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A Wound That Never Healed

The Guardian, 23 April 1998

Thanks to Tony Swift from the U.K. for typing it up. Thanks to Frank Turner from the U.K. for sending me a copy of the original article.
The article also appeared on the Sandy Denny Mailing List
This article © 1998 The Guardian, U.K.

Sandy Denny, the British Baez, died tragically at 31. Now, two decades later, we are finally realising how good she was. Robin Denselow reports:

Twenty years ago this week the finest British female singer of the last three decades died after a tragic accident. Sandy Denny fell down the stairs of a friend's house, struck her head, and went into a coma. She never regained consciousness. She was 31. At the funeral, a lone piper played The Flowers of the Forest. I was one of the small group of her friends and fans who stood around the grave that day wondering how she would be remembered.

Sandy was the first great female British singer of the rock era, an unlikely, genial and slightly chubby star whose quiet persona changed utterly once she started singing. Until Sandy came along, the music scene of the sixties had been dominated almost completely by men and by bands, apart from the odd blues singer like Maggie Bell and traditionalists like Norma Waterson.

It was a time when everything and everybody seemed to be connected - there were rock bands experimenting in underground clubs like UFO, and there were eccentrics like Roy Harper or the Incredible String Band emerging through the folk circuit. Sandy managed to combine both these scenes, changing the face of British music almost by accident.

She became the leading vocalist of the new and vibrant British folk-rock scene after she sang a few of her favourite trad songs to her band, Fairport Convention, one night in a dressing room. “We thought, ‘What could we do that was different?’” said Sandy, “so I sang them some songs.” No one in the band seemed to realise the importance of the experiment at first, but Fairport's blend of traditional narrative songs and a sturdy rock band backing became one of the distinctive English rock styles of the sixties and seventies.

Then she moved on, concentrating on her own melancholy songs, many of them obsessed with death, their oblique lyrics utterly at odds with her jovial self. Again, she was moving the British music scene into new territory, and in the process she became an icon, a home-grown answer to both Joan Baez and Joni Mitchell.

She hasn't been forgotten, 20 years on, but it's the sort of anniversary this self-effacing lady might have expected. Fairport Convention, who produced their greatest work when Sandy and Richard Thompson were part of the line-up, are “not planning anything special”, but they did revive her best-known song Who Knows Where The Time Goes? on an album last year.

Island records are marking the occasion with a series of releases, starting with Gold Dust, a recording of her last concert at London's Royalty Theatre in November 1977. Unfortunately it won't be in the shops until a month after the anniversary has passed.

It's unfortunate too that there's been a dispute over another “new” Denny album. Released by Strange Fruit, The BBC Sessions 1971-73, was withdrawn on the day it was released after a contractual dispute between record companies. It was special because it's the only recording on which Sandy can be heard playing solo. It's a tribute to Denny's lasting appeal that even this album-that-never-was found its way onto several “best of the year” listings at Christmas.

That might have amused her, in her droll fashion, and she would have been flattered that everyone from Blur to Sonic Youth currently claim to be Denny fans. But she would have acted as if she didn't quite believe it, for despite her achievements she remained painfully modest, even insecure about her work. If she was ever aware of the extent of her talent, she never showed it.

She may have acted at times as if she had no real confidence in herself, but once she started singing she displayed an emotional intensity that was applied to anything from the traditional songs to ragtime or her own haunting ballads.

It's easy to see why she was never quite treated as a superstar in her lifetime (even if she was voted Britain's best female singer time and again in the music press), why she suffered so badly from the whims of pop fashion, and why fellow musicians so admired her. As her latest live releases show, there was a timeless quality to her work.

Her career started in a typical mid-sixties fashion. A student at Kensington Art College, she started on the folk circuit. “I liked singing,” she told me, “but I was frowned on by the more ethnic folkies.” She got bored “flitting around the country by myself. Finding my way to obscure pubs”, so she joined a then-struggling band, The Strawbs, with whom she recorded one album, before auditioning for Fairport Convention. She confessed, after she'd got the job, that she thought they were American. They certainly sounded that way, with their West Coast blend of soft-rock and Dylan songs. But while she was with them, they developed their interest in folk-rock. Sandy's strong, flexible voice was a match for both the rousing guitar work of Richard Thompson and the fiddle-playing of Dave Swarbrick. But her own song-writing was developing too, and Who Knows Where The Time Goes? was to be a bestseller for the American singer Judy Collins.

Denny moved on, just as the Fairports were becoming famous. At the end of 1969 she started a new band, Fotheringay, with the Australian guitarist Trevor Lucas, whom she was to marry three years later. Soon she moved on yet again, this time to a solo career. She was now the most important woman on the British music scene, but typically refused to act the part. Then 23, she lived in Fulham with Lucas, three cats and an enormous dog, and seemed happy to sit around, making tea, telling jokes, and talking about anything other than her career. I once asked if she was ambitious. “No, yes. Well, I just plod. It just happens.” She wouldn't discuss what her songs were about.

“They are biographical. About 10 people can understand them. I just take a story and whittle it down to essentials. I wouldn't write songs if they didn't mean something to me, but I'm not prepared to tell everyone about my private life, like Joni Mitchell does. I like to be a bit more elusive than that.” She elaborated by attacking John Lennon for being too explicit. “He really blew his cool when he explained exactly how he wrote Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds.” It wasn't worth pursuing the subject much further.

She recorded three mostly introspective solo albums between 1971 and 1973, but she was still as restless as ever. She made an excursion into rock theatrics, appearing alongside The Who and playing the part of The Nurse in Tommy, proving again that her clear, exquisite voice was a match for any rousing backing. For a while she rejoined Fairport Convention (which now included her husband), but quit once again to make another solo album, Rendezvous, in 1977. By then she was planning to move to America with Lucas and their daughter, Georgia, who was born nine months before her death. She never had a chance to relaunch her career in the States, where this most English of singers might, ironically, have reached a wider audience.