Nick Drake

by Patrick Humphries

  While living in Jamaica, Blackwell found work at various times as a water-skiing instructor, real-estate salesman, and early in 1961, location manager for a little film about a secret service agent, based on a novel written by a close friend of his mother’s. The film was called Dr No; the friend was Ian Fleming.

  In 1959, as a teenager, Blackwell had spent a formative six months in New York, where he was mightily impressed by the enthusiasm and musical policy of the nascent Atlantic Records. On his return to Jamaica, he launched Island Records, and by 1960, had his first Jamaican number one: ‘Little Sheila’ by Laurel Aitken. Within two years Island Records had released two LPs and twenty-six singles. By 1962 Island’s Jamaican records were actually selling better in England, especially in the West Indian immigrant communities around London, Bristol and Birmingham. So on 8 May of that year Chris Blackwell boldly launched Island Records in the UK. The operation was run from his front room, with Blackwell delivering the product from the back seat of his Mini-Cooper. In 1989 he would sell Island Records to the Polygram group for an estimated £200,000,000.

  In March 1963 Blackwell rented Island Records’ first premises, at 108 Cambridge Road, London NW6. Initially, sales were all to the Jamaican community, but ska and bluebeat were soon taken up by the Mods, who were busy roaring round the capital on their scooters. The labels on those early Island records were designed by a young advertising agency, Saatchi & Saatchi. Blackwell subsidized his quality Jamaican releases (including the 1963 debut single from one ‘Robert Marley’) with parallel product, including two albums of bawdy rugby songs and the risqué Nights Of Love In Lesbosl

  Blackwell’s first hit came in March 1964, with ‘My Boy Lollipop’, by Jamaican teenager Millie, who later became one of only two acts to cover a Nick Drake song during his lifetime. Accompanying Millie to a TV appearance on Thank Your Lucky Stars, which was recorded at the ATV Studios in Birmingham, Blackwell was advised to check out an R&B quartet at a tiny club in the city. Hearing a fifteen-year-old Stevie Winwood belt out Ray Charles numbers in front of The Spencer Davis Group, he knew immediately that he was in at the beginning of something. But he also recognized that the potential of The Spencer Davis Group was too big for Island at the time, and though he went on to manage and produce the group, their records were licensed — as was the Millie record – through Fontana.

  A run of hits throughout 1965 and 1966 confirmed Blackwell’s instincts about the commercial potential of The Spencer Davis Group and the teenage Stevie Winwood. They became the first white British act to be signed by Blackwell, and the signpost to the future of Island Records. By the end of 1966 the band were releasing harder, more pounding material such as ‘I’m A Man’ and ‘Gimme Some Lovin”, but eighteen-year-old Winwood was tiring of the pop restrictions of The Spencer Davis Group.

  There was a definite schism between the commercial pop groups and the underground bands in the late sixties. Bands like Fairport Convention, Pink Floyd and Jethro Tull, who had emerged blinking from the underground and into the charts, would appear, faintly embarrassed, on Top Of The Pops to promote a single which had flukishly emerged as a chart contender. But the distinction between serious bands and pure pop groups like Marmalade, Dave Dee, Dozy, Beaky, Mick & Tich and The Tremeloes, was carefully maintained.

  Within the first months of 1967 Winwood shook off his pop shackles and formed Traffic. Blackwell may have been concerned at the cost of Traffic’s debut album (a then staggering £5000), but the group were soon established as the first major Island act. As the sixties upped the ante, Island began its first golden age.

  Following the floodgates opened by The Beatles’ Sgt Pepper album in June 1967, Blackwell was quick to appreciate how potent that new music could be. The other major labels soon jumped on the Progressive bandwagon, giving house room to underground bands on such labels as Harvest, Deram, Vertigo and Dawn. Island kept the higher ground.

  David Betteridge was effectively Blackwell’s deputy at Island Records during the years that Nick was there. Appointed Managing Director of the label in 1968, it was he who handled the day-to-day running of the company during its glory years. Recognizing his MD’s sound commercial leanings, Blackwell allowed him his head when signing new acts. ‘I tried to sign Queen … Procol Harum, we all loved “A Whiter Shade Of Pale”,’ Betteridge recalls, ‘but they were wrapped up with a publishing house and we couldn’t get them. I can remember Chris and myself sitting down with Peter Grant trying to do a deal to sign Led Zeppelin, but we just didn’t have the money. A hundred thousand dollars, worldwide, including recording costs, excluding America.’

