Jim Irvin - Angel Of Avalon: Sandy Denny (1a. parte)
AUTOR: Jim Irvin
TÍTULO: Angel Of Avalon: Sandy Denny
EDICIÓN: 1998
PÁGINAS:
Artículo publicado en Mojo, 1998:
Angel Of Avalon: Sandy Denny
Jim Irvin, Mojo, 1998
ON THE AFTERNOON of Monday, April 18th, 1978, a young London-based musician named Jon Cole left his flat in Barnes, climbed into his Datsun Cherry and set off for Hammersmith where his band, The Movies, were rehearsing.
He turned the corner into the long road where his friend - a teacher named Miranda Ward - lived in a first-floor flat. The previous evening, Miranda had given him a spare key and asked if, while she was working, he would look in on the woman who was staying with her. The woman's husband had just run off, taking their baby daughter with him. Miranda thought it would be nice if someone kept an eye on her and checked to see if she needed anything. But Jon couldn't be bothered; he was already late for his rehearsal.
Then something changed his mind.
As his car drew level with the bus stop outside 93 Castlenau, he heard a woman's voice whisper a single word in his ear: "Help."
He wasn't a man prone to hearing voices - and he hasn't heard any since - so he paid attention to the command in his head, pulled into the drive and opened the door to Miranda's flat. Miranda's friend was upstairs on the landing. She was dressed in bell- bottomed jeans and a pink mohair sweater. She was stretched out on her side, feet touching the bottom of the steep set of stairs which curved up to the next floor. She was motionless.
Jon checked her breathing. She was alive. He called for an ambulance and was told it would be there in five minutes. In the meantime, he went into the kitchen to make some tea. He was calm. He felt sure the woman would be fine, that perhaps she'd just fallen and knocked herself out. He even called to her from the kitchen.
"Do you want a cup of tea, Sandy?"
*
CHURCH ROAD, Barnes, nine years earlier. On a fair, crisp Sunday afternoon in February 1969, a young band working on their third album are waiting for their singer to turn up. They're in Olympic 1, a popular eight-track studio housed in the town's old music hall. Last year, the Stones cut Beggars Banquet here and, just a few months ago, Led Zeppelin chose it as the place to record their debut album. Now Fairport Convention are ready to lay down an English folk song they've been experimenting with, 'A Sailor's Life'.
Ashley 'Tyger' Hutchings, founder member of the group and keen to push them further towards folk, is tuning his bass. Guest fiddler Dave Swarbrick has been here with engineer John Wood since the previous afternoon, testing pick-ups on his violin so he can hear himself above the guitars of Richard Thompson and Simon Nicol. They set up in a semi-circle flanking boyish drummer Martin Lamble. Out in the control room, next to Wood, sits producer Joe Boyd, an American mogul in London. He's the man behind Witchseason Productions, which manages and records Fairport Convention, The Incredible String Band, John Martyn and Nick Drake. He's engrossed in the baseball pages of a New York Times. The atmosphere in Olympic 1 is relaxed but industrious.
Then Sandy arrives.
Short, full-figured and rosy-cheeked, with a cloud of fine, fair hair tumbling over her shoulders, 22-year-old Sandy Denny resembles the archetypal English farm wench in her peasanty floral print smock-dress. Her speaking voice normally hearty, today (and not for the first time) she's seeking sympathy and monopolising attention: she has woken up with a terrible cold and is afraid her voice won't hold out for more than one take, though this doesn't stop her lighting up another Embassy. She clatters into the vocal booth Wood has readied facing the band. Through its glass panels, she can be observed sipping honey and lemon and peeling tissues from a box. She kicks off her shoes and stands at arm's length from the large rectangular, Neuman microphone and clamps on a set of headphones.
'A Sailor's Life' was her idea, a traditional air she'd learnt from Martin Carthy while touring folk clubs as a solo singer. She played it to the Fairports backstage before a show at Southampton University, and they seized on it as a showcase for the new sound they were developing. They drafted a seascape from surging cymbals and seagulling guitars, with plenty of space for liquid solos by Richard Thompson, and premiered the song that night. According to Richard it "sent the audience to sleep". But the sound excited the band and they invited Swarbrick down to their next recordings.
