> Sandy Denny > Obituaries, Interviews and Articles > Sandy Denny 1947-1978

Sandy Denny 1947-1978

Rolling Stone magazine, May 1978, by Greil Marcus

Sandy Denny's career was in decline when, after a fall, she died April 21st of a cerebral hemorrhage. Best known for her work in the late Sixties as a lead singer and songwriter for Fairport Convention, a British folk-rock band, she had made a series of increasingly ineffective solo albums since leaving the group in 1970, briefly rejoined a dry-bones version of Fairport in 1974, and at the time of her death was preparing to try her luck in the United States. Denny left her husband, Trevor Lucas, and their nine-month-old daughter, Georgia; she was thirty-one.

Denny was less a folk singer than a singer who meant to defeat time, and that may be why, in her strongest moments, no female singer of the last ten years could touch her. As with Van Morrison on Astral Weeks and Veedon Fleece, no one else could go where she went. The cover of Fairport Chronicles, an almost ideal collection of Fairport and post-Fairport recordings, is a photo of Stonehenge; listening to Denny, you might imagine her taking in the history that image represents in a glance. Simply, there was no distance in her music, or at least in the music for which she will be remembered: her singing on her own Fotheringay and Who Knows Where The Time Goes, on Bob Dylan's I'll Keep It With Mine, Fairport guitarist Richard Thompson's Genesis Hall and Meet On The Ledge, the traditional ballads Tam Lin, A Sailor's Life and Matty Groves or on her raging duet with Robert Plant for Led Zeppelin's The Battle Of Evermore. She sang about serfs and noblemen with the naturalism of a woman describing everyday life, and she sang about everyday life as if from the perspective of a woman a thousand years gone.

There was nothing spectacular about Denny's clear, even voice; she didn't use it to hit notes. Rather, it was the feeling she put into her singing that stayed with the listener: she never flinched from the emotion of her songs. Whether her tone was delicate, as with Fotheringay, or furious, as with Tam Lin, it always held its shape. What you heard was a kind of awe at the contingency of human life and the beauty of the world, a certain reverence for the past, and a steady determination to take her place in the long story she was telling: if Joan Baez turned the ancient Matty Groves, the tale of a deadly rivalry between a peasant and a lord, into a protest against social inequality, Denny sang it as a duel with herself.

Her finest music - unlike much of the best music of the late Sixties and early Seventies - has not dated in any manner: Fairport Convention, Unhalfbricking, Liege and Lief and bits of Denny's best solo albums, Sandy and The North Star Grassman And The Ravens, sound as if they would have been as appropriate well before Denny was born as they would years from now. But then, Denny didn't often sing about matters that date. On the first Fairport Convention album there is an instrumental Denny co-wrote; she hums in the background. The title that was given to that tune is The Lord Is In This Place, How Dreadful Is This Place, and I doubt if I am the only fan of Sandy Denny's who thought of it when I heard that she had died.

[NOTE: What We Did On Our Holidays was the first Fairport album released in the U.S., where it was retitled Fairport Convention.]

> Sandy Denny > Obituaries, Interviews and Articles > Sandy Denny 1947-1978

Sandy Denny 1947-1978

New Musical Express, 6 May 1978

She stayed with the band for three seminal albums, including the legendary Liege and Lief (from which period came the mighty Matty Groves and many other “Trad. Arr. Fairport” classics). That one album, it can be safely said, instigated the whole English folk/rock movement; it's not surprising that, despite her many other notable achievements, Sandy Denny's name will remain inextricably linked with Fairport - whom she re-joined for a series of gigs and the Rising For The Moon album in 1974.

After leaving Fairport initially in 1969, she formed the under-rated and all too short-lived Fotheringay. The band's one recorded album was more than enough indication of the band's unrealised potential.

Four solo albums followed, each gradually leaving her folk roots further behind, from the haunting The North Star Grassman to the lushly orchestrated Like An Old Fashioned Waltz, but each stamped with her own individual style. Her voice was undeniably impressive, but accessible. With Sandy a song had to be felt, not simply admired.

When I met her last May she was relaxed and friendly, looking back on those traumatic Fairport days with great affection, delighted that Richard Thompson had come in to play on Rendezvous - “I'm sure he was glad to get back, wailing away on electric guitar” - and she was thinking of moving to America, where her brother lived, to try out American studios and musicians. “Not,” she stressed, “because they're better, but it would be a complete change. Over here you tend to get terribly relaxed and think, ‘Oh well, Take 36’ …”

Aside from her well-known folk connections, Sandy also appeared on The Bunch, an album of old rock'n'roll standards with erstwhile Fairport members, Led Zeppelin IV "Led Zeppelin IV" and Lou Reisner's Tommy production. There was also talk of her recording an album of old Fats Waller / Inkspots numbers, which she was particularly fond of.

Sadly that project will now never materialise, but as some small solace, Sandy Denny left a legacy of fine recordings: just listen to her memorable interpretations of Richard Thompson's Genesis Hall and Farewell Farewell or Dylan's Percy's Song, or indeed any number of her own beautiful compositions, particularly the Sandy album or Solo and the title track of Old Fashioned Waltz.

She leaves a husband, a daughter and a great many admirers who knew her only through her music. She will be greatly missed.

