Greg Irons

Ashley Hutching’s biographers describe a famous early poster for the original Fairport line-up:

‘…the band are playing on the roof of a Gothic-style house, centred on a giant’s head. Judy Dyble is stage left. A ghoulish Thompson, Nicol and a serious Hutchings cluster around Lamble’s drum kit. The group’s name is outlined as if in smoke from the twin chimneys. Dyble, commenting on the imagery reminiscent of Mervyn Peake’s fictional creation of Gormenghast castle, recalled, “I wish I had one of those. A friend has got one and they put it in the attic because the kids were scared of it.”’

Greg Irons (1947-1984), the man responsible for this 'scary' art work, was an American poster artist, underground cartoonist, animator and tattoo artist. Together with his girlfriend (later to become his first wife), Evann Walker, he spent an eventful year in London in 1967-8, picking up work as and where he could. One job was drawing animation cells for the Beatles film Yellow Submarine. His hope of designing rock posters was frustrated when he found that Hapshash and The Coloured Coat had the market all but sewn up. No one seems quite sure at this distance how the Fairport commission came his way. Mark Irons, Greg’s surviving brother, told me that he thought the connection was made through Evann Walker:

‘I do know she had some clerical gig related to the music industry which must be how she hooked Greg up with the poster job.’

Joe Boyd’s memory concurs:

‘I remember Greg coming to my home/office in early 1968 where we discussed him doing a Fairport poster. He had SF references and yes, I think his girlfriend had met Tod Lloyd (Witchseason partner) or maybe one of the Fairport.’

But there’s an even more intriguing connection, of which I was totally unaware until I came across Patrick Rosenkranz’s excellent biography of Greg Irons. For some, if not most, of their London year Greg and Evann shared a flat with Sandy Denny. This was the tiny mews cottage in Stanhope Mews West she mentioned in at least one interview. The fourth flatmate was a ‘Canadian girl’, whose parents were leasing the property. I’ve since been in touch with the ‘Canadian girl’, and if the lady in question is kind enough to let me share her memories, I’ll publish them here. This is a period in Sandy’s life – between her leaving the Strawbs in 1967 and her joining Fairport in 1968 – which we know very little about. Also staying intermittently at the mews in this period was the mysterious ‘Tigger’, whom I referred to in an earlier post: we seem no nearer to identifying this big cat.

Sadly, Evann Walker died of cancer in 2006.

Thank you to all those people quoted for helping me to piece together (or start piecing together) this story.

References
- Brian Hinton and Geoff Wall, Ashley Hutchings: The Authorised Biography. The Guv’nor and the Rise of Folk-Rock, 1945-1973 (2002), p54
- Patrick Rosenkranz, You Call This Art?! A Greg Irons Retrospective (2006), p25
- Obituary of Evann Walker-Quezada, Point Reyes Light, 28 September 2006

Through the looking-glass

I love this photograph by Ray Stevenson, taken in 1969. What is she thinking? The trivial thoughts that can occur when faced with your own reflection? “Does my bum look big in this?” – that sort of thing. Or serious thoughts? It reminds me, as Denny so often does, of Lewis Carroll:

'“Oh, Kitty! how nice it would be if we could only get through into Looking-glass House! I’m sure it’s got, oh! such beautiful things in it! Let’s pretend there’s a way of getting through into it somehow, Kitty. Let’s pretend the glass has got soft like gauze, so that we can get through. Why, it’s turning into a sort of mist now, I declare! It’ll be easy enough to get through – ”'
[Through the Looking-glass (1872)]

The photo also reminds me of a peculiar song she wrote around this time, ‘Autopsy’. It took a long time before I came to like this number. Structurally it had always felt a little like the halves of two unfinished songs bolted together – the same reaction I’ve always had to ‘Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds’ as that song lurches from meditative verse (inspired, coincidentally, by Lennon’s love of Lewis Carroll) to singalong chorus. My other problem with ‘Autopsy’, when I first came to write about Denny’s work analytically, was the lyrics: quite simply, I didn’t know what it was about, beyond what you might guess from the title, that it’s an act of dissection, probably undertaken at the end of a relationship.

The breakthrough was hearing her original demo, recorded on almost the last day of 1968 (now available on Boxful of Treasures), an impassioned tour de force with Denny accompanying herself on thunderous 12-string, which sent me back to the more controlled version with full band on Unhalfbricking and the BBC recording on Heyday. The Unhalfbricking one is remarkable, not least for drummer Martin Lamble’s negotiation of the shifting time signature. As for Sandy’s demo, it’s hard to believe it was recorded forty years ago, it leaps out at you with such immediacy.

Perhaps my two difficulties – the musical and the lyrical – were linked? The song’s obvious feature, unique in her work, is the contrast between the two verses. Musically this is signalled by a change of tempo (the music slows down), a change of time signature (at least in the Fairport arrangement: from 5/4 to 4/4 via some bars of 3/4), possibly a key change as well (as the persistent E flats in the second verse shift the tonal centre from D minor to G minor). The music changes character. Could this correspond to a change of characters in the lyrics? In other words, is the ‘you’ of verse one identical with the ‘you’ of verse two? It could be a dialogue song (like ‘Nothing More’) or the singer could be adopting more than one persona (as in ‘It Suits Me Well’).

The only documented evidence about ‘Autopsy’ comes from Denny’s father, Neil, who said that the song was about ‘a girl that was always telling her troubles’. We could expend energy speculating which of her women friends might have fitted that description, but the likeliest candidate is nearer home: Denny herself. Her songs are so often autobiographical: she is usually in the picture somewhere, whether as observer or observed.