And here they are, aware that this epic song won't retain its tension over too many takes. This has to be the one.
Someone counts it off and Simon and Richard sound the first chords, bright and open, strummed like lapping waves. Martin plays splashy rolls on his cymbals, Ashley's bass anchors the intro with a pulsating drone, then moves to a triplet which sketches the pitching of a vessel. Sandy begins to sing: "A sailor's life, it is a merry life/He robs young girls of their hearts' delight/Leaving them behind to weep and moan/They never know when they will return. . ."
Somehow, this young woman from Wimbledon, streaming cold and all, sails from her soundproofed box in the middle of Barnes and harvests history's echoes. Her voice is river-clear, evoking a siren's magnetic music and the lament of Polly on the shore; now delicate, now robust, it summons longing and departure. It's sultry and sad and deep as the sea. And when it glides away, Richard's guitar breaks over the song like a giant wave, Swarb's violin both a ghostly hornpipe and a lightning bolt. Swaying like a storm-tossed galleon, it's a dynamic tour de force: an unrepeatable take of 11 minutes and 11 seconds.
When it's over, Boyd and Wood are grinning. Everyone knows they've been present at the birth of something definitive.
This is the story of a suburban, middle-class English girl blessed with a magical voice. When she died suddenly in 1978, aged only 31, she'd become one of the finest singers and songwriters this country's ever produced. It's a story with many levels and many of the people who lived through it recall it differently. Sandy's father proudly pictures the sweet, sunny-natured daughter who moved him to tears singing 'Away In A Manger' at a primary school concert and again years later singing 'Wild Mountain Thyme' at the Royal Albert Hall. Her last words to him - over the phone, a week or so before she died - were something like, "You are clever, daddy." He'd solved a crossword clue in The Observer (Answer: Three line whip). Her close friends, on the other hand, knew a raucous woman who swore like a docker, drank like a horse, filled a room with her chatter and caused scenes in Soho nightclubs. She was loved by most who met her, knew her, heard her; yet she often displayed so little confidence in her marvellous talents that those same friends could be worn down by her hunger for reassurance.
Rather than reveal herself, she'd often write heavily coded songs about her friends. They're almost all reflective, downbeat songs of great elegance. On stage, their creator was likely to finish one, light up a cheap cigarette, forget which song she was doing next, trip over her second-hand dress, send her drink flying, exclaim "Bugger me, I'm a clumsy cow," and roar with laughter.
It was a wartime romance. Neil and Edna Denny fell in love in Babbacombe, Devon at the RAF's Number One Training Wing. He was a navigator, she was in postings. They wed in 1942, honeymooning that Christmas. Their son, David, was born in January 1945. Their daughter, Alexandra Elene MacLean Denny, was born on January 6th 1947 in Worple Road, Wimbledon. She would forever be known as Sandy.
Neil and Edna were loving, if traditional, parents who expected their children to do well at school and encouraged them to play instruments. Sandy was a natural at the piano, able to play set pieces from memory. Yet she developed a deep mistrust of teachers, possibly, says her father, after one of them punished her arbitrarily for being so unrelievingly good. Fiercely loyal to friends, she irritated her headmistress by always taking the blame for errant classmates.
At home Neil Denny loved settling down by the gramophone, and had a large collection of classical music, Gilbert and Sullivan, the traditional songs of his Scottish heritage, Fats Waller and The Ink Spots. When the '60s arrived, the family kept abreast of pop, though the teenaged Sandy ignored her father's protests about Bob Dylan's "horrible, grating voice". She was fascinated by Dylan's words and how he phrased them and she was moved to pick up her brother's guitar.
