It was in this big, rambling, Victorian house near Chalk Farm Tube, in his ground-floor room, sparsely furnished, that Nick wrote the songs which would form his second album, Bryter Layter.
Haverstock Hill winds up into Hampstead village. To the north, beyond the tall, looming, Victorian properties, lies Hampstead Heath. It is one of the most appealing addresses in London: Martin Carthy had lived there in the early sixties as he began making his mark on the London folk scene — Anthea Joseph remembers Carthy and his wife and a young Bob Dylan chopping up a piano for firewood during the bitter winter of 1962. Richard and Linda Thompson occupied a property just off Haverstock Hill in the seventies, and The Strawbs’ song ‘Pieces Of 79 & 15’ referred to properties the band once occupied in Haverstock Hill.
Brian Wells remembers how Nick continued to compartmentalize his life even when he was living full time in London: ‘He had all these mysterious friends in London, and he would keep all his friends in different compartments, and would kind of allude to “Well, I’ve got these friends in London”. They were rather special people … He would say, I’m doing a record, doing these sessions, but I never met John Wood. I never met Joe Boyd. I never met any of these people. They were names that Nick would occasionally allude to. I guess he was quite good at keeping people at a distance. In Cambridge I felt he and I were buddies, and then subsequently when he was living in Haverstock Hill, I would go and see him, and by then he’d become odd … I think Bryter Layter was being recorded around then. I remember being in a room with Nick with Robert Kirby, and Nick was playing Robert some of the songs, some of the tracks that needed to have arrangements on them.’
Nick’s Hampstead period boasts all the hallmarks of poetic bohemianism: the artist, alone and suffering for his art (Arthur Lubow had the Hampstead room ‘so cold that he took the mattress off the bed, dragged it near the gas fire, and piled up blankets for warmth’). But Molly Drake felt that it was while he was in his bedsit in Haverstock Hill that ‘the shadows closed in’ around her son. It seems that at some point, bohemian isolation gave way to lonely depression.
Anthea Joseph, who spent many hours sequestered with Nick — at Witchseason, backstage at concerts or in radio studios – concluded that he was paranoid: ‘He wouldn’t let you in … I felt he was really terrified of the human race. Everything was a nightmare. But he wasn’t nasty, not at all. He’d just go and sit in the corner. He wouldn’t throw paddies and jump up and down. He’d just say: “I’m going”, and then you’d have to persuade him to come back. He really was frightened. It was difficult, because it’s so hard to deal with people like that, because you can’t talk to them. Because they won’t talk. Richard, Sandy, John Martyn, were all extremely serious — and in their individual ways were equally difficult to deal with. But you could talk to them, which was the difference … I don’t remember any “ordinary” conversations with Nick. Never, not one. That’s what was so weird, because mostly with almost anybody that you see on a weekly basis, some sort of conversation developed, even if it’s only “Where’s my beer?” “Can’t I have some more money?” Never even that. He’d just come in, and be there, but wouldn’t talk.’
Nick ventured out sporadically to gig, and fairly frequently to Chelsea – where the Sound Techniques studios were located, close by the Thames – to begin recording his second album for Island. The recording of Bryter Layter spread over nine months during 1970, and one reason suggested for the delay was Nick’s unhappiness with the sound of the violins which featured on many of the tracks. Robert Kirby was again called in to arrange Nick’s music, with Joe Boyd producing, and John Wood engineering the album.
Robert Kirby: ‘Joe’s strength was that he was good at getting a team together who could work together properly … John Wood did fashion the sound, but in the first place, it was Joe who put the team together to get that sound. I think they made a very good pair.’
Joe Boyd: ‘Bryter Layter is certainly the record I felt most completely satisfied with. The one record I can listen to with unalloyed pleasure, and not think for a minute, oh, I wished I’d mixed that differently. We certainly put an awful lot into it. John Wood loved Nick, and I think took tremendous care, which you can hear in the way it stands up. I think the sound he got on Nick’s voice, the sound on the acoustic instruments, is just very, very good. We did have that feeling of real pleasure and excitement about the record. We remixed it endlessly … Whenever I’m stuck in a studio and I can’t face listening to a song again, I say: “Remember Bryter Layter … and remember how rewarding it is to listen to now.” It was only eight-track, but there were so many layers and different ways of approaching it.’
