As we drew south, the mist it came down
A love letter to the lyrics of Late November by Sandy Denny
The wooded ravine to the wandering stream,
The serpent he moved, but no-one would say.
The depths of the waters, the bridge which distraught us
And brought to me thoughts of the ill-fated day.
I always loved the title. Late November. You immediately know when she’s talking about, yet it remains vague, like ‘early evening’, or ‘offshore.’ A vicinity, not a grid reference.
So when Sandy Denny entertains “thoughts of the ill-fated day” you’re not quite sure which day she’s thinking about.
But then, you’re not quite sure in Late November what is memory and what is real and what is premonition of events yet to come. All is foreboding. Time is slippery. So is the relationship between the imaginary and the real. The song is vague and specific at the same time. Like ‘late November’; like dreams are.
Late November — the time — is transition: the boundary between Autumn and Winter. Denny’s world was defined by blurred boundaries and transition — music as old as the hills played by thrusting young rockers, cathartic celebrations of death and tragedy, songs of omens and visions but also of ancient history. Yet it was also a world connected to old certainties: death, the land, and the sea, and the seasons that in their changing defined the lives of most folk who ever lived.
Late November — the song — describes the moment Denny saw a jet fighter crash into the sea as she walked along a beach in Scotland. More transitions: from air to water, life to death, ear-splitting noise to eerie silence. Later Denny recalled feeling she’d been on that same beach before. It had been in a dream she’d described in her notebook: she was in the tour van with Fairport Convention, the band with whom she was igniting British folk rock at the time. A roadie was driving. He asked her to hold the steering wheel while he sorted the stereo.
“On the right hand side of the road was the sea,” her diary says. “and we were driving along the edge. The sea was black and choppy. The sky was stormy grey.”
That dream had come to her in February 1969. In May, that same roadie, a man named Harvey Bramham, was killed while driving Fairport Convention’s van. The band’s drummer also died, so did Richard Thompson’s girlfriend. Sandy Denny had decided to travel separately that day.
Then, in dark, wintry November, she witnessed the pilot lose or cede control of his plane and disappear into “the depths of the waters” around her. It was a tragic accident which triggered the memory of a premonition of another tragic accident in which she could have died and people she knew did.
From all this does Late November come.
The wine it was drunk, the ship it was sunk,
The shot it was dead, all the sorrows were drowned.
The birds they were clouds, the brides and the shrouds
And as we drew south the mist it came down.
The beginning of the story sounds like the end of another. Everything is spent.
Somewhere in this first verse is a band driving their van down from Scotland. Yet it’s shrouded, beautifully wreathed not just in mist but a certain brand of folk mysticism. All feels buried, covered with mist and clouds and shrouds, or drowned, either by the sea (black and choppy no doubt) or by drink. Sandy Denny struggled with alcohol for much of her life; here it feels both refuge and prison.
The temples were filled with the strangest of creatures
One played it by ear on the banks of the sea.
That one was found but the others they went under.
Oh the tears which are shed, they won’t come from me.
Even when you know the story, Late November eludes the fickle grasp of definition. Like any dream it does not wish to flatter you with meaning. It merely allows its disjointed images to unfurl, one by one, goading you to treat it as a coherent narrative. It’s a fairy tale as rendered by Aubrey Beardsley: dark, tangled, doomed. Here we stray into a vista of temples, strange creatures, the banks of the sea. A glimpse of a talented musician — playing it by ear — lost to waters. The ocean followed Denny around. The most extraordinary music she had made with Fairport Convention prior to Liege & Lief — the album they made that summer, after the car crash, but before the plane — was A Sailor’s Life. It is a storm, a whirlpool, a dervish. It’s the only companion piece I know to Funkadelic’s Free Your Mind And Your Ass Will Follow, and it makes that groove sound like a lullaby in comparison. The band make the water sound hungry.
Those “tears which are shed” — they are passive, detached, much like the wine which was drunk and the ship which was sunk. It’s an old folk grammar trick. They are not Denny’s tears though. Perhaps by now she had learned not to cry. Perhaps it seemed better to submerge the sadness along with the ship.
The methods of madness, the pathos and the sadness,
God help you all, the insane and wise.
The black and the white, the darkness of the night,
I see only smoke from the chimneys arise.
God, the bounce and flow of these lines. At first you hear the opposites: the insane and wise, the black and the white. But, of course, it’s nowhere near as clear as that. Not in this dream, this blur, this torture of the imagination. “Madness” and “sadness” rhyme but don’t seem so opposite as they might. “Pathos” and the poignancy of loss — what method can we divine here? asks the singer, like so any before and since. And then the “darkness of the night” — night is one more covering, of course, like the shrouds and the clouds, but there’s no opposite here, no day to counter the night. Instead there is only its concentrated form: darkness. Night is not the opposite of day but merely darkness in diluted form.
Through all this Denny sees only smoke. The sign of warmth and home but also fire, the trails of disaster, perhaps a crash.
The pilot he flew all across the sky and woke me.
He flew solo on the mercury sea.
The dream it came back, all about the tall brown people,
The sacred young herd on the phosphorus sand.
And here at last is the pilot, out of control. Waking Denny from her dream, or perhaps from her thoughts as she walks along the beach, or from inebriation. The crash, that unimaginable moment when the plane simply disappears, is not mentioned, though the February dream is — evoking those “tall brown people” with their lives ahead of them. The “mercury sea” is metallic, thick, quicksilver beautiful, dangerous. And beside it, on the shore, watching, described in perhaps the greatest ever definition of a band, certainly the most poetic, is the “sacred young herd on the phosphorous sand.” We treat our musicians sometimes as spiritual healers, as shaman, yet often they are just kids, led by expectations as much as creating them. Denny was 22 when she witnessed this. When she wrote this. Phosphorous is non-metallic. It ignites spontaneously, it glows in the dark. Fame, art, or simply youth — I don’t know what the phosphorous represents specifically but its instability and its excitement and even the soft cushion of its syllables have played their trick on many a young musician.
And so just as the song begins with an end, to me it seems to end with a beginning. The group, young and hungry as water, ready to ignite. It is a climax both melancholy and romantic, as when a documentary that charts a musician’s decline returns us to footage from the beginning of the film — footage of the early years, innocent and playful. How far we’ve come, we think.
Denny left Fairport Convention just as they’d created their greatest work. She’d spent her life singing the folk songs the band had just discovered and had another route planned. She would start her own band. She would craft timeless albums like The North Star Grassman And The Ravens. She would sing with Led Zeppelin on The Battle Of Evermore. She didn’t stay anywhere for long. She kept moving. Her time was limited. It was almost like she had a premonition of what she had to do.
She left the band in late November.
If you liked this, you might also like the love letter to The Last Living Rose by PJ Harvey.