Forced to drop music after a dispute with the teacher, she passed her art A-Level and won a scholarship to Kingston School Of Art.. But her parents had more traditional ambitions for their daughter, so she left grammar school a term early and took some casual nursing work at the Brompton Chest Hospital in Fulham. She hated it She found caring for the sick too stressful and came to dread walking through the subterranean corridor that led past the mortuary. Working in a chest hospital didn't stop her smoking, either. "I needed to smoke to steady my nerves," she later recalled.
In the autumn of 1965, shortly after taking up her college place, Sandy visited The Barge, a floating folk club moored by the Thames in Kingston. She came away convinced she could sing better than anyone on the bill. The next week, she plucked up courage and returned to the club with her guitar. "My mouth went dry and I could hardly sing," she recalled some years later, "but when I came off and everybody applauded I knew I'd always want to do it."
Stage fright never left her. Nevertheless, she started singing regularly at folk venues like Bunjie's coffee bar, Les Cousins and the John Snow. Fellow folk-scene debutante Philippa Clare recalls that back then "if you had three chords and long hair you were a folk singer." Although Sandy's repertoire was limited - Tom Paxton and Pete Seeger songs and a few stand-bys concerning trains and hobos - her warm, sparkling voice set her apart from the ranks of Joan Baez and Julie Felix impersonators.
Soon an agent named Sandy Glennon was booking her for about £15 a night; Sandy quit her foundation course to devote herself to singing. By 1966, she noted later, the folk boom crowd was jaded and some of the performers were set in their ways; but others welcomed the gifted newcomer. American singer-songwriter Jackson C. Frank, lived in a South Kensington house with his compatriot Paul Simon and British singer Al Stewart. Frank had a reputation as the intense young beatnik about town. He and Sandy began dating. It was a tough initiation in love. Sandy adored the truculent Frank and his songs - which she began including in her sets - but he was demanding and had aggressive moods (he was later treated for schizophrenia). When he started taking hard drugs, the relationship fizzled, but Sandy continued to sing his songs 'Blues Run The Game' and - perhaps aware of the irony - 'You Never Wanted Me'.
During a residency at the Deane Arms in South Ruislip she met folk stalwarts Alex Campbell and John Renbourn. In November 1966, Campbell invited Sandy to join him on a session for the BBC World Service show A Cellarful Of Folk, where she sang 'Green Grow The Laurels'. The connection led, early the following year, to her first recordings, singing on a session divided between two albums: Alex Campbell & Friends and Sandy & Johnny with the Johnny Silvo Folk Group. Her solo debut was the traditional song 'The False Bride', Campbell introducing her as "a new young singer who has something to say."
As she bonded with such road-hardened players, the new young singer discovered a taste for the folk scene's other favourite pursuit. Sandy learned to drink.
*
IT WAS A rare time to be in London. At The Troubadour, a coffee bar at 275 Old Brompton Road (still there today, still dripping with atmosphere), folk's finest would pull up a stool and perform - even Bob Dylan on one occasion. One regular was Dave Cousins, leader of a trio from Twickenham, The Strawbs.
"I dropped in at the singers' night one Tuesday," he remembers. "Suddenly, there was the best voice I'd ever heard." Perched on a stool, sporting a white dress and a white straw hat, and strumming her old Gibson acoustic, was Sandy. Dave introduced himself and, on a whim, asked if she'd join his band. "Much to my astonishment she said yes."
Soon after, Sandy witnessed the newly-formed Pentangle, an ambitious blend of folk and jazz featuring John Renbourn, Bert Jansch, singer Jacquie McShee and, on double bass, Danny Thompson, sidekick of Tubby Hayes and Ronnie Scott. Sandy, who'd always been a jazz fan, approached Danny after their show at The Horseshoe in Tottenham Court Road and asked if he'd help her with her piano playing. "I said, I'm not a teacher," recalls Danny. "but I fell for her immediately. She had an amazing chuckle. She was larger than life, a great bird to be with."
Danny lived in Wimbledon too, so duly went round to Worple Road. Sandy's mother was none too impressed with the Cockney jazzer. "Her mum worked for the local tax office," laughs Danny. "Sandy met me one night and said, Here, my mum's checked up on you and found out you're married with a son! Sandy knew, she didn't care."
