Nick Drake's 'Five Leaves Left' - A worthy Grammy nominee

photo by Keith Morris

If awards mean anything for a musician, then a Grammy is something to aspire to. Nick Drake, a relatively obscure English songwriter and guitarist who died over 50 years ago, was never going to win one in his lifetime. Like Vincent Van Gogh, his genius was only recognised long after he died. 

And now, 56 years after it was released, a specially curated collection documenting the making of his first album, is nominated for a Grammy award for Best Historical Album. It would be some kind of poetic justice were it to win. 

The boxset 'The Making of Five Leaves Left' is a lovingly detailed account of how a shy young university student came to make a richly melodic and timeless album. 

As a historical record, it is pretty much faultless and a credit to the various people involved, from the Island Records archivists, to producer Joe Boyd and engineer John Wood, and the Nick Drake estate who are keepers of the flame. It's certainly worthy of the Grammy Award. 

Will it win? Well, it's up against Queen Joni - nominated for the Joni Mitchell Archives - Volume 4: The Asylum Years (1976-1980) - so probably not. Joni can seemingly do no wrong right now, and she deserves the acclaim. But if you know his story, it would be tremendously fitting to see Nick Drake get a Grammy.

{Post-awards note: As I thought, the award went to Joni Mitchell}

Nick Drake died in 1974, having made three albums that failed commercially. But the quality of his music would not be denied. Today there is considerable demand for 'new' Nick Drake material. Hence this box set, which documents the making of Nick’s first album from 1969, starting with the two earliest semi-formal recording sessions where Nick showcased his material. 

The Making of Five Leaves Left

Albums were not generally done as slowly as this. Nick was still at Cambridge during the making of Five Leaves Left, and so the album was recorded over 14 months' of sessions in London. That would have been an age in this period of musical revolution. By way of comparison, in a 14-month period in the mid-60s, the Beatles recorded Rubber Soul, Revolver and half of Sgt. Pepper.

On The Making of Five Leaves Left, we hear the evolution, from March 1968 to April 1969, of Nick Drake’s musical vision, guided by producer Joe Boyd and engineer John Wood, with the support of his university friend and string arranger, Robert Kirby.

Any work of musical archaeology will only be as successful as the treasure unearthed in the process. In this case, the almost miraculous retrieval of two early reel-to-reel tapes that pre-date the first formal recording sessions, are the holy grail items.

The so-called Beverley Martyn tape, which was the first showcase for Joe Boyd, kept safe by Nick’s friend (and John Martyn's wife) Bev, helps fill in the picture of how Five Leaves Left came to be commissioned in the first place.

The second key piece of the jigsaw that makes this package such a compelling collection, is the nine-song tape of Nick playing and talking, recorded at Cambridge in early 1968 by another university acquaintance, Paul de Rivaz and incredibly, preserved by him. Strangely, despite the tremendous interest in Nick Drake's music in the past 25 years, de Rivaz had kept it to himself, until recently.

What these tapes show is that as early as March 1968, many of the songs that would appear on the final album in May 1969 were almost fully formed. The guitar parts were more or less worked out. 

The assurance displayed in his singing and playing from the earliest tapes is striking. Here was someone with immense confidence in his material and determined to show it. 

I've listened through to the four record/disc set a few times now, and there are many aspects worth highlighting. Here are some of the things that have jumped out to me.

• There’s a piano line on Strange Face (Cello Song) from the first proper studio session in September 1968 (volume 1, track 7). It doesn’t really work, but it’s still an excellent accompaniment. Who is playing that piano is not clear from the session notes. It is possible Paul Wheeler was present at the session.
  
  
• It's interesting to see how Day Is Done progresses between the April and November ’68 sessions at Sound Techniques. Nick’s guitar playing during this period is so clear and well articulated, you can hear his confidence, and understand how Joe and John were so impressed with him. I think I almost prefer Day Is Done without the string quartet, because it makes Nick's guitar much more prominent.
  
