> Sandy Denny > Obituaries, Interviews and Articles > Sandy Denny Dead

Sandy Denny Dead

Melody Maker, 29 April 1978, by Colin Irwin

Sandy Denny is dead. One of the greatest girl singers ever produced by Britain and a crucial influence on the folk-rock movement died at the weekend after a tragic accident. She fell down stairs at a friend's house last Monday, struck her head, and immediately went into a coma. She was rushed to hospital, but died on Friday night of a brain hemorrhage without regaining consciousness. Sandy was 31.

The disaster came as she and husband Trevor Lucas were planning to move to America to launch a new life and career after a lack of recent success in Britain. And her death came nine months after the much-desired birth of the couple's first child, Georgia.

Lucas, a fellow member of Fairport Convention during her second period with the band, was visiting Australia when the accident occurred, and immediately flew back to be with her. A quiet funeral was taking place this week to be followed by a memorial service.

News of Sandy's death stunned a music business in which she was greatly loved. Close friends from her Fairport days, like Richard Thompson and Dave Swarbrick, were shattered.

Another former colleague of many years from Fairport, Ashley Hutchings, now of the Albion Band, told MM on Monday: “Sandy was unquestionably the singer best suited to the style of music that people now call electric folk. Although she sang her own songs and those of other writers with great passion and never less than 100 percent commitment, it's in this area that her singing style was unique. She was the first, and her wonderful free-flowing and inspired singing remains unsurpassed.”

And Maddy Prior, for so long her only serious rival as the leading lady of folk, said: “It's a tragedy that a talented person in the prime of her life such as Sandy, with so much love to offer, and so much good work done in the past, could come to such a sudden and tragic end. It's a terrible waste.”

Former Fairport Convention manager Jo Lustig summed up the feelings of many: “Sandy was one of the major English girl songwriters, because she wrote like an English person and not under an American influence. She was an unfulfilled talent.”

Liege and Lief was her greatest recorded achievement. Released in December 1969, it has become acknowledged as the epochal electric folk album, an inspiration to a mass of bands, and Sandy's electrifying interpretations of traditional songs, notably Matty Groves and Tam Lin, were a vital ingredient.

Excepting a couple of minor charity appearances, her last performances took place on a British tour last November, which concluded at London's Sound Circus.

A full appreciation of Sandy Denny's work appears next week.

> Sandy Denny > Obituaries, Interviews and Articles > Sandy, First Lady of Folk-Rock (1)

Sandy, First Lady of Folk-Rock (1)

Melody Maker, 6 May 1978, by Dave Cousins

Even before Sandy joined Fairport Convention, the first connection she made with what was later to become the folk-rock scene was with a former bluegrass group who had been known as the Strawberry Hill Boys, abbreviated to the Strawbs.

Dave Cousins, of the Strawbs, flew back especially from Cleveland, Ohio, where he was on a promotional tour for the group's new album, to be at Sandy's funeral. After it, he recalled: “I saw her first doing a floor spot at the Troubador, wearing a white dress and a straw hat, looking like an angel and singing like one. Straight away, without checking with anyone, I asked her did she fancy joining a group? She agreed, and the next day she was a member.

“We did a few appearances together and made an album, but it was a great shame that it never came to anything. We played demos of our work together to people and they said they were interested but it never came to anything. We just sat there, waiting for something to happen, but it didn't. Then Fairport offered her the job and off she went, which was a sensible move on her part.

“That first album we did in Denmark had a charm of its own, though it was fairly crude, recorded on a two-track machine. I think we thought we might be Britain's answer to the Mamas and Papas.

“We always talked of recording together again, the odd single or maybe an album, but nothing came of it. We were still talking, just before Christmas. I wanted her to record my song, 'Grey Starling,' from the 'Ghosts' album, but somehow she was always off abroad somewhere doing a tour of her own and it never happened.

“I was literally broken-hearted when I heard of her death. I was in America, on a promotional tour, and I just cancelled everything and flew back for the funeral.

“To me, she was simply the finest woman singer ever to have sung in Britain. The tragedy was that she stayed within such tightly defined limits that she never achieved the mass acceptance from the people who listen to Radio One, which I think was her due.

“Her own songs have a sadness which reflects the sadness of that situation; there is a sadness in them which is, I think, a result of her frustration at not reaching that wider audience.”

> Sandy Denny > Obituaries, Interviews and Articles > Sandy, First Lady of Folk-Rock (2)

Sandy, First Lady of Folk-Rock (2)

Melody Maker, 6 May 1978, by Colin Irwin

Sandy Denny, who died last week, was unquestionably the finest female singer produced by the British folk scene. That she also developed into an exceptional songwriter - her best songs like Who Knows Where the Time Goes? and Solo will bear that out for many years to come - was a bonus we had no right to anticipate.

It may also, to some extent, have ultimately rebounded against her. For apart from the shattering tragedy of her death by a freak accident at such a young age, Sandy's loss is made even more sickening by the fact that her full potential and commercial possibilities were never fully realised. Part of it was undeniably her own fault - she was a compelling personality of extreme sensitivity, with a notorious inability to organise herself and push her career to its logical triumph.