Their 18-month affair was all you might imagine between off-duty musicians in '60s London. Danny made good money and drove a Bentley, so they'd travel around the country together whenever their schedules coincided. "She was always up for a laugh," says Danny. "She'd let stuff happen and wouldn't stand for any pomposity. She did all the things a singer wasn't supposed to. I used to nag her about the smoking, but I wouldn't have stopped her drinking - we were all big drinkers. I did try and keep her off the brandy. She got aggressive on brandy."
"Sandy on the brandy" became a familiar sight in London's nightspots - at the Speakeasy, Mario, the maitre d', kept a bottle behind the bar for her. She was a life-force, always dragging her friends out of bed to dance the night away, paying for cabs, sending them off for a good time. "Everyone - men, women, cats and dogs - fell in love with Sandy," declares Linda Thompson (née Peters), who first encountered her in the summer of 1967, when love was in the air and everyone was checking out the emergent 'underground'. Down the UFO Club Sandy got chatting with one of its prime movers, a handsome, 24-year-old Bostonian who'd developed a love for English music: Joe Boyd.
She invited him to see her at Les Cousins. Boyd recalls thinking her performance was too much in the modern singer-songwriter vein, "the cheesier end of folk." But he couldn't ignore that voice. A few days later in the street he ran into Sandy with a test-pressing of the album she'd recorded in Copenhagen with The Strawbs. Joe invited her to his Bayswater flat to hear it.
"On stage she'd seemed a bit silly, giggling all the time. Once I'd listened to the record my whole perception of her changed. She was incredibly funny, with a very quick mind, jumping from one subject to another, dropping in comments obliquely, interrupting herself with footnotes - a chaotic intelligence just poured out." Boyd gave her a lift home. They ended the evening listening to an illicit broadcast of the yet-to-be-released Sgt Pepper and began a short romance.
Linda Thompson remembers the social whirl of those days. "I first met Sandy at the Troubadour. She was with Joe Boyd drinking and being jolly. I'd heard about her before: she'd gone out with a guy I was involved with, Paul McNeal, who was a great trad singer - we were touring folk clubs together with Tim Hardin, everywhere from the Bootle Hard Of Hearing Club to some dive in Essex. I was living in a house in Holland Park with my cousin, a model who was going out with Tim Buckley. Then later I started going out with Joe."
The buzz about Sandy was growing. She'd been headlining at The Troubadour since December 1966, covered several times in Melody Maker's folk pages by writer Karl Dallas, had appeared on Alex Campbell's My Kinda Folk TV show and played a major anti-Vietnam benefit in Rotterdam. "She was the best solo female folk singer in the country," recalls singer Marc Ellington. "There were some very good traditional singers like The Watersons; there were a lot of guys writing modern material, but Sandy was the only one who could go from 'She Moved Through The Fair' onto something by Bob Dylan with complete ease and make everything her own."
*
ONE MIGHT assume it was Joe Boyd who asked Sandy to join Fairport Convention, the young band from Muswell Hill, whom he'd seen in the Happening 44 strip club and begun managing soon after he met her. In fact, Joe was in America when they needed to find a replacement for departing singer Judy Dyble. "We'd heard about Sandy," says Richard Thompson. "and read about her in the Melody Maker, so we asked her along."
The auditions took place in a Fulham boys' club in May 1968. "We saw 10 girls over two days and it was a bit disheartening," says Simon Nicol, still part of Fairport today. "But when Sandy came in, the room got louder and brighter. We were very young and I was aware of being in the presence of someone older and wiser."
"She made us audition for her, to see if she wanted to join us," laughs Richard Thompson, 18 at the time. "We played 'The Hobo' by Tim Buckley and she did 'You Never Wanted Me'. She was incredible. We went into a three second scrum and said, Right she's in! The music suddenly leapt up 100 percent. She was such a classy singer it made the rest of us sound much better."