It’s a typically evasive lyric, for sure. Has anyone ever got anywhere with interpreting it? My hunch is that it was inspired by her affair with married man Danny Thompson, but perhaps it’s futile (or nosy) to speculate? To me it exemplifies a pattern of reflexivity that I detect in a number of her songs. She writes as if looking at herself from the outside; the effect is seemingly to transfer to other people characteristics which other people would find in her. There is a character trait of Denny’s that is well brought out in Pam Winter’s biography but nowhere in Heylin’s, which is the wish to see ourselves as others see us, to step as it were behind the mirror. (Pam has an intriguing story about Sandy and her quondam best friend Winnie swapping identities at a folk club, enabling Denny to watch ‘herself’ from outside.)

So here’s my stab at interpreting ‘Autopsy’. The first verse is the voice of a reluctant listener, bored to distraction by her friend’s tearful recitation of a shipwrecked relationship. In the second verse, her interlocutor speaks, the mistress of a married man. She knows that she can only ‘borrow’ his time, that he will insist on his ‘freedom’ to return to his wife, but in accepting that she can make no claims on him, she dictates similar terms to him – that he must not think of ‘owning’ her. Since the first verse is then repeated, the perspective of the alter ego is restored and wrapped around the central, more ‘confessional’ verse.

Of course, Clive James thought that Sandy’s innate musicality was running ahead of her and the lyrics don’t amount to a hill of beans. He wrote:

'"Autopsy" shows Denny's capacity for melisma taking control of her talent for the lyric and weakening it seriously.

You must philosophise
But why must you bore me to tears?

These are the first two lines of the song, and "philosophise" is the first word you can hear — the previous two are swallowed, and one picks them up in a repetition later on. Most of her attention seems to be spent on the long, virtuoso melismatic surge with which she delivers the long "i" in "philosophise", and in general the linguistic points of the song are undistinguished going on feeble, most notably in the distressing transitional pun from "in tears" to "into years". (If I have mis-heard this last effect, it's because the singer hasn't striven to make it clear.) The song is sung in a continuous blur of vowels: abstract prettiness is the enemy and already rearing its gorgeous empty head.'
http://www.peteatkin.com/sandy.htm

It’s true that the song is unusually heavily rhymed. In the second verse all seven lines rhyme on the same vowel sound, an imprisoning prosodic structure, perhaps suggestive of someone caught in a situation not of of their choosing, but, in the hands of any but the most accomplished wordsmith, an invitation to elevate sound over meaning.

Denny was notoriously self-critical. Whatever she saw when she looked into that mirror in 1969, it was unlikely to be ‘abstract prettiness’ or a ‘gorgeous empty head’.

Postscript 1. No sooner had I written this than up pops Rose Elinor Dougall, formerly of ‘über-cool’ indie girl band The Pipettes, trilling to a journalist about ‘the music that gets her through the week’:

‘Autopsy’ by Fairport Convention – ‘Sandy Denny is one of my favourite ever singers and I think her performance on this track is so amazing. I remember hearing it for the first time on a long drive with my dad and had it on repeat for the rest of the journey. I love how much control she has, so fluid.’
[Liverpool Echo, 5 June 2009, p37]

Postscript 2. A rare acetate of ‘Autopsy’ recently turned up on Ebay. Apparently it’s an outtake from the Unhalfbricking sessions, very similar to the released version, but beginning with Sandy saying “Agaaaaainnn!” It was snapped up by someone with deeper pockets than mine ($512.50). I hope to say a bit more about this in the coming weeks.

A short tale about a long tail

‘This one has no end,’ the lady sang. Was she right?

A friend of mine has a personal website. With perverse delight he has concealed it on some Austrian server, far from the reach of web-crawlers and search engines, where like a fox having evaded the hunter it gloats over its own escape from notice. If you do somehow locate it, you are met with a ‘welcome’ page (though never was the word less apt) which is the epitome of self-deprecating English humour. It reads:

‘Congratulations, intrepid cybernaut! You have finally reached the end of the long tail.’

The ‘long tail’ is a tale I’d like to believe. The idea was promoted in a book by Chris Anderson, who challenged the conventional wisdom in retailing, namely that selling the most popular 20 per cent of products is the way to make a profit as they will account for 80 per cent of sales. No, says Anderson, not so in the new online market. His analysis of online music sales suggested that, thanks to the cheapness, simplicity and global accessibility of searching for products online, retailers could make money from more obscure products because they would always find an audience. Amazon is the textbook example of this new retail model. The theory took a bit of a knock last year, apparently, with the publication of a study by the MCPS-PRS Alliance, which found that, over a 12-month period, of the 1.23 million albums available online, only 173,000 were ever bought, meaning that 85 per cent did not sell a single copy all year. Conversely, for the online singles market, 80 per cent of all revenue came from around 52,000 tracks. In other words, the online market may not have rewritten the ‘80/20 rule’ as we supposed. For Anderson the long tail, like the rainbow, has no ‘end’. My friend believes he has found the end; almost with pride he records that his print-on-demand book ‘published’ by lulu.com was ‘demanded’ by no one in the last 12 months.

While I leave the supporters of both sides arguing over statistics, I turn to another friend who asked me why this blog has fallen silent in 2009. The short answer is that I was waiting for some good news to report. After the successes of anniversary year, I believed we’d reached a plateau – now I’m not so sure. We’re still hoping to reprint the souvenir brochure that was put together for the December concert. My contribution to that was the reprint of a long article written at the start of last year. Back then I was gloomy about Denny’s prospects in the new millennium:

‘To find Sandy’s albums in your record store you must locate ‘Folk’ on the first floor or in the basement, nestling somewhere among World, Jazz, Blues, Easy Listening and all the other consumer choices. In the Seventies she would have been on the ground floor, near the point of sale.’