American drummer Mike Kowalski was another musician who worked on Bryter Layter: ‘Nick was shy, but he obviously knew his stuff. As a guitarist, I’m sure he knew Django Reinhardt and Joe Pass, his jazz playing was strong and rootsy. The drummer’s booth at Sound Techniques was tiny, but it was a big, comfortable studio. Joe Boyd hardly said a word. Nick was very much in control. He did all the communicating. He was very demonstrative. He’d demonstrate just what he wanted in the studio, improvise, and let you groove with it. I remember there were quite a few takes. He wouldn’t let the improvisation get out of hand. He would recognize certain accents, he would hear you playing embellishments and ask you to accentuate that. “At The Chime Of A City Clock” was like that. “One Of These Things First” I remember as being a special track. Nick had this weird-looking old box, an acoustic guitar which was amplified. There wasn’t anything he couldn’t play: jazz, waltz, 5/4. Ed Carter played my 1954 Fender Precision bass on “One Of These Things First”.
‘I got on fine with Nick. He was shy, but he came down to stay with my wife and daughter and I one weekend at Chilham. We had a beautiful old cottage in the village, and Nick came down. Maybe because I was American we could communicate. He talked about music, we were both young … We were kids, you don’t think about what’s going to happen. We were young, with hair down to our waist, smoking dope.’
Dave Pegg, who played bass on most of the tracks on Bryter Layter remembers Boyd playing a more influential role during the sessions: ‘It was a very exciting record for me to be involved in … you got things like a brass section, people like Ray Warleigh there. There were some really interesting players on some of that stuff. Most of it was done live, and it was done fairly quickly. You’d have the benefit of the arrangements that Robert Kirby did — he was a fantastic arranger, who had a really original approach … It was a noticeable development from learning the stuff at the Angel, which was all very skeletal.
‘Joe was more or less in charge of it in the studio. It was very much Joe and John Wood and Robert Kirby. It was actually a very fun thing to do. All those Bryter Layter tracks. You got a real buzz off what was happening, which is not always the way with recording. Moments of great joy in the studio very rarely happen … Nick’s was one of the most memorable and enjoyable weeks I’ve ever spent in there. I still play that record all the time … it’s one of the few records I’ve been involved with that I do play, all the time. And that isn’t just hindsight, before I had it on CD, I went through the vinyl copies.’
Bryter Layter was released on 1 November 1970. As ILPS 9134, it was one of the last Island albums to be released with the familiar pink label. It was sandwiched between John and Beverley Martyn’s Road To Ruin (ILPS 9133) and Cat Stevens’ Tea For The Tillerman (ILPS 9135).
Even before joining Island, and becoming Nick’s press officer, David Sandison was aware of the label’s cachet: ‘Island was one of those labels that if you leafed through the album racks, you stopped. It was like Elektra, like Atlantic … Nick’s initial sales I’m sure were to do with that thing about Island. I can remember buying Island albums even though I didn’t know the act — they just looked interesting … But obviously the hard-core folk lot would have known about Nick via the Fairport connection and Witchseason. He had done some gigs, and word might have spread, which would account for a
few hundred sales.’
In 1970 Martin Satterthwaite also joined Island, to work in the promotion department: ‘Island was very strong in the early seventies: they had the folkie stuff, with Nick, Richard and Linda, Sandy; the reggae side, which had grown out of ska and bluebeat; the rock side with Free; and then there was the pop side with Sparks and Roxy Music. At that time Island had the same sort of impact as Motown a few years earlier: if a record came out on Motown, you went out and bought it, you didn’t even bother to listen to it, you just trusted them.’
Although he only released three albums on Island during his lifetime, Nick is irrevocably associated with the label, and appeared on a number of other Island albums. It was actually these other releases which helped Nick reach the biggest audience during his lifetime. CBS had pioneered the budget sampler album in 1968 with The Rock Machine Turns You On, but Island were swift to follow in May 1969 with the enticing twelve-track You Can All Join In. As many of the artists as could be assembled, gathered shivering, at seven o’clock one cold winter morning in Hyde Park, for the cover shot. Nick has been rumoured to be hiding among the crowd, but at the time of the photo shoot his Island debut was still several months down the line.
