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

  Karl Dallas: That was the incredible thing about [the young] Sandy – here was this silly little girl, dithering about onstage, tripping over the mike leads – who stood up onstage and told you the way life is. And I remember thinking, “But you don’t know how life is, Sandy. How are you doing this? Where is it coming from?”

  Growing up in the suburbs south of London in the Fifties, with rationing still in place, must have seemed like a life left permanently on hold. As it is, Sandy quickly learnt to keep any hidden depths to herself, until the opportunity arose for them to come out in song. The Denny/MacLean clan was as steeped in the auld Scottish austerity as in its traditional balladry. If the MacLeans came from the Isle of Mull, the Dennys were a more nomadic breed, as perhaps befits a family name derived from the Danes. Of similar Presbyterian stock, Sandy’s great grandfather William Denny, born October 16, 1873, had made his living as a boiler maker, necessitating a fairly unsettled existence bound by the notoriously volatile ship-building industry. His seven children, David Skinner, William, James, Allison, Hannah, John and Elizabeth were all born in various locations throughout Scotland and the north of England.

  Though David Skinner, Sandy’s paternal grandfather, would be born in Dundee, he was destined to be brought up a Glaswegian, and it was in its infernal soul that he would meet and marry Mary Smith MacLean during the Indian summer of prosperity that coincided with Edward VII’s brief reign. David Skinner Denny made the momentous move to London in 1923, with his wife and two sons, Neil and David Jr. He had been told that there were only two places to live in London, Hampstead or Wimbledon, and chose the latter. Neil was ten years old when the family moved south, and was obliged to start school, and doubtless soften his harsh Scots brogue, part way through a summer term at Queens Road in Wimbledon. His parents aspired to send both him and his elder brother to King’s, a private boys school with a solid reputation, near Wimbledon Village, but the fees ran to nearly twelve pounds a term, a sum they couldn’t afford, and Neil “was packed off to a new school in Surrey”.

  Despite having to scuff his way through the national school system, Neil’s aspirational background and natural wit eventually secured him a scholarship to the London School of Economics, to read a BSc in Commerce, whence he graduated in 1934. When war broke out in 1939, Neil was working in the civil service, a reserved occupation that afforded him a get-out-of-service card. However, he preferred to volunteer and in 1941 he duly signed up for the Royal Air Force. The previous summer RAF pilots had successfully staved off an imminent German invasion, improbably winning that squabble in the skyways over southern England Winston Churchill duly dubbed The Battle of Britain.

  Having signed up in the Long Room of Lord’s, home of world cricket, located in the fashionable north London suburb of St. John’s Wood, Neil found himself being billeted during initial training in one of the luxury flats on the perimeter of Regent’s Park’s Outer Circle, whilst the mess-hall was located at London Zoo. However, he soon found himself posted to Babbacombe, a couple of miles from Torquay, in south-east Devon, where he completed his training at the RAF’s Number One Training Wing.

  Neil learned to love south-west England, and the Dennys would later retain a holiday cottage in the picturesque region. Of course, this lifelong love may well have been bound up with the happy memories of his courtship of another lifelong love, a bonny lass from Liverpool, Sergeant Edna Jones. Edna may have originally joined the Women’s Royal Air Force in Birmingham, but her family were ‘Scousers’, through and through. Her father, Thomas Jones, a seaman, had found regular appointment out of the Empire’s busiest port. His father had been a blacksmith who had done well enough to own property on the North Wales coast. Edna herself grew to prefer coastal climes, and succeeded in posting herself from Gloucester to Babbacombe in the winter of 1942.

  The uncertainties of war accelerated many a romance, and Neil and Edna’s was no exception. Despite a misunderstanding leading to Neil ‘standing up’ Edna on their first date, by December 21, 1942, they were being married in an old church in Newton Abbot, honeymooning in North Devon, before returning to base for the New Year. In war, the wedding vow “till death do us part” had a certain built-in poignancy, especially as with his training complete Neil was now awaiting his first stationing.