Later in 2008 I decided this conclusion was too pessimistic: I was thinking in terms of the old technologies that I grew up with. By the year’s end, buoyed up by the apparent media interest in this long-dead songstress, I wanted to accentuate the positive, imagine how a 20-year-old, without ever leaving his bedroom, could stumble on Sandy Denny via YouTube or last.fm. So I drafted this upbeat insertion to my text:

‘But wait, here’s the upside: there’s never been a better time to have a posthumous career. The music lover (especially the younger one) no longer ventures into a shop to look for a ‘record’. Digital downloads, file-sharing and social networking sites have transformed how we ‘consume’ music. If you go hunting ‘Sandy Denny’ now, once the scent of the chase is in your nostrils, you’re only a few mouse clicks away from finding her – biographical information, music-examples, photos, even video clips. And you’re only an email away from finding others who share your new-found interest. Society has indeed become more atomised since the Seventies, but the Internet has the potential to remake those broken connections in another way.’

Still this paragraph remains unmoored, bobbing freely adrift from its context, because I don’t know whether I believe it. Is she a beneficiary of the ‘long tail’? Or is there no ‘long tail’ and is she a victim of the inflexible ‘80/20’ law which says that if you’re not in the 20 per cent of artists who generate 80 per cent of sales, then you’re not big enough to have books written or television programmes made about you?

(Statistics taken from: Patrick Foster, 'Sting in the tail for online sellers as 10m music tracks spin unloved through cyberspace', The Times, 22 December 2008, p17)

Review of the year 2008

(Queen Elizabeth Hall, London, 1 December 2008. Photo: Chris Bates)

About eighteen months ago I published a post here on the topic ‘Cults and anniversaries’. My question then was whether the upcoming thirtieth anniversary of Sandy Denny’s death might be the trigger for a serious reappraisal of her work and a breakthrough to wider acceptance. Looking back over the past year, I have my answer. The tectonic plates of musical taste are definitely shifting, and to her advantage. Think how much has happened in the last nine months:

- April: tribute concert at the Troubadour Club, London, and one-hour documentary on BBC Radio 2.
- May: she makes a ghostly appearance on Jools Holland’s influential TV show in the middle of an interview with Robert Plant.
- August: tribute slot during Cropredy Festival, including a rare occurrence of Julie Fowlis singing in English.
- September: release of Fotheringay 2 after thirty-eight years in the freezer.
- November: ten-minute feature on Woman’s Hour, BBC Radio 4.
- December: tribute concert at the Queen Elizabeth Hall, London.

Add to that Robert Plant’s revival of ‘The Battle of Evermore’ on tour with Alison Krauss (introduced from the stage with due obeisance to an absent friend) and several newspaper and magazine articles, and you can’t help feeling something is astir. For me, this translates into the paradox that, whilst I personally have had a pretty bad year, culminating in bereavement in October, this long-deceased lady has had a remarkably good year, almost certainly her ‘best’ year since she passed over. All that’s required now is to keep up the momentum. Some of you may have heard rumours of a forthcoming TV series on British women musicians. Kate Bush, Dusty Springfield, Marianne Faithfull, Amy Winehouse and (so we thought) Sandy Denny. My mole on the inside tells me that Sandy has now been dropped from the series, on the grounds that she’s "not famous enough" and viewers of BBC1 (where the series will air) have “never heard of her”. It’s a shame, whichever way you look at it, as filming had already begun on the Sandy programme and this would have been a unique opportunity to place her in rightful company whilst bringing her to the widest audience.

(l-r: Lisa Knapp, Jerry Donahue, Mary Epworth, Johnny Flynn, Sam Carter, PP Arnold, Kristina Donahue, Jim Moray. Photo: Chris Bates)

Anyway, it's gratifying that both the tribute concerts this year happened in venues associated with her. While the QEH isn’t so redolent with associations as the Troubadour in Earl’s Court, it still has its place in her story. She performed there a number of times, notably twice in 1971 – at the Fotheringay ‘farewell’ concert in January, and again in September at her London ‘solo’ relaunch, an event recalled by those who were there as fairly disastrous, under-rehearsed, but redeemed at the last minute by a glorious a cappella ‘Lowlands of Holland’. Perhaps the next commemoration of this kind (and here’s hoping there will be more) should take place outside the capital, or even outside the UK? The LA Troubadour, perhaps? – another venue she knew very well. Closer to home, I notice that the the Cathedral Quarter Arts Festival in Belfast is holding a ‘Sandy Denny night’ on 21 January 2009. The featured artist is Linde Nijland. It must be an ‘open mic’ night as well, as the advertisement says: ‘If you would like to perform a Sandy Denny song at this event contact [the Festival director] Sean@cqaf.com.’

As I write, the January/February issue of Rock’n’Reel plops through the letterbox. It contains, I’m pleased to see, not just my own retrospective piece on Fotheringay but also a poignant end-of-year message from Sean McGhee recalling that moment, so sacred to all of us, of first encounter with Denny’s work:

‘We rarely know what lies ahead for us. Little did I suspect back then, as I listened to her wonderful voice, that one day I’d be writing an editorial such as this, Sandy having long since sung her final song. Yet we’re still listening…’

Here’s to a wonderful 2009 filled with the very best sounds! Onwards and upwards!

South Bank triumph!

Once again the press awards four stars to a Sandy Denny tribute; this time it’s Robin Denselow reviewing the QEH concert in the Guardian. I was afraid his duties on the night as co-host might debar him from reviewing it as well and I’m glad to see that was not so.