  

  

  In the garden at Belsize Park

• The jaunty early versions of Time Has Told Me - on the Beverley and de Rivaz tapes - with great assurance in the guitar playing, contrast with the relatively sluggish final album version. It’s a different dynamic at play, and quite effective.
  
  One of my long-held views is that not enough prominence was given to Nick Drake the guitar player. Why, for example, does the album version of Time Has Told Me place Richard Thompson as the main accompanist?

Thompson - who also played electric guitar on an unused version of Thoughts of Mary Jane, that later appeared on the album Time of No Reply - regarded Nick as “quite extraordinary’ in his guitar playing.

“He played immaculately and uniquely on acoustic guitar, which isn’t an easy instrument to play in a flawless way. You get buzzes, you get fret noise. Not with Nick. He’d really worked at it very hard.”

Nick’s time in France and Morocco in 1967 intensified the focus on his guitar playing and would have broadened his musical vocabulary, resulting in the different rhythmic and tonal ideas, alternate tunings and the relative exoticism on display in Three Hours. 

• Hearing Nick explain his ideas for the arrangement of the unused song My Love Left With The Rain from the Cambridge tape, is one of the delightful surprises of this boxed set. Nick tells Kirby and de Rivaz “This is the one I want to have as expansive a sound as possible”, which makes it all the more curious why the song was never taken further. 
  
  
• Another of the May 1968 Cambridge tape curios, Blossom is a pleasant but unremarkable tune, notable for the work tape section at the end, where Nick shows the bass part, again demonstrating how prepared and assured he was in presenting his songs.  

The instrumental that follows this on the Cambridge tape is similarly illuminating in that it brings us closer to his compositional process, while also showing, as John Wood observed, his solid understanding of music theory.

“The most striking thing about Nick to me was how musically literate he was,” Wood told biographer Richard Morton Jack. “I’ve never worked with anyone else of that age who had that level of musical understanding and ability, as well as such a wide taste and knowledge of music.”

• On Thoughts of Mary Jane (Vol 2, track 5), Nick sings and plays the flute melody. Similarly, he knows that Day Is Done will have a string quartet accompaniment well before it is recorded.
  
  
• Nick talks about his ideas for I Was Made To Love Magic (Vol 2, track 3). Since this was only a matter of weeks after he had played the song at The Roundhouse, on the fateful day he met Ashley Hutchings, the version of Magic we hear on this tape must be close to what he played at the gig. Richard Hewson gets a bad rap generally for his arrangement work with Nick, but I've always liked what he did on Magic as it appeared on the Time Of No Reply album.

On the Cambridge tape, Nick apologises, “so badly played” (by his high standards) and then talks about his ideas for a different rhythm on Magic, with a latin-esque bass pattern.

Another Jobim-esque song (though possibly inspired by The Pentangle) follows. This is Mickey’s Tune, which was known only for its lyrics before the Cambridge tape was unearthed. And in the studio session on November 12 ’68 (Vol 2, track 12) it sounds like Nick is trying for almost a flamenco feel at the very beginning of Fruit Tree.

Alternative track order noted

I have always felt - going right back 40 years ago when I first took note of Fruit Tree as the opening track on the Heaven In A Wild Flower collection - that it might have made a better opening track for Five Leaves Left. And it nearly did, as the original master tape box for FLL has a suggested alternative numbering for the tracks.

That slightly hesitant, exploratory guitar line at the beginning of Fruit Tree is a more beguiling introduction to Nick’s world, and I feel it's rather hidden away on side two of Five Leaves Left.

• On the final series of sessions, on album 3, the version of Time Of No Reply is, to my ears, the same as the one that appeared on the 1980s album of the same name. 
  
  
• Along with Time Of No Reply, Mayfair was the other early song still being tried out at this late stage for inclusion on FLL. Both were ultimately discarded and never considered again for inclusion on a subsequent album. 

Richard Morton Jack wrote that it was striking that Nick remained loyal to Mayfair, in particular. “Perhaps he was fond of it as an echo of his mother’s style… although there’s a consensus that by 1969 it didn’t fit comfortably alongside his other material.”

