“Qualities of grandeur come across as unpretentious and grounded”: Remembering Sandy Denny

When you buy through links on our articles, Future and its syndication partners may earn a commission.

In just 10 years Sandy Denny went from Strawb apprentice to international treasure, showing that folk musicians could rock – and share Bacchanalian excesses with the glitterati too. In 2010 Prog remembered the wild English rose known as ‘The Lady.’

It’s July 1967. Sandy Denny and the Strawbs – Dave Cousins, Tony Hooper and Ron Chesterman – are in Copenhagen singing to the crowds at the Tivoli Gardens. Aside from their evening gigs, the group have come from the UK at the request of Sonet label boss Karl Knudsen, to record an album at the Vanl?se Bio cinema across town.

At the same time, a Danish movie called called Jeg Er Sgu’ Min Egen (I Belong To Me) is doing the rounds. It’s a corny battle-of-the-sexes musical vehicle for Danish pop singer Daimi, who plays a rough diamond caught between the pressure to settle down or opting instead to be a free spirit.

Since the Strawbs could only record at the cinema while it’s closed during the day, it’s unlikely that Sandy ever saw the movie. Yet it tangentially mirrored her own situation; by pursuing a singing career around London’s folk scene since late 1965, she’s incurred the disapproval of her parents, who’d hoped their wayward daughter would forego her singing nonsense in favour of a proper job.

For two days the musicians have gathered before the three-track tape machine, recording a clutch of tunes mostly from Cousins’ voluminous songbook, along with a couple from Tony Hooper. Now they try one written by Denny.

After some plaintive introductory picking, the guitars momentarily embroider a dramatic swell, before subsiding into the unhurried chords across which her words will float. Leaning into the Neumann microphone she sings: ‘Across the purple sky, all the birds are leaving...’ There’s a slight vibrato in the delicate voice, possibly nerves. After all, compared to the veteran tunesmiths around her, she’s still a novice. This is only the second song she’s ever written.

Although it would be fine-tuned (and covered in 1968 by Judy Collins) even in its fledgling form, Who Knows Where The Time Goes is unbelievably poignant. Beyond the smouldering arc of the melody’s careworn trajectory, the words are suffused with a wisdom far beyond her age. It’s a sobering thought to realise that Sandy Denny is still only 20 years old.

They say you’ll always remember what you were doing when you first heard Sandy singing. “Somebody slapped a pair of headphones on me,” says ex-Genesis guitarist Anthony Phillips, “and the first hearing of Fairport Convention’s What We Did On Our Holidays blew my mind.” Although he confesses to not being a Fairport fan, and to gaps in his knowledge of Denny’s career, he can barely contain his passion as he talks.

“Things like Meet On The Ledge were great tracks, but it was the quieter songs which had a phenomenal effect,” he says. “The whole experience of listening to Fotheringay with the guitars and the voices... that track wasn’t what I would call folk. You couldn’t really place it anywhere, really. Such beauty. When she pushed notes it was just fabulous.

“In Genesis, Mike Rutherford and I were doing a lot of interplay with 12-string chords and picking; given that we were one half of what propelled Genesis this was obviously significant. There were other bands that we were influenced by – but there’s absolutely no question that the acoustic stuff and what Sandy was doing was deeply inspiring.”

Phillips cites Fairport’s rendition of Who Knows Where The Time Goes from the 1969 album Unhalfbricking to be equally important. “The quality of her voice had a haunting, aching melancholy combined with a feeling of calm resignation. That’s damned hard to do; a lot of people, when they’re trying that kind of stuff, tend to overdo it. With her it was the understated quality that was so powerful.

“I did a track later called Which Way The Wind Blows (from The Geese And The Ghost); it wasn’t lifted from Denny – if you listen to the chords and stuff it’s quite different – but there’s something in the kind of vibe of it which was affected by Who Knows.”

It would be a foolhardy soul who pigeonholed Sandy Denny as being a folk singer. A vital component in Fairport Convention’s visionary cross-pollination of traditional folk themes and incisive rock dynamics on Liege & Lief, she quit very soon after its release in 1969 to go in search of her own muse.

Formed with husband-to-be Trevor Lucas, her band Fotheringay produced just one self-titled album in 1970. A fine but uneven work, her finest vocal performance can be found on shimmering epic Banks Of The Nile – a glacially-paced adaptation of a song that dated back to the Napoleonic wars. Amid the minimalist, mirage-like arrangements, Denny controls her voice with exquisite precision, subtly changing gears and skillfully inferring drama between lovers parted by circumstance, rather than resorting to cheap histrionics. The emotional power remains undiminished to this day.

