Salut! Live

Sandy Denny, Fotheringay and the album that refused to stay buried

Image: Linda Fitzgerald-Moore
One of the most memorable live experiences I have ever known came at the Cropredy festival in 2007, when the sublime Chris While took Sandy Denny's place in what was otherwise the Fairport Convention line-up that recorded Liege and Lief; nearly four decades on, track by track, they re-created that gloriously influential album. If that event took some of us back to the end of the 1960s, what of the tremendous project, pursued by Jerry Donahue, to ensure that a subsequent step in Sandy's career - the second, abandoned album by Fotheringay - was not lost for ever in record label archives? This article, from The National* (published in Abu Dhabi), tells the story - and, don't forget, for a mainstream readership - of Jerry's determined campaign to salvage a priceless gem of the British folk-rock era....

Thirty years have passed since Sandy Denny, a young woman with the voice of an angel but a taste for hard living, suffered a brain haemorrhage while staying with a friend in London. Just 31, she slipped into a coma and died.

She left a young daughter, large numbers of adoring fans and a fair body of recorded work that was to trickle out in various forms over the next three decades.

To coincide with this year’s anniversary of her death, the BBC produced a radio documentary named in part after her most famous song, Who Knows Where The Time Goes? The project echoed a recent explosion of interest in the singer far in excess of the attention she commanded when alive.

And just when it seemed there could surely be nothing more to say or hear, that every radio and television library, record label archive and attic had been combed for material to satisfy the fascination with her life and work, another Sandy Denny album has surfaced.

The story of Fotheringay’s 2, the follow-up record that took 38 years to complete and release, is an extraordinary one. Who, indeed, knows where the time went?

The Grehan Sisters: a short resdiscovery

Dave Eyre , whose programme Thank Goodness It's Folk broadcasts to Britain's fourth largest city each Friday 10am-noon on Sheffield Live! (93.2 FM), has added a great comment.....

Getting round to announcing the winners of my Maddy Prior competition .........

But here's something to be going on with. A film clip from the 1960s, rediscovered in the 1990s, which is described as a sort of uncompleted Irish Spaghetti Western, a musical that fell foul of financial constraints.

Its appearance here is inspired by a rekindled Mudcat thread about the Grehan Sisters. Fondly remembered from the folk clubs of North-eastern England back in the late 1960s, they are seen singing** (though not, sadly, Cricklewood, which is the song of theirs that streams into the consciousness at any mention of their name) and also offering a burst of the trademark spoon-playing.

Boys, bylines and missing fivers (2)

As a useful ps to Salut! Live's recent look at the two songs with the same title - The Boys of the Byline Brigade, on the working lives of journalists, and specifically newspaper reporters - my old friend Geoff Lakeman has duly popped up again with the lyrics to his version.

Still no word from Mickey MacConnell, like Geoff a folksinging journalist, who wrote the original song and was therefore the man who came up with the title. But attempts have been made to make sure he is aware the issue has been discussed, and credit suitably given.

In the case of Geoff's song, which he put to a tune of his own, there are references that require a little explanation to those unfamiliar with Fleet Street. These, with minor editing from this end, is his glossary:

* "The bank in the sky" was the cashier's office on the top floor of the Daily Mirror's Holborn Circus office, to which hacks would turn for the money to get to assignments (or, more likely, the pub). It was eventually closed down because so many people got advances (against expenses) and were too slow in paying them back.

* "The stab in the back" was the Mirror office pub of choice,, actually part of the building, reached by a glass bridge across the road, so nicknamed in honour of the score-settling and office politics that typically influenced conversations over pints of beer and stout.

*"The mink-lined coffin" was how one Robert Maxwell - who later did an even better job of cleaning out the place - described the Mirror because of its profligate spending, when negotiating to buy the paper. He also, famously, said: "The gravy train is about to hit the buffers..." Boy was he right when he ran off with about £800million!

* (and one from Mickey, describing his own song in the notes to his album, Joined up Writing): Boys of the Byline Brigade - a byline in newspaper parlance is when your name appears on a story you have written. This is my genuflection to all of the old time heroes who populated the journalistic days of my youth, and who were badly paid, badly regarded, and who were relegated to working the nightshift - the Doomwatch - at the end of their days.

And now for the lyrics.......

Boys, bylines and missing fivers (1)

Reporters care a great deal about their bylines. This is absurd, since the only people who take notice of them are their mothers, other reporters and people intent on suing them and their publications for some real or imagined slight.

Given that they do care so much, it is perhaps not surprising that a journalist/folkie should have written a song called The Boys of the Byline Brigade.

But it does seem odd - at first glance - that not one but two such characters should have written different songs with the same title.

I am grateful to "Captain Ginger" and Anne Kennedy Truscott for helping to clear up what I initially thought was the simple issue of who had written a single song of that name. Each contribution to the discussion contradicts at least one other, but for the happy reason that - rare in such a dispute - everyone is at least partly right.