Joey, a favourite of mine, and Clothes of Sand were likewise omitted in the final analysis and again, despite being an excellent showcase for Nick’s elegant guitar melodies, they were never considered for his following albums. They were all included on the posthumous Fruit Tree box set as part of a fourth album, Time Of No Reply. 

• Another musical snippet that was discarded by the final studio sessions is Nick’s lead into River Man, from the January 1969 session (Vol 3, track 4).
  
  
• Way To Blue, with just Nick on piano, is another revelation from the 1968 Cambridge tape (Vol 3, track 5). You might think it actually sounds good like this, but when Robert Kirby came to Sound Techniques for the first time in April 1969, to conduct the strings, he blew Joe and John away.

photo by Keith Morris

The sessions with the string ensemble were all done live, with Nick playing guitar. The first song Nick and Robert tackled was Way To Blue, which Joe and John had never heard. 

According to Richard Morton Jack, "Nick had initially written it for his own piano accompaniment, but he and Robert had since agreed – perhaps owing to the influence of Randy Newman’s I Think It’s Going To Rain Today – that its impact would be greater if he simply sang to the strings.”

Joe and John were sceptical. Having set up levels for each instrument, John gave Robert the nod.

“Suddenly, John pushed up all the faders. We heard this string part and we were both knocked back in our seats,” remembers Joe. “We thought, this is exquisite, just amazing.”

For anyone who knows and loves the original album, The Making of Five Leaves Left is a fascinating glimpse at the inner workings of an emerging talent. The weaving together of the varied source material, and the meticulous detail contained in the accompanying book, are truly a credit to the production team.

Credit is also due to Michael Burdett, for his role in bringing the Paul de Rivaz Cambridge tape to the attention of this album's compilers. Burdett will be familiar to anyone who has seen his one-man show - Strange Face - Adventures with a lost Nick Drake recording - about travelling the UK talking to random folk and a handful of celebs, while playing them a discarded early recording of Nick's Cello Song.

At the conclusion of one of these shows, Paul de Rivaz approached Burdett and explained that he had known Nick Drake. What's more, he had a recording of him. 

Not just any old recording, it turned out.

ALSO ON THIS BLOG:

A Visit To The Annual Nick Drake Gathering

Duncan Browne's Journey - and comparisons with Nick Drake

Nick Drake - Heaven In A Wild Flower 

An alternative to those predictable lists of classic albums

Sandy Denny and Fotheringay - A Beguiling Songbook

Blonde On Blonde - Bob Dylan's Artistic Peak In The 1960s

Duncan Browne's Journey - and comparisons with Nick Drake

One of my absolute favourite songs from the summer of 1972 was 'Journey' by Duncan Browne. It wasn't a massive hit single - number 23 in the UK charts - but it's one of those forgotten gems that evoke a more innocent time, driven by some nifty acoustic guitar playing. 

He released an album in 1973 called Duncan Browne. It contained Journey and several other similarly pretty and sometimes melancholy songs, such as My Only Son.

Browne accompanied himself on Spanish and electric guitar and there was some piano accompaniment from John 'Rabbit' Bundrick and bass and drums by Argent's Jim Rodford and Bob Henrit on some tracks. 

The mood evoked was not dissimilar to Nick Drake and there are clear parallels in how their careers progressed, or rather how they didn't progress.

Like Drake, Browne came from a well-to-do family. His father was an Air Commodore. Browne had initially planned to join the Royal Air Force himself, but chose instead to follow a musical path. He attended the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art, developing skills as a player and an arranger that would serve him well later.

Duncan's 1973 vinyl release

His first break into the music business came in 1967, when Andrew Loog Oldham signed Duncan to his Immediate label. The resulting album, Give Me Take You is a fine example of the classical and medieval-influenced folk music of the period. 

It didn't sell though and Duncan focused instead on work as an accompanist and arranger for the next couple of years.

