Today I am paying tribute to one of the most beautiful voices in English Folk Music. I had the privilege to speak to her briefly in the interval of a Fotheringay Concert at Cheltenham Town Hall. It was a night of amazing music. I have ommitted her classic ‘Who Knows Where The Time Goes’ as I believe it warrants a post of its own.
Alexandra Elene MacLean Denny (Sandy) was an English singer-songwriter who was lead singer of the band Fairport Convention. She has been described as “the pre-eminent British folk rock singer”. After leaving school, she started training as a nurse at the Royal Brompton Hospital. Her nursing career proved short-lived. In the meantime she had secured a place on a foundation course at Kingstone College of Art, which she took up in September 1965, becoming involved with the folk club on campus. Her contemporaries at the college included guitarist and future member of Pentangle, John Renbourn. After her first public appearance at the Barge in Kingston on Thames, Denny started working the folk club circuit in the evenings with an American-influenced repertoire, including songs byTom Paxton, together with traditional folk songs. Denny made the first of many appearances for the BBC at Cecil Sharp House in December 1966 on the Folk Song Cellar programme where she accompanied herself on two traditional songs: “Fir a Bhata” and “Green Grow the Laurels”.
By the time she had abandoned her studies at art college and was devoting herself full-time to music. While she was performing at The Troubdour folk club, a member of the Strawbs heard her, and in 1967, she was invited to join the band. She recorded one album with them in Denmark which was released belatedly in 1973 credited to Sandy Denny and the Strawbs: All Our Own Work. The album includes an early solo version of her best-known (and widely recorded) composition, “Who Knows Where the Time Goes?” A demo of that song found its way into the hands of American singer Judy Collins, who chose to cover it as the title track of an album, released in November 1968, thus giving Denny international exposure as a songwriter before she had become widely known as a singer.
Fairport Convention conducted auditions in May 1968 for a replacement singer following the departure of Judy Dyble after their debut album, and Denny became the obvious choice. According to group member Simon Nicol, her personality and musicianship made her stand out from the other auditionees “like a clean glass in a sink full of dirty dishes”. Beginning with What we did on our Holidays, the first of three albums she made with the band in the late 1960s, Denny is credited with encouraging Fairport Convention to explore the traditional British folk repertoire, and is thus regarded as a key figure in the development of British folk rock. She brought with her the traditional repertoire she had refined in the clubs, including “A Sailor’s Life” featured on their second album together Unhalfbricking. Framing Denny’s performance of this song with their own electric improvisations, her bandmates discovered what then proved to be the inspiration for an entire album, the influential Liege & Lief (1969).
Denny left Fairport Convention in December 1969 to develop her own songwriting more fully. To this end, she formed her own band, Fotheringay, which included her future husband, Australian Trevor Lucas, formerly of the group Eclection. They created one self titled album which included an eight-minute version of the traditional “Banks of the Nile”, and several Denny originals, among them “The Sea” and “Nothing More”. The latter marked her first composition on the piano, which was to become her primary instrument from then on. Fotheringay started to record a second album in late 1970, but it remained unfinished after Denny announced that she was leaving the group and producer Joe Boyd left to take up a job at Warner Brothers in California. Denny would later blame Boyd’s hostility towards the group for its demise.
She then turned to recording her first solo album, The North Star Grassman and the Ravens. Released in 1971, it is distinguished by its elusive lyrics and unconventional harmonies. Highlights included “Late November”, inspired by a dream and the death of Fairport band member Martin Lamble, and “Next Time Around” a cryptogram about Jackson C Frank, one of her many portraits in song. Sandy, with a cover photograph by David Bailey, followed in 1972 and was the first of her albums to be produced by Trevor Lucas. As well as introducing eight new original compositions, the album marked her last recording of a traditional song, “The Quiet Joys of Brotherhood” (words by Richard Farina), with Denny’s ambitious multi-tracked vocal arrangement inspired by the Ensemble of the Bulgarian Republic.
Melody Maker readers twice voted her the “Best British Female Singer”, in 1970 and 1971 and, together with contemporaries including Richard Thompson and Ashley Hutchings, she participated in a one-off project called the Bunch to record a collection of rock and roll era standards released under the title of Rock On. In 1971, Denny duetted with Robert Plant on “The Battle of Evermore”, which was included on Led Zeppelin’s 1971 album IV; she was the only guest vocalist ever to appear on a Led Zeppelin album. In 1973, she married long-term boyfriend and producer Trevor Lucas and recorded a third solo album, Like An Old Fashioned Waltz. The songs continued to detail many of her personal preoccupations: loss, loneliness, fear of the dark, the passing of time and the changing seasons. The album contained one of her best loved compositions, “Solo”, and featured a cover image by Gered Mankowitz.
In 1974, she returned to Fairport Convention (of which her husband was by then a member) for a world tour (captured on the 1974 album Fairport Live Convention) and a studio album, Rising for the Moon in 1975. Although her development as a soloist and songwriter had taken her further away from the folk roots direction that the band had pursued since Liege & Lief, seven of the eleven tracks on Rising for the Moon were either written or co-written by her. Denny and Lucas left Fairport
Convention at the end of 1975 and embarked on what was to become her final album Rendevous. Released in 1977, the album sold poorly and Denny was subsequently dropped by Island Records. Having relocated to the village of Byfield in Northamptonshire in the mid-seventies, Denny gave birth to her only child, a daughter named Georgia, in July 1977. Denny died in 1978 at the age of 31 due to injuries and health issues related to alcohol abuse. I will conclude this tribute with her sublime version of The Quiet Joy of Brotherhood for which sadly there is no live footage.
