Sandy Denny
Alexandra Elene MacLean Denny was an English singer-songwriter who was lead singer of the British folk rock band Fairport Convention. She has been described as "arguably the pre-eminent British folk-rock singer/songwriter of her time".
After briefly working with the Strawbs, Denny joined Fairport Convention in 1968, remaining with them until 1969. She formed the short-lived band Fotheringay in 1970, before focusing on a solo career. Between 1971 and 1977, Denny released four solo albums: The North Star Grassman and the Ravens, Sandy, Like an Old Fashioned Waltz and Rendezvous. She also duetted with Robert Plant on "The Battle of Evermore" for Led Zeppelin's album Led Zeppelin IV in 1971. Denny died in 1978 at the age of 31 from head injuries sustained as a result of a fall down a flight of stairs.
Music publications Uncut and Mojo have described Denny as Britain's finest female singer-songwriter. Her composition "Who Knows Where the Time Goes?" has been recorded by Judy Collins, Eva Cassidy, Nina Simone, Mary Black, Kate Wolf, Nanci Griffith, 10,000 Maniacs, Luke Sital-Singh and Cat Power. Her recorded work has been the subject of numerous reissues, along with a wealth of previously unreleased material which has appeared over the more than 40 years since her death, including a 19-CD box set released in November 2010.
In January 2023, Denny was ranked at number 164 on Rolling Stone magazine's list of the 200 Greatest Singers of All Time.
Childhood
Denny was born on 6 January 1947 at Nelson Hospital, Kingston Road, Merton Park, London, to Neil and Edna Denny. She studied classical piano as a child.Denny's paternal grandfather was from Dundee, and her paternal grandmother was a Scots Gaelic speaker and singer of traditional Gaelic songs. At an early age Denny showed an interest in singing, although her strict parents were reluctant to believe there was a living to be made from it. She attended Coombe Girls' School in New Malden; after leaving school she began training as a nurse at the Royal Brompton Hospital.
Early career
Denny's nursing career proved short-lived. In the meantime she had secured a place on a foundation course at Kingston 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 upon Thames, Denny began working the folk club circuit in the evenings with an American-influenced repertoire, including songs by Tom Paxton, together with traditional folk songs. Denny made the first of many appearances for the BBC at Cecil Sharp House on 2 December 1966 on the Folk Song Cellar programme where she accompanied herself on two traditional songs: "Fir a Bhata" and "Green Grow the Laurels".
Denny's earliest professional recordings were made a few months later in mid-1967 for the Saga label, featuring traditional songs and covers of folk contemporaries including her boyfriend of this period, the American singer-songwriter Jackson C. Frank. They were released on the albums Alex Campbell and His Friends and Sandy and Johnny with Johnny Silvo. These songs were collected on the 1970 album It's Sandy Denny where the tracks from Sandy and Johnny had been re-recorded with more accomplished vocals and guitar playing. The complete Saga studio recordings were issued on the 2005 compilation Where The Time Goes.
By this time, she had abandoned her studies at art college and was devoting herself full-time to music. While she was performing at The Troubadour 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 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 of her own, released in November 1968 and prominently featured in the film The Subject Was Roses, thus giving Denny international exposure as a songwriter before she had become widely known as a singer.
From Fairport to Fotheringay
After making the Saga albums with Alex Campbell and Johnny Silvo, Denny looked for a band that would allow her to stretch herself as a vocalist, reach a wider audience, and have the opportunity to display her songwriting. She said, "I wanted to do something more with my voice." After working briefly with the Strawbs, Denny remained unconvinced that they could provide that opportunity, and so she ended her relationship with the band.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.
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.
Solo career and final years
Denny 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", 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 ; she was the only guest vocalist ever to appear on a Led Zeppelin album. In 1972 Denny had a small cameo on Lou Reizner's symphonic arrangement of the Who's rock opera Tommy. In a brief appearance, she sang the character of The Nurse on the track "It's a Boy," which also featured vocals from Pete Townshend.
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, Denny returned to Fairport Convention for a world tour 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 Rendezvous. Released in 1977, the album sold poorly and Denny was subsequently dropped by Island Records. Denny gave birth to her only child, a daughter named Georgia, in July 1977 after relocating to the village of Byfield in Northamptonshire.
A UK tour to promote Rendezvous in autumn 1977 marked her final public appearances. The closing night at the Royalty Theatre in London on 27 November 1977 was recorded for a live album, Gold Dust, which, because of technical problems in the recording of the electric guitar, was belatedly released in 1998 after most of the guitars had been re-recorded by Jerry Donahue.
Death
would later note that Denny "really started going downhill in 1976" and demonstrated increasing levels of both manic and depressive behaviour. Depression, mood swings and the unravelling of her "tumultuous" marriage to Trevor Lucas heightened her drug abuse, in the midst of which she learned that she was pregnant. Her daughter, Georgia, was born prematurely in July 1977. Much like her moods, Denny's interest towards her daughter appeared to oscillate between obsessive and unconcerned; friends recalled both frantic, middle-of-the-night phone calls about teething, as well as Denny "crashing the car and leaving the baby in the pub and all sorts of stuff".Friends would note that Denny had a history of purposely throwing herself off bar stools and down flights of stairs, presumably as a humorous pratfall in the manner of Peter Sellers’ Inspector Clouseau character. Several remembered this behaviour as "Sandy's party trick", while Dave Pegg's wife Chris stated, "She certainly did it in my house and it could be a very dramatic gesture, like self-harming. She could do it without hurting herself usually but I had a feeling there would be one time too many." Those who knew Denny said that her increasing level of alcohol abuse in the last years of her life led to an increasing number of falls, resulting in a growing number of injuries.
In late March 1978, while on holiday with her parents and baby Georgia in Cornwall, Denny was injured when she fell down a staircase and hit her head on concrete. Following the incident, she suffered from intense headaches; a doctor prescribed her the painkiller dextropropoxyphene, a drug known to have fatal side effects when mixed with alcohol. On 1 April, several days after the fall in Cornwall, Denny performed a charity concert at Byfield. The final song she performed was "Who Knows Where the Time Goes?"
At some unknown point during the first half of April 1978, Denny suffered yet another major fall at her home in Byfield. On 13 April, concerned about his wife's erratic behaviour and fearing for his daughter's safety, Trevor Lucas left the UK and returned to his native Australia with their child, leaving Denny without telling her. He sold their Austin Princess car in order to raise funds for the journey.
On discovering Lucas's departure, Denny went to stay at the home of her friend Miranda Ward. During this time, Denny apparently set up an appointment to speak with a doctor about her headaches, and also intended to get advice about her alcohol addiction. At some point after 8 am on 17 April, Denny fell into a coma. Ward was out of the house at the time, and had asked her friend Jon Cole to check in on Denny. Cole entered the home at 3 pm, and found Denny unconscious at the foot of the staircase which led to the second floor of the house. She was rushed by ambulance to Queen Mary's Hospital in nearby Roehampton.
On 19 April, she was transferred to Atkinson Morley Hospital in Wimbledon. After receiving news that Denny was in a coma, Lucas returned from Australia. Doctors informed him that Denny was effectively brain-dead and her condition would not improve. She died on 21 April 1978 without regaining consciousness. Her death was ruled to be the result of a traumatic mid-brain haemorrhage and blunt force trauma to her head. She was 31 years old.
The funeral took place on 27 April 1978 at Putney Vale Cemetery. After the vicar had read Denny's favourite psalm, Psalm 23, a piper played "Flowers of the Forest", a traditional song commemorating the fallen of Flodden Field and one which had appeared on the 1970 Fairport album Full House.
The inscription on her headstone reads: