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

  For Christine, who knows where the time goes.

  Copyright © 2011 Omnibus Press

  This edition © 2011 Omnibus Press

  (A Division of Music Sales Limited, 14-15 Berners Street, London W1T 3LJ)

  EISBN: 978-0-85712-697-9

  The Author hereby asserts his / her right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with Sections 77 to 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages.

  Every effort has been made to trace the copyright holders of the photographs in this book, but one or two were unreachable. We would be grateful if the photographers concerned would contact us.

  A catalogue record of this book is available from the British Library.

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  Contents

  Information Page

  Preface

  PART ONE – RISING WITH THE MOON

  1. 1947–63: The Tender Years

  2. 1964–65: The Blues Run The Game

  3. 1965–67: All Her Own Work

  4. 1967–68: Ballad Of Time

  5. 1968: Sandy & The Muswell Hillbillies

  6. 1969: Come All Ye Roving Minstrels

  7. 1969–70: A New Leaf

  PART TWO – THE SOLO YEARS

  8. 1970–71: Farewell Fotheringay

  9. 1972: Maid of Constant Sorrow

  10. 1972–73: Alone Again, Naturally

  11. 1973–74: Returning To The Fold

  12. 1975: Farewell Fairport

  An Interlude With Watson

  13. 1976: Dark The Night

  14. 1977–78: No More Sad Refrains

  Epilogue : Flowers of the Forest

  Acknowledgements

  Bibliography

  Discography

  Nothing More?

  Chronology of Recordings & Performances

  Preface

  It had been a fraught weekend. It had begun early, last Thursday evening, when Trevor, her best friend’s husband, had phoned from a telephone box and informed her that he had left her best friend, Sandy, and that he had taken their nine month-old daughter, Georgia, with him. His last words to her had been, “You say you’re her best friend. So prove it. You look after her.” It was a surreal conversation, set against the background bustle of – Miranda instinctively knew – a railway station, or airport.

  If Miranda had ever liked Trevor, she had certainly never trusted him, especially after the occasion, a few years earlier, when he had come on to her one evening over dinner, when Sandy was out on the road, singing ‘Solo’. And, she knew, Trevor had always resented the influence she continued to exert over his wife of four and a half years.

  Miranda well remembered that overcast September day, when Trevor and Sandy had tied the knot at Fulham Registry Office. If every relationship has its peaks and troughs, Sandy and Trevor had scaled most of their peaks in the five years they had already known each other, and both Miranda and Sandy’s mother, Edna, viewed the marriage as a hasty, ill-conceived attempt on Sandy’s part to regain higher ground. It was not to be, and when Sandy’s final gambit, a child, failed to turn the relationship around, she began to spiral downward.

  Trevor’s attempts to catch the falling star had been tinged with a sense of futility for some time now. Ironically, it would appear it was his wife’s bequest of a daughter that had finally convinced him to put Georgia’s interests ahead of her mother’s. Sandy had recently sustained a bad fall, at a time when Trevor had done one of his disappearing acts. Though Georgia was not apparently party to the fall, he seems to have realized that, next time around, she could be. That what if now pushed him to contemplate a return to his antipodean homeland, abandoning his wife to her friends and family.

  Sandy, though, seemed quite unaware of Trevor’s change of heart. Around five in the afternoon, four hours before the fateful phone call, she had phoned Miranda from her home in Byfield, an hour-plus swing up the M1 from Miranda’s flat, two minutes south of Hammersmith Bridge in Barnes, to say that Trevor was in town, with Georgia, and that he might be stopping by on his way home so that Georgia could be fed. Feeling a tad guilty about not being in touch for a couple of weeks, Sandy promised to see Miranda real soon. Real soon.

