Nick Drake (15 page)

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 chords, 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.

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.'