Sandy Denny: Reflections on Her Music

By Philip Ward

Twice voted Top British Female Singer by readers of Melody Maker, name-checked in a Kate Bush song, photographed by David Bailey, she is the only guest vocalist ever to appear on a Led Zeppelin album, and was described by Zeppelin’s Robert Plant as ‘my favourite singer out of all the British girls that ever were’. 
For all the accolades, Sandy Denny (1947-1978) remains curiously elusive. Yet, with growing media interest and the reissue of her entire back catalogue, the signs are that Denny’s talent is burning brighter than ever. She emerged in the mid-Sixties while still a teenager, performing on the folk revival scene where she displayed her mastery of traditional singing before moving onto her own compositions and contemporary material. She was a leader of the folk-rock movement, a sound she was instrumental in creating. Whether in her solo recordings or as a member of bands such as the Strawbs, Fotheringay or—most famously—Fairport Convention, her voice speaks to us still in all its resonant purity. In this book, first published in 2011, Philip Ward presents a series of personal ‘reflections’ on her life and work. He fills in details overlooked by her biographers, surveys recent reissues of her recordings and offers the first in-depth analysis of her songwriting. He looks back to the public events marking the thirtieth anniversary of her death and assesses her alongside some of her contemporaries. In the author's words, the book is ‘a series of experiments’ in how to write about the subject. It concludes with a detailed essay arguing the case that, long before Amy Winehouse or Kate Bush, Denny was the first British female ‘singer-songwriter’ of international stature. 
Illustrated throughout, this new ebook edition includes a Postscript reviewing recent developments in her continuing story.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Troubador Publishing Ltd
• Release date: Mar 5, 2019
• ISBN: 9781838598693

Book preview

Sandy Denny, 1967

Copyright © 2011 Philip Ward

Reprinted 2015

Republished as an ebook, 2019, with new Postscript

The moral right of the author has been asserted.

Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of research or private study, or criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, this publication may only be reproduced, stored or transmitted, in any form or by any means, with the prior permission in writing of the publishers, or in the case of reprographic reproduction in accordance with the terms of licences issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside those terms should be sent to the publishers.

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In memory of my parents, who knew where the time went

CONTENTS

Acknowledgements

INTRODUCTION

Reflections

Sites of memory, sites of mourning

LIFE WRITING

Hers

Theo the sailor

Stanhope Mews

Chipstead Street

The fleeting image

SONGS

‘The North Star Grassman And The Ravens’

‘The Sea’

‘Autopsy’

‘Tam Lin’

‘Lord Bateman’

A song list c1966

RECORDINGS

Live At The BBC

Sandy and the Strawbs

The big box

Album covers

CONTEMPORARIES

Bob Dylan

Led Zeppelin

Nick Drake

Shelagh McDonald

ANNIVERSARY YEAR

Cults and anniversaries

April: The Troubadour

September: Fotheringay revived

December: South Bank Centre

A DIGRESSION INTO THEORY

The third way?

SINGER, SONGWRITER

Sandy Denny as singer-songwriter

POSTSCRIPT, 2019

Picture credits

About the author

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Thanks to: Jim Abbott, Joe Boyd, Richard Byrne, Andrew Ceelan, Keith Christmas, Gerry Conway, Linda Fitzgerald-Moore, Robin Frederick, Hans Fried, Geoff Frost, John Holman, Tim Holmes, Michael Hunter, the late Pamela Hurtt, Mark Irons, Van Johnson, Bill MacCormick, David Mercer, Clare Morris, Michael C Morton, Ron Moy, Noel Murphy, No’am Newman, Kate Partridge, Dave Pegg, John Penhallow, Colin Randall, Eddi Reader, John Renbourn, Patrick Rosenkranz, Steve Shutt, David Suff, Geoff Sullivan, Pete Townshend, Miranda Ward, Bill Watters, Pamela Murray Winters, Heather Wood and Reinhard Zierke.

Some of this material first appeared in R2 magazine (formerly Rock’n’Reel) and I owe a big debt to editor Sean McGhee. Once a stalwart of the Cumbrian punk rock scene, he has long been a staunch supporter of Sandy Denny – evidence, if evidence were needed, of the breadth of her appeal. Other sections first appeared as blogs. I have revised and updated only where necessary, hoping to preserve the freshness of my original responses. Whatever failings or errors remain are mine alone.

Special thanks to three friends who have encouraged and fed my interest in this subject: Andrew Batt, Jamie Taylor and Bambi Ballard.

All material from Denny’s private papers is copyright the estate of Sandy Denny and reproduced with permission. Thanks, as ever, to Elizabeth Hurtt-Lucas, keeper of the flame.

In the case of uncredited photographs, every effort has been made to identify the copyright owner.

PW

INTRODUCTION

Good morning, good afternoon

And what have you got to say?