One of the lads, Sandy was quite at home on the road, on the stage and in the pub afterwards. Indeed, Joe Boyd has said that when he heard she'd joined he was concerned she might be a corrupting influence on his young charges. "She was a more of a hedonist than the rest of us," laughs Simon, "but it would be unfair to call her a corrupting influence." (Neil Denny is still rather upset by such a suggestion: "Joe Boyd saw something in Sandy which we [her parents] never saw - an effing, blinding, hard-drinking girl. The Fairports were nice enough lads, but scruffy.")
During the long hours of travelling, Sandy would sing Scottish ballads, such as 'Jock Of Hazeldine', 'The Seal Woman's Croon' and 'Flowers Of the Forest' which she'd learnt from her father. ("According to legend that's really what got them intrigued by British traditional music," says Boyd.) Linda remembers that Sandy found touring gruelling. Singing over electric instruments strained her voice at first, and being in male company all day had its downside. "But she wouldn't put up with the usual shit women put up with, that's for sure," Linda laughs. "She wouldn't let the boys dominate her. And she could be difficult herself. She could really take over. Then the next minute she'd display a total lack of self-confidence."
"Incredibly low self-esteem," confirms Philippa Clare, "and she could be very defensive. One night down The Speakeasy, Pete Townshend came up and said, 'You're looking nice,' and her immediate reaction was 'What do you mean!?' She loved Pete, but she never thought people really liked her, but that they had some ulterior motive. She was always very difficult if you paid her a compliment."
Marc Ellington: "She could be very touchy about her appearance. She'd just look at a plate of cakes and put on weight and she'd either wear jeans that looked like they had the Orson Welles designer label or incredibly old-fashioned '50s dresses. Other days she'd look stunning. She was a mixture of straight-laced schoolteacher and someone who made Janis Joplin look like Mother Teresa, completely out of control. Not within an hour, within the same sentence."
Sandy's mercurial personality was the perfect creative crucible. "'I'm going to write some songs,' she said to me," recalls Linda. "I said, What do you mean write songs? It's hard to believe, but it never occurred to us to write back then. The next thing I knew we were watching the TV in her attic in Gloucester Road and a butter ad came on, this voice singing, 'We're all a lot better for butter.' And it was Sandy! She said, 'Promise me you won't tell Richard I did this, he'd kill me! But I got £40!' Then she played me 'Who Knows Where The Time Goes' and I was stunned."
In fact, the song, written when Sandy was 19, first appeared on the Strawbs recording which had so impressed Boyd. Only the second song she'd written, 'Who Knows Where The Time Goes' would, for many fans, remain her best. In Let It Rock magazine in 1974, Clive James proclaimed it "one of the two or three dozen crucial songs in rock," adding that it "showed the full power - for the one and only time - of the gift its author so unself-consciously possessed." (Despite the past tense, Sandy was still alive with some superb work ahead of her.) Whatever, it was certainly the first example of Sandy's remarkable ability to create songs which felt simultaneously ancient and modern, and sing them in a voice that made the simplest lyric feel profound.
Sandy's first Fairport album, What We Did On Our Holidays, opened with another of her compositions, Fotheringay, its melody taken from an earlier song - possibly her first - 'Box Full Of Treasures', the new lyric inspired by a book about Mary Queen Of Scots. With the lovely, hymnal 'Book Song', the blues-rocker 'Mr Lacey', covers of Bob Dylan and Joni Mitchell, 'She Moves Through The Fair' and Richard's stirring song of friendship, 'Meet On The Ledge', What We Did On Our Holidays was a strong record, but clearly the work of a group pulling in several directions.
Singer Ian Matthews wasn't as taken with folk as the others, and left early in 1969. The new quintet with Sandy taking most of the leads was quickly accepted by the fans. "You can always tell when you're on a stage with someone with charisma," says Simon Nicol; "the audience are all looking at the same spot."
