1971 was a good year for a woman to launch herself as a singer-songwriter. Highlights of that year included Carole King’s massively successful Tapestry and Joni Mitchell’s most confessional album to date, Blue. Denny’s first solo album appeared in this receptive climate. Although there were fine things on it, there was nothing to match the aggressive piano chords that announce King’s ‘I Feel the Earth Move’ (the first track on Tapestry). Holding Denny back, maybe, was an English reticence (though her own piano style, clearly heard on the solo recordings, was very assertive).¹⁰ Holding her back, certainly, was an ambivalence towards going solo. ‘Everyone keeps accusing me of being a solo artist’, she complained (Peacock 1972b). Why should it be an ‘accusation’? To the producer Joe Boyd, who had been trying to persuade her down this path ever since he first saw her in the London folk clubs of the ’sixties, it was her destiny, and he backed his conviction by securing a $40,000 advance on her solo albums from A&M Records in the US (Heylin 2000, p. 117). The answer lies in her complex psychology, which made the exposed position of the singer-songwriter anguishing for her. In the late 1960s, as folk-rock moved from the ideological to the biographical, from politics to introspection, opening up a space for the woman singer-songwriter (Whiteley 2000, p. 75), Denny equivocated over whether to occupy that space.

Much as she admired Joni Mitchell, she could not identify with the confessional nature of Mitchell’s lyrics: ‘I’m not prepared to tell everyone about my private life like Joni Mitchell does… I like to be a bit more elusive than that’ (Denselow 1971). Though Denny set out to write something personal, she concealed her identity behind a set of tropes – mostly carried over from folk song. The modern singer-songwriter tradition, as exemplified by Joni Mitchell, showed that a lyric, though rooted in individual experience and mediated through modern mass communication, could approach the immediacy of folk song, a collective form of expression born within a given community. Denny’s problem was that in seeking to insinuate the received tropes of folk song into the matrix created by the new women songwriters, a matrix ready to contain autobiographical insights, she risked ending up with something that was neither fish nor fowl. Drawing on ballads of the sea especially, she was adept at reanimating stock figures by turning them to metaphorical use. The opening proposition of ‘It’ll Take A Long, Long Time’, for example, ‘Oh, it’s like a storm at sea’, harbours a promise that the song to follow will not be ‘about’ shipwrecked sailors, so much as the turbulence of the emotional life (and her life, in particular) figured through the dramatis personae of folk song. However, when, after the chorus, the lyric drifts into rather tired imagery of ‘rules’ and ‘games’, the momentum of folk song has been lost and the immediacy of first-person narration is never found.

‘I live in a world of my own. Really I do’, she told a BBC interviewer in 1972. The last words were delivered with a peculiar stabbing emphasis. The phrase recurs in the song ‘No End’: ‘In a world of my own, they say, and who can blame them’. It is a world of imaginative retreat:

As Reynolds and Press point out (1995, p. 348), Denny belongs to a tradition of ‘unicorn keepers’ that includes Kate Bush and Tori Amos – women adventurers whose escapades take place in the ‘great indoors’: traditionally confined to the domestic realm, ‘girls become gypsies in inner space’. Ann Powers (with scant regard to the girls’ privacy) has advised scholars to study the doodles in their daughters’ notebooks: ‘if they did, they’d find traces of the Brontes and old Norse myths, of drawing-room scandals and lovelorn suicides. Kept inside, women invented a wilderness’.¹¹ Denny’s drawings, as reproduced in the published biography, exactly conform to this pattern. She sketches ethereal beings – tall, long-limbed females, one with an angel’s wings (Heylin 2000, p. 69); another floats, perhaps in the air, or, given the body’s lassitude, more likely on water (p. 26). These astral projections are a rejection of groundedness:

I have this vision of my body flying around a mountain and not wanting to actually land on top of it. Better to detach oneself from it and fly around looking at the mountain from all aspects. Landing on it would be too obvious. (Coleman 1971)

Self-definition is ‘too obvious’. Cornering herself into self-portraiture in another sketch, she finds realism in cartoon style: a naked, jug-eared, overweight figure hacks dementedly at a piano keyboard, with only an incongruous halo to signal her other-worldly inclinations (Heylin 2000, p. 158). Here is the dilemma of the ‘singer-songwriter’: while the songwriter may be intensely private, a secretive custodian of the raw material of her writing, the singer is inevitably a public figure, exposed (if she is is a woman) to the cruelly sexist jibes of a male audience who expect the proverbial ‘voice of an angel’ to issue from the mouth of a ‘porcelain beauty’.