  Neil and Edna knew that, for the duration, theirs would be a lifestyle even more uncertain than his grandparents. Thankfully, with Edna in personnel, Neil’s postings usually miraculously coincided with a posting in the same vicinity for Edna. Thus it was that when Neil was posted to Drem, a station north-east of Edinburgh, to guard the approach to the Firth of Forth, Edna found herself posted to St. Andrews. Likewise, when Neil was posted to a base in Lincolnshire, Edna followed along, with the happy news that she was pregnant.

  David MacLean Denny was born on January 23, 1945, in Gainsborough, as his father awaited orders to support the successful invasion of Normandy. By the time David was joined by his sister, two years on, almost to the day, the Dennys were back in Wimbledon, whilst Europe, in the wake of Germany’s capitulation, was being divied up into the great power blocs of East and West.

  Before Sandy could grow from baby to toddler to infant, the family found itself temporarily uprooted. Relocated to Kent’s rugged coastline, the Dennys found themselves housed on the outskirts of Broadstairs, while Neil found himself required to manage the Ramsgate office of the Ministry of National Insurance, a by-product of welfare reforms instigated by a new Labour government elected in a 1946 general election landslide on the promise of caring for its citizens from the cradle to the grave. Soon enough, though, the family returned to Worple Road, this time to their own home.

  The two years separating Sandy from David proved no great barrier, as they became the best of friends, inseparable allies against the occasional paternal frown of disapproval. If David was the elder sibling, when it came to trouble Sandy was usually the instigator. Where David was neat and orderly, Sandy was impulsive, with an oft-displayed disregard for consequences. But it seems to have been a happy enough household, run by Edna during the day, when Neil would be carrying out his new duties as commissioner of the National Savings Committee, duties that took him the length and breadth of London, and eventually as far afield as Birmingham and Newcastle, but always brought him back to Wimbledon Common, the expanse of common land where Sandy and David would often play.

  Sandy (left) with David as children outside their Broadstairs house.

  Sandy, David and dog.

  Sandy’s first school was Cottenham Park Infant School, in Raynes Park, a short bus-ride from Worple Road. Big brother David was already there, ensuring a playground companion and protector. If Sandy was not precocious in these early years, she displayed an early proclivity for attention-seeking. Her mother recalled one occasion when, having gone in search of her daughter, she found her hanging from the top of a lamppost, near the common, whilst her classmates gazed up admiringly.

  Of her aspirational parents, Edna seems to have been the more generous-spirited, generally forgiving Sandy her many trespasses. Sandy’s father was a more dour soul. Neil came of a generation, and a breed – the working-class Scottish male – who found it hard to express their emotions. Confronted with such a demanding daughter, he perhaps unconsciously felt compelled to maintain a disciplinarian guise that could all too easily mask the love he undoubtedly felt for his ebullient child.

  In her later life, Sandy would bemoan the lack of warmth from her father, and contrast it with the physical affection of some of her friends’ parents. Sandy once confided to one of her closest friends that “when she hit puberty, he actually stopped giving her hugs or cuddles.” For someone who remained, all her life, “a very tactile person”, her father’s physical distance only exacerbated the neediness in her soul. Whether fairly or unfairly, Sandy would come to feel that, where her parents were concerned, her best was never quite good enough.

  Though Sandy rarely talked about her parents, even to her closest confidants, Phil
ippa Clare recalls “once … when she was very drunk,” it all came out: “They were very controlling, her parents. David was the one that was going to be educated, and Sandy was only a girl … One minute [Edna]’d be very pushy with Sandy, and then she wouldn’t be. Usually, she was, ‘You’re not good enough, you’re not good enough’, to Sandy. Instead of encouraging her, [she] was criticising her, but from the ‘right’ place … which was why anybody paying [Sandy] a compliment, she would attack.”

  How early these feelings manifested themselves is not clear. Certainly Sandy’s desire to ‘please’ her parents never went away, hence the occasional dedications in concert. Quite possibly her initial interest in the music of the day, fed into their household via the ubiquitous family wireless, was initially a sub-conscious attempt on her part to please her Dad, whose musical tastes seem to have been considerably more bourgeois than his mother’s. Neil himself would later admit that he had “sung Gilbert & Sullivan at school – that was about the extent of my musical education … [But] I did have a good interest in ordinary dance music, jazz, that sort of thing,” and it would be this that, in Sandy’s own words, “really started me off … listening to the jazzy stuff, Fats Waller, the Inkspots, the stuff that my father and mother used to love to listen to.”

