> Sandy Denny > Obituaries, Interviews and Articles > Sandy Denny Returns to the Stage

Sandy Denny Returns to the Stage

28 May 1977

SANDY DENNY is due to play her first concerts for two years when she starts an 11-show UK tour on November 6 at London's Sound Circus. She will be fronting a sixpiece backing band that features her husband and fellow former Fairport Conventioner Trevor Lucas on vocals and guitar, Pete Wilshire on pedal steel, former David Essex player Phil Palmer on guitar, Rob Hendry on guitar, Dave Mattacks on drums and Pat Donaldson on bass.

Sandy recently gave birth to daughter Georgia, who will go on tour with her parents. The material for the concerts will be chosen from Sandy's four solo albums with a few songs from Fairport days. Support act on the tour will be bassist Danny Thompson.

The dates are: London Sound Circus (November 6), Brighton Dome (8), Croydon Fairfield Halls (10), Edinburgh Usher Hall (12), Glasgow City Hall (13), Manchester Palace (14), Birmingham Town Hall (15), Oxford New Theatre (16), Cardiff Capitol (18), Bristol Colston Hall (20), London Sound Circus (27).

> Sandy Denny > Obituaries, Interviews and Articles > Sandy Denny Fights Back

Sandy Denny Fights Back

Colin Irvin, 12 November 1977

“If I have to sing Matty Groves one more time, I'll throw myself out of a window… I'll be doing a lot of stuff from my early albums, but one of them will NOT be Matty Groves. or Tam Lin. There, you can write that down.”

There you have it. This week embarking on her first tour for two years, Sandy Denny remains as strong-willed as ever and is anxious for you all to know she won't be singing her two most famous traditional numbers, no matter how long she's been away.

Her long absence hasn't, apparently, been by design. Along with her old man, Trevor Lucas, and Jerry Donahue, she quit Fairport Convention for the second time in 1975 and then decided on a long break to recover her sanity.

But the break dragged on, she gave birth to a daughter, Georgia, and practically the only thing her fans have had to go on has been an album belatedly issued by Island earlier in the year. And Sandy has become increasingly frustrated, yearning to get out on stage and sing in public again.

“I've virtually never stopped working since I was 18 - and I'm not telling you how long ago that is - and these two years have done me a lot of good. When you've been working so long, you gradually lose your sanity without realising it. But there have been moments recently of total boredom - I got to the stage where I turned the television off if a pop programme came on. I pretended the pop world didn't exist.”

No, she says, she has no fears that people won't remember her; or that she won't be able to handle an audience after so long away. There was never a time when she seriously considered not coming back, and she didn't intend it to be so long before she did.

Though still friends with Fairport (they all live round Banbury Way), she now concedes it was a mistake to re-join the band. She had done so for emotional, as much as any other, reasons; Trevor Lucas was in the group and they saw each other only occasionally between tours, so when Fairport asked her to re-join it was logical for her to accept and bring some order into their relationship.

“It was a mistake, but in a way I had to do it. My marriage is quite important to me and I hardly ever saw Trevor. In the early part it was quite good, but there were a lot of musical conflicts.

“Swarb is an entity of his own, and we're both strong personalities … I'm not saying we didn't get on, but we did have our moments. I think they're better as they are now with just one focal point, instead of two or three.

“And there were politics - sometimes I wonder how they kept going - I keep expecting the big explosion to be splattered all over Britain. But they seem to have it all sorted out now.”

She agrees there seems to be something uncrushable about Fairport. After one sequence of personnel changes they decided to split if anybody else left; a bit later Dave Mattacks quit, but they conveniently forgot their earlier resolution and brought Bruce Rowland into the band.

Now she's confident of re-establishing herself. She's proud of all the solo albums she's made and is writing new material now. There may be one or two traditional things in her concerts, she says, adding the proviso:

“I was never in the traditional clan - I was in the layabout section with Bert Jansch and John Renbourn and all that lot.

“I'm not ashamed of any of my records. Some of them are really good, and I'm surprised they haven't sold more than they have. They haven't done bad, but I feel they deserved to be more successful. I feel it's a style of music of its own. I've never consciously copied anybody.”

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

Sandy Denny Pregnant

16 July 1977

Sandy Denny looked radiant. Yes, one is always supposed to say that about ladies when they're pregnant, but in this case it was true. She lounged back, relaxed and ebullient, on the over-stuffed sofa of the Northamptonshire cottage where she lives with her husband, Trevor Lucas.

With her baby due barely a month from now, she was already beginning to talk about an autumn tour, and with no sign at all of any frustration at having been off the road for so long - well over a year, in fact, since she and Trevor left Fairport Convention.

“To be honest," she said, “I've enjoyed every minute of it, 'cos in many ways I really needed a break from the business. I've been in it up to my eyes for over ten years, virtually non-stop, though people don't realise it because I'm not hitting the headlines every day.

“But when you're working for ten or 11 years with not much of a break you can go completely mad without realising it at the time. It's taken me since last summer to get back to some sort of sanity - something I didn't even realise I'd lost.

“Now I feel I can renew my old enthusiasm. For instance, last week I just went and played the piano for about three hours, all sorts of stuff, just for my own enjoyment. It really felt fantastic. It's the first time I've done that, just out of sheer enjoyment, not out of necessity - not having to learn something or write something. I tell you what, it feels good for the first time in years.

“I think by the time that I'm ready to go back and work, which will be October or November, I shall be ready to do it. Obviously, there's a lot to go through before then, with the baby and everything, but this is how I feel now.

“If I continue along the way I feel now about my music, not about the business but the music itself, I shall be much happier in my work when I do return to it.

“In general, I feel that I must be satisfied with myself. If I'm not satisfied with the way that I'm doing something, how can I expect anyone else to be? How can I make people feel that I'm as good as I want them to feel if I don't think I am anyway?

“Everyone, when they review my records, seems to say the same thing: another load of dirges. The trouble is that one of the reasons I write those dirgy tunes is that I can't move that fast on the piano. I'm no Fats Waller, and that's how it comes out, though it's a real drag, I know.

“I don't want to write miserable songs. Do you know how I feel after I've written a miserable sad song? Something that's really hit me and hurt me. I feel terrible. I go and sit down and I'm really upset by it. I always write on my own.

“It's like a vicious circle, being on my own. I tend to think of sad things and so I write songs that make me feel even sadder. I sit down and I write something and it moves me to tears almost. I'm fed up with feeling like that. Why do I have to put myself through it? Why can't I think about other things, try and relax a little bit more?

“I'm not really interested any more in being heavy with people. There's no point, I've just realised, because what can I do? I can't do anything about anything. What a terribly defeatist attitute, you might say, but if I can't do anything about the way things are then surely I can try to make people feel a little better about it.

“You've got to let yourself branch out as much as you possibly can, otherwise you can't appreciate things if you're bigoted, it's a pain.”

At long last, at least for a time, the pain seems to have gone out of Sandy's life, and it's a pleasure to see it.