IT’S A HAPPENING THING


Fotheringay with Jerry Donahue, far left TheLadyVanishes MICK HOUGHTON talks to Fotheringay guitarist Jerry Donahue


Jerry Donahue, bassist Pat Donaldson and guitarist Albert Lee were brought together in 1969 to record Poet And The One Man Band’s sole album. The band didn’t survive long, after which Lee and Donaldson joined Sandy Denny and Trevor Lucas in the as yet un-named Fotheringay. “Albert didn’t feel it was the right vehicle for him, but he and Pat recommended me,” explains guitarist Donahue, who in May teams up with former Fairport colleague Dave Swarbrick and singers Maddy Prior, Thea Gilmore, PP Arnold, Green Garside and Joan as Policewoman in a Sandy Denny tribute tour. Back in ’70 though, Donahue was happy


playing in “rockin’ country band” The Tumbleweeds with Dave Peacock (of Chas & Dave fame), till Donaldson “tricked him” into attending a rehearsal at Denny and Lucas’ Fulham flat. “All it took was the first number we tried out – Gordon Lightfoot’s ‘The Way I


6


Feel’. They loved the guitar part I came up and I loved their harmony parts. That changed my mind and it changed my life.” Fotheringay released just the one self-titled


album before Sandy was persuaded to go solo in January ’71. “It was the worst moment of my life, to this day,” says Donahue who later played


Sandybeingpersuadedto gosolowas“theworst momentofmylife”


on three of Denny’s four solo albums and alongside her in Fairport in ’74/75. Donahue has since been instrumental in several posthumous Sandy Denny releases, “closing the book”, 38 years later, on the sessions for Fotheringay 2 and helping salvage her final concert recordings (released as Gold Dust). Last year, he also restored the tapes from a superb,


rare surviving Fotheringay show, Essen 1970. “I feel blessed to have worked with her so extensively; there was something magical about Sandy’s voice. No-one has ever come close to it.” www.sandydennyofficial.com


Photo by Linda Fitzgerland-Moore


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