Opportunities were lost at crucial points, often through silly, almost laughable, shortcomings which were perhaps part of her endearment as a character, but did her no good in the striving for stardom. In 1971, having won the female singer award in the MM Poll, she ought to have skated into superstardom at the end of the commendable experiment of her own band Fotheringay.

That she didn't then or in the subsequent chances offered was partly down the mass market's consistent embracing of pap rather than quality, and partly to Sandy's own slightly slipshod attitude to the business.

It was evident even in the final chapter of her career - on her last tour in November when she went on the road for the first time in two years, agonisingly afflicted by nerves and with a band that was ragged and seemingly under-rehearsed.

Yet her singing was as electrifying as it ever was, and there was plenty of evidence she was still producing fine material. It made her comparative lack of success in recent years all the more frustrating.

Her own anomalies in many ways mirror those of the band to which she'll always be inexorably linked. Fairport Convention's bewildering history of misfortune, dilemma, disaster, financial crisis and misguided moves, all dragging on (though never seriously denting their breathtaking ability) in many ways parallel Sandy's inconsistency.

If ability alone was the name of the game, Sandy Denny would have made mincemeat of the Ronstadts and Coolidges. But British girl singers seem to need to prove themselves ten times more than their American counterparts, and Sandy, depressingly, never seemed to have the resilience, thick skin, and plain decent luck necessary to resist the flak in order to achieve that.

She came to Fairport Convention as Judy Dyble's replacement in 1968 after a short spell with the Strawbs. She'd previously developed a passion for folk music and worked the clubs as a soloist, though she'd been brought up on Thirties music, especially Fats Waller and Billie Holiday.

She got into music in earnest at Kensington Art School, where her fellow students included John Renbourn, Eric Clapton, and Jimmy Page, and was later to make a guest vocal appearance on a Led Zeppelin album.

She was crucial to the rise of Fairport - and therefore the whole bold folk-rock expansion - and her spectacularly brilliant work on Liege and Lief in particular is now justifiably legendary. One of the tracks, Matty Groves, eventually came to haunt her, and so significant were her interpretations of British traditional songs like these as milestones in the development of folk, that people found it difficult to accept her concentrating almost exclusively on her own material.

Fotheringay, formed with Trevor Lucas, Jerry Donahue, Gerry Conway, and Pat Donaldson, lasted just a year and one album, and always promised more than they achieved; but the fiery nature of her first solo album, The North Star Grassman and the Ravens with classic tracks John the Gun and Blackwaterside suggested her time had come.

But the paradox was that although she was always too much the dominant focal point to be encompassed successfully within a unified band, there was something holding her back.

> Sandy Denny > Obituaries, Interviews and Articles > Sandy, First Lady of Folk-Rock (3)

Sandy, First Lady of Folk-Rock (3)

Melody Maker, 6 May 1978, by Karl Dallas

Why does the sun never shine on funerals? Of course, statistically it must do so sometimes, but as far back as I can remember, when I was a young local newspaper cub reporter covering all the hatches, matches, and despatches, I can't recall a funeral day that wasn't grey or drizzling or foggy.

On Thursday the wind whipped across Putney Vale cemetery, blowing the noise of the nearby dual carriageway away into gusts of sudden silence, as a gathering of family and friends gathered to say goodbye to Sandy Denny, shivering in the cold.

Service

It was planned as a small service, for only family and close friends, and that was the way it turned out, but over the past fifteen years or so Alexandra Elene MacLean Denny has gathered friends the way some people collect gold albums, and there were people there who'd known her closely during each stage of her career, for whom their relationship with her had never been a purely music business one.

And so the people she had worked with over the years were part of her life out of the public gaze as well, and as they gathered into the chapel, there was barely standing room for them all: old folkie comrades like Alex Campbell, John Pearse and Derek Brimstone; Strawb Dave Cousins, looking pale and distraught in a blue velvet suit and open-necked white shirt, whose group she had joined briefly before replacing Judy Dyble in Fairport Convention; her old Fairport comrades, Swarb and Peggie and Simon Nicol and Bruce Rowland; producer Joe Boyd; Pat Donaldson and Gerry Conway from that great band, Fotheringay, which she formed when she left Fairport for the first time; people from each and every stage of her career who had come to applaud and stayed to be embraced by her warm, manic personality.

Piper

As they carried the coffin into the chapel, a lone piper played The Flowers of the Forest, one of Sandy's favourite traditional tunes, and as they laid it in front of the altar it seemed only too tragically appropriate: “The flours o' the forest are a' wede away.” It was then, I think, that we finally began to believe that Sandy was really gone.

We stood and read Sandy's favourite psalm, the 23rd (The Lord is my Shepherd) and then the vicar spoke to us. “I didn't know your Sandy,” he began, and though most of what he said went in one ear and out the other, as such things do, those words kept clanging round in my head as we emerged, red-eyed and some of us still sniffling our private grief, for “our Sandy,” which indeed she was.