Sandy Denny and Fotheringay - A Beguiling Songbook

In his book Electric Eden, Rob Young says the 1970 album Fotheringay can be seen as “effectively the first proper Sandy Denny record, heaving and tossing with briny swells.”

I kind of agree with him, since the very reason Sandy had left Fairport Convention in 1969, soon after the release of their landmark album Liege & Lief, was a desire to record her own songs.  

Of course, Fotheringay was a group, but Sandy’s songs formed the core of their repertoire and it was her money that funded their short life, before she buckled under pressure to go out on her own.  

Original 1970 pink label version

Recorded at Sound Techniques, produced by Joe Boyd and engineered by Jerry Boys, the Fotheringay album was released in the spring of 1970. The band toured the UK and the album sold reasonably well, but not enough to put the band up in the same league as Fairport. 

Despite the excellent musicianship displayed by bassist Pat Donaldson, drummer Gerry Conway and lead guitarist Jerry Donahue, they weren’t revered in the same way as Ashley, Richard, Swarb, Simon and DM were in Fairport. In particular, Sandy’s boyfriend, Trevor Lucas was seen as a bit of a chancer, riding on her coat-tails.

Young said Lucas had made a modest reputation for himself as an Australian folkie: “Contemporaries remember him as competent but with little musical talent; a good-time guy who latched onto his partner’s talents.”

Fairport and Fotheringay (Nick Drake, the Incredible String Band et al) shared a management company, Joe Boyd's Witchseason. Boyd and Island Records boss Chris Blackwell were adamant that Sandy should reap the rewards being offered her as a solo artist. Their antipathy towards Fotheringay proved to be the band’s undoing. 

Later, in 1973, Sandy told Rolling Stone, "They hated us at the Witchseason office. They kept saying, look, you're not Fairport and you're not The Incredibles."

On a purely musical level, these attitudes seem unfair, because the Fotheringay album hangs together very well. It contains some of Sandy's best songs, some highly credible covers and some terrific ensemble playing. As Young wrote: “Fotheringay’s mix of slow rocking English and Scottish ballads and windswept Denny originals made for a beguiling songbook.”

“Songs like The Sea, The Pond and the Stream and Winter Winds (all from Fotheringay) are beset by gusts of wind stirring up the summer’s dust, rumbling clouds and approaching squalls. The season is typically autumn or early winter."

Fotheringay live

Complementing and contrasting those songs on the album are covers of Gordon Lightfoot’s The Way I Feel and Bob Dylan’s Too Much Of Nothing, the latter of which could be said to be the definitive version of the song. Trevor Lucas does a fine job on the vocal, backed up by Sandy and Pat live, while Jerry's soloing is, as always, impeccable. 

The final track on the album, Banks of the Nile is one of Sandy's best traditional arrangements, topped off with her divine angelic singing.  

Fotheringay toured the UK, often supporting Fairport Convention. Sandy continued winning best female vocalist polls and pressure on her to go solo was incessant, ultimately breaking the band apart before they could complete a second album.

In his biography 'White Bicycles', Boyd said, “From the moment she left Fairport, Sandy and I did nothing but argue. I could get a big advance from A&M for a solo album, but she wanted to form a band with her boyfriend." Lucas was a spendthrift, but as Boyd pointed out, "the money keeping everyone on salary was Sandy’s."

At Trevor’s behest they bought a massive PA system (nickname: Stonehenge) and a Bentley to get around in. Richard Thompson recalls, “Each custom-made cabinet was the size of a sarsen stone, weighed a ton and took about six people to lift. There would be two cabinets on each side of the stage and one laid across the top, hence the name."

Sandy was bankrolling all this, to Joe Boyd’s increasing frustration: “One night in December working on the second Fotheringay album, I lost my temper after the fortieth unsuccessful take of John The Gun. Sandy and I went out and got drunk. She asked me if I would stay if she broke up the group and made a solo album.”

Sandy and Jerry Donahue

Thus were sown the seeds of Sandy and Joe’s estrangement. He had been offered a job running Warner Brothers' film music department in Los Angeles. From their drunken chat, Sandy thought Joe had committed to staying in London. She told the band it was over. 

In a 1973 interview with Rolling Stone, Boyd admitted he said if Sandy would break up the group he would think about staying on in London to produce her. “The next day I told her I couldn’t, that I had to go to LA”. He had already signed the Warners contract and couldn’t get out of it. “She never forgave me,” he said in White Bicycles.

“Fotheringay was a fabulous band,” Sandy told Rolling Stone. That its demise was unnecessary and borne of a misunderstanding made it all the more frustrating for Sandy and the others. It wasn’t the end of their working relationship though. In his biography, ‘Beeswing’, Richard Thompson said that for her first solo record Sandy wanted to have musicians she was comfortable with, which included Pat and Gerry from Fotheringay.

Pat and Gerry

“Even though Fotheringay didn’t exist, half of it was still on board! It was a strange situation, but there didn’t seem to be any animosity. I think everyone knew that Sandy had been destined for a solo career sooner or later.”

If there could be any criticism of the solo material, it was that unlike the Fotheringay record, Sandy’s records were a bit one-paced. As Thompson noted, her compositions were full of her own unique character, and with that wonderful voice of hers she could carry any tune. But Richard and Trevor both recognised the need for some variety in tempo. However, their attempts to get her to write some rockier material largely failed.

While the members of Fotheringay all ended up working together subsequently, mainly under the Fairport umbrella, there was always a feeling of unfinished business. It wasn’t until 2008, long after Sandy and Trevor had passed, that Jerry Donahue curated the release of Fotheringay 2, derived mainly from those original 1971 sessions. It holds up well and is a worthy follow-up. 

Some of the material from the aborted second album, including John The Gun, ended up on Sandy’s first real solo album, The Northstar Grassman and The Ravens. This material was augmented by new sessions helmed by Richard Thompson.

“Here at last was Sandy composing at the piano,” said Thompson, who admits he hadn’t realised before this how good Sandy was at the piano, because Fairport didn’t think to make one available to her. Here she is, playing Late November from Northstar Grassman.

“She had a beautiful touch and her voicings and harmonic sense were unique. Although you can hear her roots in traditional music, these are songs of their time…with a quality that endures.”

Fotheringay on Beat Club, playing Dylan's Too Much Of Nothing, 1970

BBC Session 1971, Gypsie Davy 

John The Gun, from Fotheringay 2, recorded 1971

Sandy Denny - Crazy Lady Blues, 1971

Sandy Denny - The Northstar Grassman and The Ravens

Also on this blog:
A Visit To The Nick Drake Gathering

What Is Led Zeppelin's Best Acoustic Song?

Duncan Browne's Journey

Music While You Work - A Guide

Joni Mitchell- The Hissing of Summer Lawns

Who's next - lightning in a bottle

Photo by Ethan Russell

In their heyday The Who were a truly exciting live band; there can be little argument about that. It wasn't until the release of their 1971 album 'Who's next', however, that they managed to capture the explosive nature of their live shows on a studio album. 

Their December 1968 stint on 'The Rolling Stones Rock and Roll Circus' showed they were a match for anyone playing live. No one got to see it at the time, though, because the whole project was shelved. The Who's skit did see the light of day on their 1977 biopic 'The Kids Are Alright'.

That confident, cheeky performance of  'A Quick One, While He's Away' was perfectly pitched for the circus tent, and so much more polished and powerful than the Stones' lacklustre act. 

Indeed, it was this upstaging of the Stones, as much as the sorry state of Brian Jones, that convinced Jagger & Co to shelve the Rock and Roll Circus film. It didn't see a full official release for almost 30 years.

From the late '60s on, with the 'Tommy' album as the core of their act, The Who built a reputation as a heavy rock band, culminating in their triumphant early morning stint at Woodstock in August 1969. 

The 1970 'Live At Leeds' album was an all-guns-blazing set, with Pete Townshend and Keith Moon driving each other to new extremes. Check out this clip of them playing the original vinyl album's opener 'Young Man Blues' at the Isle of Wight festival that same year.

As the Village Voice music critic Robert Christgau wrote in 1971, The Who's studio recordings thus far were marred by a thin sound. Their 1971 masterpiece 'Who’s next' changed all that. With the help of master engineer Glyn Johns, they managed to transfer the power and majesty of a Who live show onto a studio record for the first time. Christgau said the group "now achieves the same resonant immediacy in the studio that it does live".

It was a volatile chemistry that made them such an exciting and often unpredictable live act. John Entwistle played lead lines on the bass, allowing Townshend the freedom to jump around, imitate a windmill and bang out his wild riffs.

Moon was the whirlwind, totally unconventional as a drummer, but at his best, as on 'Who's next', he brought exceptional musicality to the drums. 

