Crazy Lady Blues; remembering Sandy Denny

I find that of all the things in this world there is none that has such an intense and instant effect upon my mood as music, and I make no apology for warning the reader that music is likely to feature in this blog even more regularly than the Second World War. This visceral reaction to music can be a hugely positive thing and there are certain songs that have long been go-tos for me when I need a lift of some kind or a calming ointment in times of depression or stress. Madonna’s Ray of Light for a boost of pure energy; the songs of the first two Sailor albums for their thrillingly sensual (and, it must be said, rakishly camp) joie de vivre; the Undertones’ Get Over You for its sense of an undefeated bouncing back from life’s rejections; and perhaps most regularly of all, CSN’s Guinevere, the first haunting guitar chords of which instantly send me to a place and time vastly distant from this one, from which it can take me a considerable time to return, and then with some reluctance.

Often the effect is the opposite, and I can quickly become melancholy to the point of tears when listening to other songs, even when the songs themselves are not melancholy ones. This can often be because of definite associations the song has; when my mother died quite suddenly back in 1992 I had been listening to Simple Minds’ Street Fighting Years album and to this day I can’t listen to Belfast Child without filling up. But often I think it is just the intensity of a nostalgic longing for the times the song represents; earlier this week, sitting at my office desk one lunchtime I started listening to Fleetwood Mac’s Albatross (which, I am told, was the inspiration for the ‘Sun King’ bit on the Beatles’ Abbey Road album), and somewhat to my surprise found that after the song had finished I had to hurriedly depart for the Gents outside, trying hard not to catch anyone’s eye on the way, because I had rather embarrassingly started to cry.

This time of year of course, the end of the summer and that feeling of encroaching autumn and the turning once more of the wheel of the year, heightens the sense of melancholy. Being now half way through my sixth decade I find it impossible not to regard the transition as a symbol of my own decline, and to wonder how many more summers I will see. If there was ever a singer so capable of capturing these themes of loss and the passing of time it was Sandy Denny, and it is appropriate that the song that has been playing on my mind so strongly since the start of September is the delicately beautiful Who Knows Where the Time Goes? The very first lines of the song give it an autumnal setting and that idea of another summer passed:

Across the evening sky, all the birds are leaving But how can they know it's time for them to go? Before the winter fire, I will still be dreaming I have no thought of time For who knows where the time goes? Who knows where the time goes?

The song was written by Denny in 1967 when she was just 20 years old and recorded twice, once as a demo and once with her new band, the Strawbs, a band that was very much part of the emerging British folk revival but is now largely known for one later and now very dated pop hit, Part of the Union. Both versions were just Denny, an acoustic guitar and that voice, somehow both fiercely strong and yet vulnerable. That folksy early Strawbs album that the song appeared on, All Our Own Work, didn’t see a release until 1973, but the song was picked up in the meantime by no less a person than the American folk singer Judy Collins, who not only put it on the B-side of one of her hits, Both Sides Now, but made it the title track of a 1968 album. It is interesting to compare the two versions. Collins also is accompanied by acoustic guitar only but gives the song a slightly different feel…it is slower with a slight Country tinge and a guitar sound that feels more deliberate, and the voice somehow feels more worldly, more knowing than Denny’s, perhaps to be expected from someone who was already an established artist.

Denny moved on from the Strawbs to replace Judy Dyble as lead vocalist of Fairport Convention, a band that had hitherto been associated with American folk covers of the likes of Dylan and the Byrds but who were soon to be, along with outfits like Pentangle, Lindisfarne and Steeleye Span, at the heart of an emerging sound known as folk rock. She recorded the song for the third time on Fairport’s oddly-named 1969 album, Unhalfbricking (a title that allegedly emerged from the band playing a game of Ghost, where the object is to continue adding to the beginning or end of a group of letters without either completing a word or ending up with nonsense – I believe the story goes that this word was allowed when challenged). This is a different and less sparse version from the earlier ones, with a gentle drum track and Richard Thompson’s electric guitar, but the unhurried, melancholy feel is maintained.

Unhalfbricking cover; Sandy's parents pose outside their genteel house while the band relax in the garden behind.

Themes of loss and abandonment, vulnerability and fear meander, ever present, through Sandy Denny’s songs. Sometimes they are slightly encoded. The deceptively sedate Late November from her (also slightly oddly named) first solo album, 1971’s The North Star Grassman and the Ravens combines jarring images from one of her nightmares with reflections of the death of Fairport’s first drummer, Martin Lamble, when the band’s van crashed returning from a gig in 1969.

The wooded ravine to the wandering stream The serpent he moved, but no one would say. The depths of the waters, the bridge which distraught us And brought to me thoughts of the ill-fated day

Other times they are more explicit, as in the song In Memory (The Tender Years):

I hear the sighing of the wind like a murmur of regret and as I close my eyes I see a face I will never forget I see you running with the dawn but that was many years ago when you had seen the tender years the only years you were to know I knew a time when you and I ran through trees of green and gold and gazed at clouds of feather grey I never dreamt we would ever grow old. But time has passed, my mind will dim the hands will turn away my days but you remain a timeless smile who'd just begun life's tangled ways.