While rehearsing for the follow-up to Holidays, the Fairports would drop by Elektra Records and hang out with Eclection, a pioneering electric folk band featuring aristocratic Norwegian, George Kajanus (later of Sailor) and a tall, red-headed, deep-voiced Australian, Trevor Lucas. In Britain since 1964, Lucas came with a reputation as a ladies' man who, apart from being a talented musician, was also a master carpenter and a superb chef. Garrulous and ambitious, with interests in music beyond the folk scene, he was also severely dyslexic. Lucas had met Sandy on the folk circuit, and moved into the Gloucester Road house where she rented the attic room. She fell deeply in love with him.
Fairport Convention and Eclection shared a bill at Mothers in Birmingham on May 12th, 1969. After the show, Sandy chose to return to London in Trevor's Hillman Hunter. The decision probably saved her life. Fairport's driver fell asleep at the wheel and their Transit van somersaulted off the M1, scattering the band and gear across the motorway. Linda Thompson: "The night after the accident at four in the morning I met Sandy in an all-night supermarket. She was just in a dreadful state saying Martin's dead, and Richard's girlfriend [Jeannie Franklyn] is dead and Tyger's badly injured. She would have been sitting next to Richard if she hadn't gone home with Trevor."
After Martin's funeral and Ashley's discharge from hospital, a band meeting decided that the old Fairport was finished. They opted to work on a brand new repertoire. Joe Boyd compiled Unhalfbricking from the songs completed before the crash, among them 'Autopsy', one of Sandy's most arcanely compelling songs, set by Richard to an arrangement in 5/8. By the time that 'Si Tu Dois Partir' (a Cajun-flavoured version of Dylan's 'If You Gotta Go, Go Now', worked up backstage at the Middle Earth club and translated into French at Sandy's suggestion) became a surprise Top 30 hit in July 1969, Fairport were beginning to see their new incarnation take shape.
"A few months before the accident, Music From Big Pink by The Band hit London," recalls Joe Boyd. "Fairport effectively said, 'We want to create something as English as this is American.' So much of what they'd done up until then was American in style. Big Pink kind of said, 'Forget it, you're not American, you're never even gonna come close to understanding this music.' At the same time it was inspiring a real feeling for roots: forget all that middle-class surface stuff. This is the Arkansas earth speaking. . . So what about the Lincolnshire earth?"
With Swarbrick now full-time on electric violin, they gathered at a house near Winchester. "I was dumfounded by all of them," recalls the new drummer Dave Mattacks, who'd previously played in dance bands. "I'd never met people like this. They were all very bright and their priorities were different from musicians I'd played with up to that time. Sandy had the most amazing voice. I'd not heard singing that good before."
The resultant Liege & Lief was warmly welcomed. Even the godfather of English folk, A.L. Lloyd, gave the new sound his approval. It remains Fairport's best-seller and has never been out of print. Critics hosannahed, America beckoned, a world tour was arranged.
At which point, Sandy left the band.
As Fairport prepared to fly to Copenhagen for a TV show, Sandy announced she wasn't going, complaining that she didn't want to fly. The band didn't take her seriously, but she failed to turn up at the airport the next morning. David Sandison, Island's Head of Press at the time, remembers Witchseason's Anthea Joseph taking it upon herself to get Sandy to Denmark. "She did a bit of detective work and finally tracked Sandy down, very drunk and belligerent, sobered her up and frog-marched her onto the next flight. Of course, as soon as she got on the plane Sandy just clicked her fingers and ordered more booze. When they arrived, Sandy was completely drunk again. She could be very selfish."
"We felt let down," says Richard. "But I remember at the airport in Copenhagen saying, 'Well, perhaps this is for the best. Aren't girls temperamental? Let's have a lads' band.' Something like that. It was Sandy's choice. She wanted to spend more time with Trevor."
The couple had set up home in Chipstead Street, Fulham. They were fervent nestbuilders. He would make furniture and cook. She'd decorate and sew, and read P.G. Wodehouse aloud to him as they sat up at night in their waterbed. They bought an Airedale and named him Watson. "After the accident, she'd become more domestic, more comfortable," confirms Joe. "Now the record was out, everybody loved it, all the offers from America were coming in. She looked at it all with new eyes and wasn't sure that was what she really wanted."
