Sandy Denny by Philip Ward

Author:Philip Ward [Ward, Philip]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781838598693
Publisher: Troubador Publishing Ltd
Published: 2015-11-15T06:00:00+00:00

LED ZEPPELIN

‘We started out soft but I was hoarse by the end, trying to keep up with him’ (Sandy Denny to Steve Moore on recording ‘The Battle Of Evermore’, Rolling Stone, 1973).

‘Having someone out-sing you is a horrible feeling, wanting to be strongest yourself’ (Sandy Denny to student journalist Barb Charone, 1973, quoted in Mojo, p50).

‘You see, here I am, the lead singer with Led Zeppelin, and underneath I still enjoy people like Fairport Convention and Buffalo Springfield. Some people may find that surprising. To tell the truth, I’ve always wanted to go into the realm of that sort of music to a certain degree, without losing the original Zeppelin thing’. (Robert Plant, in Led Zeppelin Talking, p39)

Part of me shrinks from Led Zeppelin, in the way that I shudder before the fascist aesthetics of Leni Riefenstahl’s films, fearful that I’m yielding to the call of phallocracy, of ‘cock rock’ at its elemental best. Yet I cannot deny the raw musical inventiveness of Jimmy Page’s riffs, the mesmerising banshee wail of Robert Plant’s vocals, the motor energy of John Bonham’s drumming. And then there’s that other Zeppelin, so much closer to things I understand, spreading its wispy acoustic tendrils all over Led Zeppelin III, suffusing that very special duet on the album with no name…

Led Zeppelin IV (let us call it that, as we must call it something) is the fifth best-selling album in recording history. It’s also the only album the band ever made to feature, on one track, a guest vocalist – Sandy Denny. Worldwide sales are estimated at around 40 million, sales in the US alone at over 20 million. Sales of Liege & Lief – Denny’s most successful recording as a lead artist – are probably in the hundreds of thousands. That’s a massive disparity which you might expect to lead to a massive distortion in her career profile. Surely, after collaborating with the most successful band of the 1970s, she’d always be typecast as the ‘Led Zeppelin girl’? Well, no. Because for every hard rock fan who remembers Led Zep IV as their first, life-changing encounter with Denny’s voice, there seem to be others – perhaps impatient to practise their air guitar on the next track, ‘Stairway To Heaven’ – who didn’t even notice a female singer and assumed that Plant was duetting with himself. Listening again to ‘The Battle Of Evermore’, I can almost hear why. Both voices are mixed to the centre. Although a call-and-response effect was intended – implying antiphony – this isn’t reflected in the channel separation, and the production leaves us in no doubt who is top dog. But whether underdog or overdog, how come Sandy was in the mix anyway?

Little point in looking to the Zeppelin industry for answers. Although the band has spawned a vast bibliography, Zeppelin scholars have scant interest in Sandy Denny. Even the specialist studies barely refer to her, or if they do get their facts wrong; in a recent one-hour DVD documentary on the fourth album she goes unmentioned.

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