23/10/2010

The Sea


There is a genre of song that is about a general sense of place but that each listener can relate in their own mind to a more specific time and place. Songs about the countryside, perhaps, or mountains or woods. Possibly the most extensive examples are about the sea, which lends itself to song lyrics as it did to poetry. I don’t mean so much those songs about events that happened at sea - like Procol Harum’s A Salty Dog or Gordon Lightfoot’s Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald - but just about the sea itself, the best of which enable the listener to identify with something in their own memory.

There is the classic La Mer, by Charles Trenet, which for some reason –possibly I heard it playing at the time on someone’s transistor radio –I always associate with Weymouth sea front: blue sea, sand and sandcastles with paper flags in them, ice-creams, Punch and Judy, donkey rides. The original words, apparently written on toilet paper on a French train, are actually a lot more lyrical –‘The sea, that one sees dancing along the clear gulfs, has silver reflections’ – than the much more chirpy English version that became Bobby Darin’s Beyond the Sea. Or there is the song Sailor by the American group Hem, which could be taken as a love song or a child’s lullaby. Listening to the words –‘over the ocean, pearls in the sky strung round the moon, pointing to you’ – the rich musical backing and the soft, almost murmuring, voice of singer Sally Ellyson, and the sea becomes a picture in a book of nursery rhymes. You can almost imagine Wynken, Blynken and Nod sailing past in their wooden shoe.

As someone who grew up on the south coast, the sea was part of my childhood, something always there on the landscape and marking the edges of my world. Most of the time it was a backdrop to the sort of scene described in Morrisey’s Every Day is Like Sunday, with the trudging back over wet sands and the tea and chips in the seafront cafes. There were times however, as on Portland Bill or Chesil Beach, where the storms, the undercurrents and the breaking waves on rocks, made the world of the seafront seem pretty irrelevant. It is for associations like this that a different sort of song is more fitting

The song here- by Fotheringay, the short-lived group built round Sandy Denny after she left Fairport Convention for the first time - is also just called The Sea but it paints a very different picture. It came from their 1970 album titled after the group and though some of it now sounds dated – file under Folk-Rock, early 1970’s – The Sea, fittingly given its subject matter, is timeless. The musical backing is one of those moments when words and music provided a perfect complement for the subject matter. Cymbals crash gently like waves, the bass carries the listener forward as an undercurrent and the  guitar solo by Jerry Donahue sparkles like splashing droplets in the sun. There is a feel of the Fleetwood Mac instrumental, Albatross, at times.

The mood, however, is deceptive. The sea here is not wild but is certainly not the millpond calm of Sailor or the poetic horizons of La Mer. The lyrics, penned by Sandy Denny, paint the sea as something relentless, even slightly sinister at times, with the power to bring human effort to nothing- ‘Fall and listen with your ears upon the paving stone, Is that what you hear? The coming of the sea’ There are also not many lines like this – ‘Sea flows under your doors in London town, And all your defences are all broken down’ – that could have come from a song any time in the last 2000 years.

Whether Sandy Denny based the song on a view from a particular piece of coastline or not doesn’t really matter, for the listener will bring to mind their own place to fit it. For me, the association is with being on Brighton Pier one dark wintry evening, with stars bright in a clear sky. The sea wasn’t particularly rough but it crashed endlessly against the pier supports, with spray rising to splash my face, so that the whole structure felt fragile and the blackness below was a reminder that the whole facade of a seaside town can be pretty vulnerable. The coming of the sea.

Link to song

48 comments:

  1. Wow Geoff, this is such gorgeous stunning writing. I read it several times, and the last paragraph aloud a few extra times on top of that! I just love it. I hope you turn this into a book!!!!

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  2. This opened up a whole new line of thought for me about songs to do with the sea - I suppose in my mind I assumed it was a genre but I would only have been able to suggest Sittin' on the Dock of the Bay! I hadn't known of this band but I love this song!

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  3. Great, great column Geoff - I think it is my favourite so far. THANK YOU!

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  4. What a beautiful song, and the number of bands I don't know about has never ceased to surprise me since I started reading your column Geoff! You're like a one-man resurrection effort, bringing bands back from a long lost graveyard of obscurity!