  On her third solo album, Sandy would elect to record two of her father’s favourites. Though she thankfully managed to avoid Gilbert & Sullivan at school, her father in his later years would fondly recall a performance of ‘Away In A Manger’, at an infant school Christmas pageant, that reduced a number of fellow classmates’ parents to tears. It may even have been this rendition that prompted a proud mother to “be very pushy with Sandy”, seeking out an authoritative opinion of her daughter’s talents.

  Neil Denny: When she was very young, my wife took her to the Royal College of Music, and they said, “Yes, a very nice little voice and it could develop very well, but don’t let her join the school choir or take part in amateur dramatics – let her sing naturally.” [CD]

  Despite this learned opinion, Sandy recalled that she “used to sing in the choir at primary school – solos – and everyone was quite impressed.” Her musical gifts were less in evidence when she was required to apply them to the discipline of learning an instrument. With Neil and Edna encouraging both David and Sandy to learn the piano, Sandy started lessons around the age of nine, though she would give up the instrument before secondary school because, in her own words, “I didn’t like the idea of this woman telling me to practice scales and arpeggios for an hour every night.” Perhaps, in truth, she simply didn’t like having her bluff called.

  Neil Denny: She had a wonderful ear, and she would ask her teacher to play a piece and then she’d go away, and come back next week and she’d play it pretty well. Her teacher must have had some sort of suspicion because she [decided to] put a few mistakes in, and she found out Sandy wasn’t reading it – she was doing it pretty well from ear. [CD]

  Her extraordinary ear for music was already in evidence in other ways. Her Liverpudlian cousins recall a Sandy who was always singing around the house when she came to visit them in school holidays. Her Dad also recalled, with some pride, an occasion when “she electrified the school, much to the disgust of the music mistress, by playing a Fats Waller song, ‘Ain’t Misbehavin’, in assembly. It didn’t go down well with the music teacher who was strictly a classical woman.” Sandy would later tip her hat to Waller by recording ‘Until The Real Thing Comes Along’ “as closely to the aforementioned recording by Fats as possible,” for her 1974 album, Like An Old Fashioned Waltz.

  Having passed the eleven-plus exam, designed to sort out the educational wheat from the chaff, Sandy expected to join her brother at the nearest grammar school, which was in nearby New Malden, only to find that David had secured a scholarship to King’s, the school the exigencies of family finances had denied his father. Sandy displayed little scholastic ambition, missed her brother, and quickly came to dislike her new school. Even music, which had previously provided her with some solace, if not yet a purpose, had become a chore. She promptly locked horns with her new music-teacher, who failed to share the RCM’s assessment. As Sandy herself later put it, “I just hung around waiting for my talents to be discovered by my music teacher. She didn’t like me.”

  In later interviews, Sandy would be very critical of the way she was treated by the majority of teachers at Old Central. Her distaste for conventional learning would never leave her – even when, like many an auto-didact, she went on to become a voracious reader on any number of subjects. At the time, though, Sandy wouldn’t conform to the school standards, wouldn’t do her homework on time, and was generally ill-disciplined. As one of nature’s natural conformists, Sandy’s father was at a loss as to how to deal with his daughter’s rebellious streak, failing to recognise a burgeoning contempt for all forms of authority, parental included.

  Sandy Denny: I could never be one of those people who automatically say schooldays were the happiest days of their lives. I hated it, and I especially hated the attitude of most teachers. It really worries me that so many teachers have so little experience of life and yet they have to teach life to students. A student who wants to be a teacher goes to school at five, leaves at 18, then goes straight to university … before returning to school as a teacher – and all without ever finding out what it’s like to survive without school dinners … At school I began to think that the hostile authority of the teachers was what happened to everyone when they became adult and I thought, “What a terrible drag it must be to grow up.” [1970]

  If Sandy felt she had been forced temporarily to abandon any formal musical training as a result of her music-teacher’s antipathy, she continued to develop her love of language, first given air in verses like these, on the subject of clouds, the earliest her Dad chose to preserve:

  “Clouds, higher than the trees,

  Looking down on us from above.

