> Sandy Denny > Obituaries, Interviews and Articles > Sandy Denny / Howff (1)

Sandy Denny / Howff (1)

New Musical Express, 15 September 1973, by Austin John Marshall

THE AUDIENCE looks a little warmer, younger and hairier tonight than the customary Howff fringe-theatre crowd who usually yap in cultured Hampstead tones through musical “turns”. But tonight the whole evening has been set aside for paying respects to Sandy Denny as she returns to do her first London club gig since longer than most can remember.

The lucky ones get seats: the rest stand - and it's only 8.15. The music press, Guardian and Telegraph are piling up the empty wine bottles, whilst Al Stewart, Carolanne Pegg and the Gandalph-bearded Viv Stanshall can be seen hovering in and out of the bar.

At last - here's Sandy - looking succulent in a long green figure-hugging flower print. A measure of nervousness escapes in her slightly paranoid/Cockney humour but she settles down at the Steinway hired at £50 - hence the entry price of a quid a nob). Then her eyes close, her face turns up to the light and she's into Late November.

The audience are so completely with her that she has them from the first moment.

Actually she could have sung The Yellow Pages or nursery rhymes and made them sound like and archetypal tragedy - such is her expressiveness in performance, beauty of voice and conviction of mood in her music.

But, of course, it's mostly Sandy Denny originals - the held-back power and breadth of the sea, and brooding stormclouds - a typical Sandy Denny song is the musical equivalent of a Turner painting. A succession of favourites spiral up round the paper lanterns. One new song - Solo - touches in a very sharp way on the topic of contemporary personal isolation. And once - in John The Gun - she lets rip a taste of her potential power, almost overloading the PA.

The management have turned off the cooling fans to cut down background noise, and by the time Sandy is called loudly back for an encore her fringe is pasted to her forehead and she's gasping for air in the heat. But she bounces up to give us Fats Waller's standard Until The Real Thing Comes Along. It did Sandy, it did.

> Sandy Denny > Obituaries, Interviews and Articles > Sandy Denny / Howff (2)

Sandy Denny / Howff (2)

Melody Maker, 8 September 1973, by Karl Dallas

Sandy, from here on you can do no wrong as far as I am concerned. On Monday at London's Howff you did what I've always known you could do. You gave a completely flawless performance in which every single song was a minor masterpiece - no, I withdraw that word minor - and you did it completely on your own.

It's been nearly a year since we saw you properly, and it's been many a long year since we have heard you in such good voice but it was well worth waiting for.

The emotion in your singing was almost unbearable at times, particularly in your very fine new song, Solo, with its poignant autobiographical theme, “ain't life a solo”.

Indeed it is. But when you can carry an audience along with you this way you are actually less alone than when you used to pack the stage with friends to give you moral support.

Your encore, Until The Real Thing Comes Along, was superb, a quiet, gentle way of saying goodbye. Until the next concert tour comes along. Let it be soon.

> Sandy Denny > Obituaries, Interviews and Articles > Sandy Denny / Howff (3)

Sandy Denny / Howff (3)

Music Week, 15 September 1973, by Rev Anderson

IN ONE of her now rare concert appearances in Britain, Sandy Denny came to the Howff last week and proved in just over an hour that she really is one of today's greatest vocal talents. She has complete and utter control over her strong if sometimes strange voice and at times, when seated at the piano, she sounded just a little like a female Gilbert O'Sullivan.

She sings her own material. Traditional songs seem to have been deleted from her repertoire, but she did conclude the evening with 'Until The Real Thing Comes along', a jazz standard from the 30s.

Most memorable were two songs, hopefully both to be included in her forthcoming album. They were Solo, a difficult song, she said, in the “every man is an island” mould describing how life is a solo performance by each individual, and Old Fashioned Waltz, a tribute to nostalgia.

> Sandy Denny > Obituaries, Interviews and Articles > Sandy Denny / Howff (4)

Sandy Denny / Howff (4)

The Guardian, 4 September 1973, by Martin Walker

A WOMAN alone. Herself, a piano - whatever spell they can weave. It is the hardest task of any entertainer. It means a fragile dependence upon the quality of each and every song. In concert, each phrase must balance, each note must tell, each crescendo must stun. There can be no skulging behind a heavy bass section, no lagging in the chorus. There is a raw point of utter solitude from which a woman soloist must perform.

