Paul Wheeler: ‘When that first Randy Newman album came out it didn’t sell at all, and the record company gave copies away … they said it’s such a good record, they gave it away. That sort of thing Nick picked up on. I remember the picture on the sleeve, of Randy Newman, totally isolated …’
The musicians on Five Leaves Left were familiar names from the folk-rock fraternity of the time — Fairport Convention’s Richard Thompson played on one track, and cellist Clare Lowther had worked with The Strawbs. Danny Thompson, besides playing double bass with Pentangle, was a regular first call for many jazz and folk acts, and by the time he came to contribute to Five Leaves Left he had already played on albums by Alexis Korner, Donovan and The Incredible String Band.
The sessions for Five Leaves Left began in July 1968, but the album’s release was delayed for a year, partly because the studio was coping with the installation of its first eight-track equipment, but also because of the way that Nick was coaxed into recording by his producer. ‘The way that I worked with Nick was very different from the way I worked with the other artists,’ Boyd recalled in a Musin’ Music interview. ‘We worked … together slowly. There was no self-contained group around Nick. With the other groups or artists we tended to go in, do a record in a concentrated period of time. With Nick, we just went in, did a couple of tracks, listened to them, thought about it, thought what we wanted to do with them, worked on them a bit, put down a few more tracks, wait a month, wait six weeks, think about it some more, perhaps work with an arranger … It was very different, and it was very reflective.’
Nick Drake’s painstaking approach to his craft was apparent from the moment he first entered the studio to make his debut album. He was barely twenty, and still a student splitting his life between the serenity of his home in Tanworth and the more hectic allure of Cambridge, but while he may have been soft-spoken and painfully shy, there was also a determination, an intensity in Nick, which was almost intimidating in one so young.
Danny Thompson doesn’t remember much discussion with Nick about music during the sessions: ‘I got played the stuff, and I played it. He was surrounded by strings and all kinds of musicians – half the LSO was there … I was left to get on and do what I do, which was pleasurable for me. The communication was through Joe. Joe is this great catalyst… he used to conjure up nice mixtures, put them in the pot. There were deadly serious straight musicians … some people assume it was just me and Nick in there, having a fag and talking about crumpet and playing, but it wasn’t at all. He was in one corner of the studio not even playing – his tracks were already down. He was watching as I played, he had a grin on his face. They were my bass lines. There was nothing written for me. There was that instant rapport that a musician has with another musician who realizes that that’s what he wants … There were times there was just the two of us working out things and times when they had all these strings in … But even when there was just the two of us, he wasn’t “did you hear the one about the Irishman …?”’
The delay between the recording and release of his debut album had in part to do with Nick’s determination that the record should sound as perfect on vinyl as it did in his head. There was also the fact that he was still ostensibly studying at Cambridge, some sixty miles away. Anthea Joseph witnessed this painfully slow gestation at close quarters: ‘I spent an awful lot of time at Sound Techniques, Old Church Street, Chelsea … The first album took ages. Ages. It went on for months … What I always felt was that Nick would sort of pack up mentally, so you had to stop. There was no point in trying to push it, because you weren’t going to get any further. Joe was wonderful with him: “Put him in a cab, take him home.” But he was determined to get that record out of him if it was the last thing he did. And he did it, but again giving space – always the space. He was like that with all of the albums – sometimes more than he should have been.’
Boyd, in an unsourced interview, remembered the sessions for Nick’s debut album: ‘Making Nick Drake’s Five Leaves Left was one of the most enjoyable studio experiences for me. [‘Three Hours’] “cooks” more than almost any other, because of the rhythm section of Danny Thompson and Rocki Dzidzornu from Ghana. The title reflects, I assume, the time it took in those days to get from London to Cambridge, where Nick had been going to university. It shows off his startling guitar technique, he had listened to some of Robin Williamson’s colleagues, like Bert Jansch, John Martyn and Davy Graham, but he had his own style with complex tunings which have often mystified imitators. His photographic image shows a delicate and shy person, which is true in a way, but his hands and fingers were very large and incredibly strong. People often talk about his voice, his melodies and his lyrics, but it was the cleanliness and strength of his guitar playing that served as the spine of most tracks and made everything work.’