  Moving swiftly on the breeze,

  More gracefully than a wingèd dove.

  In their hundreds they rest on high,

  On the sun they seem to lie,

  Till twilight comes,

  And dark is nigh.”

  Written shortly after she began secondary school, in her best spidery, girlish scrawl, these lines barely hint at a writer’s search for an original voice. However, the fact that they conclude with as Dennyesque an image as “and dark is nigh” suggests that Sandy’s fear of (and fascination with) the dark night, came early and stayed late. It would remain well in evidence in the commonplace books she began to keep in college – in one of which she asked for “mercy on me when the darkness/ fills the room in which I stand/[and] I feel alone, though someone holds my hand”; in the formative poems and songs she began to write in her teens, most of which she withheld from her workbooks; and in the few opportunities offered for creative writing in school.

  At the age of 14, Sandy wrote an essay in her English class, called ‘Empty Houses’, in which she imagined seeing an empty house “down a dark and ill-lit lane, my first reaction be[ing] to break into a sprint until there was no trace of it in view.” Imagining “strangers under the beds, dead bodies in the cupboards, snakes behind the door, and murderers crouched behind every chair and table,” she finally admits that “there is no need to be frightened of empty houses … they hold no vices except for that scurrying passer by with the vivid imagination. That’s me.”

  Though the essay apparently warranted only a B+, Sandy at least recognized she was equipped with a “vivid imagination.” The following summer, her cousin Hilary was exasperated when her childhood chum seemed less interested in playing than in locking herself in her room, where she insisted on peace and quiet as, “she said she was writing songs! … I was never allowed in.” It seems more likely that she was scribbling poems, though as her father Neil remarked to Colin Davies, one time, “She was very secretive – you never knew what was coming out.” Even at this early stage, Sandy seems to have had a sense
that she was gifted. It was a feeling that never left her, even though no obvious direction as yet suggested itself.

  Sandy Denny: Deep down inside me I thought I would do something, but maybe every little girl has that. I thought I was going to be this great ballet dancer, and a sculptor, and Edith Cavell. I had an incredible amount of confidence in my ability. And how much you succeed depends exactly on how much confidence you’ve got in yourself. Because I don’t look like the dolly-bird singer, I had to have confidence. [1972]

  Confidence in her own ability was already offset by a singular lack of assurance when it came to her physical appearance, betrayed not only by that final sentence to Annie Nightingale, above, but by the many drawings Sandy made of the female form in her notebooks, invariably long, lithe, pencil-thin individuals.

  Despite insecurities about her weight, Sandy was already beginning to take an interest in boys. A girl by the name of Winnie Whittaker, who attended the local convent school, was approached by a 15-year-old Sandy one day, and bluntly asked if she knew a Mary O’Keefe. When Winnie owned that she did, Sandy asked if said friend was ‘going steady’ with a certain Edward. When she responded, “Yes, she’s in love with him,” Sandy informed her that a friend of hers was also dating the same lad. A sceptical Winnie asked her the name of this girl and when Sandy replied, “Myrtle Snodgrass,” it became more than a little obvious that Sandy and Myrtle were one and the same, and that Sandy was looking to put a dampner on the opposition.

  Though the luckless Myrtle never seems to have dated the popular Edward, Sandy and Winnie became fast friends, for a time acting as each other’s alter-egos. Since Winnie was a large, plain girl, she represented little threat to Sandy’s fragile self-confidence when it came to the more competitive elements in such a friendship. As a friend of Sandy, Winnie was assured of a steadfast loyalty that would last all her days. She would also be assured of a riotous time in her company. In return for this, she was expected to participate in any pranks that sprang to mind. Even Sandy’s headmaster, unimpressed as he was with her scholastic record, told her parents that, naughty as she was, she was also very loyal, and would shoulder the blame whenever there was trouble, never revealing the co-conspirators she had sucked into her latest cock at authority.