(‘Solo’)

REFLECTIONS

‘She was the perfect British folk voice. Not a trace of vibrato. Pure and easy’ (Pete Townshend)

‘The pre-eminent British folk-rock singer’ (Richie Unterberger)

‘Don’t listen to her! You’ll realise that the rest of us are wasting your time’ (Rachel Unthank)

Name-checked in a Kate Bush song. The only guest vocalist ever to appear on a Led Zeppelin album. Twice voted Top British Female Singer by readers of Melody Maker. Drinking buddy of Keith Moon and John Bonham and a regular at the Colony Club in Soho. Friend to the Laurel Canyon set and Mama Cass. More than a friend, according to some accounts, of Frank Zappa. Photographed by David Bailey, Anton Corbijn and Keith Morris. Once shared a stage with Peter Sellers. Has a variety of day-lily named after her…

For all the accolades and associations, the British singer-songwriter Sandy Denny (1947-1978) remains curiously elusive. She emerged in the mid-Sixties while still a teenager, performing on the folk revival scene where she displayed her mastery of traditional singing before moving onto her own compositions and contemporary material. She was a leader of the folk-rock movement, a sound she was instrumental in creating. Whether in her solo recordings or as a member of bands such as the Strawbs, Fotheringay or – most famously – Fairport Convention, whether as singer or writer, her voice speaks to us still with uncanny urgency. But why? What is it telling us?

In 2006 Joanna Newsom, darling of the ‘nu-folk’ movement, appeared on NPR’s online music show All Songs Considered. As guest DJ she discussed her music with host Bob Boilen and played some favourite tracks. Intrigued as I am by her elfin stage presence and exotic songwriting, I’m afraid I can never get past the Lisa-Simpson vocals. In short, la Newsom doesn’t do it for me. But her list of influences was something else. In a playlist entirely in thrall to her parents’ generation she chose music by Van Dyke Parks, Randy Newman, Lindsey Buckingham… and Sandy Denny. I almost began to warm to the garrulous young Californian when I heard what she heard in ‘Next Time Around’:

Relating to what you just pointed out – the tone-shifting – that’s one thing I would relate to Sandy Denny and Randy Newman specifically. But in the case of Sandy Denny I think one of her incredible gifts was as just an unbelievable sort of melodist. Like, I don’t think there are very many people making music who have ever been like this or who ever will be like this. It’s almost like, I don’t know, Paul McCartney or something like that – like, her sense of melody and sort of the interval separating each progressive note of her melody is so incredibly deliberate. It’s just like carving out some sculpture or something. I mean, it manages to feel fluid and intuitive but at the same time from, like, a compositional perspective or whatever, it’s just unbelievably ambitious and interesting and just reaches such incredible heights. And then there’s this sort of bedrock shifting tonality of the piano part in that song – it, like, slays me!

Her analogy with sculpture is spot-on. What Newsom probably doesn’t know is that Denny’s favourite form in her art school days was sculpture. It was one of three unfulfilled early ambitions she confided to Anne Nightingale in 1971:

Deep down inside me I thought I would do something, but maybe every little girl has that. Everybody has huge fantasies. I thought I was going to be this great ballet dancer, and a sculptor, and Edith Cavell… (Petticoat, 20.2.1971)

But Newsom’s comparison with sculpture is apt for another reason. When describing music, we instinctively sidestep into another medium. ‘All art aspires towards the condition of music,’ said Walter Pater, implying music’s place at the pinnacle of a hierarchy. There’s a famous Ronald Searle cartoon showing the aftermath of a music lesson at St Trinian’s. While two rascals giggle in the background, a disgruntled cleaning lady sweeps up piles of discarded crotchets and quavers. The joke is that music has no tangible ‘existence’, yet perforce we talk as if it has.

That’s why there is no settled way to write about music. If such be true of classical music, how much truer it must be of rock and folk, which haven’t been respectable long enough for critical canons to establish themselves. This book, accordingly, is a series of experiments in how to write about popular music, and one artist in particular. Quasi-academic vs bloke-ish/blog-ish… Musicology vs fanzine… Inevitably, there’s a discordance of styles and registers, for which – if it’s held to be disfiguring – my apologies. Inevitably, there will be a lot of sentences beginning with ‘I’. First-person intrusions are an irritant in biography; but this isn’t a biography. Subjectivity, as I argue in a short ‘digression into theory’, has a place in music writing, especially if you can vary your point of view. So I call these pieces ‘Reflections’ – images of the subject, thoughts on the subject, from different angles.

The section on ‘Life writing’ is the place to start if you know nothing of Sandy Denny. It sets out the conventional narrative of her life, before gathering up details of her early career in London overlooked by her biographers. In ‘Songs’ I hazard some lines of interpretation for a handful of her songs, an exercise I return to near the end of the book. ‘Recordings’ looks at the important new releases of recent years which satisfy an increasing public appetite for her work, while the section on ‘Contemporaries’ places her among four other stars in the firmament to compare their luminescence. Wherever possible, I’ve tried to to locate photographs that illustrate (or indeed ‘reflect’) what I’m talking about, rather than merely ornament the text.

The long final piece, written in early 2005, was actually my earliest attempt to grapple with Denny’s work. It offers, so far as I am aware, the first (and only) in-depth analysis of her songwriting. The study of popular music, like every other branch of human learning, 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 circulating it privately to a number of people, I was encouraged by very warm responses from Joe Boyd, Denny’s producer on the early Fairport and Fotheringay albums, and from Simon Nicol, her Fairport bandmate in the late Sixties who continues to anchor the group to this day.

