the momentum of folk song has been lost and the immediacy of first-person narration is never found.

‘I live in a world of my own. Really I do’, she told a BBC interviewer in 1972. The last words were delivered with a peculiar stabbing emphasis. The phrase recurs in the song ‘No End’: ‘In a world of my own, they say, and who can blame them’. It is a world of imaginative retreat:

I’ve always lived in a mansion
On the other side of the moon.
I've always kept a unicorn
And I never sing out of tune ('Solo').

As Reynolds and Press point out (1995, p. 348), Denny belongs to a tradition of ‘unicorn keepers’ that includes Kate Bush and Tori Amos – women adventurers whose escapades take place in the ‘great indoors’: traditionally confined to the domestic realm, ‘girls become gypsies in inner space’. Ann Powers (with scant regard to the girls’ privacy) has advised scholars to study the doodles in their daughters’ notebooks: ‘if they did, they’d find traces of the Brontes and old Norse myths, of drawing-room scandals and lovelorn suicides. Kept inside, women invented a wilderness’.11 Denny’s drawings, as reproduced in the published biography, exactly conform to this pattern. She sketches ethereal beings – tall, long-limbed females, one with an angel’s wings (Heylin 2000, p. 69); another floats, perhaps in the air, or, given the body’s lassitude, more likely on water (p. 26). These astral projections are a rejection of groundedness:

I have this vision of my body flying around a mountain and not wanting to actually land on top of it. Better to detach oneself from it and fly around looking at the mountain from all aspects. Landing on it would be too obvious. (Coleman 1971)

Self-definition is ‘too obvious’. Cornering herself into self-portraiture in another sketch, she finds realism in cartoon style: a naked, jug-eared, overweight figure hacks dementedly at a piano keyboard, with only an incongruous halo to signal her other-worldly inclinations (Heylin 2000, p. 158). Here is the dilemma of the ‘singer-songwriter’: while the songwriter may be intensely private, a secretive custodian of the raw material of her writing, the singer is inevitably a public figure, exposed (if she is is a woman) to the cruelly sexist jibes of a male audience who expect the proverbial ‘voice of an angel’ to issue from the mouth of a ‘porcelain beauty’.

Many noticed the contrast between the apparently extravert, often frivolous, appearance that Denny presented in life and the melancholy, introverted tone of much of her music. This fostered the idea that the music was coming from somewhere deeper, even that it answered a therapeutic need. ‘When I write a song I don’t remember writing it… I’m like a different person in my music’ (BBC interview). That person was so absorbed – or transported – that, in the grip of creativity, she would not even notice Watson, her beloved Airedale, defecating on the carpet (Heylin 2000, p. 226). We know that she had to be on her own when writing, needing to be ‘quite secretive’ (Gilbert 1973, p. 23). Yet, for this intensely gregarious woman, being on her own was always a severe test of her equilibrium:

It’s like a vicious circle being on my own. I tend to think of sad things and so I write songs that make me feel even sadder. I sit down and I write something and it moves me to tears almost […] I don’t want to write miserable songs. (Anon 1977)

Miranda Ward comments on Denny’s ‘100 per cent emotional recall’ (Heylin 2000, p. 47). A troubling incident from years before could be raised in conversation and within no time ‘she was as upset as when it first happened’. Something similar is occurring in the songs: their intensely personal contents, their jealously guarded ‘meanings’, are re-enacted at each performance of the song. ‘Late November’ illustrates the process. It ends, as we have seen, with a profusion of baffling surreal imagery (the ‘mercury sea’, the ‘phosphorus sand’, etc) rooted in a worrying dream that Denny had in February 1969 and recorded at great length in her notebook. This same dream contained an apparent premonition of the road accident in May 1969 which cost the lives of Fairport’s original drummer and Richard Thompson’s then girlfriend and might have ended her own, had she not accepted a lift from her boyfriend (Heylin 2000, pp. 128, 96). By all accounts, she found solo appearances draining - not only did they highlight her many insecurities; behind the opaque imagery of her lyrics she was re-living whatever had gone into their making.

As her repertoire narrowed in the course of the 1970s to her own material (leavened by one or two covers of Dylan and Richard Thompson songs), so the emotional investment she required from herself in concert seemed to grow. When Al Stewart caught her solo show at the Howff, Camden Town, in September 1973, he was surprised to find her ‘totally paranoid about going out and singing’, something he had never noticed in her Fairport days (Judd 2002, p. 163). These pressures were alleviated, or worsened, by alcohol and drug use. Linda Thompson recalls seeing her after her final London show in 1977, with ‘blotches all over her face. She looked fifty’ (Heylin 2000, p. 230 – she was actually thirty at the time). If one asks why most cover versions of Denny’s songs are so unsatisfactory, the reason must be that they are never delivered with the authority that comes from authorship. In life she adopted an exposed position, presenting sometimes difficult material which was never going to propel her into the pop charts. It is impossible to write about the songwriter without at the same time writing about the singer, since one function of the songwriting was to create an ideal repertoire for her voice - with the concomitant danger that the music ran ahead of the lyrics. Yet in interviews she insisted that words, for her, were the most important part of a song (Coleman 1971; Peacock 1972a). Despite their occasional ineptitude, the lapses into schoolgirl versifying, the folksy archness, Denny’s songs - in her own performances of them - are always compelling communicative acts, expressive of consistent preoccupations and a force of personality that still sweeps the listener off his or her feet. Truly, as she wrote in ‘The Lady’, ‘she had a silver tongue’.