  Around eleven o’clock Sandy phoned again. This time there was an edge to her voice, though she remained outwardly calm. She had noticed a bunch of Trevor’s clothes were missing and wondered if Miranda had heard from her husband. Miranda had little choice but to tell her the truth and, after threatening “such a bollocking” if Sandy did not “keep herself together,” promised to drive to Byfield and bring her back to Barnes. Only one problem, Trevor had told Miranda that the keys to the car, which was parked in Washington Road, had been sent by registered post. Depending on when he had posted the envelope, they might not arrive until Saturday morning.

  He’d lied. The keys were delivered through the door, around midnight, by a stranger who ran off when Miranda called after him. Miranda, with little traffic left on London’s notorious arterial roads, made it to Byfield by quarter to two in the morning, to find Sandy dozing, and her two beloved Airedale hounds nowhere to be found. A frantic search managed to wake most of the sleepy little village but failed to yield a single Airedale. Finally, at five in the morning, Sandy recognized the futility of further forays and allowed Miranda to transport her back to Barnes.

  It was now Monday morning. Trevor was nowhere to be found. A shroud of silence as to his whereabouts had descended, and would only lift when Sandy had sunk into silence herself. Signs of that flinty resolve that had been Sandy in her twenties had manifested themselves through the weekend, buffeted by the inevitable mood swings but, as morning dawned, Miranda was roused by Sandy, in dire need of pain killers. A severe headache, the worst of many she had been afflicted with in recent weeks, had awoken her around six. Miranda found the necessary pills and by the time she was ready for school – having crash-landed from her Sixties’ job as Hit Paradef’s English correspondent into the needs-must calling of school teacher – Sandy was asleep and it was all Miranda could do to write her a brief note, before heading off for work.

  She would later write in her diary, “Somehow couldn’t leave but did.” The note she left Sandy was full of the combination of helpful practical advice and positive thinking that she hoped would get Sandy through the initial shock, enabling her to focus on a future that was already ebbing away. It read, in part:

  “I spoke to [Sandy’s brother] David. He thinks you should ring around. I have doubts – it’s too like your usual possible panic. However – up to you. If you are going to ring around please hold horse until I’ve seen you …

  Doctor[‘s appointment] at 4.00 pm – I’ll be back as soon after 3.00 as I can …

  Remember to eat!!

  Fires off! Don’t try lamps – too dodgy!

  Toaster doesn’t stop on its own! The smell will tell you if you forget!! Don’t panic, just shut kitchen door!

  Talk to cat but tell her I’m not starving her.

  You’ll win out! Chin up and all that blah!

  Write a song – Two lost dogs chased by sheep and farmer and farmer’s wife….

  [Friend] Jon Cole [is at] 748 6693 – but he’ll be at m
eeting all morning – will come in after that.”

  In fact, Cole would call in on his way to his meeting-cum-rehearsal, on a day still etched in the present twenty one years later:

  “I am heading for a rehearsal in central London. It’s a clear bright day. I leave my flat in Church Road and get into the car. It is a red Datsun Cherry. Past Olympic Studios, before the traffic lights, and then into Castelnau, left by MacArthur’s the hamburger joint, and the Red Lion pub on the right. Castelnau is wide, flat, straight, some trees, mansions on each side. I slow down for the pedestrian crossing by Miranda’s house. By the pedestrian crossing is a bus shelter. I hear, quite clearly on my left, a [single] word. Help. Who said this word? I know it’s odd, but it sounded like it was from someone in the passenger seat. Now, I’m not unusually psychic … Most likely, the word came from someone at the bus shelter. Just a coincidence. Wherever it came from, the word triggered a memory, that Miranda had asked me – if I was passing – to call into her house to see if Sandy was okay, if she wanted anything. No pressure. As I am not running late, I decide to pay the courtesy call. Into Miranda’s drive under the tree, use the key she gave me a few days earlier, turn right, then dog-leg left, up the first flight of stairs. On the stairs I hear, somewhere, a cat. A mew. Rising up those few stairs to the first floor, Miranda’s apartment, I already had a feeling which was not good; it was disquiet, and probably came from the cat.

