Nick Drake - better programming might have helped

As this weekend marks the annual pilgrimage of Nick Drake’s most devoted fans to Tanworth-In-Arden - the village in Warwickshire where his family lived - I thought I would explain my contention that his records were perhaps not presented optimally.

I fell in love with Nick's music for the guitar playing, and specifically the harmonic richness of his sound through the use of alternate tunings. I don't think enough was made of his pure talent as a guitarist during his short career.

After he died, in November 1974, I had read Nick Kent’s NME long-form obituary, ‘Requiem For A Solitary Man’, which familiarised many people with his story, if not his music. Even that excellent piece wasn’t enough to generate more interest and sales of Nick’s three albums, Five Leaves Left (1969), Bryter Layter (1970) and Pink Moon (1972). For myself, I knew them then, but I only grew to love them later.  

In the mid-80s I bought a cassette copy of an Island Records retrospective called ‘Heaven In A Wild Flower - An Exploration Of Nick Drake‘. I played it constantly (you remember how cassettes in your car stereo would loop continuously). It is pretty much ‘The Best Of Nick Drake’, cherry-picking tracks from the three albums in roughly chronological order.

My copy of Nick's first album

For me, the key to this new appreciation was the sequencing - the order of the songs. Heaven In A Wild Flower works so well as a compilation because there's a seamless musical arc created by the first few songs. 

It also, from the outset, highlights Nick Drake the guitarist. His first album, Five Leaves Left, begins with the song Time Has Told Me. I've never understood why this song was featured so prominently, here and on subsequent sampler albums. To me it's a lacklustre and rather old-fashioned arrangement. It certainly doesn't highlight Nick's guitar playing at all.

Heaven In A Wild Flower begins instead with Fruit Tree, a beguiling introduction to Nick Drake’s world, previously hidden away on side two of Five Leaves Left.

Above all else, Nick was an excellent acoustic guitar player, and that slightly hesitant, exploratory guitar line at the beginning of Fruit Tree is your doorway into his bedroom at the family's grand Warwickshire home, Far Leys, where he worked up most of his early songs.

Cello Song was track 2 on ‘Heaven…’ upping the tempo and building the intrigue with a more assertive guitar figure and some inspired accompaniment from bassist Danny Thompson and conga player Rocky Dzidzornu. Then comes ‘Thoughts Of Mary Jane’, with its lilting pastoral melody. Over the first three tracks, a variety of moods have already been created.

Not taking anything away from the individual songs on Five Leaves Left - River Man and Three Hours especially are astonishingly accomplished pieces. Song programming is so important on records, though, and I genuinely believe that if Five Leaves Left had been programmed differently, it would have been more successful.

And it very nearly was.

The original master tape box for Five Leaves Left has a suggested alternative numbering for the tracks, as follows:

Side One

Fruit Tree

Cello Song

Thoughts of Mary Jane.......

River Man is suggested as track 5, instead of track 2 as it appears on Five Leaves Left.

I’d have been hooked on Nick’s music much sooner if Fruit Tree had been the first track on Five Leaves Left. The song programming could certainly have been better. I’d like to believe that is why Heaven In A Wildflower is programmed as it is, because Joe Boyd, or someone at Island, decided to try the sequencing suggested on the original tape box. 

 

Having said all the above, this new bid to gain acceptance for Nick Drake in the 1980s made not the slightest difference to his sales numbers. The compilation was actually deleted by the time Drake's music started to really become popular in the late 1990s. You'd think the sheer quality of the songs would have been enough to gain wider recognition. 

 

An original pressing of the second album, Bryter Layter,
with the two posthumous compilations on cassette, all quite rare today

Around the same time in the 1980s, I bought a compilation issued by Joe Boyd's Hannibal Records, called Time Of No Reply. This contains early demos, outtakes from Five Leaves Left and some songs that might have made it onto a fourth album. They were recorded as far back as 1968 in some cases. It is hard to understand why some of them (the title track, Joey and Clothes of Sand for example) were not released during his lifetime. His playing is clean, crystal clear and emotionally engaging, sometimes painfully so. The album also included songs from his last recording sessions, including the bleak cri de coeur 'Black Eyed Dog' and the simple beautiful melody of Voice From The Mountain.

Many of the songs are certainly good enough to have been included on previous albums, but it wasn't until after Nick died and they checked the vaults for unreleased material, that Boyd and engineer John Wood realised what treasures they still had.

It's easy with hindsight to speculate whether Nick could have been better presented as an artist. Personally, I think maybe they should have marketed him less as a singer-songwriter and more as a guitarist. It seems that Nick's refusal to actively promote the records by playing live frustrated the marketing people at Island Records, who had many other artists to focus their attention on.

There is no question that Nick Drake possessed the talent to have made a successful career in music, if circumstances had been different. He was a gifted guitar player, but because he used a number of different tunings, he needed time to retune his guitar between songs. Audiences at his few concerts would become restless and Nick, lacking the street-wise bravado of a John Martyn, didn't have the banter to keep the audience engaged.  

As Nick himself wrote to a prospective psychotherapist in 1973, "There was a lot of pressure around, and I suppose I sort of cracked up."

 

His withdrawal from live performance was undoubtedly a major factor in his failure to break through. His only known radio session was recorded for John Peel between the first two albums. This was all well before the video age. There is no film of him in any form as an adult. 

 

The indifference of the record buying public must have come as a shock to Nick, especially after the sacrifice he made by dropping out of Cambridge in his final year. His deepening depression has been well-documented, but perhaps not enough has been said about the lighter side of his personality. 

 

The hardback book compiled by his sister Gabrielle, entitled 'Remembered For A While' gives a well-rounded account of Nick's life and shows how the darkness that fell on him was perhaps not inevitable.

Nick's music is a very personal thing, but I was delighted to find that the annual gathering at Tanworth is an uplifting celebration. Although he didn't live to see how much his music has touched people, there is some consolation in the fact that his music lives on and now inspires many millions of people around the world.

If you’re still wondering what all the fuss is about Nick Drake, get hold of a copy of 'Heaven In A Wild Flower'. It’s the perfect introduction.

See also on the blog:
A Visit to the Annual Nick Drake Gathering

Duncan Browne's Journey - and comparisons with Nick Drake