For me there were many, many highlights with numerous great performances (plus one I’d rather forget). How wonderful to hear Swarbrick sing again, accompanied by Kevin Dempsey’s sensitive finger-picking guitar! What a find is Mary Epworth (whose lovely picture I can’t resist publishing below)! The variety of textures, ranging from full band to solo singer, ensured that songs emerged often in a new light. The great PP Arnold showed us how the big later songs could be opened out into soul numbers, while Johnny Flynn applied his quirky, Country-edged style to a pair of classics. I even changed my mind about Marc Almond; I marvel at how deeply he has taken these songs into himself, cherishing the lyrics and reimagining them for chamber ensemble.

I spoke to several people in the audience who knew little about Sandy Denny but left wanting to know a whole lot more. A triumph of organisation for Andrew Batt, I’d say, who pulled the whole thing together, and a major step in bringing this music to the widest possible audience. The concert was recorded for possible radio broadcast.

There were a few moaning Minnies, not present at the concert but keen to explain in cyberspace why they would not be there, preferring to stay at home and play her albums or savour the memory of seeing Denny live. One of them dismissed the whole thing as a ‘vanity project’ undertaken by the ‘nu-folk elite’ (whatever that may be), a comment so wide of the mark that it hardly merits a response. But a contributor to the BBC Folk and Acoustic Message Board (‘Bluecore’) surely speaks for the majority of the audience:

'Of course no single performer matched Sandy (that really wasn’t the point of the concert) but it was great to hear her songwriting acknowledged, see today’s young stars paying homage, and to be part of 1,000 people turning out on a Monday night to remember someone who died (largely unacknowledged) over 30 years ago.'

As for the illustrated souvenir programme – my main contribution to the event – it sold out before the concert even started, a victim of its own success. I know it was ‘sought after’ because, in the interval, some madwoman kept trying to buy my copy off me. Rest assured, we’re going to do a reprint and make it available by mail order. News of that to follow.


Set list, Queen Elizabeth Hall, 1.12.08:

MARY EPWORTH
Come All Ye
Listen, Listen

JIM MORAY
Late November
Matty Groves

KRISTINA DONAHUE
Nothing More
John The Gun

SAM CARTER
Bushes and Briars

MARC ALMOND
The Northstar Grassman and The Ravens
Next Time Around
All Our Days

BABY DEE
The Lady
No End

INTERMISSION

ARCHIVE FOOTAGE OF FOTHERINGAY
Gypsy Davey

LISA KNAPP
The Quiet Joys Of Brotherhood

DAVE SWARBRICK AND KEVIN DEMPSEY
It Suits Me Well
One Way Donkey Ride

LISA KNAPP
Reynardine

P.P. ARNOLD
I’m A Dreamer
Like An Old Fashioned Waltz

JOHNNY FLYNN
Stranger To Himself
It’ll Take A Long Time

MARY EPWORTH
Solo

KRISTINA DONAHUE
No More Sad Refrains

ALL
Who Knows Where The Time Goes?

[There is amateur video of Johnny Flynn's performance here and of Marc Almond, 'All Our Days', here. Audio of Mary Epworth's numbers is available here. On MySpace you’ll find an album of Chris Bates’s photos on the Sandy Denny page.]

Shame that NME darlings Florence and the Machine pulled out of the gig, especially as Florence Welch is telling interviewers that Sandy Denny is one of her favourite female artists (along with Diane Cluck, Grace Slick and Kate Bush).

South Bank Centre tribute

The Lady : A Tribute to Sandy Denny

Monday 1 December 2008, 7.30pm, Queen Elizabeth Hall, London

In the 30 years since her death, Sandy Denny has emerged as one of the UK’s greatest singer-songwriters. A unique line up of artists including former colleagues and young admirers re-interpret her songs in this very special tribute showcasing her work with Fairport Convention, Fotheringay and her solo career.

A great line up is promised (to be announced over the next few weeks) but early birds can get tickets here.

The above is from the Sandy page on MySpace, announcing the final event of anniversary year. I'm only peripherally involved in this one, but I heartily recommend it and hope to see some blog readers there. More details will appear here as I have them. Joe Boyd was complaining that tributes to Denny should be happening in the largest venues, not in little clubs like the Troubadour with a capacity of 120. I'm quite sure all 950 seats at the QEH will be sold out on 1 December, so don't delay.

Update, 11.11.08. Now confirmed to appear: Marc Almond, PP Arnold, Martin Carthy, Baby Dee, Lisa Knapp, Jim Moray, Dave Swarbrick, Jerry Donahue, Johnny Flynn, Mary Epworth, Sam Carter, Kristina Donahue and members of Bellowhead.

As I understand it, the concert is all about looking beyond the ‘Fotheringport’ family (though, of course, they will have their rightful place on the night) to find the much wider fan base she deserves. For instance, the Independent recently quoted Jamie Reynolds of Klaxons (NME Best New Band 2007, etc.) saying that Sandy would be the vocalist in his ‘fantasy’ band. Hence the welcome presence of a number of newer, younger artists who will bring in their own audiences, present her work in novel ways and take her legacy into the next generation.

Update, 28.11.2008. Jude Rogers, in her column in today's Guardian, much of it about Sandy Denny, cites this gig as evidence that 'her dark star is rising everywhere'.

Fotheringay 2

I don't usually go in for advertising on this site but I'll make an exception to draw attention to an important new release from Fledg'ling:

'Fans of Fotheringay rejoice - the nine classic performances on their debut album are soon to be joined by eleven more studio recordings. Jerry Donahue has been working for many, many months reviewing all the recordings to finally bring this remarkable project to conclusion.

