When we feel stranded and alone, sometimes we turn to God. At first glance there is little evidence to suggest that Denny was ‘religious’, other than her flirtation with the Church of Scientology in the mid ’seventies (Heylin 2000, pp. 209-10). An entry in a notebook paints her as a sceptic (Heylin 2000, p. 210), as does the song ‘Bushes and Briars’. Written probably in March 1972 when she was recording at The Manor Studios in the Cotswolds and chanced upon an empty church during a Sunday stroll (Heylin 2000, pp. 148-9), the song is a bleakly Larkinesque meditation on reasons for non-attendance. Inside, a vicar (‘the clergy’s chosen man’) communes with a non-existent congregation, perhaps the spirits of the dead (‘all those souls at rest’), consoled by ‘the book in his hand’. Denny, outside, in the churchyard, recalls a time when those buried there (‘all those people beneath my shoes’) were fortified by Christian doctrine, but though she sees ‘the path which led to the door’ of the church, she cannot take it. The song consistently identifies the living with ‘bushes and briars’, the dead with ‘thistles and thorns’, bringing the two metaphors neatly together for the first time in the final verse. Best appreciated in the stripped-down solo version with guitar on a BBC radio recording, ‘Bushes and Briars’ demonstrates how she could ‘take a story and whittle it down to essentials’ (her practice, as she told Robin Denselow in 1971), convincingly marrying a realised situation to a controlled use of metaphor and metonymy.

Yet, sceptic or no, the liturgical fossils of an Anglican upbringing are embedded in the lyrics she wrote as an adult. In ‘One Way Donkey Ride’ she ends each verse with a variation on the formula of the Beatitudes (‘Blessed are the poor in spirit: for theirs is the kingdom of heaven’ etc, Matt 5:3):

God bless the poor ones who have none though they have tried…
God bless the poor ones who want some but are denied...
God bless the poor ones whose patience never died...

The final variation identifies the ‘poor’ with Christ’s triumphal entry into Jerusalem (Matt 21: 6-9): ‘God bless the poor ones on that one-way donkey ride’. Freud, in his sceptical treatment of religion The Future of an Illusion, conceded that religion consoles us by supplying what he called an ‘oceanic’ feeling, as if we are ‘one with the external world as a whole’ (quoted in Storr 1989, p. 92). ‘One Way Donkey Ride’, over an undulating barcarolle rhythm, explicitly links religious sentiments to Denny’s all-pervasive water imagery:

Is it ocean or stream, this love in my blood,
Bringer of joy or of sorrow?

Preceding the ‘beatitude’ conclusion of each verse is a recurrent invocation of ‘oasis of love, sweet water of life’. The end of life’s ‘journey’ will ‘soon be in sight’. We are like birds of passage gliding over the water, for – and this is perhaps the most beautiful and disturbing image of the whole song – ‘birth is the start of the swansong’. This whole lyric suggests a pantheism beyond Christian denominations, beyond Christianity indeed, rooted in a reverence of the natural world. It comes as no surprise to learn that Denny’s music is nowadays much prized among adherents of Wicca, the ‘old religion’, who find in songs like ‘Rising for the Moon’ an instinctive Neo-Paganism making them appropriate for use in ‘Esbat’ (the rites associated with the Full Moon) and other ceremonies.⁴

So her thoughts ran from private quasi-religious sentiments (‘One Way Donkey Ride’) to institutional religion (‘Bushes and Briars’). This is important, lest we get the impression that all her writing is about the inner life. Several songs attempt to address public concerns – the public concern of her time, the peace movement. Of her three anti-war numbers – ‘Peace in the End’, ‘John the Gun’ and ‘One More Chance’ – the first, a collaboration with Trevor Lucas (her words, his melody) is negligible, but the other two are fine songs. ‘John the Gun’ features, by Denny’s standards, an unusually angular melodic line, as if seeking a macho equivalent for its subject, a demonic warrior who plays ‘the game of war / In moonshine or in sun’. Evidence perhaps of a mutual influence between Denny and Richard Thompson at the time when he was playing in her backing band The Happy Blunderers and edging towards his first solo project Henry the Human Fly, this is the one Denny song that Thompson has performed since her death. In ‘John the Gun’ the tradition of folk personification (as in ‘John Barleycorn’) is revived. By contrast, ‘One More Chance’, the highlight of Fairport’s Rising for the Moon album, is a slow rock ballad starting in her customarily indirect style, which then builds towards a tremendous middle eight where the inevitability of war is roundly called into question: ‘Is it too late to change the way we’re bound to go?’ From one of her notebooks (the same one that contains the 1969 dream) we know of a further assault on public issues, a curious lyric titled ‘Requiem’ which incorporates lightly versified quotations from Martin Luther King’s famous Memphis speech of 3 April 1968 (‘I have seen the promised land’, etc). Addressing a man she refers to sometimes as ‘the prophet’, sometimes as ‘Luther’, the singer wonders ‘if the life you gave for peace was all in vain’.