November 1969 saw the release of another Island sampler, Nice Enough To Eat, which included, as well as King Crimson, Mott The Hoople, Jethro Tull, Fairport Convention, Traffic and Free, Nick’s ‘Time Has Told Me’. It was on this album that the bulk of late-sixties record buyers first chanced upon the music of Nick Drake. With their roster growing, Island were confident enough to make their third sampler a double album: Bumpers was released in early 1970, featuring Nick’s ‘Hazey Jane’, and was followed in 1971 by El Pea, which included ‘One Of These Things First’.
These were the records which made their way into back bedrooms and student digs, to be played and replayed as the all-important decision was made: which full-price album to buy? The problem was that while Nick Drake was alive and well and releasing records, there were a lot of calls on the purse-strings of his potential audience. Aficionados of singer-songwriters had new albums by Leonard Cohen, Al Stewart, James Taylor, Tim Rose, Tim Hardin, Michael Chapman, Ralph McTell and Van Morrison all competing for a place on their turntable. Nick was only one of a number of new acts trying to break through, and if he was to stand any chance at all it was with Bryter Layter.
The album is Nick Drake’s masterpiece. Bryter Layter is a record of timeless tranquillity and unimpeachable atmosphere, which merits comparison with Van Morrison’s moody and meandering Astral Weeks and Love’s unclassifiable and mysterious Forever Changes. Robert Kirby acknowledges a debt: ‘We were certainly listening to Astral Weeks heavily at that time … the string-bass playing, the violinist. It’s funny, that’s got a track about walking around Ladbroke Grove, and Nick’s got “At The Chime Of A City Clock”. There are similarities. And yes, we were listening to it a lot at the time …’
Bryter Layter extends beyond rock and folk. In its wistful mystery is a timeless, beatific calm; yet what chance did that have against the blitzkrieg steamrollering of the third album from Led Zeppelin? As an indication of what Bryter Layter was up against, among the albums which held sway on the UK charts during the twelve months from November 1970 were Simon & Garfunkel’s all-conquering Bridge Over Troubled Water, Motown Chartbusters Volume 5, The Rolling Stones’ Sticky Fingers, The Moody Blues’ Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, Rod Stewart’s Every Picture Tells A Story and John Lennon’s Imagine. A heady mixture of crowd-pleasing compilations, student favourites, and ex-Beatles.
Aside from the rock-steady rhythm section of Pegg and Mattacks, and the sterling lead guitar of Richard Thompson, one other intriguing name which appeared on the sleeve of Bryter Layter was that of ex-Velvet Underground founder John Cale. The Velvets had yet to be deified, but those in the know, knew their importance. Cale went on to a peripatetic solo career, and cropped up — like Woody Allen’s Zelig — at all the crucial moments in rock ’n’ roll history. The Velvet Underground’s white-noise enthusiast, he kicked the door open for David Bowie’s later experimentation (Bowie acknowledged the Velvets on the sleeve of his masterly Hunky Dory). Cale was also there at the birth of Punk, producing the debut albums of Patti Smith and Jonathan Richman, either of which could lay strong claim to being the first Punk album. Cale was also there for Squeeze and The Happy Mondays; Brian Eno and Nico; Lowell George and The Stooges …
Cale already knew Joe Boyd, and came to Bryter Layter immediately after producing Nico’s Marble Index album. In an interview with Mike Barnes for The Wire, Cale talked about his work on Bryter Layter: ‘I was doing a lot with Nico and it was on one of those trips that I met [Drake] … I had a 12-string and he’d never seen a D12 before, a Martin. And you know that very complicated picking he had? He just picked up the guitar and it was just like this orchestral sound coming out. He went nuts. He was sitting there stunned by it … I hardly ever dealt with him. I think it was Joe … One other way of developing what I did with Marble Index was to do Nick Drake and The Incredible String Band and whatever came around. Joe seemed to appreciate what I was doing. Everything he showed me was very interesting.’
The lushness of Bryter Layter seemed to make a strong impact on Cale: certainly his best solo album, 1973’s Paris 1919, was the most lavishly orchestrated of his career. Journalist Nick Kent remembers talking to him about his work with Nick Drake: ‘Cale said he was a genius musician, but you couldn’t talk to him, he was like a zombie, like he just had no personality left.’
Richard Thompson’s playing on Bryter Layter was singled out for praise, but he was dissatisfied with it. Talking to Connor McKnight in Zig Zag, while Nick was still alive, Richard talked about working with Nick: ‘He is a very elusive character. It was at Trident, I think, and I asked him what he wanted, but he didn’t say much, so I just did it and he seemed fairly happy. People say that I’m quiet, but Nick’s ridiculous. I really like his music, he’s extremely talented and if he wanted to be, he could be very successful.’
