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As the night train from Birmingham hurtled through the dark towards London, Fairport Convention singer Sandy Denny wept. The Fairports were returning from a gig at
Mother's club and, although the groups' star was in ascendant, Denny was plunging into despair. "She spent most of the train journey in tears," recalls Fairport founding member Simon Nicol. The
precise reason for those tears was hard to pinpoint but Denny seemed to see her life collapsing around her. Much as she loved the Fairports, she viewed their latest album, Liege and Lief, as a retrograde
step. Largely the brainchild of Fairport bass man Ashley Hutchings, and fueled by a desire to create something as distinctively English as the folk-rock of the Byrds was American, Liege and Lief consisted of
traditional English folk songs played on electric instruments. The album's producer, Joe Boyd, points out that "Sandy had been involved with the traditional for a long time, but always rather
ambivalently. She sang traditional songs as well as her own compositions. I think she was amused at Ashley's fanatacism." Amused and disturbed might be more accurate, because she was more committed
to the idea of writing her own material than to rearranging the lost treasures Hutchings dug out of the vaults of Cecil Sharp House, the North London repository of English folk music. Drummer Dave Mattacks
confirms that the album "polarised Ashley and Sandy. Ashley wanted to go further in that direction but, for Sandy, it was just too much deja vu. Sandy's reason for going was 'I've done this, I don't
want to pursue the traditional thing. I'm into writing my own songs.'" |
