'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