6 Notes

Aknowledgements

All material from Denny’s private papers is copyright the estate of Sandy Denny and reproduced with permission. Special thanks to Elizabeth Hurtt-Lucas, Pamela Hurtt, Miranda Ward and Pamela Murray Winters.

Endnotes

1. Information courtesy of David Mercer and Geoff Sullivan.

2. Cf. Ashley Hutchings: ‘I slept with her once, but that was for comfort. That wasn’t for sexual reasons’ (quoted in Hinton and Wall 2002, p. 71).

3. However unwittingly, the compilers of the Fledg’ling collection of Denny’s work, A Boxful of Treasures, showed singular insight by incorporating into the cover art some of Tenniel’s illustrations to Alice in Wonderland. Returning to Carroll’s masterpiece with Denny in mind, it is chilling to come upon Alice’s comment as she plunges down the well: ‘"Well!" thought Alice to herself. "After such a fall as this I shall think nothing of tumbling down stairs!"’ (Carroll 1971, p. 13).

4. Information courtesy of Steve Shutt. I wonder whether her folk inheritance may also be in play here. Celtic legend assigns significance to borderlands – the boundaries between night and day and between the seasons. In Celtic religion the festival of Samhain, marking the end of summer and the start of winter, was celebrated on 1 November (i.e. All Saints’ Day in the Christian calendar, ‘after Halloween’ in Denny’s language). It was a period considered outside or suspended from time, a time of ‘immense spiritual energy’, when 'the worlds of life and death were inextricably intertwined' (Green 1992, pp. 185-6).

5. Gina Glazer recalls sitting in a café with Denny when a ‘cutesy-poo in her mini-skirt walked by’ (quoted in Winters). Denny’s comment – ‘If I looked like that and sang the way I do, I’d be famous’ – sums up the contradictions in her personality: insecurity about her appearance, kept at bay by finding a deep reassurance in her music, both emotions combined with a ‘success neurosis’ (her phrase, Nightingale 1971) which may be hard to understand in today’s celebrity-obsessed culture – wanting enough of it to achieve her musical ambitions but not so much that she cannot go into a café unrecognised.

6. This knowledge is not as common as Linda Thompson implies. Although Kingsley Abbott, a confidant of the young Fairporters, recalled that ‘she obviously was very keen on Richard initially’ (Hinton and Wall 2002, p. 70), the claim was not repeated by Pam Winters’ other interviewees, and Miranda Ward is sceptical, pointing to her friend’s preference for ‘older men’. Another conundrum is Richard Thompson’s song ‘That’s All, Amen, Close the Door’ (on Mock Tudor, 1999), a lyric strewn with ambiguous references to Denny, which could be read as a very belated reply to ‘Nothing More’ (‘Please don’t ask for more / […] Was I in love? / In love enough to know’), although its primary meaning seems to be that, since ‘she gave as much / As she had to give’, we, her audience, should ask for nothing more.

7. Information courtesy of Pete Townshend.

8. This is one of the Hebrew proverbs (‘Adagia hebraica’) collected by Ray (1678, pp. 408-9). In the original it reads ‘Thy secret is thy prisoner’, etc.; Ray also had several sentences of commentary following the one she quotes (‘We ought to be as careful’, etc.). Obviously she must have encountered these lines in some modern source - possibly a dictionary of quotations, as various other references to ‘secrets’ and ‘secrecy’ are recorded on the same sheet. In ‘The King and Queen of England’ she pursues the idea that music holds secrets under lock and key: ‘Every note of each song brings a vision / Of love and of pain back to me. / Like a captive I’ve locked in a prison / And whose liberty rests upon me’.

9. Cecil Sharp wrote in 1907: ‘So far as I am aware, no English collector has yet found a folk tune in the lydian mode. […] The English folk singer, to judge by his tunes, is very sensitive to the harsh effect of the tritone, which, of course, is the characteristic interval of the lydian mode’ (Sharp 1965, pp. 68-9).

10. There was a technical consideration here as well, as she told Rolling Stone magazine: ‘I’ve gotten better as a pianist just through having played. At first, I couldn’t play and sing at the same time. It took me a long time to learn to do it. It was so alien. I was trained to play classical pieces, and I simply could not coordinate the parts at first’ (Moore 1973).

11. Ann Powers, Village Voice, 12 May 1992, quoted in Reynolds and Press 1995, p. 348. Christine Pegg, then married to Fairport’s long-serving bass player, was also struck by Denny’s other-worldliness: ‘she had an incredible imagination and lived in a slightly different world to the rest of us’ (Irvin 1998, p. 54).

