‘I saw Nick at the Roundhouse,’ Ashley Hutchings recalls. ‘He was on a bill, a charity gig, with a friend, and I was playing with Fairport. I was in the audience wandering around before going on, and my eyes went to the stage … The thing that struck me first of all was his demeanour and his charisma. I didn’t take the songs in. He sang well, he played well enough, the songs were interesting. But it was Nick the person; Nick the figure on-stage which really registered. That is what made a really strong impression on me.’
Just three years older than Nick Drake, bass player Ashley Hutchings had founded Fairport Convention in 1967. He would guide the band through their classic years, effectively inventing English folk-rock with Fairport’s seminal 1969 Liege & Lief album, but soon afterwards he left. He went on to pursue his own vision of indigenous English folk music, played on electric instruments, with Steeleye Span and The Albion Band, with whom he still performs.
Ashley struggles to define exactly what struck him about that first performance: ‘It was a unique impact … because in no other case did I then go away and recommend an artist to a manager. I mean, instantly I went away to Joe and related that I’d seen Nick, been very impressed with him … To such an extent that I can’t remember anything about who played with him. I have been asked over and over who was with him — was it a guitarist, a bassist? But it was Nick I focused on. I went up to him after he came offstage and said how much I had enjoyed it, and did he have any plans? He said no, he was casting around. I said, well, I’m with Fairport Convention, we’re signed to Joe Boyd, and may I mention you to him? Or words to that effect. I recall him writing something down, a contact address or something … I definitely got a contact off him that night, otherwise he would just have vanished off into the underground of 1968.’
In later years, when Nick’s reluctance to perform to promote his records became legendary, it seemed ironic – almost incredible – that it was his stage presence which first alerted Ashley to his potential. Looking back nearly thirty years to that gig, Ashley tries to explain precisely what impressed him so forcefully about Nick’s performance: ‘I remember this very good-looking boy, who held himself very well on-stage, and I just thought, here’s someone who’s really got something. It contrasted so nicely with what was going on at the time – there was a lot of extravagance at that time. And he stood very still, and he performed very simply.’
David Wright, Nick’s schoolfriend from Marlborough, was also at the Roundhouse in 1968, but his memories of that crucial gig are rather different: ‘Somebody said: “Nick’s playing at the Roundhouse, why don’t we go?” … I have a vague recollection that as Nick came out, he was out of his head, capable of playing the guitar, but pretty smashed. He said what a big night it was because he was being watched by record company people, but it was obvious we weren’t getting through, it was all “Oh hi, man …” Country Joe & The Fish were definitely on, who were sensational.’
The precise date of the Roundhouse appearance which sparked Ashley’s interest is elusive and likely to remain so. Over the years, it has even been suggested that Ashley’s memory is at fault, and that he first saw Nick perform at Cambridge. Robert Kirby, who was more involved in Nick’s early Cambridge performances than anyone, thinks Cambridge a less likely venue: ‘I don’t know about the Roundhouse gig, but I don’t know where Ashley would have seen Nick perform at Cambridge … And Nick was down in London a lot. I would tend to go with what Ashley said.’
Journalist Pete Frame has a dim memory of seeing Country Joe wandering through the crowd at the Roundhouse, incongruously dressed in a sports jacket. But the Roundhouse was a focal point of the London underground scene, and gigs were held there frequently. Along with The Doors and Jefferson Airplane, Country Joe & The Fish were among the leading West Coast outfits, and one of the first to make the trip to Europe. The band’s UK debut at the North London venue in February 1968 seems on balance the likeliest occasion for Ashley’s discovery of Nick Drake.
On Ashley’s recommendation, Nick supplied a tape of four of his own songs to Fairport’s manager, a man whose name would come to be inextricably linked with that of Nick Drake. Joe Boyd was only twenty-six, but had already carved himself a considerable niche in British rock music by the time he first heard the name of Nick Drake. For his part, Nick was already familiar with Boyd’s name as producer of albums by Fairport and The Incredible String Band.
Born in Boston, USA, in 1942, Boyd was a fresh-faced music veteran. A former room-mate of Tom Rush and teenage friend of Geoff Muldaur (and later producer of Muldaur’s ex-wife Maria’s ‘Midnight At The Oasis’), Boyd first came to London in 1964, tour-managing The Muddy Waters Blues & Gospel revue. He was production manager at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival, best remembered for providing the platform for Bob Dylan’s controversial first electric performance. Dylan’s pick-up band that July evening were plucked from The Paul Butterfield Blues Band, whom Boyd had encountered earlier in Chicago. Impressed with Butterfield’s musicians, Boyd recommended them to George Wein at Elektra Records. Wein was suitably grateful and ‘as kind of a reward’ let Boyd run Elektra’s London office. Boyd arrived in London in November 1965 and within weeks London began to swing to the boom of the beat groups, and gentlemen’s hair began to edge over their ears. It was a time to be young.
