Sandy Denny | Take It Easy

I don’t often play the same person in successive weeks for Song Lyric Sunday, but I’m doing that today. As you may recall, last week I played three versions of a Bob Dylan song, including one by the late, great Sandy Denny, and she was a part of the band I’m featuring today. As Jim tells us in his post our task today is to play a song by a supergroup: just check Wikipedia, where you will find a page with an enormously long list of supergroups, which for some reason doesn’t include my choice for today. Why not? It’s because they were (mostly) English folk musicians, who never seem to get the profile they deserve. I do my best to make up for that, as you may have noticed!

The Bunch were a folk supergroup of their day. The band was put together by an Australian, Trevor Lucas, previously of Eclection and Fotheringay, in late 1971. He recruited three ex Fotheringay members, Pat Donaldson, Gerry Conway (also in Eclection, later in Fairport Convention), and his girlfriend (and later his wife) Sandy Denny, who had just released her debut solo album. Ian Whiteman, who had worked with Sandy, and Tony Cox were brought in to play piano. Richard Thompson (Fairport Convention) joined on guitar, his girlfriend and friend of Sandy’s, Linda Peters, came in on vocals. Trevor also hired The Dundee Horns, who were Roger Ball, Molly Duncan, and Mike Rosen (the latter was also previously in Eclection), who later went on to form The Average White Band, and ex-Fairport Convention members Ashley Hutchings and Dave Mattacks also joined. They are all listed on the album sleeve at the top of this piece.

Trevor gathered his musician friends together specifically to make the album Rock On, which was released in April 1972. I bought it just before I went to uni, and it became a part of the soundtrack to my three years there. It was comprised of songs they had grown up listening to: cover versions of 1950s and early 1960s rock and roll and country material from such artists as Chuck Berry, Hank Williams, and Buddy Holly and The Crickets, and contains many joyful moments. I’m going to play you four of its tracks today, as they are all very short, starting with this one:

When Will I Be Loved was written by Phil Everly, and the Everly Brothers had a hit with it in 1960. Linda Ronstadt had an even bigger hit with her version in 1975. Linda Peters (later that year, Thompson) and Sandy share the lead on this one, and it is probably my favourite of the three versions – but no doubt I’m biased! And before I forget, here are the lyrics – this is SLS, after all:

I’ve been made blue
I’ve been lied to
When will I be loved

I’ve been turned down
I’ve been pushed ’round
When will I be loved

When I meet a new girl
That I want for mine
She always breaks my heart in two
It happens every time

I’ve been cheated
Been mistreated
When will I be loved

Lyrics: Genius.com

Songwriter: Phil Everly

When Will I Be Loved lyrics © Sony/ATV Music Publishing LLC, Spirit Music Group

My second selection from the album is Love’s Made A Fool Of You, a Buddy Holly song also covered by the Bobby Fuller Four, and here Sandy takes lead with Linda on backing vocals:

Next up is another Buddy Holly song, Learning The Game, on which Sandy also takes lead vocal:

Buddy’s original is taken slightly faster than this but I think it works well at this pace, and Sandy’s beautiful voice really does the lyrics justice.

I’m closing with one of my favourites from the album, which I’m sure you’ll know:

That one dipped into the Sixties, just. The Loco-Motion was written by Gerry Goffin and Carole King, and was a big hit in June 1962 for Little Eva: #1 in the US and Canada, and #2 in the UK. On this version Linda takes the lead, and I think it’s great!

If you look these up on Wikipedia you will struggle to find any reference apart from on the pages for the band and this album. The Bunch don’t feature on their list of supergroups, and their versions aren’t listed amongst the noted cover versions of these songs. But as far as the definition of a supergroup goes, in my view they were definitely that – the cream of English folk rock of their day – and Wikipedia is missing a trick.

At a concert in 1974 which included many of these performers Linda, noting their origins, described them as ‘Fotheringport Confusion,’ which I think summed them up well. By then she was married to Richard Thompson, who responded by remarking that this was a rather strange way to offer her resignation from the group. Needless to say, it wasn’t, and they continued as the duo they had by then become for several more years: I have featured them here before, back in April with Bright Lights. My favourite genre will continue to be played by me whenever I get the chance!

The Bunch may not have been in the league of supergroups like Cream, CS&N and the like, but they were the cream of the UK folk scene at that time and they had a lot of fun making music together that was slightly out of their normal sphere. In doing so, they proved for me that all those genre barriers that people, especially critics, apply to music really don’t count for very much, do they?

See you again for Tuesday Tunes, I hope? Take care 😊