Broken dream

Not quite in his league
Image:Jef Aérosol

Who wanted to be a folk singer? Professionally, I mean, not just getting up, as many of us did, to do floor spots at the local folk club.

Like Christy Moore, I certainly yearned for the life of the troubadour. There were two key obstacles: unlike Christy, I was a rotten singer and extremely limited guitarist.

But the will was there, as I was reminded during my recent moving epic when poring over old letters that passed between my (then) future wife and me.

It bears no date, but the contents make it clear that it was written when I was still living in Shildon, Co Durham and Joëlle was back at home in Le Mans.

The letter began with some waffly excuses for not writing enough. Later I revealed a modest improvement in my parlous financial position; my boss, the editor of the local paper where I worked, had said I could start charging all of £1.50 a week in expenses for writing a folk column.

Then these words appeared:

"Also, folk music looks like beginning to pay me. Phil Steele and I have a booking a Guisborough on Jan 29. We'll get £8 inclusive."

John Mayall's part in my journey from blues to folk

John Mayall
Picture: Cmicblog

Billy Bragg once told me he was of folk, though not from folk.

The difference is subtle but not too hard to comprehend. Unless you are a Waterson, a Carthy, a Copper, a Doonan or a Lakeman, you are likely to have arrived at being "of folk" by this or that route.

How many generations a family needs to have had a strong interest in, and/or experience of performing, folk music before a member can accurately say he or she is "from folk" is open to debate.

But for most of us, the test is academic. Our parents hadn't the slightest interest; if there was music in the house it was the popular music of the age, or maybe light opera or piano lessons for the kids. So we found our own route to folk, or it found us. We ourselves recoiled in horror from the likes of the White Heather Club or the Spinners whatever we later thought of either.

Mine included, odd as it may seem, John Mayall, the veteran British bluesman who brings his band to the Théâtre de Verdure in my present home town of Le Lavandou, on the Med between St Tropez and Toulon, this Wednesday. I'll be there, as - I suspect - will the mayor, since I am told he's a huge fan and has all the albums to prove it.

Del Shannon, Bobby Vee and me

What on earth has this got to do with folk music?

Absolutely nothing is the only honest response but on a day heavy with Fairport, I have decided to stray a little off-piste before concluding the Simon Nicol interview, which will take the form of a second instalment.

The high points of the careers of Bobby Vee and Del Shannon, pictured together above with due thanks to Bobby's web site, were not their separate appearances, years after the hits dried up, at the New Shildon Workingmen's Club in County Durham.

But I bet they both took away particular memories of their evenings there.
Del Shannon's encounter with the admirable but sometimes unbending nature of the workingmen's club movement - I speak with affection since my late father was a long-serving club secretary, also in Shildon - actually made the national press.

The Daily Mirror, possibly only in its northern editions, ran the story of the great man's arrival at the front door as that night's star turn.

"Where are your club cards?" growled the steward on duty at the entrance.

"But I'm the artist who's appearing here tonight," Del protested, perhaps struggling to suppress that famous falsetto.

The steward was not impressed. "Aye," he said, "they all say that. As far as I am concerned, if you're not a member or an affiliate, you're not getting in unless someones signs you in."

What's for desert, Christy?

It used to be considered evidence of acquired respectability, since only the great and the good were supposed to be invited. Then the BBC started scouting around for any old riff-raff, provided they'd made a bob or two, to come on air and choose the records, favourite book and luxury they'd take to their Desert Island.

But thank goodness they've gone back to the old standards. This coming Sunday's guest on Desert Island Discs will be our old friend Christy Moore.

Well, he's certainly my old friend and I am grateful to Phil Myers, at the UK.music.folk forum, for giving me a few days to work out how to hear the show from France - yes, I know these things are really quite easy but unless it's for football, when mountains are moved in a flash, I sometimes struggle with the technology.

I wonder whether Christy will choose anything by his old mate from early days slogging around the English folk clubs, the late and much lamented Tony Capstick.

The reason I ask is that news of the broadcast takes me back to one of my earlier encounters with Christy, and my only one with Tony.

Folk meets academia

Picture: Andy South Wales

A few years ago, I badgered my then masters at the Telegraph into sending me up to the North east to write about the new folk music degree course at Newcastle University (this corrects earlier reference; see comments).

As always when out-of-town travel loomed, I consulted the football fixtures list first. Lo and behold, my visit could coincide with a Sunderland game (we beat Man Utd 2-1 in a League Cup tie).

The article seems to have disappeared from Telegraph archives, but I reproduce it on the continuation page here.

It tells you a little more about the origins of my interest in folk, as well as quite a bit about the course - the latter aspect naturally needs (and will eventually get) a proper update since I was talking about the pioneering stage of an innovation that has proved hugely successful.