When it came to creating material on the piano, her technical limitations meant she wasn’t able to indulge in instrumental thrills and spills. Her writing is necessarily framed within a stately, contemplative tempo; the perfect medium through which her dreams, ideas and stories would press themselves against our world. “It’s too fast,” Denny is heard telling pianist Ian Whiteman at the start of Next Time Around from 1971’s debut solo album, The North Star Grassman And The Ravens. She’s heard her tapping the preferred time with her foot as the chords fall at a funeral pace.

While some songs in her repertoire can be categorised as expressions of love and loss, the oblique lyrical content of many tracks (including Next Time Around) resists easy interpretation, littered as they are with cryptic referrals to the people and places that crowd her interior universe.

If she was realistic about her own capabilities as a musician, she was was equally certain of her sources of inspiration. Speaking to Sounds’ Jerry Gilbert in September 1973, she notes the indelible effect of the elements upon her work: “I often picture myself standing on a beach or standing on a rock or a promenade or something. I just put myself there sometimes, and without even realising it I find myself describing what I’m looking at; and often it’s the sea.”

It’s easy to visualise her standing on some hazardous promontory, cloaked in her introspection, surrounded by the breakers of everyday life, peering off toward a horizon that seems terminally dark and perilously foreshortened. While her albums have their moments of novelty or the occasional musical redundancy, at their best they also speak directly to that part of us which is lost and looking for the light.

“At various points in my life, Sandy Denny’s music has meant a great deal to me,”observes Tim Bowness, vocalist with No-Man. “There are qualities of grandeur and flight in her music – yet it comes across as totally unpretentious and emotionally grounded. Songs like Who Knows Where The Time Goes, Autopsy or The Pond And The Stream are eerily evocative in themselves, but are also hugely evocative in terms of the personal memories they unearth whenever I play them.

“As with someone like Nick Drake, the best of what Sandy did possesses a timeless purity and a sense of grace, which provide an interesting contrast to the often earthy, ‘boozy bird’ way she sometimes presented herself.”

Garrulous and frequently able to drink her (mostly) male colleagues under the table, Denny bucked the stereotyping of female singer-songwriters common to the times. She had the kind of magical social mobility among the rock scene’s aristocracy that others could only wonder at – she hung out with Pete Townshend, Keith Moon and Frank Zappa.

Her appearance on Led Zeppelin’s fourth album on The Battle Of Evermore (recorded midway between leaving Fotheringay and going solo) lights a fire under Robert Plant’s lead vocals, her rising voice giving Zep’s frontman a run for his money.

Her death from a brain haemorrhage in 1978 means she has ascended to the pantheon of artists whose departure has secured the kind of ubiquitous critical and commercial acclaim that was beyond them when they were alive.

Seemingly gathering up every last available scrap of song ever to leave her lips, 2010’s 19-CD box set feeds an apparently insatiable demand for anything bearing the Denny imprimatur. Yet it’s only the latest in a long line of compilations of varying quantity, along with the expanded reissues of her work with Fairport Convention, her band, Fotheringay, and the four solo albums she recorded and released during her lifetime.

Perhaps the presence of so many best-ofs and bonus-padded editions speak to the fact that there is no single Denny album that definitively contains all of her brightest moments or provides the sum of her poetic insights. There is no one true Holy Grail; rather a scattering of priceless jewels strewn amid lesser trinkets, whose construction can often seem as erratic as they are eclectic.

An increasing dependence on alcohol, combined with her legendary capacity to rub people up the wrong way, resulted in some ill-judged and badly timed decisions impacting on both her career and personal well-being.

Alongside her too-swift departure from Fairport Convention after Liege & Lief, we see Fotheringay’s potential cut short as the band imploded during the making of a second album. Even her brief return to Fairport in 1974 isn’t the triumph it ought to have been. The solo albums – The North Star Grass Man And The Ravens (1971); Sandy (1972); Like An Old Fashioned Waltz (1974) and Rendezvous (1977) – individually remind us that hers was a career abruptly curtailed, and so her full potential will eternally remain unfulfilled. The passage of time does not dampen the jarring suddenness of the song’s ending.

‘In the Copenhagen rain / You were drifting in the mull of broken dreams / A thin veneer of laughter hid the tantrums and the pain / A photograph is seldom what it seems...’ These lines come from Copenhagen, a Strawbs song released on Dancing To The Devil’s Beat in 2009. Aside from being a touching remembrance of their time spent at the Tivoli Gardens and the recording at the Vanl?se Bio, they provide a telling portrait.

“I saw lots of Sandy in the years after the Strawbs, before she died,” Dave Cousins recalls, “and we always remained the best of friends. Writing the song, I was so moved by remembering how bubbly Sandy was one minute, and all dejected the next. She was up and down all the time. It was an extraordinary experience recording with her. It’s such a tragedy she’s not around now – I’d love to get together with her and do that all over again.”