  By September 1969, when Island released Nick Drake’s Five Leaves Left, the label already boasted Jethro Tull, Spooky Tooth, Fairport Convention and Free; waiting in the wings were Mott The Hoople and King Crimson. There was undeniably something special about Island Records during those heady years. Inextricably linked to the most innovative and exciting noises emerging from the underground, Island seemed somehow to stand outside the mainstream. If you bought a record released on Island, you knew you were in safe hands. You might not understand the album and be baffled by the obliqueness, but once that little pink ‘i’ began revolving, you could be sure you were in good company.

  Another hallmark of good quality was the tiny image of a flying witch, which announced that the record now playing was a product of Joe Boyd’s Witchseason company. Throughout 1968 Boyd’s acts criss-crossed the country: The Incredible String Band, enchanting and irritating in equal measure; Fairport Convention, hauling up and down the pre-motorway roads, swerving from university campus to campus. But Boyd was keeping his ears open for something fresh, and Ashley Hutchings was able to provide that freshness.

  Anthea Joseph: ‘There were the Incredibles, John and Beverley [Martyn], Fairport, Dudu Pukwana … and Nico (“Get me a television show.” “Where are you, Nico?” “I’m in a telephone box on Tottenham Court Road.” “How long are you in town for?” “I leave tomorrow to see my friend.”) … All sorts of odds and sods used to pass through there, but those were the core – Fairport and The String Band were really the serious ones, and of course Nick.’

  Struck by the sounds he had heard on the reel-to-reel four-track tape, Joe Boyd signed Nick to Witchseason in 1968. Witchseason offered a unique three-tiered package to its act: management came through Boyd, as did the company’s record production, with Boyd as producer and John Wood as regular engineer. The company also offered music publishing through its Warlock Music arm, with offices in Oxford Street. Boyd even had a finger in the visuals – Osiris Visions, who produced a lot of material for the Island acts of the day, were linked to him.

  The timing proved fortunate. In 1968, the year that Nick Drake signed his first professional contract, UK sales of long-playing records overtook singles for the first time. It was a sea change which would bring real benefits to artists like him. In 1968 the margin was only slight – 49,184,000 LPs to 49,161,000 singles – but it was sufficient to make the music industry far more inclined towards album-oriented acts. That Nick was perceived in this way is confirmed by the fact that during his career he never released a single.

  Anthea Joseph recalled Nick’s earliest days at Witchseason: ‘I remember him arriving: this tall, thin, very beautiful young man … who didn’t speak. He could just about say hello to you, once he’d decided that you were a human being. And he wrote these extraordinary songs. He’d come in and he’d sit, just sit, doing nothing, reading the paper, watching the world go by.

  ‘Nick was signed to Witchseason … We had our own label, but Joe, as ever, was running out of money, and he and Chris Blackwell got together – like-minded persons, very similar sorts of people – and Chris, who was making it relatively big in this country at the time, suggested that he take over the Witchseason label. Joe said that he could do that, provided he had the Witchseason logo on the disc. So it was Witchseason, although Island controlled the work, and Joe remained the boss man as far as Witchseason was concerned. A
nd it worked very well.

  ‘They were all on a stipend … It must have been something like £15 or £20 per week. It was a lot at the time; it was enough to live on without starving to death and you could pay your rent.’

  Nick had written the ten songs which constituted his debut album over the preceding eighteen months. Friends from Marlborough recall hearing songs which appeared on Five Leaves Left for the first time in Aix during early 1967, and Cambridge contemporaries heard the same songs played in college rooms during Nick’s time at university.

  The one weakness of Nick as a writer, the fundamental flaw, is the adolescent obsession with loneliness and the inability to communicate, which betrays his extreme youth when he wrote the songs. He wrote songs such as ‘Time Of No Reply’ and ‘I Was Made To Love Magic’ at an age when most people feel that no one understands them and that really meaningful communication is impossible. It is a landscape Bob Dylan recognized on ‘A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall’: ‘where black is the colour and none is the number’; a place the majority of us visit, but soon leave. For Nick, though, it became home, and he stayed there far too long.