Unachieved, possibly uncompleted, ‘Requiem’ is hardly vintage Denny (though, of course, we know nothing of how she was going to set the text to music). Nonetheless, it shows her alertness to events across the Atlantic. There is biographical evidence that in 1976, when she was at work on her final studio album Rendezvous, Denny was seriously thinking of relocating to the US. Her career had stalled in her homeland, and she had many musical friends and admirers on the West Coast (Heylin 2000, p. 217). While Miranda Ward insists that this was Lucas’s idea, not Denny’s, and points to her friend’s susceptibility to ‘LA throat’ whenever she visited, the notebooks from this period show the singer’s thoughts turning to escape:

But there's nobody listening, what chance is there
they all like it here anyway,
though they don't say.
Those porcelain beauties with no need to breathe air
with no reason to rise till the end of the day.
Take me away.

By the time this draft had evolved into the song ‘Take Me Away’, its frustration at the inhibitions of Englishness (‘How can I really believe this is my land?’) and the effortless poise of models (‘porcelain beauties’ perhaps recalling the ‘dolly birds’ and mini-skirted ‘cutesy-poos’ who had drawn her fire in earlier years)⁵ had been replaced by a more generic wish to be taken out of herself, expressed in characteristic aquatic imagery: ‘We’ll find the rain clouds, and the rivers will flow’. Her thoughts on America crystallised in what was long intended to be the album’s title track, ‘Gold Dust’. This song, almost certainly written in 1976 and audibly striving for a much ‘funkier’ sound than her previous work, specifically evokes events from Denny’s solo tour of the States in 1973. She travelled from coast to coast, a fact neatly encapsulated in the metonymic phrase ‘from Liberty to redwood trees’. Miranda Ward, who accompanied her friend on this tour, believes that she is specifically commemorated at several points: the ‘good companion’ who ‘tried her very best’ would position herself backstage ‘in time to hear my final song’, cigarette ready lit. When the two women met up with Fairport Convention, also on tour, in Los Angeles, Ward was thrown into the hotel pool after a bout of serious drinking:

It's never very formal how you dress
For oysters by the swimming pool.

Earlier in the tour there was a day off and the tour promoter took them into the Rockies:

Then slip away into the mountainside
Like the man in the Lazy E.

Ward’s London flat had always been a hideaway for Denny when the pressures of career and relationships grew too much:

You have a simple mansion underground
Without address or telephone.

But it is the song’s elliptical chorus which suggests the questionable allure of the West Coast, as if events of three years earlier were being vividly called to mind:

Golden,
Where are you?
Sold on gold dust.

Here is the California Gold Rush conflated with ‘precious’ memories, word associations with the old mining town of Golden, Colorado (which Ward thinks they may have visited), perhaps a reminiscence of the idealistic chorus of Joni Mitchell’s ‘Woodstock’ (‘We are stardust / We are golden’). Whether or not Denny was ‘sold on’ the idea of emigration, it never happened.

Another couplet of ‘Gold Dust’ suggests that America may have held other attractions for the singer:

He stores away the moments of her smiles
As if they were rare butterflies

While Denny’s travelling companion now insists that the two lines following these, which speak of stalking prey and bartering for merchandise, recall Ward’s efforts to track down an Ovation guitar for Lucas’s use in LA, this couplet by its choice of image seems to allude to a love affair from a later American visit. A possible draft lyric for another song refers to ‘the night in New York you stayed with me when I was lonely’, with the consequence that ‘stage fright and thoughts of you stir up the butterflies – just those two’. As with many opaque allusions in her songs, it is difficult to know whether the resonance of these lines would be amplified if we knew more of their biographical background. Consider the song ‘Nothing More’, which, it has been suggested, is about Richard Thompson (Heylin 2000, p. 115). Certainly, the portrait of a reticent, fiercely talented individual – cast here in the folk song form of a dialogue - is recognisable, even if not intended. The speaker (let us call her S) offers help to a friend (let us call him R). R rejects S’s help, preferring to overcome ‘hard times’ on his own. S retorts that R holds beautiful ‘pearls’ in his hand but will not show them to anyone, not even S. R, ever suspicious, cannot be sure that S wants only to see the pearls ‘and nothing more’. This smacks of a highly allegorized treatment of what could have passed between these two creative talents. ‘Everybody knows that she was mad about Richard and couldn’t get Richard’, Linda Thompson told Denny’s first biographer (Winters).⁶ S wants something more; R wants ‘nothing more’: any narrower interpretation would be invidious. When pressed on this song by an interviewer, Denny avoided discussion of the subject-matter, drawing attention instead to its economy of musical means:

The difficulty of tying down her portraits in music to any one individual is illustrated by another song, ‘Friends’. This, her published biographer confidently asserts, is about Denny’s relationship with Pete Townshend, a claim based on a candid interview in which Townshend spoke of a night when they ‘nearly slept together… [Later] she rang and told me she’d written me a song’ (Heylin 2000, p. 164). The lyric suggests the anger of a would-be lover spurned (‘Do me a favour, stay away from my door’; ‘But you waste my time now…’). The absence of her partner, Trevor Lucas, is clearly indicated: ‘My love is not here, my love is away. / You’ve caught me alone but you’ve nothing to say’. There is apparent support for this identification. Joe Boyd recalls Denny telling him that ‘Friends’ was about Townshend: ‘It’s a real attack… ’Cause he used to come hit on her when Trevor was away’ (Winters). However, the problem is that, when shown this lyric thirty years later, Townshend rejects the idea that this song could be ‘about’ him. He says in no way does it describe the very cordial relations between them: on the night in question ‘they didn’t argue’.⁷ Her wish that, if he wanted to touch her, he must stay all night seems in retrospect to belong to the pattern of loneliness and fear of the dark that she wrote about so often. Whoever it was she wanted to stay away from her door, it was not Townshend. The interpretative options remaining are that the song is ‘about’ someone else altogether (this is Townshend’s own suggestion); that it combines elements of several of her unfulfilled extramarital dalliances including Townshend; that her reading of the night in question was so different from his that they might as well have been at opposite ends of Parsons Green (always a danger in male-female relations); or that, wishing not to give herself away, she wrapped up the shared experience to the point where it becomes unrecognisable to the participants.

Scribbled on a loose sheet among her notebooks are these words:

Identifiable as a (slightly truncated) quotation from the seventeenth-century naturalist and antiquarian John Ray, this could stand as a motto for Denny’s portraits in song of friends and lovers.⁸ As she reflected in 1972,

Everything's so metaphorical now, especially my own songwriting - it's a bit evasive, to say the least. But it's very difficult for me because I'm an evasive person. I never really want people to know exactly what I'm thinking (Peacock 1972a).

Stung by criticisms of her earlier albums, she told interviewers in the early ’seventies that she was going to write in a more direct way, an intention that extended beyond lyrics to her musical language. What she admitted to, the ‘doomy, metaphorical phrases, minor keys, weird chords’ (Peacock 1972a), were under notice, even if they were integral to her fragile ego stability. In Denny’s work verbal and harmonic language follow one another in the sense that, when the lyric tends to obscurity, so also does the harmony. At these times the characteristics of her musical style are most marked: a penchant for descending bass lines (‘Solo’), chromatic chord changes, bass pedals with chromatically shifting harmonies on top (‘After Halloween’), tritone intervals created by her use (certainly not derived from English folk music) of the lydian mode⁹ (‘Bushes and Briars’, ‘Wretched Wilbur’), and a taste for major seventh harmonies, especially at the peak of a rising melodic phrase (‘One More Chance’, ‘The Lady’). In seeking to simplify her lyrics, she restricts the musical vocabulary to the point where a certain middle-of-the-road blandness threatens to set in. An example is the self-consciously nostalgic ‘Like An Old Fashioned Waltz’ – yet even here the five simple chords which comprise its harmonic lexicon are disposed in an unusual extended phrasal structure which shows that the singer’s innate musicality has not been submerged. ‘Like An Old Fashioned Waltz’ is one of Denny’s few songs in 3/4 time and as such invites comparison with another triple-time piece, ‘The King and Queen of England’. This song was apparently written with Fairport in mind, when she rejoined the group in 1974, but it shows how much effort of will was required for her to write in an accessible vein. Never recorded by the band and known only through a beautiful solo demo recording, ‘The King and Queen of England’ catches Denny relapsing into habitual opaque allegory – ‘In the folds which begin every ending, / I wish I forever could lie’ - and the arrestingly chromatic harmony that went with it. Though the song is nominally in the key of G major, the verse endings slide down through A, G, F# and E, to land on the tonally unrelated chord of C# major.