7 Bibliography

Books and articles

Anon. 1977. ‘Making waves: Sandy Denny’, Melody Maker, 16 July, p. 14

Carroll, Lewis. 1971. Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass, London: Macmillan [first published 1865 and 1872]

Coleman, Ray. 1971. ‘Why Sandy wants to fly’, Melody Maker, 15 May, p. 13

Dallas, Karl. 1970. ‘Fotheringay, the sea, and Sandy Denny’, Melody Maker, 27 June, p. 15

Denselow, Robin. 1971. ‘Sandy solo star’, The Guardian, 10 September, p. 10

Gilbert, Jerry. 1973. ‘Sandy Denny in the Talk-In’, Sounds, 8 September, pp. 18, 23

Green, Miranda J. 1992. Dictionary of Celtic Myth and Legend, London: Thames and Hudson 

Greig, Charlotte. 1997. ‘Female identity and the woman songwriter’, in Sexing the Groove: Popular Music and Gender, ed. S. Whiteley, pp. 168-77, London: Routledge

___. 2004. ‘The lost girl’, The Word, November, p. 112 [review of A Boxful of Treasures]

Heylin, Clinton. 2000. No More Sad Refrains: The Life and Times of Sandy Denny, London: Helter Skelter 

Hinton, Brian and Geoff Wall. 2002. The Guv’nor and the Rise of Folk Rock 1945-1973. Ashley Hutchings: The Authorised Biography, London: Helter Skelter

Humphries, Patrick. 1997. Nick Drake: The Biography, London: Pimlico

___. 2003. ‘The singing Madonna with an angel’s voice’, Sunday Express, 20 April, pp. 54-5

Irvin, Jim. 1998. ‘Angel of Avalon’, Mojo, June, pp. 42-59 [reprinted with revisions in A Boxful of Treasures]

Irwin, Colin. 1977. ‘Sandy fights back’, Melody Maker, 12 November, p. 46

___. 1978. ‘Sandy, first lady of folk-rock’, Melody Maker, 6 May, p. 4

James, Clive. 1974. ‘In a lonely moment’, Let It Rock, March, pp. 24-5

Judd, Neville. 2002. Al Stewart: The True Life Adventures of a Folk Rock Troubadour, London: Helter Skelter

Laing, Dave, Karl Dallas, Robin Denselow and Robert Shelton. 1975. The Electric Muse: The Story of Folk into Rock, London: Methuen

MacDonald, Ian. 2003. ‘Exiled from Heaven: the unheard message of Nick Drake’ in The People’s Music, London: Pimlico, pp. 210-57

Moore, Steve. 1973. ‘Sandy Denny: sympathy for the solo artist’, Rolling Stone, 21 June, p. 14

Nightingale, Anne. 1971. ‘Sandy Denny: "I am so frightened of success"’, Petticoat, 20 February, n.p.

Peacock, Steve. 1972a. ‘London horrors for Sandy’, Sounds, 8 January, p. 5

___. 1972b. ‘Sandy quietly getting together’, Sounds, 22 April, p. 11

Ray, John. 1678. A collection of English proverbs digested into a convenient method for the speedy finding any one upon occasion… The second edition enlarged by the addition of many hundred English, and and an appendix of Hebrew proverbs, with annotations and parallels, Cambridge: W. Morden

Reynolds, Simon and Joy Press. 1995. The Sex Revolts: Gender, Rebellion and Rock’n’Roll, London: Serpent’s Tail

Sharp, Cecil. 1965. English Folk Song: Some Conclusions, 4th rev ed prepared by Maud Karpeles, London: Mercury [first published 1907] 

Shipston, Roy. 1970. ‘One of the best!’ Disc and Music Echo, 20 June, p. 15 [review of Fotheringay] 

Storr, Anthony. 1989. Freud (Past Masters), Oxford: Oxford University Press

Whiteley, Sheila. 2000. Women and Popular Music: Sexuality, Identity and Subjectivity, London: Routledge

Wilson, Tony. 1968. ‘It’s easy to see the change in Sandy’, Melody Maker, 27 July, p. 11

Winters, Pamela Murray. (1999?) Unpublished biography of Sandy Denny. MS


Off-air and unofficial recordings

Fotheringay in concert, BBC radio broadcast, 2 April 1970

Sandy Denny and The Happy Blunderers, live at Lincoln Festival, 24 July 1971 [audience bootleg recording] 

Interview with Sandy Denny, ‘Tomorrow’s People’, BBC World Service broadcast, 23 April 1972



Select discography

The Bunch, Rock On. Island. ILPS 9189. 1972

Sandy Denny, The North Star Grassman and the Ravens. Island. ILPS 9165. 1971

___, Sandy. Island. ILPS 9207. 1972

___, Like An Old Fashioned Waltz. Island. ILPS 9258. 1973

___, Rendezvous. Island. ILPS 9433. 1977

___, Gold Dust: Live at the Royalty. Island. IMCD 252. 1998

___, A Boxful of Treasures. Fledg’ling. NEST 5002. 2004

___, The Attic Tracks Volume 3: First and Last Tracks. Limited edition cassette. Australian Friends of Fairport Convention. FOFC 5. n.d.