  Paul Simon flitted through the streets of alienation on ‘The Sounds Of Silence’ and noticed flashing neon illuminating vast crowds, drawn together by their very inability to communicate; but later he discovered the restorative powers of life and love, music and hope. Nick Drake never had time to develop and grow as a writer, or as a person. The appeal of his work comes from the universality and purity of his themes: lack of understanding, lack of affection and lack of communication; but a deeper understanding of the rich complexities of human experience takes years. Age might have consoled him and filled him with wonder and wisdom, had he had time. But we can only imagine how he would have developed as a songwriter, and perhaps that is the greatest loss of all.

  Anthea Joseph had already witnessed first-hand Dylan’s impact on the contemporary music scene when she began working closely alongside Nick, so her observations of Nick’s writing are particularly pertinent: ‘Nick never made the connection that I’d known Dylan. Everything was interconnected. The only thing, I suppose in retrospect, is that what Bob did was to liberate people in words. I mean, he wrote these extraordinary songs … We’d all grown up on Bill Haley and stuff … but this small little Jewish miracle turns up and he had a tremendous impact on everyone, even The Beatles. They would never have written the later stuff without that influence. They’d have just mooned and Juned for ever, and they’d have made lots of money, but they would never have written some of the songs.

  ‘Bob was like a great big buffalo, with horns pointing … just absolutely blitzing everything. I mean, it was amazing. He had an enormous effect on Nick. I mean, that’s why Nick wrote the way he did … I’m not sure about how good those songs really are. He was extraordinary and he was unique. But he was not, I think, on a par with the Dylans, or even the Paul Simons of this world … Or the Richard Thompsons, because when he started seriously writing songs, and Joe acquired him, it was too late, the damage was done. The growth wasn’t there — the intellectual growth in songwriting terms. It would have been very interesting to know what would have happened if he hadn’t become so ill and been so damaged. Where he would have gone, because the brain was there.’

  By the time Nick Drake went into Chelsea’s Sound Techniques studios with Joe Boyd to record Five Leaves Left, the songs were largely written and polished – the challenge would be getting the arrangements right. This was Nick’s first album, but even as a student he’d had a very clear idea of how he wanted it to sound. Nick’s mother had observed that from an early age he was ‘an absolute perfectionist’; others were about to discover the same thing.

  Joe Boyd: ‘I probably enjoyed making those records as much as anything I’ve ever done, the material was so rich that it lent itself to contributions, which in a way is more fun for a producer. It feeds your ego, I suppose. The Fairport would arrive as a ready-made band, with arrangements that they’d already worked out live, and you are basically recording something that exists. With Nick, there was the opportunity to be creative, and the wonderful thing about his music was that when you did bring in a John Cale, or a Richard Thompson … that was incredibly exciting and fulfilling to hear what happens when really good musicians … would begin to play and hear what was going on. People had incredible respect for him.’

  It was either Peter Asher – Head of A&R at The Beatles’ Apple label, or Tony Cox – an arranger with connections at Island (not Terry Cox of Pentangle, as has been suggested) — who recommended that Boyd use Richard Hewson to do the arrangements for Five Leaves Left. As house arranger at Apple, Hewson worked with The Beatles on ‘The Long And Winding Road’ and on Mary Hopkin’s worldwide smash ‘Those Were The Days’, and had successfully arranged the strings on James Taylor’s eponymous debut album.

  Despite the impressive credentials, Nick did not consider Hewson’s arrangements suitable for his album, and instead called in the services of his colleague and friend from Cambridge, Robert Kirby, who explains: ‘I arranged “Way To Blue”, “Day Is Done”, “Thoughts Of Mary Jane” and “Fruit Tree” at Sound Techniques. We were both nineteen. Those four tracks with the string quartet, we did in one three-hour session. We did them live with Nick; nothing was over-dubbed. So Nick was playing guitar, and we were doing the quartet and the string bass with him. He would play his part in exactly the correct tempo each time there was a take. Most of the time was spent getting a decent string sound.’