In the early 1970s, Mickie Most signed him to RAK Records and the first fruit of this new patronage was the single 'Journey'. It was the surprise hit of the summer in 1972, a quirky tune with a bright and breezy lyric:

"Pack up your sorrow, put away your evening star
But don't change your clothes, I like you just the way you are"

and: "Soon we'll be sailors, sailing on the salty sea
Where the waves of the world would be the one and only company"

Artist and label were taken by surprise at the single's success, it seems, because it was many months before an album was ready for release. By then, the momentum had been lost and the Duncan Browne album was another commercial failure. 

Which is a shame because it's a fine album. The songs have a distinctive character and the guitar playing is excellent.

Clearly, the competition among singer/songwriter/guitarists was intense in the early '70s. It's not hard to see why artists like Richard Thompson and John Martyn succeeded. It's less clear why talents like Nick Drake, Dave Evans and Duncan Browne didn't. 

With Nick, we can say he failed at least partly through his own refusal to play live; his shyness and lack of stage banter (in marked contrast to John Martyn, for example) making it hard for him to tough it out on the gig circuit.

Duncan did at least try to gain a wider audience. He toured and gave interviews on the back of 'Journey'. He appeared on the BBC's Old Grey Whistle Test in February 1973, playing two songs from the album - the opening track Ragged Rain Life and My Old Friends. 

Watching the clip of Duncan, it's easy to imagine how it could have been Nick Drake up there being introduced by Bob Harris. I wonder if the BBC approached Nick. He did do at least one radio session for John Peel's Top Gear show in 1969. What a shame he didn't do a Whistle Test session, so at least we would have film of him performing.

As with Nick, Duncan's recorded legacy is fairly slim. One of his most engaging songs from the early 70s was the 7-minute B-side of Journey, called In A Mist. It displays his natural dexterity as a guitarist and conveys the story of a love lost, reflecting on the nature of fidelity, commitment and possession. It is open and beautiful in its melancholy, just as Nick Drake's songs are.

Again, the low sales of the Duncan Browne album convinced him that he was better suited to being a backing musician and arranger for others. 

It's not such an unusual choice for musicians who, for whatever reason, find themselves fated to be a sideman. Like Mick Ronson, who most often played second fiddle or arranger for other artists (Michael Chapman, Bowie, Ian Hunter, Dylan even). 

In the late 1970s Duncan tried again. He had a hit single in the Netherlands with The Wild Places and formed the band Metro with Peter Godwin; sales were modest. 

In keeping with the more polished stylings of Metro, his solo album Streets of Fire at the turn of the 1980s had hints of Dire Straits, especially in the opening track Fauvette. The pattern of commercial failure remained intact though.

His biggest commercial success came later, when David Bowie recorded the Metro song Criminal World on his massive selling 1983 album Let's Dance. By that time though, Metro had disbanded. 

Later in the decade Duncan was diagnosed with cancer. He died in 1993, aged 46. 

Duncan Browne sustained a reasonable career as a musician without ever making the big time. And perhaps he was content with that. He certainly hasn't enjoyed the same posthumous success as his contemporary, Nick Drake.

IF YOU LIKE MY BLOG, PLEASE HIT THE FOLLOW BUTTON ON THE SIDE PANEL THANKS

Also on this blog:
A Visit To The Annual Nick Drake Gathering

The Making of Five Leaves Left - A Worthy Grammy Nominee

Nick Drake: Better Album Programing Might Have Helped

2-Tone and possibly my best gig ever

Queen's 1976 Free Concert in Hyde Park

Memories of the Reading Festival, 1975

Five Days of High Drama at the Isle of Wight, 1970

From Pinner to LA - Elton's Big Breakthrough, 1970

My Woodstock 50th Anniversary Diary

A Wizard, A True Star - my all-time favourite album

Blonde On Blonde - Bob Dylan's Artistic Peak in the 1960s

 Joni Mitchell - The Hissing of Summer Lawns

A visit to the Annual Nick Drake Gathering

Summer 2019 - Last weekend, I was invited by a friend to the annual 'Gathering' at Tanworth-In-Arden, a small village in rural Warwickshire. It's a celebration of Nick Drake's music, with musicians from across the world volunteering their versions of Nick's tunes.