After several years of careful research in dusty tape archives, the surviving members of Fotheringay have been able to complete their second album begun back in 1970. It is very, very rare that musicians get the chance to complete a project begun 38 years previously. Fotheringay 2 will be released on Fledg’ling Records on 29th September 2008.

Fotheringay remain one of the great might-have-beens of British music. They lasted less than a year, and released just one album, but their disappearance robbed the early-’70s scene of a group of musicians capable of taking folk-rock to new heights of subtlety and musicianship. Now, the nine songs on that debut album, assumed for almost four decades to be their sole testament, are joined by the eleven that would have constituted a follow-up. Sadly they broke up during the recording sessions for that second album. Incredibly all the tapes survived in various record company archives. Guest musicians include Rabbit Bundrick on keyboards and Sam Donahue (Jerry’s father) on saxophone.

Track list: John the Gun * Eppie Moray * Wild Mountain Thyme * Knights of the Road * Late November * Restless * Gypsy Davey * I Don’t Believe You * Silver Threads and Golden Needles * Bold Jack Donahue * Two Weeks Last Summer - Fledg’ling FLED 3066'

Fotheringay were: Sandy Denny, Pat Donaldson, Trevor Lucas, Gerry Conway and Jerry Donahue.

There's a sample track from the album, a wonderful vocal take on 'Wild Mountain Thyme', up at MySpace and a telephone interview with Jerry Donahue about the project at Folk Alley.

Colin Randall over at the Salut! Live website is running a competition for ‘your best or most vivid memory of Sandy, Fotheringay, Fairport with Sandy, Sandy solo, Sandy on record.’ He has three copies of Fotheringay 2 to give away for the best entries.

My review appears in the November/December issue of Rock'n'Reel. Five stars - it deserves no less.

The surviving members of the band gathered at a launch party in Huddersfield. (Below l-r) Jerry Donahue, Pat Donaldson, Gerry Conway. Photo by Martin Hair (used with permission).


In preparation for an article I was writing on the background to the new album, Gerry Conway kindly agreed to answer my questions by email. Here are some of his replies (reproduced with his permission):

PW: Fotheringay 2 - how did you feel listening to and working on this material 37/38 years on?

GC: Because of the friendships that were formed all those years ago it felt perfectly natural to carry on working on the tracks. Our rapport with each other was just as good if not better for the passing of time.

PW: How much of what we hear on the second album was recorded anew?

GC: I replaced the drums on ‘Two Weeks Last Summer’ and added some percussion. I didn’t feel that I could live with the original. I thought it would be nice to add the harmony vocals that appear on different lines. For reasons unknown there wasn’t a drum track on ‘Wild Mountain Thyme’ so that was added. We tried some harmony vocals but I thought Pat sounded best duetting with Sandy. I love what he did. ‘Bold Jack Donahue’ was extended at the end so I added some tom toms to match the ones at the front of the track.

PW: What was your impression of Sandy the first time you met her? Was that in your Eclection days?

GC: Yes I was with Eclection then. I thought Sandy was very shy and very humble when we first met. She and I got on very well and I enjoyed her company very much.

PW: Did songs like ‘Nothing More’ and ‘The Sea’ already come as demos from Sandy with fixed ideas of how they should be done, or were the ideas ‘worked up’ in the studio?

GC: Sandy’s songs were usually complete when she played them to us for the first time. Arrangements and parts were arrived at in an organic way. That is to say, songs were played over and over until they sounded good. Sandy never told us what to play but you knew instinctively when she was happy with what you were doing. We mostly rehearsed at Sandy and Trevor’s place in Fulham.

PW: Who was the bandleader? From the first album you’d guess it was Sandy, as she dominates the vocals and songwriting. But the second album, with Trevor’s contribution prominent, sounds more like the equal-parts democracy that she wanted the band to be.

GC: There wasn’t a band leader as such but for my part I felt that Sandy was the teacher and I was the pupil. Trevor was very ambitious for the band and often came up with grand ideas that didn’t fly but we had a lot of fun trying.

PW: Was the Albert Hall gig with Elton John really as scary as has been suggested?

GC: Not scary just a bit daft. Pat and I had been doing sessions with him and thought he was a great singer and player. We didn’t know anything about him and certainly didn’t know that he had a full scale rock and roll show. Not the perfect opener for Fotheringay but one for the grandchildren.

PW: Nick Drake toured briefly with you. Any memories?

GC: I don’t remember the tour unfortunately, only being in the studio with him once at Sound Techniques but I don’t think the tapes survived.

PW: The only archive film of Fotheringay is from German TV Beat Club. The band looks very relaxed. Do you remember that session?

GC: We would have been doing European dates at the time and probably dropped in to record it very quickly between gigs. When I first saw it I was shocked to see how young we all looked. It’s very nice to have though.

PW: The farewell gig in 1971 must have been emotional? I’d love to have heard Sandy’s take on ‘Let It Be’: was that solo at the piano?

GC: To be honest I’m not sure but we probably would have played along with her having found ‘ourselves in times of trouble’.

'Lord Bateman'

Writing recently about the lost film of Sandy Denny, I was reminded that there are also lost recordings. Among these, real legends swirl around ‘Lord Bateman’, pencilled in for her first solo album, The North Star Grassman and The Ravens, but never completed. Studio logs record sessions on 6 April and 1 May 1971.

What else do we know?

David Suff describes his frustration when compiling A Boxful of Treasures, his great retrospective of Denny’s work released in 2004:

‘Many days were spent searching for an elusive recording of Sandy singing ‘Lord Bateman’ - Ashley Hutchings recalled a memorable 1971 session with Steve Winwood playing organ. Careful searching eventually found five reels of tape, unfortunately they all contained rehearsal backing tracks, with no vocals at all.’