  “But then I saw Sandy. My eyes were at her level as I came up. She’s lying on the floor, not quite on her back, just enough on one side to look like she is asleep, eyes closed, breathing regular. What the hell has happened to the ruddy woman? Her feet are by the bottom step of the stairs that lead up past a full-length window, steep, narrow stairs, with books piled up in the way, up to the top-floor room where I [presume] she’s been staying. Behind her, a few inches away, the door of the loo is closed. It doesn’t look to me like she’s just come out, because she’s fallen across the doorway, feet by the bottom step of the stairs, as if her last movement was from those stairs. She has obviously either passed out, or for some other reason fallen. I bend over her to check that her breathing is not obstructed. I smell no alcohol and see nothing untoward, no blood, no bruising. To me it looks like she just went to sleep on the floor and will be okay very soon.

  “Something in me says that I should talk to her, which might help to bring her round. I straighten up and I say, ‘Sandy, are you okay? Sandy, I’m going to call an ambulance, don’t worry.’ And I make for the telephone, Miranda’s number two phone in the kitchen. The kitchen is directly opposite the loo on the landing where Sandy has fallen. It’s a small kitchen, quite spicey-smelling, with a window over the front and the phone. I dial 999 and give the details. They say they’ll be there in 10 minutes. I am now stuck uneasily in the kitchen. But there is a kettle … I say, right out loud as if she was standing there, ‘Sandy, I’m making a cup of tea, OK?’ I mean, she did not look ill, not even pale; perhaps she was just a little concussed and would wake up any moment. And there I’d be with a cup of tea. I made the tea, two cups. I checked she was breathing. I waited. The ambulance arrived in good time. The ambulance men took her away. They were too casual. I can see them bumping down the stairs. I don’t remember a stretcher. Perhaps their names were Burke and Hare. I must have found out where they were going. After that I made some telephone calls. But the rest of the day is a blur.”

  Sandy Denny, perhaps the finest singer of the modern folk milieu, died four days later, at 7.50 p.m. on Friday, April 21, 1978. She was barely thirty-one years old, and had been a mother less than nine months. By her side, when they switched the life support machine off, was her husband, Trevor Lucas. After much ringing around, a phone-call from the consultant at Saint Mary’s to the Melbourne home of Lucas Senior had informed the errant husband that if he got on the next flight, he might just find his wife still alive. He had, and he did, but she would never know. Sandy never regained consciousness.

  The verdict delivered at the inquest, the following week, was that the first lady of folk-rock had died as a result of a “traumatic mid-brain haemorrhage,” as a result of a fall. The party line, which soon ossified into an incantation, was that she had fallen down a set of stairs at Miranda’s flat. The traumas of the previous weeks – her original fall, her husband’s desertion with Georgia, the splitting headaches, indeed all of Sandy’s seemingly hellbent decline – were written out of history as the Fairport family closed ranks on a tragedy they had all seen coming, but had felt powerless to affect. The funeral, at Putney Vale cemetery, was a truly maudlin affair. The burden of guilt had descended on all too many well-meaning bystanders, though not as much as on an ashen Trevor. Genuinely mired in his own private pit of despair, Trevor found himself ostracised by Sandy’s grieving, and unforgiving, parents, neither of whom had ever accepted him as their son-in-law in aught but name.

  Others proved equally unforgiving. As Christine Pegg, wife of Fairport bassist Dave Pegg, put it, “There was a whole army of people who wouldn’t answer the phone to him. We all felt incredibly guilty. Deep down we knew it had all been going wrong, we knew Trevor was thinking of going, but we’d got into the habit of keeping our heads down while the storm passed – and this time it didn’t.”