Miss Denny gripped us last night from her first song, the one which is supremely hers, Late November. And she sings the hard way; no saccharine sweetness, no winsome, fey appeal to the high notes and our better natures. At times one hears courage and at times her voice conveys an almost telepathic sense of blunt pain.

The only woman I have heard who could compel an audience in this blunt and harshly loving way was Janis Joplin. There is point to the comparison. The greatest slide guitarist of our (and perhaps any) time Sun House, once said that only when you heard a good woman sing the blues did you know how gentle the blues could be. Janis Joplin sang blues in their savagery and in their tenderness. What Miss Denny sings may not be the blues. Sweet melancholy yes. Haunting beauty yes. It is part of the blues and a part of a part of a tradition that goes centuries back before folk music. Miss Denny has had an erratic career. When she is on form she can outsing any female artist and move an audience to a point that is beyond tears. She was on form last night.

> Sandy Denny > Obituaries, Interviews and Articles > Sandy Denny / Howff (5)

Sandy Denny / Howff (5)

Moment Of Truth For Folk Singer's Talent

Daily Telegraph, 5 September 1973, by M.R.

By the time Sandy Denny, the young English singer, ended her concert at the Howff, Regent's Park Road, in the early hours of yesterday, she had created an occasion wich lovers of good contemporary songs, beautifully sung, will long remember and cherish. It was one of those happenings that critics dream of but rarely experience, when a good but hitherto erratic singer suddenly takes off, carrying her audience with her, on the kind of trip that singing is really all about. It was, in fact, Sandy Denny's moment of truth.

When she first appeared in the folk clubs and on concert platforms Miss Denny was both over-praised and under-valued.

Since then she has lived through many changes and uncertainties and has written a number of excellent songs. Now the uncertainties seem to be behind, and she has emerged with her own voice, spinning her own incantatory magic out of her modest, self-depreciating self.

In some of her songs at the Howff. particularly Solo, No End and, and its own way, Old Fashioned Waltz, talent became genius and there were glimpses of depths which few other singers have revealed to us.

> Sandy Denny > Obituaries, Interviews and Articles > Sandy Denny / Howff (6)

Sandy Denny / Howff (6)

Melody Maker, 15 September 1973

ALL IN ALL, it's been a funny sort of year for Sandy Denny. She hadn't performed in this country before last Christmas though she's worked in America a number of times and played a couple of gigs in Spain.

And it's typical of her that her first British appearance in almost a year - apart from her unscheduled appearance at Cambridge - should have been her show at the tiny Howff on Monday this week.

“I just thought it would be nice.” she said. “It's a cosy place to play. I thought I'd quite like to because I really like playing. It was just that I haven't done it for a while and I felt like doing a gig.”

Much of the year she's been working on her latest album, so far not quite completed, so far not even titled.

She'd hoped to do much of it in America when she found that she and her old friends of Fairport were on the West Coast together, but for various legal reasons that didn't prove possible, and all she laid down there was a couple of vocals.

And the increasing involvement of her old man, Trevor Lucas, in Fairport, moving from being their producer to an actual member of the band, has also held up things.

“I had to give it a rest for some time because Trevor wasn't available.” she said, “So I had to wait until he had some free time.”

“I think this one is simpler and more romantic than the last. It's more direct, I know I always say that about every album, but I'm a bit of an old softie at the moment. I'm going to have to get myself some boxing gloves.”

“You know me, I'm always pleased with what I'm doing at the time, recording-wise, luckily, up to this point. I don't particularly relish any of my old records as being better than the one I'm doing at the moment.”

“Which is good because that gives you an incentive to carry on when you really do have that feeling that you are doing something that is better than the last album.”

“If you always feel like that then I always feel you can keep doing it. I felt that way with the last album and I feel that way with this”.

British audiences hadn't heard any of the songs on the new album until the Howff on Monday, though she did some of them in America.

None of the songs is traditional. There's a jazzy version of the old Fats Waller hit, Until The Real Thing Comes Along with real jazzers like Ian Armitt on piano, Diz Disley on guitar, Danny Thompson on bass and Tony Coe on sax - though Tony hadn't been added to the mix she played me, and she intends to re-do the vocal.

“We did it live, apart from Tony, and it was really fun, and the spirit was so good that I didn't want to stop them when I felt the vocal wasn't going quite right. So I'll do that again until I get it right.”