Music critic Karl Dallas, writing in 1998, recalled working on a compilation set in the mid Seventies. He was quite certain that he’d heard a vocal track – of sorts:

‘When I was assembling The Electric Muse (the original four-album set with the Shirtsleeve Studio artwork, not the travesty ‘re-release’ put out last year by Castle Communications), David Betteridge of Island gave me privileged access to the Island vaults, to listen to a whole lot of unreleased product (including the never-released Maverick Child single from Fairport VI, with Roger Hill on the vocals). Alongside brilliant alternative readings of stuff like the inevitable Sloth and a great Calvary Cross, were some traditional renditions of ballads like Lord Bateman, with a whole range of backings, including Steve Winwood on keyboard on one version. Unfortunately, Sandy’s was merely a guide track for the musicians, not even properly on mic. I urged her several times to go back and record the vocals properly, but she said she regarded it as past history, something she couldn’t get to work. However, those tracks are still there, somewhere, wherever Polygram (or Seagram’s whisky, the label’s new owners) have stashed them. Who knows, someone might be able to work a miracle and bring her vocals to centre stage. They can do wonders with electronics, these days. Oh well . . . perhaps not.’

Neither Hutchings nor Winwood appears on the credits for North Star Grassman, so their involvement must have been confined to this one session. Normally Hutchings was downright nerdy in keeping cassette copies of every session he worked on, but this habit seems to have deserted him on this crucial occasion. Winwood, of course, played on the sessions for Denny’s final solo album, Rendezvous, and I’ve seen suggestions that he laid down his part at that stage. Although one track begun in 1971 was reworked during the Rendezvous sessions in 1976 (‘Losing Game’), I doubt she revisited ‘Lord Bateman’ so late in her career; she ‘regarded it as past history’, part of an involvement with the traditional she had left behind.

Denny transcribed the lyrics into one of her notebooks, so we know exactly what version of the text she was using. (Well, I would know if I’d had the presence of mind to check the lyrics when viewing her papers a couple of years ago. A Spanish fan, José Luis Gallego, confidently posts the lyrics on his Sandy website and no doubt this is close to what she used.) It’s a mighty curious song, I always feel. What are we to make of Bateman himself? Unable to keep his vow of loyalty a day beyond the seven promised years, this is a man who takes a new bride, then sets her aside when his old flame turns up on the doorstep, offering the poor rejected girl only ‘coaches three’ (or a ‘coach and three’?) by way of compensation. A carriage to go home in is a fine thing if you arrived on horseback, but still… I see how the song would have appealed to Denny’s mischievous sense of humour, remembering how she rewrote ‘Gypsy Davey’ to give it a happy ending. In her version of that song the cuckolded lord does not dwell on the wrong done him by his wife but quickly seeks solace elsewhere: ‘And ere six months had passed away / He’d married another lady’. Perhaps in this sense she was in tune with the truth to experience which is folk song’s greatest strength. For AL Lloyd, who encouraged Denny in her earliest explorations of these songs, their essence was consolation, not escapism:

‘Generally the folk song makers chose to express their longing by transposing the world on to an imaginative plane, not trying to escape from it, but colouring it with fantasy, turning bitter, even brutal facts of life into something beautiful, tragic, honourable, so that when singers and listeners return to reality at the end of the song, the environment is not changed but they are better fitted to grapple with it.’

References

C Heylin, No More Sad Refrains (2000), pp138, 273, 274
D Suff: http://www.thebeesknees.com/?p=12#more-12
K Dallas: http://www.amazon.com/review/R2CZDW3CUZOMH2
S Winwood: http://www.winwoodfans.com/cs/cssess02.htm#Denny

JL Gallego: http://club.telepolis.com/sandydenny/Letras/lordbateman.htm
AL Lloyd, Folk Song in England (1975), p170

Searching for lost film

There is, notoriously, very little surviving film of Sandy Denny. Although she appeared a number of times on BBC television, in an era when videotape was expensive whatever survives survives by accident. In fact, there was much systematic wiping of British TV archives in the Seventies. What now seems like cultural vandalism was justified at the time by shortage of storage space, fire risk leading to increased insurance premiums, etc. [1]

The sure bets are the three songs she recorded solo for the One in Ten show in September 1971 and two numbers recorded with Fotheringay for an appearance on German TV’s Beat Club in August 1970. The BBC material (‘North Star Grassman’, ‘Crazy Lady Blues’and ‘Late November’) has now been lovingly restored to broadcast quality and reissued on DVD as part of the boxed set Live at the BBC. The German material awaits an official re-release, even though other artists’ work from the series has appeared on DVD on the Continent. It turns up, in inferior quality, on YouTube and other sites, and gives a rare opportunity to see Denny interacting with her co-musicians of choice. ‘Gypsy Davy’ is her vocal; she leads from the front, swaying gently in time to the music. On ‘Too Much of Nothing’ she sings backing, gazing across all the time at Lucas, whose lead vocal it is. A lot of mud has been slung at that man over the years – and I’ve probably been as guilty of Trevor-bashing as the next Sandyphile – but, as you watch this piece of film, it’s hard to gainsay the affection she must have felt for him.