I am a fairly committed fan of Nick Drake's music, which is to say I have the three albums he made during his short life, a couple of posthumous compilations and I've read his sister Gabrielle's companion book, Remembered For A While. I've also learnt a few of his songs on the guitar. Nick was, above all, a very talented guitarist, so I understand how daunting it might be to perform his songs in front of an audience that knows them well.

The Nick Drake Gathering, held over a weekend and now in its 14th year, remains a low-key affair. It is held just a few yards from his family's former home - the place where he wrote and demo'd many of his songs - and where he died, aged 26, in November 1974.

The local villagers are largely tolerant of the intrusion, since this is not a profit-making venture. The organisers and the people who attend do it out of love and admiration for Nick Drake's music.

On Friday evening, the village hall at Tanworth is packed out with people who have come from all over the country, and some from abroad, to pay their respects in song.

Many of them have also been drawn in by the introspective nature of Nick - the shy man from a well-to-do background - the guitar prodigy whose mental health suffered, in part at least, from a failure to gain widespread recognition for his undoubted talent.

The three albums he released in his lifetime failed commercially and Nick withdraw from live performance very early in his career, which made it very difficult for his music to reach a wider audience.

There are several books about Nick's life and music, the most detailed of which is 'Remembered For A While' a document of his life and a compendium of his music, compiled by his sister Gabrielle with Cally Callomon, who manages Nick's estate.  (EDIT. this was written before the publication of Richard Morton Jack's excellent book, Nick Drake - The Life).

Remembered For A While is a window on Nick's early life and the travels that helped nurture his musical talent. Articles by friends and acquaintances, and by Gabrielle herself, reveal facets of his character, often contradictory, which only adds to the intrigue. 

The book also contains some heartbreaking diary entries and correspondence from his parents. The letters where his father Rodney tries to convince Nick not to drop out of Cambridge, nine months before graduation, are particularly poignant in the light of subsequent events.

'Far Leys' - where Nick lived with his family

Visiting Nick's home town, you realise he must have had a fairly idyllic upbringing amongst the grand houses and the surrounding fields.

We drove past Far Leys, the impressive red brick mansion that was the Drake family home. We then paid a visit to Nick's grave in the village churchyard. A modest headstone sits beneath a mature oak tree.

A polite noticeboard on the tree asks that people respect that this is a family grave site and to be mindful not to clutter it with fan tributes. Most people are respectful of this but there have been reports in the past of people chipping bits off the headstone.

The village of Tanworth-In-Arden

Back at the village hall, the evening's performances begin, with each artist allowed to play two songs. Most choose to play one of Nick's and one of their own. Some of the performers are accomplished players and singers; some less so, but that just adds to the charm of the evening.

Nick's guitar playing was often quite complicated, so it is no mean feat for any musician to get up and try to play it in front of an audience that knows the music intimately.

Among the highlights is a beautiful rendition of Place To Be by 27 year-old George Boomsma, similar in style to Nick's early home demo version (tuned drop D rather than Nick's CGCFGE) that has the arpeggiated guitar figure, instead of the strummed version that appeared on the Pink Moon album. George played and sang it very well, receiving the loudest ovation of the evening and drawing a few tears from those around me.  

At the interval, I spoke to George about his version, and we agreed it is a mystery why Nick didn't play the song like this on the album. He was accompanied at the Gathering by his friend and fellow singer/songwriter Katherine Priddy. Here they are, duetting on the Bert Jansch tune Black Water Side.

The band hazeyjane do an imaginative interpretation of the track Know (from Pink Moon) which emphasises the underlying beat of the song by the simple expedient of the guitar player stamping his foot.