Linda Peters, who would later marry Richard, was at that time going out with Joe Boyd: ‘I remember being at the Nick Drake session, and it was difficult, because Nick didn’t talk, and Richard didn’t talk. I think that Richard felt that his work was very perfunctory on it … There was definitely a bit of rivalry there too, because Nick was Joe’s darling.’
Anthea Joseph, who knew both Nick and Richard, also observed some tension: ‘The rivalry between Richard and Nick … it was very difficult because they were all such babies – terribly young. They did get jealous … And Joe had made a great deal of Richard, quite rightly so, because he was so good, you could see it — a little jewel. But Nick required serious, hands-on looking after. And he trusted Joe, he trusted him implicitly, and I think that was really the base of their relationship. Joe was an extraordinary man, warts and all, and he took Nick on because he knew he’d got something rare …
‘Joe lavished himself on these people, and Nick in particular. But it was that sort of late teenage “He’s mine”, “No he’s not, he’s mine”, you know. Joe never showed any favouritism to anybody — but both the kids did feel — because they were both songwriters, good-looking … And they were at that rather tender age.’
Linda Thompson, who went out with Nick for a while, was another who noticed how much he and Richard had in common: ‘It was funny, going out with Richard and going out with Nick, there were those similarities. They were both very withdrawn and very remote, and they both had these glamorous older sisters, both very outgoing. When Richard would do a solo on Nick’s album, Nick would smile, he would like that.
‘There was a point when I thought Richard could go Nick’s way … Richard used to walk around with uncashed cheques, he never changed his clothes, he didn’t speak … I think it was very hard for him to pull himself out of that, but he’s a survivor, Richard, and he latched on to people who were outgoing, outgoing enough to pull him out of it. I think he made a definite effort to do that, and
Nick didn’t. Couldn’t.
‘There are people I know, like Sandy [Denny], who died young, and there are countless stories … But it’s a bit of a blank page with Nick.’
Dave Pegg remembers Nick as easy to work with: ‘The only thing was, you never really knew what he thought about it, whether he was happy or not, because he would never communicate. Probably Joe knew whether he was happy or not … It all went down fairly quickly. There were never any occasions where stuff was never going to work, where we had to completely redo the track in a different way, or try for a different feel.
‘The people they chose to play on those tracks were all from different backgrounds, that made it really exciting stuff to do … It must have been quite strange for Nick, because he’d not have had the experience of working with that many people, all in the same studio, all at the same time. Myself and DM had done lots and lots of sessions … Bryter Layter was certainly one of my best and most enjoyable experiences at Sound Techniques.
‘In a day we’d do three or four tracks, it was all very quick, everything was in those days, there didn’t seem to be all the faffing about that you get nowadays. In a three-hour session, you’d be doing two tracks. DM and I would go off and do things with Paul & Barry Ryan … I think we used to get £17 for a session, and then you got three quid porterage if you carried your own gear.’
Nick’s lack of communication, even about the music, was something that struck Danny Thompson too: ‘He was not very communicative about anything musically, which isn’t unusual. A lot of people, either because they’re in awe of you or something, they stand back in the studio. I reckon I’m a pretty normal geezer, I don’t think I’m very difficult to get on with; you just think, well, it’s their problem, whatever it is. There’s a shyness, and there’s something else – a deeper one.’
Bryter Layter is a beguiling record. The three instrumentals may teeter rather too close to Easy Listening, but otherwise the album is an enticing blend of folk stylings, jazz, blue-eyed soul and ballads. There is a fluency to Nick’s playing throughout, the Fairport rhythm section is rock-solid, and Robert Kirby’s arrangements enhance and enrich the musical textures. It is perhaps more than coincidence that John Cale appears on the album’s two best tracks. ‘Fly’, which is coloured by Cale’s viola and harpsichord, also features Nick’s most bruised and vulnerable vocal: faltering and stumbling, as if he is making it up as he goes along, the song gains a fragility and uncertainty which repays endless replays. The number begins with a plea, and there is a pleading note in Nick’s voice which speaks of vulnerability and the knowledge that commitment can only lead to hurt.
Nick Drake Page 14