No More Sad Refrains: The Life and Times of Sandy Denny [Paperback]

With intimate accounts from friends and colleagues, this is a bold but never sensationalised look at the finest British singer-songwriter of them all

With Fairport Convention, Fotheringay and in her own solo career, Sandy Denny had one of contemporary music’s finest voices, and Melody Maker twice voted her best female singer. She was also a highly acclaimed songwriter, composing most of her own material. However as one of the few women in the fast-living, hard-drinking music industry of the era, Sandy was forever torn between the thrill of the rock ‘n’ roll lifestyle and a desire to escape to a simple family life in the country. Sadly, Sandy never did reconcile her life’s conflicting forces, and died aged 31 in 1978 in circumstances surrounded with mystery.
Sandy Denny remains the finest female singer-songwriter this country has ever produced.

Gripping biog of the best English female singer-songwriter
Clinton Heylin's biography (details listed above were initially incorrect and will shortly be corrected) No More Sad Refrains, draws on hours of fresh interviews with Sandy's closest friends and musical collaborators, access to her diaries and unreleased work, to produce a moving portrait of a complex, driven, but fatally flawed genius, who remains the finest female singer-songwriter this country has ever produced. "My favourite singer out of all the British girls that ever were." Robert Plant --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

"I beg that some who said they loved me before May search their hearts to find not love - but more "It's a very independent kind of life being a folk singer [but], although I felt I was more my own master, I always really wanted the comforts of home ..." - Sandy Denny Sandy Denny, perhaps the finest singer of the modern folk milieu, died at 7.50 p.m. on Friday, April 21, 1978. She was barely thirty-one years old, and had been a mother less than nine months. By her side, when they switched the life support machine off, was her [estranged] husband, Trevor Lucas. After much ringing around, a phone-call from the consultant at Saint Mary's to the Melbourne home of Lucas Senior had informed the errant husband that if he got on the next flight, he might just find his wife still alive. He had, and he did, but she would never know. Sandy never regained consciousness. The verdict delivered at the inquest, the following week, was that the first lady of folk-rock had died as a result of a "traumatic mid-brain haemorrhage," as a result of a fall. The party line, which soon ossified into an incantation, was that she had fallen down a set of stairs at Miranda's flat. The traumas of the previous weeks - her original fall, her husband's desertion with Georgia, the splitting headaches, indeed all of Sandy's seemingly hellbent decline - were written out of history as the Fairport family closed ranks on a tragedy they had all seen coming, but had felt powerless to affect. The funeral, at Putney Vale cemetery, was a truly maudlin affair. The burden of guilt had descended on all too many well-meaning bystanders, though not as much as on an ashen Trevor. Genuinely mired in his own private pit of despair, Trevor found himself ostracised by Sandy's grieving, and unforgiving, parents, neither of whom had ever accepted him as their son-in-law in aught but name. Others proved equally unforgiving. As Christine Pegg, wife of bassist Dave Pegg, put it, "There was a whole army of people who wouldn't answer the phone to him. We all felt incredibly guilty. Deep down we knew it had all been going wrong, we knew Trevor was thinking of going, but we'd got into the habit of keeping our heads down while the storm passed - and this time it didn't." The tributes in the various papers were suitably elegaic, headed by those from perhaps the two journalists who had known her best: Karl Dallas, who had first come across her singing back in 1964, furnished Melody Maker. with his thoughts; and Robin Denselow, husband of Sandy's good friend Bambi Ballard, who penned some lines for The Guardian. But the folk-rock roster of Chris Blackwell's Island label had been all but swept away by the new wave of punksters then assailing the charts. The death of Sandy Denny was accorded nothing like the acreage of newsprint it might have warranted barely a couple of years earlier when she was fronting another makeshift Fairport and - after selling out the Royal Albert Hall - dedicated a brand new original, 'I Won't Be Singing Any More Sad Refrains', to her proud father Neil, from the stage of London's most prestigious venue. But her decline from that day in June 1975 had been precipitous. As it is, 'No More Sad Refrains' would end up closing out not only Sandy's next album, Rendezvous, but the considerable musical legacy she would leave in her name. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.