The story behind the title of Nick Drake’s debut album is as well known to fans as the album itself: it was the caution found toward the end of every packet of Rizla cigarette papers. A reminder that there weren’t many opportunities left. ‘All smokers will recognise the meaning of the title,’ began Melody Maker’s single-paragraph review, which went on to call Drake’s debut ‘interesting’. Robert Kirby is sure that Nick intended the reference as ‘an in-joke’ – by the time of its release, everyone who knew, knew just what Rizla papers were being wrapped around. In the short life and work of Nick Drake, omens and portents abound; and the title Five Leaves Left took on even greater significance, when, just five years after its release, he was dead.
In 1996 Alex Skorecki was kind enough to send me a copy of a short story written around the turn of the century by the American writer O. Henry which he thought of interest. ‘The Last Leaf’ concerns a young painter, dying of pneumonia in her Greenwich Village garret. The doctor senses she has already given up on life: ‘She has one chance in – let us say, ten … and that chance is for her to want to live.’ But what keeps her attention, and keeps her alive, is the ivy growing in the yard outside:
‘They’re falling faster now. Three days ago there were almost a hundred. It made my head ache to count them. But now it’s easy. There goes another one. There are only five left now.’
‘Five what, dear? …’
‘Leaves. On the ivy vine. When the last one falls I must go too.’
Given that Nick was reading English at Cambridge while recording his first album, it is quite possible that he had read the O. Henry story. In which case he would have known that Henry’s story had a hopeful ending – the artist’s life saved by the love of her friend and an old man’s sacrifice.
Whether it wears myriad influences on its sleeve (the first efforts of Bob Dylan and The Rolling Stones); distils a stage act on disc (as with The Beatles and Paul Simon); explodes with the never-get-a-second-chance frenzy (Bruce Springsteen); or opts for ‘Let’s put all the singles on’ calculation (The Sex Pistols and Oasis), a debut album is always a statement of intent.
Five Leaves Left is an astonishingly mature and assured debut. From the cover in, it speaks volumes of its author: the elegant, enigmatic figure, shot three-quarters on, looking out of a window, half smiling at some half-forgotten joke. A wistful, autumnal mood is evoked by songs such as ‘Day Is Done’, ‘Time Has Told Me’ and ‘Cello Song’. The titles suggesting isolation and painful self-awareness, like the songs from a room which Leonard Cohen was so visibly and tortuously producing. The world of Nick Drake, on the evidence of this album, was a vacuum, where the only way was to blue.
From its Rizla-inspired title to a song like ‘The Thoughts Of Mary Jane’ (‘Mary Jane’ being a euphemism for marijuana), the record was a dope-smoker’s delight. The sense of world-weariness, the shifting, loose atmosphere which pervades the record, is redolent of the late sixties. Much of the atmosphere comes from the husky timbre of Nick’s singing, the sound of his voice, as if he had just inhaled and was slowly letting the smoke out.
Much of the record’s appeal came from Nick’s voice, but also from the d
exterity of his playing, which manages to be noticeable without ever appearing intrusive. The album does have flaws, particularly the inconsequential ‘Man In A Shed’; and perhaps the arrangements are a tad lush. But play Five Leaves Left back to back with any other record from the same year and you are struck at once by the quality and timelessness of Nick Drake’s debut.
Lyrically, the songs on Five Leaves Left are largely unremarkable. Nick tended to use lyrics as part of the pattern, an integral mix with his guitar, voice and arrangement. The words of ‘Fruit Tree’ are eerily prescient: a song which recognizes the frailty of fame, and that the only real fame is posthumous. Otherwise, the lyrics, taken in isolation, would not have seemed out of place in Marlborough’s school magazine. Lost love, a sky-bound princess, unrealized love, inability to communicate, unrequited love — all revealed a tendency to idealize, because little of what Nick wrote at that time came from experience of the world outside himself.