  In an interview with Musin’ Music Boyd recalled Nick’s disappointment that Hewson’s arrangements did not match the sounds inside his mind: ‘Nick didn’t like them and I agreed, they were a bit corny, and when we were trying to think what to do, Nick kind of said rather timidly, “Well, I have this friend from Cambridge who might be quite good,” and I said “Oh sure, has he ever done anything, has he ever done any work?” and he said “No, but I think he’d be quite good.” And there was something in the way Nick said it … Nick was very, very definite when he knew he was on firm ground and you could tell that it was a firm idea that he had, and I said “Let’s give it a try.” ’

  A meeting between Nick, Robert Kirby, Joe Boyd and John Wood did little to allay the fears, but once Kirby’s arrangements were heard on the first run-through in the studio, Boyd and Wood were convinced. It must have been intimidating as a newcomer to be working with a fifteen-piece string section, but Kirby was unfazed, and his arrangements remain an integral part of the distinctive sound of Nick’s debut album.

  Harry Robinson arranged ‘River Man’. A venerable Scottish band leader, Robinson was also the Lord Rockingham whose XI had been one of British rock ’n’ roll’s greatest novelty outfits. Robinson’s career has spanned the whole history of British rock ’n’ roll, from arranger on The Allisons’ 1961 ‘Are You Sure’, through work with Sandy Denny and Nick Drake, right up to Everything But The Girl.

  Double-bassist Danny Thompson recalls how the latest match was made: ‘Ben [Watt] went and dug Harry Robinson out for the last Everything But The Girl album. They kept saying: “Where is he now?” and I said, well, he doesn’t want to do anything … So they found where he was, and he said: “Oh no, I haven’t been asked to do anything for years, oh no.” So they went to his house and played him the stuff of Sandy’s and Nick’s. He said: “Oh, I’d forgotten all this.” It stirred him up, so he did some arrangements for their Amplified Heart album. That’s a good thing that came from what he did with Nick Drake …’

  Talking on Swedish radio in the only full interview about Nick he had given before this book, Robert Kirby remembered the circumstances of Nick’s recording debut: ‘I found him very easy to work with; he gave me quite a free hand. He gave me a song like, say, “Fruit Tree”, on the first LP. He came round one day, played it, and I taped it on to my tape recorder. He said that he possibly heard oboes on it, and strings, and that was about it. I used to then sit with him and go through exactly how he played his chor
ds, because he always detuned his guitar. He used strange tunings, not proper guitar tunings, and not the ones like people use in D tunings. He had very complicated tunings. Very complicated. Sometimes a low string would be higher than the string above. And so it would be very important for me to write down exactly how he played each chord, and every bar. And I would do that with him; that sometimes annoyed him, I think, because it took a long time. But I had to do it. And then he’d go away and leave me to do the arrangement how I wanted it. And he was very easy to work with.’

  For Five Leaves Left, Kirby worked with fifteen classical musicians, including principal violinist David McCallum – father of the actor – and the man who taught Jimmy Page how to apply a violin bow to his electric guitar when they were playing on a session together before the formation of Led Zeppelin. Kirby’s arrangements – their effectiveness often due to his restraint – are heard at their best on ‘Way To Blue’, where Nick puts his guitar to one side and is only accompanied by Kirby’s pointed and supportive orchestration. The effect is of a boat gently bobbing on a sea of strings. The intimacy and impact of Five Leaves Left is further enhanced by the assured production of Joe Boyd and John Wood.

  The sound which Nick wanted for his record was directly inspired by the debut album of the young Californian singer-songwriter Randy Newman, which had made a strong impact on Nick when he heard it earlier in 1968. Played alongside Five Leaves Left, Randy Newman has striking similarities, most obviously the lush orchestrations which punctuate the songs – particularly the opening ‘Love Story’ and the spellbinding ‘I Think It’s Going To Rain Today’. Newman’s arrangements almost masked his unremarkable voice and one-dimensional songs, and his background in film music was evident, notably on ‘Cowboy’. But it was the orchestral accompaniment, massed and used as an instrument, that give the record its real impact and made such an effect on Nick.