And that’s about it, or nearly it. I guess one of the reasons (there are others) why no TV documentary has ever been made about Denny is that there’s so little archive footage to bring it to visual life. The ‘girl singers’ she displaced at the top of Melody Maker polls – Dusty Springfield, Cilla Black, Lulu – all had their own TV series in the Sixties, so are well-represented on film. Even the tedious Julie Felix fared better, as the acceptable face of Folk in the Sixties. At the Troubadour event in April, Karl Dallas told an amusing story about Felix. Around 1967 he was invited to attend one of David Frost’s famous soirées. Thinking his new protégée a cut above Miss Felix – recently sky-rocketed to national fame by her appearances on The Frost Report – he took Denny along, hoping to introduce her to the Great Communicator. The introduction was never made; and perhaps it is just as well. Even Felix felt compromised by having to trade in her usual protest songs for pap like ‘Going To The Zoo’: the price of stardom.

Well, maybe there’s more archive out there. The Television Society at Birmingham University recorded a Fairport concert at the University in June 1974. Filmed with a single camera by student fans, visually it’s pretty crude stuff, to judge from the copy of a copy that I’ve seen. But it preserves a cracking performance of ‘Solo’. There are false claims that Dave Pegg owns the original of the Birmingham video. In fact, no one has ever found the original; it may no longer exist. Peggy told me: ‘I only have a rough copy which I have duped a couple of times for fans. I would like to see it improved and released maybe as a charity benefit.’ The University TV Society survives but enquiries to its present office-holders have gone unanswered.

In the late Sixties to mid Seventies, there was a music show on ABC, the Australian broadcaster, called GTK, short for ‘Get To Know’. It only ran for ten minutes, four nights a week, and for a while was pretty much the only place to see contemporary music on TV down under. It was assumed most of the programmes had been wiped by now – but apparently not. Someone has been gathering them up and cataloguing them. TARA, the online archive of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, throws up this curiosity from June 1973:

ID 597456 / GTK EPISODE 674

B&W;0.00 VS BOATS IN HARBOUR, MEMBERS OF FAIRPORT CONVENTION SIT AT OUTDOOR CAFE TABLE;0.38 MCU IV LUCAS AND DAVIS RE PLAYING CONCERTS OVERSEAS, PLAYING TO LARGE AUDIENCES AT STADIUMS, TOURING, CA VS MEMBERS OF BAND AT TABLE…

Is this, as the entry suggests, three minutes of TV interview with ‘Sandy Davis’ and Trevor?

Sometime in 1975, possibly early September, Fairport (with Denny on board) recorded a half hour session for Westward TV. This was first broadcast in the Westward region on September 25 1975 and repeated on Thames TV (December 22) and Yorkshire TV (29 December). Super-sleuth Jamie Taylor is on the case, checking whether any of these now defunct companies left a copy behind for posterity.

In January 1973 Fairport appeared at the The Great Ngaruawahia Music Festival in New Zealand. Although Denny wasn’t to rejoin the band officially until the following year, she was there supporting her other half. Years later, on a visit to the NZ Broadcasting Corporation, Trevor Lucas was buttonholed by a cameraman. Let John Penhallow, Fairport’s first manager, take up the story:

Trev says ‘Right mate – what’s up?’ – and the guy says he was a freelance cameraman working for NZBC at the time and he shot Fairport’s set at the Festival – and he kept the roll(s) of 16mm film in his home as NZBC didn’t want to use it – so Trev says ‘oh that’s nice’ and walks on! I said ‘Trevor you didn’t! What was his name – where can we find him again?’ But by then it was year old news and we didn’t have the means to track him down if Trevor had’ve recalled his full name. So there you are – in an ageing cameraman’s attic somewhere in NZ is a reel or two of Fairport in colour with sound from the built in mic I suppose, including a couple of songs with Sandy who guested with Fairport.[2]

Could there be more? Home cine, perhaps? By the Sixties parents who could afford it had started to record their children’s embarrassments on 8 and 16mm. The breathless sleeve notes to Sandy and Johnny (1967) claim that ‘Sandy… has just completed one television series with Alex Campbell and is about to commence another’, though I’ve never found confirmation of that anywhere. And what about overseas sales? Some of the missing episodes of favourite British sitcoms have been rediscovered mouldering in the basements of foreign TV stations. Was The Old Grey Whistle Test (Denny appeared on the first series in June 1972) sold abroad? Does the Van Speyk Show from KRO-TV Holland, on which Fairport Convention featured in January 1975, gather dust somewhere? And what on earth did she mean in her March 1977 interview with Patrick Humphries by saying, ‘I’ve only done television shows since I left Fairport’?

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------
[1] For an account of the great video-cull of the Seventies see http://www.teletronic.co.uk/missing.htm. Despite the BBC’s avowed intent to make its entire archive publicly accessible, much of the past has been lost; see http://www.bbc.co.uk/cult/treasurehunt/about/lost.shtml.
[2] http://launch.groups.yahoo.com/group/SandyDennyList (message 5393).

Rock writing revisited

Here is a photo of someone enjoying life. The booze may have contributed to her fatal fall. The fags certainly changed – I would say coarsened – her voice. But there’s no doubt she’s having a ball, which is a roundabout way of introducing the proposition that music’s function is ‘to reveal what we live for’ – as makers, as listeners, and as writers about music.

Last summer I posted an entry here about ‘Rock writing’. My argument back then was that there has to be a ‘third way’ for popular music criticism between the extremes of gonzo journalism and academic musicology. I like to think it touched a nerve; it certainly drew a response. One of my respondents was the excellent Ron Moy of Liverpool John Moores University. In the careless way which is more journalistic than academic (mea culpa!) I had been less than generous about his book on Kate Bush, basing my comments on some rather overcooked advance publicity from the publisher. Since Ron got in touch, I’ve read his book – which is what I should have done in the first place – and recommend it wholeheartedly. I like the way he builds a survey of Bush’s entire output outwards from a close reading of Hounds of Love, his central text. He tells me that he took flak from some readers for the ‘subjectivism’ of his approach. Granted, it’s not every academic who will interrupt his flow to tell you how he split up with his long-term partner in August 1985, how he was ‘on the brink of tears’, ‘hypertense’ etc [1]. But his point is that in this condition he was ‘extremely sensitive to all forms of emotional and artistic stimuli’, thus primed for the release of what he sees as Bush’s masterpiece in September of that year. The approach is right. This is music to be lived by.