On ‘Day Is Done’ there is an image of a tennis court which could have come from Antonioni’s contemporaneous exposition, Blow-Up. The image of a rose without a thorn, which appears in ‘Time Has Told Me’, was made popular by Leonard McNally’s eighteenth-century poem ‘The Lass Of Richmond Hill’. The language on Five Leaves Left is ornate, self-conscious even, as you might expect from someone who was still nominally studying for an English degree.
It is only when Nick’s voice carries the words to meet his masterly music, and the Boyd/Wood alchemy comes into play, that the magic is made – sublimely well on songs such as ‘River Man’, ‘Cello Song’ and ‘Three Hours’. The rolling guitar which ushers in ‘Cello Song’ is fluid and quite distinctive, Clare Lowther’s bowed cello and Rocki Dzidzornu’s congas lend an exotic colouring; but always, the glue that binds the song is Nick’s playing: the rolling, relentless guitar which never rests.
‘River Man’ is enriched by Harry Robinson’s lavish string arrangement, which kicks in just as Nick reaches the first refrain. ‘River Man’ is the song Nick’s Cambridge contemporaries recall him performing most often in various college rooms, and knowing that adds to the song’s identification with the city. When Nick sings about shows which last all night during summertime, you can picture May Balls during the early summer days after exams have finished, played out along the silver spine of the River Cam which flows through the city.
‘Three Hours’, one of the album’s most beguiling tracks, is the only song we know to be directly inspired by someone Nick knew. Jeremy Mason, Nick’s old friend from Marlborough, accompanied him on that pivotal trip to Aix in 1967, but hadn’t seen him for some time after that: ‘I bumped into a chap called Robert Kirby, at the George in Bishop’s Stortford. We were talking about Nick, and he said: “Oh, so you’re Jeremy Mason … Nick wrote a song about you on this LP we’ve just been doing; it’s called “Three Hours” ’. This would have been 1969.
‘When I asked Nick whether this tune was about me, he said yes. I said: “Well, what does it mean?” He said: “Well, if you don’t know it doesn’t matter … it’s the way I perceived your situation at that time.” And believe me, I’ve listened to it a thousand times … Three hours from sundown, Jeremy flies …’
Despite the mention of London in the second verse, ‘Three Hours’ has echoes of Aix, a city dating back to Roman times, and nearby, cave paintings reaching back even further. Joe Boyd assumed that the title alluded to the time it took Nick to travel to London from Cambridge, but since we now know that the song was about Jeremy Mason, it seems possible that it refers to the time it took to get from Marlborough to London.
Five Leaves Left is an impressive debut; there is real audacity on ‘Way To Blue’ and ‘Fruit Tree’, where Nick sings simply against an orchestral backing, the rock ’n’ roll reliability of bass, drums and guitar removed. What mars the album is an apparent straining for diversity, obscurity and eclecticism, as on the unsuccessful jazz meanderings of ‘Saturday Sun’ and the juvenile narrative of ‘Man In A Shed’ — a facile rewrite of The Beatles’ ‘Fixing A Hole’. As with the films of James Dean, because Nick left such a small body of work, too much is often vested in those few precious discs. Five Leaves Left was indeed a remarkable debut, but its real significance at the time was as a signpost to what could be, rather than what was.
Robert Kirby came down from Cambridge soon after Nick, with his life clearly mapped out. Proud as he was of his work on Five Leaves Left, he had seen it simply as a diversion, a distraction from his intended path: ‘The first album got a lot of critical acclaim, a lot of acclaim from musicians, peer group, which was almost worse … I had decided that I’d be quite happy teaching music at a public school – doing the choir, a bit of Gilbert and Sullivan. But when I got the cheque for doing Nick’s stuff …
‘Joe got me some work, then I did Zero She Flies for Al Stewart. When I saw what the offers were I thought, there’s a career here as arranger. It all came in very quickly … I worked with Ralph McTell on his first two albums, Tim Hart and Maddy Prior, Keith Christmas, Shelagh McDonald, Andy Roberts … Dave Cousins’ solo album Two Weeks Last Summer. It seemed a positive thing to do, to get on with a career as an orchestrator.
