> Sandy Denny > Obituaries, Interviews and Articles > The Gift

The Gift

RAM, 25 January 1989

Sandy Denny died ten years ago and the world lost one of its most unique voices. Shane Danielson pays respect, clears some misconceptions and takes notes on the life with one-time husband, co-musician and - soon to be - biographer, Trevor Lucas.

This is because it will be Christmas soon - though that season is not quite yet upon us. Time enough remains for suggestions, offerings.

Mine is the gift of remembrance. Alexandra Elene MacLean Denny, known to her friends and fans simply as Sandy, died a little over ten years ago. A fall down a flight of stairs, a mid-cerebral heamorrhage: she never regained consciousness. In her passing, England lost not only the finest female singer to grace popular song, but also one of the most accomplished and unquestionably gifted songwriters of her generation. A decade ago.

Today it is raining, and unseasonably cold. In a leafy suburban street, all the colours seem to run. There is a house like a cottage, a large dog that rushes to meet me. Inside, Trevor Lucas is towering, friendly, with a voice that seems to rumble upwards from the earth. After the departure of Sandy, and the equally gifted Richard Thompson, just one album later, Lucas joined Fairport Convention, perhaps the single redeeming feature of the lumbering, passionless beast that band became. And he was her husband.

“What was Sandy like?” A wry smile, a moment's silence. “She was…” and stops. His lips purse, he considers. Selects words. There are obviously many answers.

“If she came into a room, a party, she was immediately the centre of attention - partly, I suppose, because of who she was: she was always incredibly respected, even back in the early days, just by virtue of her voice. There was a real awe attached to her. But it was something more than that -- she had a charisma about her, a style, that people were automatically drawn to. It was amazing to watch, at times.”

“Yet at the same time, she was prone to extremes. Sandy was in many ways an extreme person, who inevitably tended to get her own way most of the time. And she had the ability to put the shits into people when they first encountered her. Most people realised almost as soon as they met Sandy, that you don't put a word out of place. Be precise: don't bullshit her around. She didn't tolerate fools easily. And the people who knew her well knew what she was like, and what it was about, and how to get around that -- because at times it was like walking on eggshells.”

“Above all, she was incredibly sensitive, and especially in regard to being a woman in rock and roll -- and not one of the really glamourous women, at that. The industry, in those days -- and I don't know, though I presume it's much the same now -- was an almost entirely chauvinist environment. And there are always these managing directors of record companies who want to find an attractive girl singer who might just fancy them. It's sickening, it really is, but that was exactly how it was. And men are fortunate in that they don't come under that sort of pressure, they don't have to deal with that kind of bullshit. But she did, and it depressed her.”

One cigarette burns out. Another is lit. The story is prone to diversions worthy of Heroditus, fragments of gossip -- all entertaining, most relevatory. And, slowly, a picture of the artist begins to take shape:

“There were so many contradictions to Sandy, it's very difficult. I mean, she could get on quite well meeting Princess Margaret -- she'd chat away quite happily, without any kind of self-consciousness at all. Yet put her in a supermarket, and expect her to talk to the check-out girl, and she'd be a bundle of nerves. She had real difficulties in relating to people, at times.”

Among the legend springs a viper of rumour -- the (whispered) suggestion of a woman devoted overmuch to alcohol:

“Sandy drank, yes. She liked to drink. She liked the effect of alcohol, the feeling of being drunk -- which is always dangerous. And she was one of those people whose bodies don't metabolise alcohol very well, so the first drink really had the effect of the last one.”

“But, to understand her, I think you have to consider she'd had a very restrictive childhood, until that time when she actually broke away from home. And when she did get out, and saw there was a good time to be had out there, she was determined to have it. She started working as a nurse, at the Brompton Chest Hospital, and that was really the first time she'd had any freedom at all. And, like most people who've been confined in that way, she was only more eager to live life to the full.”

“Ultimately, Sandy's drinking was really no more a problem than was Dave Swarbrick's or Dave Pegg's. Once, at the Troubadour in Los Angeles, we played three shows in one night -- and Sandy happened to fall off stage, just like that. But the audience, who were fantastic, just caught her and stood her back up. And she didn't miss a note.” He laughs.

“But those incidents, while part of the fun of those days -- and Fairport were always a fun band: I think the main reason we made no money was basically that we were having too good a time to care less about it -- those moments have a tendency to become exaggerated, to be taken for the whole story -- and the truth of the matter is obscured.”

Nevertheless, the significance of her work with Fairport cannot be overestimated. In just three successive albums, she was instrumental in the definition of a new style. The contemporary-based, remarkably eclectic pop of What We Did On Our Holidays, Unhalfbricking, revealing a maturing folk sensibility, and influecence which finally culminated in the mammoth Liege and Lief -- the album which singlehandedly launched the British folk-rock movement, in the process setting a standard that was never to be equalled by their peers.

Yet the balance was shifting: Fairport, seizing upon the idea of traditional musics with modern instrumentation, was looking squarely into the past for inspiration. Bass player Ashley Hutchings, in particular -- seized by a passion for traditional music so suddenly, and so completely, as to still astound Lucas -- began hunting for manuscripts in Sir Cecil Sharpe House -- the library whose manuscripts constituted the raison d'etre of the essentially academic folk scene of that time.

Though this shift was as least partially attributable to her background, and her influence, Sandy nevertheless felt constrained by the change.

“This was, after all, exactly what she'd escaped from in order to join Fairport in the first place. Liege and Lief was originally intended to be a one-off; their rationale was: 'Let's make a traditional record, and then go back to what we really want to do.' The … to stick with it was completely unexpected. And she was basically tired of doing folk music exclusively, and fed up with a lot of the attitudes which surrounded that scene: she didn't want to sing Farmer Jones songs for the rest of her life. She had a huge amount of her own material, was writing very prolifically, and she could see that the band had less and less place for that.”

“You see, the traditional folk thing, the way it was organised -- was particularly confining for her. It was far cooler, in those days, to say you'd 'found' a song, from a traditional source, than to actually write something. History lent virtually anything some kind of credibility. And Sandy, from the time she'd worked the clubs, had always copped a lot of flak for writing her own songs, not singing traditional things.”

Need I add that she was/is my idol? Hers are the only records which can make me cry. I have never heard a performance so affecting as the reading of her signature tune, Who Knows Where The Time Goes? -- not that found on Unhalfbricking, but that of a version earlier by a year, on the very first Strawbs album, accompanied only by the acoustic guitar. Nor one so sad. She is 18; her voice is pure, effordless, perfect: she will never again possess quite this quality of tone. The tremolo will deepen, the range narrow ever so slightly. It will become the voice of a mortal rather than a goddess -- yet all the more gorgeous for that.

The photos show her: smiling, pensive -- sometimes beautiful, sometimes plain. And the songs reveal her better than any commentary. The world of her compositions is a bleak one, peopled by lonely, unfulfilled characters. At her best, she is at once mournful and inspiring -- not quite surrendering to her latent pessimism, yet infused by it, drawing strength from it.

So this then, is my gift, to whoever of you will accept it, in this season most charitable. Invest in a Sandy Denny album. Whether it be given to a lover, a friend -- for those to whom sometimes you cannot articulate. Or kept, simply for yourself. Turn off the light, lie back and listen. For I have heard the voice of and angel. And so can you.