Some friends have suggested that Sandy was more spooked by the accident than she let on. It gave her a glimpse of mortality, and made her consider the future beyond rock music, a trade still rare among young British women at the time. Her insecurity stretched to Trevor too. She fretted about his fidelity, certain that he slept with other women on tour. "She could see a situation developing where she'd spend the next year touring and lose her relationship with Trevor," says Joe. "For the first time in her life she had a settled relationship and she didn't want to give it up."
Another factor in her departure may have been the arrival of Swarbrick. He and Sandy were both natural dominators of the group dynamic. They had a deep respect for one another but wound each other up. It may have been one big personality too many.
"I keep wanting to reveal incredible dramas about the split," Sandy told Disc & Music Echo after both she and Ashley Hutchings had quit the band, "but I really don't have the energy to make anything up. I didn't think I could sing particularly when I joined them and they in turn were incredibly unenthusiastic about everything - at least that was the impression they gave to me."
"It was very tricky for her to settle into the discipline of working with other people," decides Marc Ellington, who invited Sandy to sing on his own albums. "But she found it very difficult to stand up on her own and was reluctant to go solo. She liked the camaraderie and power of a band and not having to take care of herself." Sandy's solution was to form a group with Trevor. The music would be on her terms, and she'd have the support of a full band and Trevor where she could keep an eye on him. They gathered former Eclection drummer Gerry Conway, bass player Pat Donaldson and guitarist Jerry Donahue from Poet And The One Man Band. For a few days they were called Tiger's Eye. Then they became Fotheringay.
"I'll never go solo again," Sandy told Disc gleefully in September 1970. "I'm too happy with bunches of people."
"It was pretty much Sandy's show," says Donahue, "but she encouraged all of us. It was the closest I've ever come in music to a family." Fotheringay was so harmonious, Donahue can only recall one argument: between Sandy and Gerry Conway, about a cheese sandwich. Donahue also realised something that Sandy couldn't always see: "To Trevor she was the greatest thing ever. He thought she was very, very special."
In the 1970 Melody Maker Poll, Sandy took the rosette for Best Female Singer, and soon afterwards she recorded the performance most rock fans know her by, 'Battle Of Evermore', a duet with Robert Plant on Led Zeppelin IV.
"I didn't realise until I'd nearly finished all the lyrics that it needed to be a call and response thing," says Plant, "so I approached Sandy, my favourite singer out of all the British girls that ever were, and she was up for it. I don't think it took more than 45 minutes. I showed her how to do the long 'Oooooh, dance in the dark' so there'd be a vocal tail-in. It was perfect against my bluesy thing. She and I got the Melody Maker awards that year, two singers from groups that never got on the radio!"
"I left the studio feeling slightly hoarse," Sandy told student journalist Barbara Charone in 1973. "Having someone out-sing you is a horrible feeling, wanting to be strongest yourself."
But while things were looking up for Sandy, others were unhappy about Fotheringay. Joe Boyd had had long discussions with her about going solo after Fairport, and had even secured a $40,000 advance from A&M in America for her next record. He was irked to see the money, which could have given her some security, being frittered away on the band. He was also upset that his vision of a Sandy solo album which fully explored the creative chemistry between her and Richard Thompson was not to be.
Some fans thought Fotheringay a step sideways, too. The album was well received, chiefly for Sandy's singing on tracks like the pellucid 'Banks Of The Nile', but the response to their first shows was muted. Sandy found the responsibility of being the main attraction a strain. Fotheringay's support act was a young duo, The Humblebums, comprising future stars Gerry Rafferty and Billy Connolly. The latter has recalled Sandy to Philippa Clare as "one of the angriest women I ever met."
"That generation of female singers had it a lot harder than they do today," notes Boyd. "There's no hesitation now about assertively being a star, with management and planning. There was a lot of conflict about being a woman in that role then, and the more successful you become, the more you leave people behind, so the more you run the risk of being on your own. Sandy was afraid of being a big success. A lot of female performers from that generation had that fear."
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