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  5. Thanks for comments!I think this was probably the best thing that Fotheringay did

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  6. Just want to say I could really relate to the column. For me there was a James Taylor song that my mother use to listen to. Going to Carolina in my Mind was the name of it. Every summer my mother would drive my brother and I to Virginia, and the Taylor song wasn't about va, but the south, and the coastline. For me that song will always remind me of Virginias coast because of the memorie associated with it. ..... A great reading.

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  7. Beautiful, beautiful column this week, Geoff. And I think it is a wonder that this album wasn't more popular. Perhaps fans were expecting the looser, more ragged sound of Fairport Convention and found the classical perfectionism to be stifling. I'm not sure.

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  8. Who Knows Where The Time Goes? is my favourite song ever!:)

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  9. I was at the Cropredy festival in 2007, when Chris While took Sandy Denny's place in what was otherwise a Fairport Convention line-up. It was superb, they recreated Liege and Lief track by track.

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  10. Sandy is probably at her very best on the exquisite traditional song Banks Of The Nile. That is my favorite from this amazing album.

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  11. Thanks, excellent and underated song and album and band!

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  12. Great record, great blog, indeed.

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  13. I love the cover of the album - http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_NK3NwhcAKOY/SzNx_qsFDCI/AAAAAAAAEVM/3pzzIj4R6e8/s1600-h/Fotheringay.jpg - it is like a renaissance painting but with electric guitar.

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  14. So glad there are fellow Fotheringay fans out there! For me, the album is at its best when it features Denny's incredible vocals over a rolling cadence of syncopated bass-heavy guitars. But I do also like the Gordon Lightfoot cover "The Way I Feel" featuring Lucas on vocals.

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  15. Of all the stuff she sang, I think the Fotheringay album captures Denny's vocals at their best. Thanks for this great column, Geoff!

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  16. I'm not sure when it came out, but I read somewhere that the second, abandoned album by Fotheringay has been finally released, fairly recently - it is called 2 by Fotheringay I think. I'll try to track it down and report back!!

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  17. So interesting, Geoff! I'm very familiar with the electric folk of Fairport Convention but this has a more American folk-rock sound.

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  18. What I really like about your blog is the love & soul that you put into sharing your musical tastes... Opening some kind of your own musical library to share! I think this deserves a special appreciation from the visitors. So, thanks for sharing,

    Derek

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  19. My best concert ever was Fotheringay performing at the Tenth National Jazz and Blues Festival at the Plumpton Race Track in East Sussex on August 8 1970. They did The Sea as their second song.

    Thanks for this profound column, Geoff. I spotted you had posted again when Blogger featured your column as its 'best of the week' this morning. Congrats!

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  20. I've always been a big fan of Fairport and Fotheringay so I would like to thank you very much for this.

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  21. I have heard the second album - it came out in 2008. It's beautiful, and Trevor is better integrated into the lineup here on 2 than on 1.

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  22. Hey KB-what is the Blogger reference? Amazing you saw Fotheringay-they also appeared at the ill-fated Krumlin Festival the following week, which has the reputation of being one of the worst festivals ever due to appalling weather. From accounts, their colleagues in Fairport Convention took the stage totally inebriated after spending the day in the beer tent waiting to go on.

    Trivia note for Tiffanye-I believe the cover was painted by the sister of Trevor Lucas

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  23. Geoff, it's an interesting point you make about the sea being connected to memory somehow, I have a sense this might be an actual phenomenon in psychology. Very interesting!

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  24. I love when you share about your background Geoff and how fascinating that you grew up surrounded by sandcastles and Punch and Judy! From the blog I would have imagined it was something way more cosmopolitan - London I guess. Except I remember from the first blog that you didn't go to London until a teenager (Waterloo Sunset). I guess it is like George Orwell, who I always imagined to have had an incredibly cosmopolitan childhood, but then I read he grew up somewhere north of Reading. Anyway, thank you for this great column!

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  25. I love the comparison to the Fleetwood Mac instrumental, Albatross!

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  26. I totally agree with you about the musical backing suiting the words and music, although I think there were quite a few times when this was the case, of the various songs you have written about, Geoff. And I think it's a wonderful way to make a song really a 'song about a place'. So that the song itself communicates the sounds of a place. provided a perfect complement for the subject matter.

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  27. My favourite thing I've read in a long long time:
    "Brighton Pier one dark wintry evening, with stars bright in a clear sky. The sea wasn’t particularly rough but it crashed endlessly against the pier supports, with spray rising to splash my face, so that the whole structure felt fragile and the blackness below was a reminder that the whole facade of a seaside town can be pretty vulnerable. The coming of the sea."