The North Star Grassman and the Ravens; Sandy as rustic apothecary.

Or the song Two Weeks Last Summer that she recorded with her immediate post-Fairport band, Fotheringay:

The dancing plants grow low Burning embers start to glow The pictures soon will fade Pictures that the flames have made Your hazy, wistful face Suddenly is gone without a trace

Despite her origins on the folk scene and the perfect match of her voice with the sort of folk-influenced songs produced by the Strawbs, Fairport and Fotheringay, it is not so easy to categorise Sandy Denny. She was constantly on the move and this seemed to be from a sense that she was looking for a context in which she would be free to develop in whatever direction she liked as a singer-songwriter. Fotheringay was more her vehicle than Fairport had ever been, and the logical extension of that was to go solo, although a lot of the musicians who continued to work with her were old friends and colleagues from Fairport days. She was famously the only singer deemed worthy by Led Zeppelin to provide guest vocals on one of their albums – on the Tolkein-esque mandolin-driven track The Battle of Evermore on Led Zeppelin IV her vocals and those of Robert Plant complement and reinforce each other beautifully, and though her voice has to work a bit harder than it was used to on her solo or Fairport albums she was unduly modest when she commented “having someone out-sing you is a horrible experience”. Her third solo album, Like an Old Fashioned Waltz, saw her branch out further into pop and jazz-influenced songs, and the playlist included a cover of Whispering Grass that rather saves the song for those only familiar with it through that later ‘Ain’t Half Hot Mum’ pairing of Don Estelle and Windsor Davies.

I often feel that it is possible to divide musicians between the tough survivors and those vulnerable ones more likely to be victims of the lifestyle, and that you can distinguish the two from quite a distance. Thus Mick Jagger and Keith Richards were always going to survive no matter how much they dabbled with drugs, whereas for Brian Jones it was only going to end one way, a tragedy evident already from the sad, somnambulant, disoriented figure in the 1968 We Love You video. Similarly a decade later in a band quite different and yet oddly similar in some ways that ubercynical survivor John Lydon was always going to move on from the experience of being a Sex Pistol whereas Sid Vicious, who had drunk the rock and roll cool-aid, was a more likely victim (“Sid Vicious, rock and roll clich-ay!” as Edward Tudor-Pole sang with shocking callousness on The Great Rock’n’Roll Swindle). Sandy Denny’s early vulnerability, and perhaps that restlessness that resulted in such short tenures with the Strawbs and Fotheringay, seemed to mark her out in the second group. As the 1970’s progressed she had increasing issues with alcohol- and drug-abuse, exacerbated by problems with her marriage to Australian folkie Trevor Lucas. Becoming a mother in the summer of 1977 did not save her. Friends continued to express concern at self-destructive behaviours that now risked harming her baby daughter also. Fairport guitarist Richard Thompson said of her at this time "At that point, I would see her sporadically and I was distressed when I did. She was drinking more, doing more drugs, and I would have a really bad feeling that some potential tragic outcome was on the cards. Sandy was a mess. Her baby needed protecting. But even in a situation like that, people have to come to their own realisation.”

In March 1978, visiting her parents in Cornwall, she fell down the stairs, hitting her head on a concrete floor. Whether alcohol was involved is not clear, but apparently she told friends afterwards that her mother had been unwilling to take her to a hospital because of her drunken state. After the fall she started developing severe headaches and was prescribed a painkiller known to be dangerous when mixed with alcohol. Trevor Lucas, now estranged from Denny and living in Australia, decided that his daughter was no longer safe with her mother and flew back to London to get her; by the time he arrived in London Denny was in a coma, having been found unconscious at a friend’s flat where she had been staying. She died on April 21st 1978 at the age of 31 – a relatively grand old age compared to Sid Vicious or Brian Jones, but I still find it hard to believe that my teenage son is already well over half as old as Sandy Denny when she died.

It has been pointed out that her stock as a musician had fallen low by the time she died. The iconoclastic Year Zero of Punk had seemingly rendered irrelevant those folk divas in smocks with songs of sea captains and fair maidens, let alone legendary mandolin-driven ditties about battles and ring wraiths. But while Denny’s last solo album, 1977’s Rendezvous, disappeared almost without a trace, it seems hard to believe that, even with a voice hard-pressed by the end by substance abuse, she wouldn’t have had the flexibility to carve herself a niche in the 1980’s world of slick keyboard-heavy power ballads alongside many others with a fraction of her talent.

Sandy Denny was a one of a number of musicians with whom I feel I have had quite an intimate relationship through their works, and I am grateful for the pleasure her music has brought me in my and its various moods. She was brought up close to where I now live, and attended Coombe Girls School in New Malden, which I pass on the bus whenever I have to go to Kingston town or hospital. Whenever the bus stops there in the afternoon and I sit and wait for all the girls to pile onto the 213, I reflect on the young girl pushing her way onto the bus with her mates those decades ago, full already of songs and ideas, destined to achieve so much and yet depart so early.