Fairport Convention, What We Did On Our Holidays. Island. ILPS 9092. 1969

___, Unhalfbricking. Island. ILPS 9102. 1969

___, Liege and Lief. Island. ILPS 9115. 1969

___, Rising for the Moon. Island. ILPS 9313. 1975 

Fotheringay, Fotheringay. Island. ILPS 9125. 1970

Jackson C Frank, Jackson C Frank. Columbia. 33SX 1788. 1965

Theo Johnson and others, Hootenanny at The Barge. Summit. ATL 4150. 1965

Richard Thompson, Henry the Human Fly. Island. ILPS 9197. 1972

___, Mock Tudor. Capitol. 7243 4 98860 2 5. 1999



Web sources

www.sandydenny.co.uk

www.myspace.com/sandydenny

By far the most comprehensive online resource for information about Sandy Denny (http://www.informatik.uni-hamburg.de/~zierke/sandy.denny) was maintained by Reinhard Zierke of the University of Hamburg. This site has now been taken down, sadly, but may still be retrievable through internet archives such as the Wayback Machine.

8 Postscript 2006

This article was written in early 2005. The study of popular music, like every other branch of human knowledge, has now been sucked into the academy, and the article was designed for one of the new breed of academic journals serving this constituency – hence its rather elevated tone. It found no favour there: I was told I was trying to please too many people and had ended up by pleasing none. Since then I've learned that it did please a number of people whose opinions count for more than those of career-track academics with their eye on the next ‘Research Assessment Exercise’. In particular, after my article had appeared briefly on a Richard Thompson fansite, I was encouraged by very warm responses from Joe Boyd - Denny’s producer on the early Fairport and Fotheringay albums - and from Robin Frederick - the American singer-songwriter and friend in the ’sixties to Nick Drake and John Martyn, who drew my attention to parallels with Drake that had not occurred to me.

The last year has also brought some important additions to the bibliography. First among them must be Joe Boyd’s compellingly readable autobiography, White Bicycles: Making Music in the 1960s (which, interestingly, also lingers over the Drake-Denny comparison). Britta Sweers’ study Electric Folk: The Changing Face of English Traditional Music offers what I believe to be the first technical analysis of Denny’s vocal technique, showing how her use of ornament, syncopation and speech rhythm augmented the musical effect while still supporting the sung text. Also for musicians, there was the long-anticipated appearance of Maartin Allcock's Complete Sandy Denny Songbook. John Harris, the hip young gunslinger of today’s rock journalism, published a lengthy - primarily biographical - piece in The Guardian when her solo albums were re-released by Universal-Island last year. On TV the BBC’s Folk Britannia series included a rare interview with Anne Briggs in which she spoke with undimmed admiration about her old friend. And, most recently, a two-hour DVD documentary has appeared, Sandy Denny Under Review – somewhat dry, heavy on talk, light on music, perhaps a tad reverential towards someone whose speaking voice, as her friends recall, was always on the edge of laughter, but evidence that interest is rising ahead of two upcoming dates in the calendar: the thirtieth anniversary of her death (April 2008) and, before that, what would have been her sixtieth birthday (January 2007). Visitors to MySpace and other outposts of the ‘blogosphere’ will also be heartened to discover how many young people are using these new media to record their enthusiasm for a musician who died before they were born.

Hindsight provokes a host of afterthoughts. There is a book to be written about Denny’s art. Whether by me, or by one of those whey-faced professors, I cannot predict. Perhaps the keenest insights can only come from those who knew her best, like Ralph McTell:

I first met Sandy in Les Cousins in the 1960s. She could be difficult. So many facets of her personality were in conflict with the inner one that emerged through her songs. She could be one of the boys on the surface, yet carry the ache of the artist’s responsibility just underneath. At her best, she was heartbreakingly beautiful, her smoky, sexy voice cracking in just the right place to touch the emotional heart of the song. At her worst, she stretched the patience of those who loved her to despair. Those who are really honest would not have been surprised that she died so young, possibly before her best work, but the tragedy of losing her leaves a gap that will never be filled. I still cannot listen to a whole album of hers all the way through. (Quoted in Chris Hockenhull, Streets of London: The Official Biography of Ralph McTell, 1997, pp96-7)

by Philip M Ward 2005/6

The Best Of Sandy Denny 10 ( 1996 )
Listen Listen / Lady / One Way Donkey Ride / It'll Take A Long Time / Farewell Farewell / Tam Lin / Pond In The Stream / Late November / Solo / The Sea / Banks Of The Nile / Next Time Around / For Shame Of Doing Wrong / Stranger To Himself / I'm A Dreamer / Who Knows Where The Time Goes

A baby will respond to it's mothers voice and instinctively know from the very first second of it's life where it belongs. Who can explain why a record, a recording of music and human voice - can make you feel the same way? Years pass, the usual excitements and disappointments of life passes. Years flow by, a water flowing under a bridge - always passing by. The sky is blue, the sky is grey, the sky is rose tinted - and everything in life is led this way. Everyone else is moving in directions all around at angles. You understand that something is missing, that something out there can speak to you, that you don't even comprehend or imagine. It could be a beautiful girl ( or guy ) whom you are immediately attracted to, for no apparent reason. It could be their eyes. It could be their presence. It could be something less tangible. It may not even be something real. Responding to the singing voice of someone long dead - is a peculiar thing. Sandy Denny's voice speaks to me. It caresses me, hugs and loves my very soul.