Ron Moy’s ‘Introduction’ is especially pertinent to my theme, because in it he outlines the development of a ‘bunker mentality’ in UK higher education. Despite the growth of popular music studies, he says, the last twenty years have seen a continuing ‘lack of dialogue between the spheres of academia and journalism’, particularly regrettable as ‘some of the most successful examples of popular music are those that manage to straddle the commercial and the critical worlds’. It’s a missed opportunity. In support of his views he quotes David Buckley, biographer of Bowie and The Stranglers:

‘In the early 1990s, it seemed as if a new way within popular music studies was not only possible, but inevitable. Simon Frith, Jon Savage and Steve Redhead were producing work that elided the safe boundaries between rock journalism and academic discourse […] However, today it seems that the two are as entrenched in their positions and as separatist in their views as ever.’ [2]

As it happens, recent weeks have also brought obituaries of Wilfrid Mellers in the national press (why am I so superstitious as to see synchronicity where others see mere coincidence?) I never met the great prof, though in a former life (for an aborted book project) I was supposed to interview him about his memories of his composition teacher Egon Wellesz. Too late now. The first academic muso to write sympathetically about popular music, Mellers surely deserves his column inches. As a pupil of FR Leavis and an early contributor to Scrutiny, he took from his master a discriminating – not to say moralizing – intelligence, believing that ‘a limitless plurality of values is indistinguishable from no values at all’ [3]. What was striking was that these values extended beyond the ‘great tradition’ of Bach and Beethoven to encompass Bob Dylan and The Beatles as well as jazz and ethnic musics. As one of Mellers’ pupils, Richard Middleton, wrote in the Guardian, his core belief was a ‘revisionist form of Leavisism: that musical value and human truth could in principle be found in any sort of music’ [4]. Reading this sent me back to the Editorial that Middleton contributed to a special number of Popular Music in 1994 marking Mellers’ eightieth birthday. There he wrote of another ‘Leavisite’ quality taken over into Mellers, the emphasis on close reading of texts:

‘We find that this has permeated subsequent popular music research much more hesitantly – and with variable results. It’s fair to say, too, that Mellers’ own method hasn’t been particularly influential, in fact it has been the object of criticism for its “subjectivism”.’ [5]

Ah, too ‘subjective’, was it? That word again. Mellers saw music’s function as ‘to reveal what we live for’ [6]. Hounds of Love helped sustain Ron Moy through a period of ‘excessive drinking, insomnia and sexual promiscuity’ following a painful break-up [7]. There has to be room in music criticism for the subject and, in our interactions, whether in the concert hall, the basement club, the ivory tower or just inside a pair of headphones, that subject may as well be the listener as the composer or performer. We have to get away from what Nicholas Cook has called ‘the underlying, root metaphor of Western musical culture: that music is some kind of object’ [8].

The Mellers obituaries reopened, albeit briefly, the door to a ‘third way’. Here is Richard Morrison, responding to the Times obit:

‘People thought, and still think, that musicians and writers about music should “stick to what they know”. But that mentality has led to the appallingly ghettoised musical life that we have today, in which almost no one has the curiosity or confidence to enjoy both Robbie Williams and Richard Wagner, or Coldplay and Chopin. Mellers tried to bridge every gap, especially the gap between music and “real life”.’ [9]

I have a plan, long in gestation, quixotic in ambition, to found a new popular music magazine. It will carry articles combining documented facts with biographical insights, broad cultural context with precise (but not forbiddingly technical) discussion of words and music and their interrelations. In its field of view it will accommodate makers of music and consumers and every mediating jobsworth and technology that comes between them. But though it dares to inhabit the no-man’s land between Brixton Academy and the Oxbridge academy, it won’t be all serious [10]:

Provisionally, this magazine, I call it Brush on Drum, adapting a favourite line from one of my favourite artists, Laura Nyro: ‘A rush on rum / of brush and drum’ (New York Tendaberry, 1969). Is anyone with me?

References
1. Ron Moy, Kate Bush and ‘Hounds of Love’ (2007), p39
2. Moy, pp8-9
3. Obituary of Wilfrid Mellers, Times, 20 May 2008, p53
4. Guardian, Letters, 24 May 2008, p35
5. Popular Music 13/2 (May 1994), p.vi. Not a journal I have much time for, as regular readers will know, but this issue contains more sense than most.
6. Quoted in Times obituary of Mellers
7. Moy, p39
8. Nicholas Cook, Music: A Very Short Introduction (1998), p70
9. ‘Opinion’, Times2, 21 May 2008, p7
10. Cartoon from Minneapolis Star and Tribune, 1987, quoted in Susan McClary and Robert Walser, ‘Start Making Sense! Musicology Wrestles With Rock’, in Simon Frith and Andrew Goodwin, eds, On Record: Rock, Pop and the Written Word (1990), p277. This whole article is relevant to my topic as well, but too detailed to go into here. In a footnote – never the best place to pick fights – the authors take Wilfrid Mellers to task for applying ‘criteria of musical complexity and the mystified image of the artist-as-genius from standard musicology to popular artists’ (p290).

Illustration: from NME interview with SD, 15 January 1972, reprinted in NME obit, 6 May 1978.