‘I certainly think a factor in his leaving Cambridge, was that Nick had been told by people he admired that there was an obvious career carved out for him. To promote the first album, to be available …’
Chapter 7
The first the world at large knew of Nick Drake came with the release of Five Leaves Left in September 1969. Nick’s debut was squeezed in between ILPS 9104, Free’s second album, Free, and ILPS 9106, the Joe Boyd-produced, Dr Strangely Strange album Kip Of The Serenes.
Initial printings of the album sleeve switched around the running order – in those days there were two sides to an album — and Side One closed with ‘Way To Blue’ and ‘Day Is Done’, but the order was transposed on the sleeve. Also on that first run of albums, the lyrics of ‘Three Hours’ are inexplicably printed as ‘Sundown’. A mint-condition, pink-label copy of the album from 1969 would now be worth £30.
Island Records’ inaugural press release which introduced Nick Drake to the world, ran in part:
‘NICK DRAKE is tall and lean. He lives “somewhere in Cambridge”, somewhere close to the University (where he is reading English) because he hates wasting time travelling, does not have a telephone — more for reasons of finance than any anti-social feelings and tends to disappear for three or four days at a time, when he is “writing”, but above all … he makes music!
‘As a child, NICK took classical piano lessons and later progressed to guitar and a love of the blues. But by his early teens was involving himself in writing music and lyrics. He developed a real talent for composing beautiful melodies and writing fine lyrics which coupled with his raw and often plaintive voice caught the attention of Tyger Hutchings of Fairport Convention one evening when they were on the same bill.
‘At his recommendation Fairport’s Manager and Producer Joe Boyd went to see NICK … and so started the chain of events which led to the production of FIVE LEAVES LEFT – ILPS 9105 – a unique album, fresh and original, the first of many LPs … from NICK DRAKE.’
Vivien Holgate’s piece was pretty standard press fodder for the time – trying to whip up a bit of interest in an act that nobody knew about, or wanted to. Not when there was a chance to see Led Zeppelin at Surrey University for 7/6d on the door, or listen to new albums from The Band, Pink Floyd or Bob Dylan. The only ace in the hole was that air of tantalizing mystery.
Nick’s introduction to the media was calculated to make him appear more mysterious and abstract than the shy, but certain twenty-year-old he actually was. The vagueness about his location (’somewhere in Cambridge’) and that eschewal of material possessions (’he does not have a telephone’), the concentration on his purity of intention, valuing music above all else, all helped to flesh out the picture of a singer-songwriter eager for recognition.
Highlighting Nick’s ‘love of the blues�
� was a sign of the times. At the time, white-boy blues was all the rage: Cream had split in 1968, but John Mayall was still providing a finishing school for the next wave of Guitar Gods – Mick Taylor had replaced Brian Jones in The Stones; Peter Green’s Fleetwood Mac were making headway, while Eric Clapton had gone on to join Stevie Winwood in the much hyped, short-lived supergroup Blind Faith. All offered highly visible platforms for extended workouts on the guitar. It was the era of the Guitar Hero, and blues was the currency.
Of all the blues giants, none towered taller over the landscape of the 1960s than the late Robert Johnson. It may seem disingenuous to suggest a connection between the haunted bluesman of the Mississippi Delta, who sold his soul to the Devil at a midnight crossroads in return for playing the guitar like no one else, and died poisoned by a lover’s jealous husband, and the public-school-educated, well-spoken scion of an upper-middle-class English family. But as time went on, the lives of the two men, superficially so different, appeared to be haunted by the same demons.
Nick Drake’s fondness for the blues is well documented and like many middle-class white kids of his time, he was fascinated by the lives of the poor black bluesmen. That fondness may well have shaped the title of the fourth track on Five Leaves Left — ‘Way To Blue’. After Nick’s death, his friend Robert Kirby said that one of his regrets was that he would never now get to hear Nick play the blues again.
The first time you hear it, there is something enticing about Nick’s voice – frail and wistful, it cannot help but call you in. There is a cobweb fragility, but it is the voice of a friend, a friend you haven’t seen for a long while, and who you’re not sure you’ll be seeing again.
Nick Drake Page 12