I can't even remember the first time, or why. I'm fairly sure I bought this without having heard a single note of any of her records. I cannot remember why I bought this in the first place. I guess I’d read something about her that attracted me. The very song that especially drew me in, appears last of all. So, upon first listening, I would have sat through the entire proceeding songs - still willing myself onwards, still intrigued. 'Who Knows Where The Time Goes' is my very being and soul. Her voice, so tender - so fragile and loving. So pure. It pleads, it quivers. It's so very English and I grew up in a very English countryside fashion. She wore terribly unfashionable dresses and clothes. She looked the epitome of the traditional English house-wife. She wasn't. She loved a drink, she was loud and unsubtle. She sang like an angel. Everyone has an angel. Some ideal of the person for them. The person for me - the ideal, which never exists - would sing like Sandy Denny. 'Farewell, Farewell' - a Fairport Convention tune beautifully played by Richard Thompson showcases Sandy’s voice especially well. In all of it's purity and loving, pleading and longing. 'Listen, Listen' which opens this compilation. She sounds so strong and apart. She sounds like everything I’ve ever wanted. 'The Sea', 'Solo'. The vocals on those songs in particular are powerfully strong and clear.

I'm a tragic soppy romantic who has lost in both love and life. The very fact and existence of music keeps me plugging away. I’ve never met anybody else who likes Sandy Denny. Never found anybody else to convert to her voice. She's my secret, my treasure. The knowledge she is highly loved and respected pleases me enormously. Some day I’ll meet a fellow Sandy Denny fan and we can talk about her music over a pint or two. Well, maybe - but perhaps not. I can dream. I can feel loved all over again in my time of dying. I can be with Sandy's voice and nothing else will matter in the entire world.

Readers Comments

STEPHANIE MARCOU STEPHANIEMARCOU@aol.com

I came across Sandy Denny by chance after hearing her sing who knows where the time goes in the film "crush", i was bowled over by the purity of her voice, it did remind me a little of Joan Baez, I went and bought the anthology the double album and have been completely entranced. I am a fan of classical singing particulrly sopranos and all the great singers sing in that emotional, evocative way, they are almost crying when they sing and this is what Sandy Denny does, I recommend you by an album by Claudio Muzio in the great singers series or just about anything by Maria Callas if it not too alien a sound to you. Anyway I can't wait to convert some of my friends to her Sandy Denny is definetely one of the greats.

Simon Ford simon@ford5484.freeserve.co.uk

In words you've captured the voice perfectly. I was lent Liege & Lief by a friend in work. I can't belive at 39 yrs of age an album (from a genre of music I have had no real previous experience of) can have such a profound effect. Much of that has to do with a voice from a lady I'd never heard of. I'm a sensible lad but I've fallen in love. Pure, romantic, essentially English.

Rob mill406@aol.com

I have burned CDRs with Sandy's music and given them to three people because, (this may sound arrogant) I hate to think what they are missing.I would have never discovered her, but I purchased a book by the VH1 channel about tragic rock star deaths. The article compared her to Janis Joplin and I thought they meant her musical style and I was looking for folk music to soothe my troubled soul not a blues shouter.I eventually asked the owner of a music store about her and he said her music was folk.The best music site on the web I have seen is allmusic.com (aol), it has a good biography on almost every musician from every style of music. The site is also good at rating the albums of artists and tells how the album was made ect.It said Sandy Denny is the best female singer songwriter England has ever produced.This got me thinking (O.K. I think regularly) rather, pondering. I am 48 years of age and of all the thousands of people I have come accross (musicians, doctors, lawyers, m! illionaires ect) I have never heard the name Sandy Denny come from their lips. I bought the Sandy Denny box set Who Knows Where The Time Goes from a C.D. store and the owner wanted to meet me. He said "finally someone with the intelligence not to buy a Britney Spears C.D." and the box set had been on the shelves a long time. I thimk music should be a passion above criticism and to each his own, but I like to compare Sandy's talent to Rap Stars talent. Almost all Rap stars cannot play a musical instrument, cannot write a song, and have weak singing voices so how can they be called musicians? How can anyone who cannot hit a baseball, throw a baseball, or catch a baseball be called a baseball player? The reason many female singers prance around in skimpy outfits is to distract the audience from the fact they have no musical talent. As my favorite Libertarian writer says:" Rap,and other modern popular music has been around long enough that many young people simply do not recogni! ze good music" I think he is on to someting I do not want. Take care. (but give it back I need it) P.S. In a television interview Billy Joel said Rap music cannot be considered music because it has no melody.