Originally Boyd’s brief was to market the Elektra label in Europe by helping promote acts like Tom Paxton and Judy Collins, but overwhelmed by the wealth of indigenous talent London was producing, the young American began erring more towards A&R. Within a year of arriving in London, he was recommending to Elektra in New York that they sign new bands like Cream and The Move, but the label passed on both. One of the first acts Elektra did allow Boyd to sign was a group called The Powerhouse, a studio-only, blues-based supergroup featuring Eric Clapton, Steve Winwood, Paul Jones and Jack Bruce, who recorded briefly and anonymously for the label. The London underground scene burgeoned and Joe Boyd was the man with his finger on its pulse.
Throughout 1966 Boyd flitted around the happening hot spots of the capital. He co-founded the Notting Hill Free School, which led to his seeking a venue for charity gigs, which led in turn to the unveiling of the UFO Club. By 1967 Boyd had overseen the first recording sessions of two hotly tipped bands: Pink Floyd and Soft Machine, as well as producing the Floyd’s debut single, ‘Arnold Layne’. But Elektra passed on the Floyd, as had Chris Blackwell’s fledgeling Island Records, and EMI insisted on using a staff producer for the band’s first album. Frustrated by corporate obduracy, Boyd decided to go his own way.
Witchseason was initially set up late in 1966 as a production company to oversee Pink Floyd, but when the Floyd connection was severed early in 1967, Boyd kept the name, which was inspired by a recent Donovan hit, ‘Season Of The Witch’. Based in Charlotte Street (coincidentally crossing Donovan’s ‘Sunny Goodge Street’), Witchseason was unique at the time in offering its artists the complete package: management, concert promotion and record production.
Anthea Joseph worked alongside Joe Boyd at Witchseason. Her background was very much on the folk side of the London music scene – at one point she was running seven folk clubs in the capital every week. Such was Anthea’s reputation on the London folk scene that when Bob Dylan arrived in London for his first visit in 1962, he had been given two names to contact: Melody Maker’s venerable jazz and blues master, Max Jones, and Anthea Joseph. Anthea recalled those days at 36 Charlotte Street: ‘Hardly spacious accommodation. It was one of those Georgian houses, you went up a rickety staircase, you came to our floor. Joe had an office … I had an office, then we had a sort of open-space bit which people congregated in … There was very little furniture. And everything came off the back of a lorry … Very few chairs, so people spent a great deal of time sitting on the floor … We had a publishing company and then there was the record company, so we were Witchseason/Warlock. Warlock was the publishing company and that upset The Incredible String Band no end – and Nick, I might add. I thought he’d find it funny, but he didn’t…’ Boyd had signed The Incredible String Band to Elektra, where he produced their breakthrough albums: The 5000 Spirits … and The Hangman’s Beautiful Daughter. Otherwise, at the time he first heard the name of Nick Drake, Witchseason’s roster comprised Fairport Convention and John and Beverley Martyn. The first time Boyd remembers meeting Nick Drake was when Nick came into the Witchseason offices to deliver a reel-to-reel tape he had recorded in Tanworth during the Christmas vacation after his first term at Cambridge. There was something intriguing and quietly compelling about the songs on that tape, and to his eternal credit, Boyd recognized their quality straight away.
In a radio interview in 1986 he spoke of hearing Nick Drake for the first time: ‘The first time I heard the songs I immediately knew I wanted to make a record with him. The songs were just so much better than the things that I was hearing at that time. I think on that demo tape was “Time Of No Reply”, “I Was Made To Love Magic”, “Time Has Told Me” and one other track that ended up on Five Leaves Left [probably “River Man”] … and I just went home and played that tape over and over again.’
Fairport Convention’s first album had appeared on Polydor, but by 1968 the Witchseason acts had found a new home – at Basing Street, London W11 — with a company busy establishing itself as the British music scene’s leading independent label. Island Records was the brainchild of Chris Blackwell, who was born in London in 1937 but had spent an idyllic childhood growing up on the West Indian island of Jamaica. He was sent to public school in Britain, but was expelled from Harrow aged seventeen, and on returning to Jamaica, served as aide-de-camp to the island’s Governor-General, Sir Hugh Foot.
While living in Jamaica, Blackwell found work at various times as a water-skiing instructor, real-estate salesman, and early in 1961, location manager for a little film about a secret service agent, based on a novel written by a close friend of his mother’s. The film was called Dr No; the friend was Ian Fleming.