A couple from Brazil (pictured here) also choose Know but with a very different rhythmic style that I thought quite amusing, but I think it baffled a lot of people. Generally it is the performances that stay faithful to the spirit of the originals that goes down best with the audience.

At the last, a first-time performance of  I Was Made To Love Magic (from Time Of No Reply) brings the evening to a satisfactory close.

Sound man Peter Rice, who was at Cambridge with Nick, told the audience that 'Magic' was the first song he ever heard of Nick's and it remains one of his favourites.

It is a strange feeling, to be sitting in a hall so close to where Nick had lived and to be listening to his songs being played to a devoted audience all these years later. But at the same time, it is in keeping with the romanticism and the innocence evoked by much of his music.

On Saturday, a second concert is held at the church

I found the whole experience gave me a deeper appreciation of what a gifted musician Nick was, and how his music lives on through all these different interpretations.

In this video about the annual Nick Drake Gathering, made in 2012, Peter Rice (at 7 mins 30) revisits the site of Nick's first recital as a solo artist, performing with a string quartet orchestrated by Robert Kirby, who did many of the arrangements on Nick's first two albums.

The 2020 Nick Drake Gathering was cancelled because of COVID-19. The organisers made the best of the situation though, and invited people to contribute to an online festival. This was aired on the 26th July 2020. It contains some newly contributed videos and some of the best performances from previous years.

Here's the link to The Virtual Nick Drake Gathering

The live Gathering returned in 2022 and I took my daughter along. When she was six or seven years old, Pink Moon was one of her favourite songs, so we always had to have the album in the car.

On this visit to Tanworth, we went on the Saturday for the concert in the village church of St Mary Magdalene, where Nick had played the organ as a boy. 

It was a particular treat to see that a few of the performers had mastered the more complex guitar parts of songs such as Three Hours, the unreleased Far Leys and the aforementioned Hampstead demo of Place To Be. Robert Barnett deserves a special mention for, I think, capturing the most precise notation and indeed spirit of the songs. Here is his performance at the 2022 Gathering.

I hope to return to the Gathering one day. If you have the opportunity, it's well worth a visit. 

IF YOU LIKE MY BLOG, PLEASE HIT THE FOLLOW BUTTON ON THE SIDE PANEL THANKS

See also on this blog: 

The Making of Five Leaves Left - a worthy Grammy winner 

Nick Drake - Heaven In A Wild Flower

Duncan Browne's Journey - and comparisons with Nick Drake

Nick Drake - Heaven In A Wild Flower

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 how I came to love his music.

It was the guitar playing that caught me first, 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.

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.

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 plod and a 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.

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 significant 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.  

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. 

His voice draws you in, masterfully recorded by engineer John Wood. Above all else though, Nick was an excellent and original composer for acoustic guitar. His playing was clean and often highly technical. That slightly hesitant, exploratory guitar line at the beginning of Fruit Tree is your doorway into his world.  

Cello Song was track 2 on ‘Heaven…’ upping the tempo and building the intrigue with a more assertive (and tricky) 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. But it's important, with an artist like Nick, to set the scene properly. Song programming is so important on records. 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 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. You'd think the sheer quality of the songs would have been enough to gain wider recognition. But the world still wasn't ready. Heaven In A Wildflower was actually deleted by the time Drake's music started to really become popular in the late 1990s. 

 

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

At about the same time as Heaven In A Wildflower in the mid-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 on Time Of No Reply 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. There is no question that he 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 booze-fuelled bravado of a John Martyn, didn't have the banter to keep the audience engaged.  

Nick's refusal to actively promote the records by playing live would have been extremely frustrating for the marketing people at Island Records, who had many other artists to focus their attention on. 

As Nick himself wrote to a 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 LIKE MY BLOG, PLEASE HIT THE FOLLOW BUTTON ON THE SIDE PANEL THANKS

See also on the blog:

The Making of Five Leaves Left - A Worthy Grammy Nominee

A Visit to the Annual Nick Drake Gathering

Duncan Browne's Journey - and comparisons with Nick Drake