Disa Bjarney disabjarney@torg.is

I totally agree with you! Sandy Denny is a treasure! A treasure much more valuable than gold. It is a pity that her music is not mainstream, but maybe it is not supposed to be. I guess Sandy finds her way to those who want to listen, listen.....

bassplayeredd eddie123zeppelin@hotmail.com

I know her from when she sings on the Led Zeppelin song "the battle of evermore" that happens to be one of the few Zeppelin songs i don't like but she has a nice voice.

david walsh davidxwalsh@hotmail.com

back in 1977 i was going out with a girl and in her house one evening i discovered the Fairport Convention Unhalfbricking album in her sisters collection of lp's. I was immediately taken with the voice of Sandy Denny and it has haunted me ever since, i sometimes even attempt to sing farewell or crazy mAN michael in public, her tragic death was a huge loss, I still listen to her music and that of fairport convention, the girl who introduced me to them is long gone

bzribee@yahoo.com

I am so glad to find your site, and looking forward to listening to some of your top 100. When I was in Jr. high in Miami, Fl, I had a friend in Montreal who decided to educate me musically. Among the many wonderful cassette tapes he sent me, I still have Fairport Convention, Fotheringay and many others. Sandy's singing has always stayed with me and "Who Knows..." is one of the earliest songs I learned to play on guitar. Now I am finding myself playing music again with new friends and performing informally at a family like open mic in Southern Calif. I've gone back to all those old tapes (soon to be replaced by CDs) to re-learn these old favorites. There are many of us fans out there--we just didn't konw anyone was looking for us. If you're ever in S. CA, let's have that pint. Your site is great. Thanks.

Neil Oakley npoakley@hotmail.com

I'm also a recent convert to Sandy Denny, after reading something about her in a weekend magazine. I'd never really considered listening to Fairport Convention or heard of Sandy, so I bought Unhalfbricking and What We Did On Our Holidays. I agree completely with Adrian - I seem to have fallen in love with the voice of a woman who died years ago, but who seems to express so much beauty, gentility, power and as has been said, 'Englishness'. I've never heard anything like her, and I can't quite understand why I've not been listening to her for years. I'm also the only person I know that likes/knows of her, and I'm very tempted to keep it that way: she's my beautiful, fascinating secret.

Ray ok2reply@tiscali.co.uk

I was profoundly moved by Sandy's music when I was a teenager in the 60s but since then have not bought any back catalogue. A couple of month's ago I started to read what I could on the net and was strangely drawn again almost like an ache for a lost love. I leave roses at her grave when I can but I live in the Midlands and she's in London. I recently played and sang in a pub and everyone was chatting until I played Who Knows Where The Time Goes - it was new to most (being younger than me) but they all stopped talking and listened. I told her on my last visit. This all sounds very fey and I am the most pragmatic and skeptical of guys but she was (and perhaps is) very precious and clearly a dearly missed by many another.

mflanagan marthaflanagan@hotmail.com

Sandy Denny is so very far from unknown by living musicians (sorry I cannot spell) and listeners. She is even name checked in a Spice Girls song as one of The Legends Built To Last (granted the Girls probably didn't write a lyric). I recall hearing,hmm, was it Emmylou Harris, or someone like that (i,e, good, famous, talented, and sensible) saying that she'd had little interest in Folk music, growing in Texas, until she heard "Who Knows Where the Time Goes" on the radio. And in case that seems too old a story...have a look at Emiliana Torrini's WONDERFUL Fisherman's Woman, she has covered Next Time Around. It isn't the best track on the album, but if that Icelandic/Italian/UK based wonder is paying homage, you can bet the world of real musicians still know. I'd recommend that album to any S Denny fans.

Ann annhwilliams@yahoo.com

I've always loved Sandy Denny's voice. I was a student in Cambridge, England, in the early 70s and was lucky enough to attend a couple of concerts with Sandy. I've updated my old vinyls with CDs, of both her stuff and Fairport Convention. In fact I stumbled across your site because I was listening to Story of FC on my computer as I work on a rainy Saturday afternoon in Hong Kong. "Fotheringay" always, always gets to me - it never fails to brings tears to my eyes. Googling "Fotheringay" I came across your site, and I'm glad I did, because you write very eloquently about her. Sandy lives on in all of us who love her work!

Trevor teiver1@yahoo.co.uk

Thanks for the great review of Sandy!! I am also a big fan after getting her boxset (boxful of trasures) last year. Her songs are errie its like I have heard them before in a different life. Reyardine, Matty Groves, The Sea, Autospy are just some of my favourites. What a singer!

paledruid paledruid@yahoo.com

I first became aware of her voice on Led Zep's 4th album. I fell in love with her voice, immediately. The purity and passion that burns from her vocal chords makes me shiver every time I hear it. Sandy Denny's voice has always made me feel that I wish had met this very special person. I am listening to her while I write this; her voice seems to comfort me and scare me at the same time. She could start quietly like a mother's whisper, then swell into a summer storm. It will surprise me if I ever hear a voice that has a similar effect on me.