Fairport Convention, 1968

The years since 2005 have brought significant additions to the bibliography. First among them must be Joe Boyd’s compellingly readable autobiography, White Bicycles: Making Music in the 1960s (which lingers over the comparison with Nick Drake, another lost soul). 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. John Harris, the hip young gunslinger of today’s rock journalism, published a lengthy reassessment of Denny’s work in The Guardian when her solo albums were re-released by Universal-Island. 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. Soon after that, a two-hour DVD documentary appeared, Sandy Denny Under Review – somewhat doughy, 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 a signal that interest was rising in advance of the thirtieth anniversary of her death in April 2008. (Another section of this book looks back, with pleasure, to that anniversary year.) Since then, we’ve had Rob Young’s monumental history of English folk music, Electric Eden, which features a number of sharp-witted passages on Denny’s work.

Hindsight provokes a host of afterthoughts. There is a much longer book to be written about Denny’s artistry than this one. 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)

SITES OF MEMORY, SITES OF MOURNING

For the Sandy Denny fan, sites of pilgrimage are few, and disappearing. Sound Techniques Studio in Chelsea, with its distinctive oak-aged acoustic, where so many of her greatest recordings were laid down, is long gone: replaced by flats. The apartment she shared in Stanhope Mews West in 1967-68, where Richard Thompson first heard her play ‘Who Knows Where The Time Goes?’, is likewise no more. After forty years in the ownership of one person, the house in Parson’s Green with the William Morris wallpaper, scene of some of the cosiest domestic photos of Sandy and boyfriend Trevor, was sold in May 2007; its new owners have reportedly gutted the place. Visitors to Arthur Road, Wimbledon, report they have trouble finding the spot where Mr and Mrs Denny stand forever on the cover of Unhalfbricking while their daughter and her bandmates romp on the lawn behind them. Remote from London’s constant rebuilding, only the cottage in Byfield, her final home, remains [see colour plates]. And the grave, of course. Where is that? Not in the country churchyard at Shipton-on-Cherwell that inspired her to write ‘Bushes And Briars’ but back where she started: in the suburbs.

I’ve been twice to Putney Vale Cemetery, a sprawling outer-city necropolis. Best approached by car, it’s a tedious journey from central London by tube and bus. The first time, I had to ask directions in the cemetery office. A helpful woman said: ‘Oh yes – the Fairport Convention singer?’ No place to lecture a total stranger on how that description does less than justice to a lifetime achievement, so I bit my tongue, thanked her for the map and made my way to the grave. Cemeteries turn your thoughts inwards: meaning to think about the deceased, you find you’re thinking about yourself. As I arranged some carnations into what I imagined was a tribute, it struck me that there was something invasive about tending the grave of someone you never knew. I was performing an office which I had previously only done at family graves. What right did I have? It was a question that ate away at the proper feelings of reverence and regret I had brought to her graveside. I like the Jewish custom of leaving a stone on a grave; since the Dianafication of Britain, the carpets of supermarket flowers marking every site of mourning embarrass me. On my second visit I merely stood quietly and looked – no flowers this time, no stones – remembering those lines sung in defiance which now sounded like a valediction forbidding mourning:

I won’t linger over any tragedies that were

And I won’t be singing any more sad refrains.

Several years ago, courtesy of Elizabeth Hurtt-Lucas and her London-based parents, I was kindly given access to Denny’s notebooks. Laying them out on the big dining table, I couldn’t disguise a certain disappointment. As a fan, I had expected, handling objects that had once belonged to her, to get a sense of magical aura. Instead, the papers had a musty smell – as is to be expected of material kept in attics and cupboards for 25 years and shipped to Australia and back again – and a disconcerting familiarity. I recognised the stationery: those exercise books you used to buy in newsagents in the Seventies. Sandy’s cardboard box full of notebooks looked spookily like my cardboard box full of notebooks, safely stowed in the attic of the parental home. But where my notebooks were filled with childhood plans for epic novels, artificial languages to promote world peace, absurd efforts to compose ‘symphonies’, hers were song lyrics, frolicsome cartoons and a deal too much of what can best be called

Reviews for Sandy Denny

[the7ken7petersen · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

This book is, unashamedly, a celebration of the music of Sandy Denny. It does begin with a brief biography but, even this, omits the bad times. Philip Ward is clearly smitten with Denny and this very nearly tips the book into sentimental fawning. He always, although, sometimes only just, pulls away from this danger and the book certainly made me pull out some CD's that had gathered dust too long.The explanations of Denny's songs, add interesting biographical links which do make the listening more entertaining and, I am sure that most people would agree that it was a tragedy for her life to be cut short, although, of course, an untimely death is helpful in turning a good singer/songwriter into a saint.I am not sure weather it is a compliment to Mr. Ward that his book has lead me to purchase a more conventional biography of Ms Denny, or weather it highlights the omissions of this work. As it was never intended as a definitive biography, I think probably the former: whichever, I thank him for renewing my acquaintance with a superb singing voice.