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  28. As an American I was a bit bemused by what on earth "Wynken, Blynken and Nod" could be.... then googled it:) Ahh, this column is a great educator on British culture!

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  29. Geoff's wonderful quotations of the lyrics made me want to read them all in full: here they are in case anyone wants them........

    Do I ever wonder? You don't know.
    You'll never follow, and I'll never show.
    D'you see the water and watch it flow
    And float an empty shell,
    And you think that I'm hiding from the island.
    You've a fault in your senses. Can you feel it now?

    Time? What is that? I've no time to care.
    I've lived for a long while nearly everywhere.
    You will be taken, everyone, you ladies and you gentlemen.
    Fall and listen with your ears upon the paving stone.
    Is that what you hear? The coming of the sea?

    Sea flows under your doors in London town.
    And all your defences are all broken down.
    You laugh at me on funny days, but mine's the slight of hand.
    Don't you know I am a joker, a deceiver?
    And I'm waiting for the land.

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  30. For Erika, here is a clip of Carly Simon singing Wynken, Blynken and Nod set to music!
    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j7Wp8qAFoQY

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  31. I'm not sure I fully understand the fuss about Sandy Denny - her voice always seemed to me like a less unique version of Joan Baez's voice. Although I do like the Fotheringay sound, with its merging of electric and acoustic.

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  32. Thanks for the info on the cover art Geoff! I think the Renaissance style artwork really suits the sound, as from what I understand Denny/Fairport/Fotheringay were part of the 60s Olde Musik revival.

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  33. And this is the sea they sailed on!
    http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_0tA5dmNlUGY/SM12Ku09GuI/AAAAAAAABwI/FHG85c5pDe8/s400/wbn.jpg

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  34. I also think that Denny's voice really suits this song - it is so languid and timeless, as though time stands still, which staring at the sea always makes me feel.

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  35. I don't see the Baez connection - she's far more Eva Cassidy I think.

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  36. This music has a very British quality I think - I wonder if that is what (unfairly) prevented Denny from ever achieving stardom in the U.S.

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  37. Not sure about either Cassidy or Baez - I hear Kate Bush in Denny!

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  38. I think you'd like her song Bruton Town, Geoff. From the 1970s sometime.

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  39. I have always presumed that this song was about a person. Because I think her songs were always about people. In an interview once she explained that her rivers and streams in songs were always metaphors for particular people - because people could be described in natural terms, as natural forces. So I think this "song about a place" is also a "song about a person".!

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  40. I would have loved to see how she weathered all the changes in music, around when she died. I feel like punk and new wave were replacing British folk-rock. Would she have adapted? It would have been interesting to see, if she had lived past 1978.

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  41. I agree about Denny's voice suiting this song and the subject matter - I also love how you drew out the version of the sea that feel dark, brooding, if not full on stormy/dangerous. I associate Denny (her voice, her persona) with being about impending doom, although romance too. And her voice cuts through me like wind on the English moors - or an empty English beach.

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  42. Thats an interesting analogy about rivers/water and people-the sea figured in a lot of her songs. I am not sure what direction she would have gone in -on some of her later albums there was a bit of a MOR slant-Candle in the Wind etc

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  43. I remember reading about the Krumlin festival and being very very glad I wasn't there!!

    The Blogger reference was to the whole Blogger service, of which your blog is part. It featured your blog the other day on its front page as blog of the week. It's gone now I think, but the snippet showed you had posted a new one on The Sea, hence I came to read it. I think I need to sign up for the service where it emails me when you post a new one though, instead of relying on Blogger to feature you!

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  44. Oh wow, thanks for the Carly Simon link. I think I'm glad you wrote about The Sea instead of this one about sailing in a shoe!:) And thank you for the book cover too! It's all very surreal. And who would have ever imagined it could be relevant to a discussion of songs about places:)

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  45. MOR = Middle of the Road? I agree. I think she was fading fast as a cutting edge talent by 1977.

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  46. I only knew her as a singer on Led Zepellin's The Battle of Evermore (having grown up in the US where I think she didn't have much presence), so thank you for this Geoff!

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  47. I love Sandy Denny. Just last week I visited her grave. She is is Putney Vale Cemetary in London - go up Central Drive and turn right on Richards Way. Take the fourth path on the left and Sandy is on the right side in front of the maple tree.

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