This jazzy feel may surprise some who think of Sandy as someone who has emerged out of the folk scene to become a singer of more general appeal, but when she was just one of a crowd of girls who used to turn up at the old Cousins and the Scots Hoose - though outstanding among them - she always had ambitions so sing jazz.

She played me two other incompleted mixes of songs from the album, interrupting them to indicate where strings would come in here, a guitar solo there.

One, The Carnival, reminded me somehow of those “end of an era” songs she wrote at the time that Fotheringay was breaking up, and indeed the line-up on it was entirely Fotheringay, Trevor, Jerry Donahue, Pat Donaldson, Gerry Conway.

It's a real autumn song, which could be something of a downer with its images of departing carnivals and the end of summer sunshine, were it not for the strangely uplifting play-out of Sandy's solo voice singing “Come back soon, the carnival” against a veritable choir of Sandy's chanting the one word “carnival” over and over.

I doubted it when she said all the voices were her own, though I recalled the remarkable tour de force she made of Dick Fariña's Quiet Joys of Brotherhood on the last album. I remarked that she'd be putting all the back-up singers out of work at this rate.

“It's just little ol' me, doing my impersonations.” she gagged.

The second song was more romantic, almost banal, with the words - I kid you not - “Roses are red, violets are blue” opening it. The title: Like An Old Fashioned Waltz and though it is, as she says, romantic, there's a somewhat valedictory mood about it, too, for it's a song of nostalgia. These are the ways it used to be, it says.

I told her that the waltz was the only actual ballroom dance I'd ever managed to get my feet around. If she'd called it Like an Old Fashioned Foxtrot she'd have lost me immediately.

“Then it's aimed at you, then, isn't it? Great.”

While she was in the States there was a rumour that Sandy might rejoin Fairport, and it turns out to have been more than a rumour, after all. But it didn't happen.

“There was an emergency situation at one point, where it was a case of will I or won't I? But the emergency situation passed and the idea faded out with the emergency.”

“It's really nothing to do with me, it's just they asked me. But because I happen to be me and I used to be with them everyone starts making a big thing out of it. If some other group had asked me to join they wouldn't have made such a big thing out of it, perhaps, you know?”

It must have been a hard choice for her to make, for Sandy has always preferred not to go out alone. She did the American tour on her own.

“I found it very heavy, actually, to be absolutely honest, I found it exceptionally heavy. There were only three of us. I had a sort of assistant with me and David, my brother, who manages me. When there are just three of you travelling all over America it puts a lot of strain on everybody.”

“Everybody else enjoyed it, David especially, in some ways there were moments when I did but especially the way I did it, which was on my own, it was a bit kind of isolated. A very strange experience.”

It's no surprise, therefore, that when Sandy has her next concert tour in the late autumn, she'll probably have the strength of a band around her, even though it may be only a couple of other musicians.

“I'm working in October and November, concerts and colleges. I'll try to do more concerts.”

“I mean, I like doing universities and colleges as well but it's better like in a concert hall with all the comfortable seats and all those kind of things. People like relaxing to listen rather than sitting on the floor and getting uncomfortable and having to shift every five minutes.”

“I just think it's a lot more relaxed, using a theatre. Mind you, a lot of universities have got theatres now which makes it a lot easier from that point of view. Those are the nicest ones, obviously, to do, because at least people can sit down.”

“I'm probably going to be working with Pat Donaldson and Gerry Conway, if everything works itself out, just as a trio, until we might get somebody else later on. We were even thinking about not calling it me but calling it something else, like a name, you know, to make things a bit more even. But I don't know, we're still not absolutely sure.”

“I'm not really sure what I want to do. It's a simple as that. Even down to the major decisions about whether one does it or does not do it at all. It's from there, to the minute details of how you are going to do it when you do what you do.”

“As a matter of fact, I'm a bit numb about the way things are going at the moment. When you're a bit indecisive about some things it becomes such a strain to make decisions. One tends to put things off. I like to kind of delay the decision as much as possible, and therefore one gets into a sort of mesmeric state about were things are going.”

“Apart from writing, I do a lot of thinking. Trying to find out if I have any enthusiasm under that lazy facade.”

Is it just a facade?

“Well that's what I'm trying to find out.”

Despite all evidences to the contrary, I think the logjam in Sandy's life is beginning to break up right now. Her album is nearly finished. She's going out on the road again. I don't think she is as far from a decision as she thinks.

The funny year is coming to an end.