Peter Braybrook peter.braybrook@virgin.net

I first heard her in 1968. You never lose that first love of a voice such as hers.It is timeless. While a university student I spent a lot of time listening to folk music and trying to emulate it. My wife (my girlfriend/fiancee then) has a pure voice but never gets near the emotion of Sandy's clear warbling. Beauty and emotion spill out of the speakers. We all miss Sandy and wish once more we could hear her live. When I reach heaven and I am handed a violin to play perfectly, I hope that she will join us in a chorus or two! "We'll meet on the ledge."

john G johnnygnote@hotmail.com

I first heard Sandy on the Fotheringay Album in 1971. I was floored by the voice of this very tiney but awsome woman. Needless to say I became quite enamoured with her, You might say I still have a crush on her. Over the years I grabed every album by Sandy I could find and was blown away when I found her singing on Battle Of Evermore with Zeppelin. Wen I heard of her passing I went in to mourning for almost 2 years and a deppresion that lasted a bit longer. Most of my friends couldn't understand what I did. Being a musician, songwriter and singer, I knew that the world had lost one of the greatest artists we will ever know. Sandy lives on in my heart and I'm sure in the hearts of many others. She, like so many others we have lost, can never be replaced. People may like or dislike her music. BUT!!! in my opinion her singing, her writing, her very persona was and is a blessing on this Earth!!!

Damien Aulsberry emilyandsean@eircom.net

Your review was amazing never hav i read such a perfect take on a person. you describe sandy denny to a tee. i have been listening to her for 20 years and she just blows my mind everytime i hear her voice. I listen to quite a bit of folk music mainly irish but i have always had a love for sandy and fairport. its not just music its a way of life. i met the fairport line up as it was then in 1987 and they have kept in contact ever since through their newsletter.Im from Kildare and in the town of Kilcullen in particular Fairport and Sandy are Gods.

Robert faial47@gmail.com

My first encounter with Sandy Denny came from hearing Judy Collins sing 'Who Knows Where the Time Goes?" On her 1968 album of the same title. I thought it was not only the best song I had ever heard Judy Collins sing, but also one of the most beautiful songs I'd ever heard. A check of the liner notes revealed it had been written by Sandy Denny. I haunted record stores for 2 years and everywhere I went (in the US) no one had ever heard of Sandy Denny, nor were there any listings of recordings under her name. I happened one day into a store called "Pooh-Bah Records" in Pasadena, lamenting to the owner that I had been searching for a long time to find Sandy Denny records. He said " She's in a band, you know. It's called fairport Convention. I have a record that they released last year, no one's bought it yet. he pulled out a dusty copy of Liege & Lief. I bought it, took it home, and played it for 4 days straight! From that moment on, I have bought every recording of Strawbs, Fa! irport, Fotheringay, Led Zepplin, solo albums and samplers that contain her magical voice.Yes, I bought the book, too. I hav also purchased every Fairport album as well as solo efforts by Fairport members past & present. As Richard Thompson said on one of the Fairport videos, " Sandy was a one-off" There never has been, nor will there ever be anothe Sandy Denny. However, she will live forever in the hearts and minds of those who knew her.

Fotheringay 8½ ( 1970 )

Nothing More / The Sea / The Ballad of Ned Kelly / Winter Winds / Peace in the End / The Way I Feel / The Pond and the Stream / Too Much of Nothing / Banks of the Nile /

A band actually, rather than a solo release as such, although lack of communication and confusion on the part of producer Joe Boyd led to Sandy splitting the group in an attempt to keep Joe Boyd in England. Sandy Denny and Trevor Lucas. Jerry Donahue and a rhythm section of Pat Donaldson on bass and Gerry Conway on drums. Post Sandy of course, Fairport released the eccentric in places 'lads' album, 'Full House'. Sandy forms Fotheringay, a very harmonious, tasteful and classy band. Exceptional players yet well within the confines of musical acceptibility. Indeed, the most common critiscm of this era of Sandy's all too brief career is that Fotheringay were too harmonius a bunch, hence the album lacking some of the fire and tension that produced Sandy's best work with Fairport. Oh, only one of the songs here, 'Banks In The Nile' is traditional. There's no fiddle. The sound is more akin to then contemporary singer/songwriter than folk-rock. Sandy contributes a number of piano based tunes, Trevor Lucas is responsible for penning 'The Ballad Of Ned Kelly' and co-pens 'Peace In The End' with Sandy. He also leads the band through their renditions of Dylan's 'Too Much Of Nothing' and Gordon Lightfoot's 'The Way I Feel'. So, i'll ignore the Sandy penned tunes for a moment and concentrate on what else is contained within the CD. By far the weakest cut on the album is Trevor's 'The Ballad Of Ned Kelly', sitting uneasily as it does alongside the superior Sandy material. He does better with other peoples songs, 'The Way I Feel' for instance featuring a Lucas lead vocal and sterling, storming guitar work that really does make it a highlight of the entire LP set. The Dylan cover is very much in Fairport mode I suppose, yet with such competition in the Dylan covers genre, fails to quite distinguish itself. The Denny co-penned hippy singalong of 'Peace In The End' also sports a Lucas lead vocal and is quite enjoyable. What such Lucas led material adds upto is something solid, yet without moments of sheer magic. Fortunately for Fotheringay as a band, Sandy had a few self-penned aces up her sleeve.