An attachment to (dorian) modal harmony is one of the lingering survivals of her origins in the British folk revival. By the time Like An Old Fashioned Waltz was released in 1973 she had certainly purged much of the folk diction from her lyrics, retaining from her folk music origins only an attachment to strophic verse forms, which means that the ear, denied the variations afforded by chorus or middle eight, must be content with her decoration of the basic melody. In the famous recordings of traditional material earlier in her career (‘A Sailor’s Life’, ‘Matty Groves’, etc), there was this and more: there was the forward drive of narrative. This impulsion is sometimes lacking in her own songs. However, there is an advance. Despite the grandiloquent orchestral overlay (what Denny called their ‘fur coats’), the later songs achieve a colloquial directness of utterance. ‘No End’ is a case in point. Describing an encounter in one of her preferred wintry landscapes between a ‘traveller’ and a ‘painter’, both of whom seem to have characteristics of Denny herself even if the pronouns are always masculine, the song opens matter-of-factly:

They said that it was snowing
in astounded tones upon the news.
I wonder why they're always so surprised
'cos every year it snows.

Only the awkward use of ‘upon’ in the second line to supply an extra syllable disturbs the idiomatically modern flow. As we have seen, a new directness, slightly unnerving to those used to her periphrases, is seen in another song on Like An Old Fashioned Waltz, ‘Friends’. As if to compensate for such indiscretion, she balances ‘Friends’ on Side Two with ‘At the End of the Day’, her most cloying ode to the lanky Australian she married in 1973 - a tiny little song, a four-chord trick, improbably bulked out to 6 minutes 28 seconds with a ‘fur coat’ thick enough to smother it.

The frustrating aspect of Denny’s songwriting is that someone capable of writing so well was also capable of writing so badly. Thirty years ago, in the short-lived journal Let It Rock, Clive James (1974) published an article about Denny which was structured around this contradiction. It remains one of the very few seriously evaluative pieces ever to appear on her songwriting. James’s argument was that, within the ‘folk-rock’ idiom of the time, ‘with the important exception of Richard Thompson’ (and how right he has been proved there), Denny was the one person ‘capable of writing a contemporary language’. He instances successful lyrics from early songs – including her most famous, ‘Who Knows Where the Time Goes’ – and contrasts them with the (in his view) obscure and evasive lyrics, so vitiated by folksy archaisms, schoolgirl poetasting and random plunderings of the myth-kitty, that fill her albums of the early ’seventies. The problem, as he saw it, was that by the time she left Fairport Convention at the end of 1969, her voice, that supremely expressive instrument, had started ‘to do its own writing, and the writing has begun the destructive process of turning into a mere pretext for exercising the pipes’. What James saw was that her ‘gift for language’ was ‘unmistakable’ – empowering her to do ‘that dangerous something extra, taking the full resources of contemporary speech and turning them into song’ - but somewhere along the way it had become a ‘casualty’.

That ‘gift for language’ is well-documented. Word games were obviously a pleasure – it was one such that produced from her the nonsense title of her second album with Fairport, Unhalfbricking. When Anne Nightingale met her in 1971, she was in the middle of a game of Scrabble. Heylin reproduces written work both from schooldays and later that shows a lively mind channelling itself through a wide vocabulary. However, James’s criticism has validity. Some of the obscurities in her lyrics are audibly the result of the search for a rhyme, a vowel sound or an extra syllable, the triumph of sound over meaning. Her penchant for internal rhyme produces the meaningless: ‘Misers mise and compromise’ (‘Wretched Wilbur’). Misfiring poeticism leads to archaism: ‘the bridge which distraught us’ (‘Late November’ - OED has ‘distraught’ as an obsolete past tense of ‘distract’, meaning ‘pulled apart’). And malapropism is an ever-present danger when metrical considerations are uppermost: ‘To you I’ve purposefully never been cruel’, she writes in ‘Friends’, where the sense demands ‘purposely’ (i.e. on purpose). Of course, the advantage for the singer-songwriter is that she can use her authorial presence to neutralise such criticisms, to the point where they no longer seem to matter.

Go to next section