Patrick Humphries

> Sandy Denny > Obituaries, Interviews and Articles > The First Lady of Folk Rock

The First Lady of Folk Rock

Folk News, May 1978 by Karl Dallas

I will still be here,
I have no thought of leaving,
I do not count the time.
Who knows where the time goes?
Who knows where the time goes?
- SANDY DENNY

Tears don't help the dead, I know, but they might help me. Somehow it is unthinkable that we shall never again see Sandy Denny's sunny, manic face, watch her looning about on stage and then suddenly pouring out such an intensity of passion as to make the hairs on the back of your neck rise. As unthinkable, yes, as the thought that one day the sun might not rise and we'd be plunged into perpetual dark.

I have written a number of obituaries since I started documenting the music of our time a couple of decades ago, but there has never been one as hard as this to write, because though I have known some of the subjects fairly well through interviews, none of them has been a close friend which is what, in a very real sense, Sandy Denny was to me.

I saw her first at Bruce Dunnet's Scots Hoose on Cambridge Circus at the height of those halcyon Soho summer days everyone writes about, when Paul Simon, Ralph McTell, Jackson C. Frank, Anne Briggs, Al Stewart, Beverley, Roy Harper, the Young Tradition, Bert Jansch, John Renbourn and the makings of Pentangle, Donovan Leitch, Joe Heaney, Nigel Denver and a young Jewish boy called Dylan were hanging out all over the West End. Her choice of material was abyssmal ("Last Train to Yuma"!), and what was later to become an engaging gaucheness was at that time sheer, wooden amateurism.

But that voice, even then, before maturity had conferred the understanding that was to make her a superlative interpreter of her own and other people's lyrics, stood out in the crowd, where most of the girl singers were trying to be weak and simpering imitations of Joan Baez, without that lady's firm commitment to the need for social change to sharpen up the sweetness.

She told me at the time that she didn't feel she was a folk singer in the same bracket as, say, Annie Briggs or Heather Wood, and in fact her leanings were more towards jazz, but actually the problem was that the music she was meant to sing hadn't been invented yet.

I didn't know what it was, but I was certain that it wasn't what she was doing right then.

Then one day a complete stranger (who has also, now, become a friend) rang me up out of the blue, saying he played with a rock band called Fairport Convention whose girl singer had just left. People told him I might have a suggestion.

I did -- and I turned out not to be the only one. Sandy Denny got the gig, and as much as I like Judy Dyble's voice, it is clear that the development of Fairport Convention as we know it today, for all its twists and turns and changes of personnel, started when Sandy Denny joined them.

That was a magic band. On one side stood Sandy, on the other this haunted looking guy called Ian Matthews. Ashley (Tyger) Hutchings wore green tartan breeches and gaiters. They did, for instance, one of the few versions of Leonard Cohen's "Suzanne" which actually added anything to the original, swapping the verses back and forth between them.

The later years have been well documented, the car crash which scarred them all mentally from then on, the retreat into the country to get together "Liege and Lief", making her the first lady of folk rock, winning awards even when she hardly sang a note, Sandy's brief spin-off with that under-rated and influential band, "Fotheringay", upon which she and Trevor Lucas pinned so much hopes, her brief return to the band, and then what was hoped to have been the beginning of her new solo concert career in November of last year, but which turned out to be the last time, to my knowledge, she ever sang in public.

Although it began shakily, at the final event (which was recorded) she was singing almost with her old power, and some of her performances of the individual songs were as tremendous as that night when she performed entrirely alone at Roy Guest's Howff in Primrose Hill, and moved me, quite literally, to tears.

So if I cannot find them now, because the sense of outrage, of waste, of promises unfulfilled still chokes up the place where they should flow, I will save them instead for when I can bear to play one of her many fine recordings again. Not tears of sorrow for a departed friend, but tears of joy for the legacy of great music she left us, of love for the friend she was and will always be, as long as memory holds.

- Karl Dallas

> Sandy Denny > Obituaries, Interviews and Articles > Singing Queen of Folk Rock

Singing Queen of Folk Rock

The Guardian, 27 April 1978

Sandy Denny, who has died in a London hospital aged 31, was one of the most individual and compelling British songwriters and singers of the last 10 years.

She was in a coma for four days at Atkinson Morley Hospital, Wimbledon, after falling down stairs at a friend's flat. Sandy, who died of a brain haemorrhage, was planning to move to America with her musician husband Trevor Lucas and nine-month-old baby Georgia.

She was one of the originators of "folk-rock", a ballad artist of considerable sensitivity and insight, and a singer who could switch easily between highly amplified rock styles and gentle emotional and personal solopieces at the piano.

Sandy's career started in typical mid-60s fashion. A student at Kensington Art College, London, she performed around the folk club circuit, introducing her own songs alongside traditional material.

She joined a then-struggling band, The Strawbs, with whom she recorded an album. Then, almost exactly 10 years ago, she auditioned for Fairport Convention confessing after she had got the job that she had thought they were American.

In 1969 the Fairports reached their peak. By now Sandy was known also for her song-writing abilities and she seemed set to become a major artists.

But at the end of 1969, just as the Fairports were becoming well-known, she left and started a new band Fotheringay with Australian guitarist Trevor Lucas whom she married three years later. Fotheringay rarely matched Fairport on stage.

After Fotheringay she went on to make four solo albums which included highly personal, quietly introspective ballads.

From 1974-6 she re-joined Fairport Convention, which now included her husband, and their 1975 album Rising For the Moon was an impressive return to a strong mixture of rock tunes and ballads.

The public were not so impressed and Sandy quit again, returning to solo work. Her last album Rendezvous came out last year. At her last London concert her haunting, sensitive voice was as fine as ever.

She may have suffered from the whims of fashion and her own insecurity, but she had the personality and talent to develop even further. She'll be sadly missed.

- R.D.