I love the way Sandy's songs seem to occupy their own worlds and sense of time. 'The Pond And The Stream' is vague story-telling, strong impressionism and leaves much to the imagination. The emotion present in the voice lends added emotions, the result is as the singer intended. Certain words and phrases are sung in such a way as to make them focus, such as bold type on a page. The medieval guitar passages are all too fit for a song that's as timeless as it's creators voice. 'Winter Winds' is another medieval sounding piece akin to a new 'Fotheringay' the song, appropriately enough. 'Banks Of The Nile' is pure excersize in Sandy as a singer, and as such is clearly great. 'The Sea' and 'Nothing More' are both among the finest Denny compositions. Her voice is still at full strength, possibly the best it ever was, in 1970. Fotheringay benefitted, but nobody was under any illustions what the main attraction was. Still, half of the best solo Sandy ever and half of a decent and competent folk/country/rock band is still pretty good. As such, this falls just shy of classic yet Sandy's song are enough.

Readers Comments

Simon Patten qwhizzer@yahoo.co.uk

By and large I agree with your comments in respect of the above album although I'm inclined to think that your admiration (entirely deserved) for Sandy's contribution means you are a bit unfair to Trevor Lucas. My own view for what it's worth is that his contributions stand up pretty well in the context of this particular album and that he and Sandy were probably at their happiest as a couple at this time. This may in turn have contributed to her own performance on the album which, I quite agree shows off her voice and songwriting at its very best. This was the band's first album and it all came apart before they could produce a second although some of the material did end up on Sandy's solo albums. What a shame they didn't stay together! Still this is one of my all-time favourite albums.

North Star Grassman & The Ravens 8 ( 1971 )

Late November / Blackwaterside / The Sea Captain / Down In The Flood / John The Gun / Next Time Around / The Optimist / Let's Jump The Broomstick / Wretched Wilbur / The North Star Grassman / Crazy Lady Blues

Richard Thompson co-produced this album with Sandy and engineer John Wood. Everybody wanted a true Thompson/Denny collaboration, sadly, 'North Star Grassman' wasn't to be the kind of collaboration we wanted. Richard's guitar parts are always technically impressive and 'right', yet creatively, he's in the shadows here, hiding behind Sandy. Sandy plays piano and presumably wrote the majority of these songs on piano. Richard plays the majority of the lead guitar parts. The rhythm section are far too polite and nobody seems to want to take the lead. Sandy should have been taking the lead, of course. Her songs feature, eight of the eleven songs are Denny compositions. Yet, there is no clear artistic direction and everybody merely seems to be playing their own parts. Richard's parts often sit behind Sandy's piano melodies, making them rather redundant. Sandy, following the break-up of Fotheringay, it could be said, wasn't at her most confident here. Having said all of this, of course, there are still some terrific compositions and performances present.

The opening tune 'Late November' works, Richard Thompson plays a distinctive melody seperate to Sandy's Piano which dominates. Good lyrics and flowing into the traditional 'Blackwaterside' forming a strong album opening. You still wish that Richard would let go though and truly play creatively. He seems too in awe of Sandy throughout the album, always wanting to support her but not wanting to cause any conflict. It wasn't this way in Fairport where every member was seen as equally important. 'Down In The Flood' continues on from Fairport covers of Dylan tunes, yet again, nobody really seems to be holding this cover version together. Excellent Piano playing from Ian Whiterman and lead vocals from Richard Thompson effectively sees Sandy relegated to backing vocalist on a song for her own album! It's just a strange thing the lack of confidence issue she had. Good tune though, good cover, excellent rock n roll Piano parts.

Three guitarists along with violin and a good rhythm section see that 'John The Gun' is one of the highlights here. Sandy sings well of course and but for a slick lack of pace, this is a perfect performance. Fairport in their pomp could have done this Sandy tune better justice, but it's still pretty good as we have it here. Nobody steps on anybody else's toes, that's the problem. Great violin though and a great tune. Still, 'Next Time Around' is a mighty highlight. The strings frame Sandy's voice well, her Piano is always prominent, playing minor key melodies. This tune has a late at night feel and her vocal is very emotionally affecting. Lyrics as poetry, those strings. John Wood, engineer on the Nick Drake albums, sure knew how to record strings. Still, for all the tasteful and well performed songs, the album rarely rises above a mid-tempo stupor. Sandy alone with her voice and songs hold this album together. The excellent title track, for example. Even with the lacklustre energy, it's still a brilliant song. 'Crazy Lady Blues' is great instance of a stellar Sandy song suffering from this albums lack of idenity. The album remains wonderfully listenable though, as most of Sandy's discography does.