  The tributes in the various papers were suitably elegaic, headed by those from perhaps the two journalists who had known her best: Karl Dallas, who had first come across her singing back in 1964, furnished Melody Maker with his thoughts; and Robin Denselow, husband of Sandy’s good friend Bambi Ballard, penned some lines for The Guardian. But the folk-rock roster of Chris Blackwell’s Island label had been all but swept away by the new wave of punksters then assailing the charts. The death of Sandy Denny was accorded nothing like the acreage of newsprint it might have warranted barely a couple of years earlier when – fronting another makeshift Fairport and selling out the Royal Albert Hall – she dedicated a brand new original, ‘I Won’t Be Singing Any More Sad Refrains’, to her proud father Neil, from the stage of London’s most prestigious venue. But her decline from that day in June 1975 had been precipitous. As it is, ‘No More Sad Refrains’ would end up closing out not only Sandy’s next album, Rendezvous, but the considerable musical legacy she would leave in her name.

  Clinton Heylin, March 2000

  Part One

  RISING WITH THE MOON

  1

  1947–65: THE TENDER YEARS

  Sandy (left) with Edna’s mother.

  “I always feel, well maybe Sandy was delivered by a spaceship. Her parents were these two extremely thin, pinched people. And David was as straight as a die … But she was just wild.”

  Linda Thompson

  Alexandra Elene MacLean Denny barely knew her paternal grandmother, Mary Smith MacLean, the matriarch who – proud to be one of the MacLeans of Douart, from the Isle of Mull, seven miles west of Oban – insisted on her clan name being handed down through the generations. It was she who first dubbed her grand-daughter – born on January 6, 1947 at Nelson Hospital, Wimbledon, to her son, Neil, and his wife, Edna – just plain ol’ Sandy. Neil and Edna had chosen the name Alexandra “because it was the only name we could agree on. My wife [always] used to insist that she be called Alexandra but my own mother called her Sandy, the Scottish dimunitive of that name, and within a week of going to school, everyone called her Sandy.”

  The young couple were temporarily dependent upon Neil’s parents, who were letting them share their house on Worple Road in the months after they had been demobbed, and doubtless felt especially beholden to the household head, which was assuredly Mary Smith. According to singer Linda Thompson, the matriarchal hierarchy was destined to extend down through the Dennys, where Edna “wore the pants,” to her only daughter, who, “being [from] such a matriarchal family, didn’t [ever] think she was a little woman.”

  Mary Smith MacLean bequeathed an equally important legacy to her one and only granddaughter, one that must have been in the genes. Though Sandy apparently never
heard her sing, unless it was in the cradle, Mary Smith MacLean had been something of a ballad singer in her nineteenth-century youth, being born in August 1879. A Highland lass, she spoke both Gaelic and English. According to her son, she could actually go to Gaelic-speaking parts of Ireland and be understood. She would also, in Neil’s words, “dirge away at … things like ‘The Seal Woman’s Croon’” (the song Neil remembers his mother singing may even have been the legendary ‘Grey Selchie of Shool Skerry’, a ballad only ever collected in the Orkneys and Shetlands). Mary Smith’s repertoire was truly arcane, steeped in a balladry centuries old in conceit and conception. The Scottish ballad tradition, though, seemed to all but bypass the side of the family Sandy was born into.

  Neil Denny: My brother and I could vamp, and we all had our little piece to do … [when] the family in Scotland used to have these family music things … [but] my wife wasn’t particularly musical. My family was, but not our lot. My three cousins all played instruments. [CD]

  The one song Neil remembered his mother singing, and which he hoped his daughter might learn to sing, was a Scottish Gaelic song called ‘Fhir A Bhata’, or ‘The Boatman’. He recalled Sandy saying she would one day record it. He even went to the trouble of photostating the music book in which it lay, without ever hearing Sandy sing it. And yet Sandy was true to her word, singing the song at her first real session, a recording by Peter Kennedy at Cecil Sharp House for the BBC World Service ‘Folk Song Cellar’ series, on December 2, 1966, at the tender age of nineteen. Even here, on her earliest extant recording (save for half a dozen home demos), that voice soars and glides through this traditional tale of weal and woe with a real sense of its subject matter. Everything is in place, save the stamp of originality. For that, she could hardly turn to her now dead grandmother. It would have to come from somewhere within.