By '71 and tired of playing 'Tommy' and their 60s hits to the same audiences, Townshend conceived a new album concept as their next big project. He built himself a studio and began creating a new musical landscape.

In the new Apple TV series 1971, Townshend says, “I’d heard about synthesisers and music computers and I could see this new revolution coming.

"Lifehouse was going to be a movie based on a dystopian idea about the way media, electronics and technology would change society. I imagined this world in which there was incredible pollution, incredible difficulty with living in the outside world and so what the government did is it stuck us in our houses and fed us entertainment to keep us happy while they cleaned up the air.

NME review, click to enlarge

“I called it The Grid, this global communication system where everybody would be fed similar stuff. It would be surreptitiously policed and censored. Once they’d got us in and they were feeding us the programmes, we would imagine we had access to everything, because of its richness, its persuasiveness and its beauty. It was an anticipation of the idea that everything would go wrong, but that music would prevail."

Unfortunately, Pete couldn’t sell this concept to the band. They thought he'd gone mad. But producer Glyn Johns was sufficiently interested in the musical ideas to help Pete condense them into conventional backing tracks that The Who could then play along to. 

Rolling Stone magazine’s 1971 review noted that “Townshend wrings more than his money’s worth out of his £14,000-worth of synthesizers, making, I daresay, shrewder at once more adventurous and better-integrated — use of them than any rock experimenter before him."

In 'Baba O’Riley', for instance, he sets the stage for the band’s dramatic entrance with a pre-recorded VCS3 part he obtained by programming certain of his vital statistics into a computer hooked up to the synthesizer, then treats the part as a drone while the song’s two major chords are transposed over it.

All in the best possible taste

The looped and synthesised intro to 'Baba O’Riley' and the trippy electronics of  'Won’t Get Fooled Again' were inspired by minimalist composer Terry Riley’s 1967 album 'A Rainbow in Curved Air'. 

Rolling Stone noted the quality of the musicianship on this album, “with Moon thrashing and bashing more precisely than ever before on record, Entwistle dreaming up all manner of scrumptious melodic and rhythmic flourishes (listen especially to what he plays beneath the chorus of 'Won’t Get Fooled Again').

"And Townshend, with chunky acoustic rhythm, resounding monster chords of the classic sort, and cogent and lyrical solos, playing with exemplary efficiency and taste.” Singer Roger Daltrey also rose to the occasion with some of his most assured vocals, including the legendary scream at the climax of Won't Get Fooled Again. 

Re-reviewing 'Who’s next' in the mid 1970s, the NME’s Steve Clarke noted that Keith Moon’s unique style of playing – often without a hi-hat, hence the wash of cymbal sounds on many recordings – meant he lacked “the bombastic precision of many of Britain’s rock drummers. Instead. Moon sounds spontaneously manic, and nowhere has he sounded better than here.”

back cover photo

While the dramatic opening and closing tracks of 'Who's next' are the ones most people remember, there’s a satisfying variety in the moods in the remaining songs, with particularly melodic passages in 'Love Ain’t For Keeping', 'Song Is Over' and the utterly brilliant 'Behind Blue Eyes'. The acoustic-to-electric transition on the latter exemplifies the tension and release dynamics of The Who at their best – and with lyrics to match.

“When my fist clenches crack it open, before use it and lose my cool. If I smile, tell me some bad news, before I laugh and act like a fool.”

RS described ‘Song Is Over’ as “an unutterably beautiful song in which Townshend sings exquisitely over a gentle piano background with Daltrey charging in exhilaratingly, with breathtaking chord changes in the manner of the “Listening to you I hear the music . . .” refrain from Tommy.”

Pete may have failed to get the broader Lifehouse project off the ground, but 'Who's next' nonetheless carries a strong sense of what Clarke observed as “We’re all part of something bigger and somehow one day we’ll all join together as one.” 

Photo by Ethan Russell

The cover shot of the monolith in a Sheffield slag heap is odd but effective, although as Townshend pointed out, it bears no relation to the narrative of the record. Indeed, photographer Ethan Russell said he thought after they had done it there was no chance it would be used.

Quite how it was selected then is a mystery. Townsend added, "Of course I don’t like it. It’s got no artistic consequence whatsoever. No link to the music. It’s meaningless. It’s four guys stopping in a car and pissing up against a chunk of concrete. Anyway, can we move on?"

Also On This Blog:

Five Days of Drama at The Isle of Wight, 1970

The Who 'Put The Boot In' at Charlton FC, 1976

Sunday Night at The Saville, 1967