Many noticed the contrast between the apparently extravert, often frivolous, appearance that Denny presented in life and the melancholy, introverted tone of much of her music. This fostered the idea that the music was coming from somewhere deeper, even that it answered a therapeutic need. ‘When I write a song I don’t remember writing it… I’m like a different person in my music’ (BBC interview). That person was so absorbed – or transported – that, in the grip of creativity, she would not even notice Watson, her beloved Airedale, defecating on the carpet (Heylin 2000, p. 226). We know that she had to be on her own when writing, needing to be ‘quite secretive’ (Gilbert 1973, p. 23). Yet, for this intensely gregarious woman, being on her own was always a severe test of her equilibrium:

It’s like a vicious circle being on my own. I tend to think of sad things and so I write songs that make me feel even sadder. I sit down and I write something and it moves me to tears almost […] I don’t want to write miserable songs. (Anon 1977)

Miranda Ward comments on Denny’s ‘100 per cent emotional recall’ (Heylin 2000, p. 47). A troubling incident from years before could be raised in conversation and within no time ‘she was as upset as when it first happened’. Something similar is occurring in the songs: their intensely personal contents, their jealously guarded ‘meanings’, are re-enacted at each performance of the song. ‘Late November’ illustrates the process. It ends, as we have seen, with a profusion of baffling surreal imagery (the ‘mercury sea’, the ‘phosphorus sand’, etc) rooted in a worrying dream that Denny had in February 1969 and recorded at great length in her notebook. This same dream contained an apparent premonition of the road accident in May 1969 which cost the lives of Fairport’s original drummer and Richard Thompson’s then girlfriend and might have ended her own, had she not accepted a lift from her boyfriend (Heylin 2000, pp. 128, 96). By all accounts, she found solo appearances draining - not only did they highlight her many insecurities; behind the opaque imagery of her lyrics she was re-living whatever had gone into their making.

As her repertoire narrowed in the course of the 1970s to her own material (leavened by one or two covers of Dylan and Richard Thompson songs), so the emotional investment she required from herself in concert seemed to grow. When Al Stewart caught her solo show at the Howff, Camden Town, in September 1973, he was surprised to find her ‘totally paranoid about going out and singing’, something he had never noticed in her Fairport days (Judd 2002, p. 163). These pressures were alleviated, or worsened, by alcohol and drug use. Linda Thompson recalls seeing her after her final London show in 1977, with ‘blotches all over her face. She looked fifty’ (Heylin 2000, p. 230 – she was actually thirty at the time). If one asks why most cover versions of Denny’s songs are so unsatisfactory, the reason must be that they are never delivered with the authority that comes from authorship. In life she adopted an exposed position, presenting sometimes difficult material which was never going to propel her into the pop charts. It is impossible to write about the songwriter without at the same time writing about the singer, since one function of the songwriting was to create an ideal repertoire for her voice - with the concomitant danger that the music ran ahead of the lyrics. Yet in interviews she insisted that words, for her, were the most important part of a song (Coleman 1971; Peacock 1972a). Despite their occasional ineptitude, the lapses into schoolgirl versifying, the folksy archness, Denny’s songs - in her own performances of them - are always compelling communicative acts, expressive of consistent preoccupations and a force of personality that still sweeps the listener off his or her feet. Truly, as she wrote in ‘The Lady’, ‘she had a silver tongue’.

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© Philip M Ward 2005