In 1959, as a teenager, Blackwell had spent a formative six months in New York, where he was mightily impressed by the enthusiasm and musical policy of the nascent Atlantic Records. On his return to Jamaica, he launched Island Records, and by 1960, had his first Jamaican number one: ‘Little Sheila’ by Laurel Aitken. Within two years Island Records had released two LPs and twenty-six singles. By 1962 Island’s Jamaican records were actually selling better in England, especially in the West Indian immigrant communities around London, Bristol and Birmingham. So on 8 May of that year Chris Blackwell boldly launched Island Records in the UK. The operation was run from his front room, with Blackwell delivering the product from the back seat of his Mini-Cooper. In 1989 he would sell Island Records to the Polygram group for an estimated £200,000,000.
In March 1963 Blackwell rented Island Records’ first premises, at 108 Cambridge Road, London NW6. Initially, sales were all to the Jamaican community, but ska and bluebeat were soon taken up by the Mods, who were busy roaring round the capital on their scooters. The labels on those early Island records were designed by a young advertising agency, Saatchi & Saatchi. Blackwell subsidized his quality Jamaican releases (including the 1963 debut single from one ‘Robert Marley’) with parallel product, including two albums of bawdy rugby songs and the risqué Nights Of Love In Lesbosl
Blackwell’s first hit came in March 1964, with ‘My Boy Lollipop’, by Jamaican teenager Millie, who later became one of only two acts to cover a Nick Drake song during his lifetime. Accompanying Millie to a TV appearance on Thank Your Lucky Stars, which was recorded at the ATV Studios in Birmingham, Blackwell was advised to check out an R&B quartet at a tiny club in the city. Hearing a fifteen-year-old Stevie Winwood belt out Ray Charles numbers in front of The Spencer Davis Group, he knew immediately that he was in at the beginning of something. But he also recognized that the potential of The Spencer Davis Group was too big for Island at the time, and though he went on to manage and produce the group, their records were licensed — as was the Millie record – through Fontana.
A run of hits throughout 1965 and 1966 confirmed Blackwell’s instincts about the commercial potential of The Spencer Davis Group and the teenage Stevie Winwood. They became the first white British act to be signed by Blackwell, and the signpost to the future of Island Records. By the end of 1966 the band were releasing harder, more pounding material such as ‘I’m A Man’ and ‘Gimme Some Lovin”, but eighteen-year-old Winwood was tiring of the pop restrictions of The Spencer Davis Group.
There was a definite schism between the commercial pop groups and the underground bands in the late sixties. Bands like Fairport Convention, Pink Floyd and Jethro Tull, who had emerged blinking from the underground and into the charts, would appear, faintly embarrassed, on Top Of The Pops to promote a single which had flukishly emerged as a chart contender. But the distinction between serious bands and pure pop groups like Marmalade, Dave Dee, Dozy, Beaky, Mick & Tich and The Tremeloes, was carefully maintained.
Within the first months of 1967 Winwood shook off his pop shackles and formed Traffic. Blackwell may have been concerned at the cost of Traffic’s debut album (a then staggering £5000), but the group were soon established as the first major Island act. As the sixties upped the ante, Island began its first golden age.
Following the floodgates opened by The Beatles’ Sgt Pepper album in June 1967, Blackwell was quick to appreciate how potent that new music could be. The other major labels soon jumped on the Progressive bandwagon, giving house room to underground bands on such labels as Harvest, Deram, Vertigo and Dawn. Island kept the higher ground.
David Betteridge was effectively Blackwell’s deputy at Island Records during the years that Nick was there. Appointed Managing Director of the label in 1968, it was he who handled the day-to-day running of the company during its glory years. Recognizing his MD’s sound commercial leanings, Blackwell allowed him his head when signing new acts. ‘I tried to sign Queen … Procol Harum, we all loved “A Whiter Shade Of Pale”,’ Betteridge recalls, ‘but they were wrapped up with a publishing house and we couldn’t get them. I can remember Chris and myself sitting down with Peter Grant trying to do a deal to sign Led Zeppelin, but we just didn’t have the money. A hundred thousand dollars, worldwide, including recording costs, excluding America.’
By September 1969, when Island released Nick Drake’s Five Leaves Left, the label already boasted Jethro Tull, Spooky Tooth, Fairport Convention and Free; waiting in the wings were Mott The Hoople and King Crimson. There was undeniably something special about Island Records during those heady years. Inextricably linked to the most innovative and exciting noises emerging from the underground, Island seemed somehow to stand outside the mainstream. If you bought a record released on Island, you knew you were in safe hands. You might not understand the album and be baffled by the obliqueness, but once that little pink ‘i’ began revolving, you could be sure you were in good company.
Another hallmark of good quality was the tiny image of a flying witch, which announced that the record now playing was a product of Joe Boyd’s Witchseason company. Throughout 1968 Boyd’s acts criss-crossed the country: The Incredible String Band, enchanting and irritating in equal measure; Fairport Convention, hauling up and down the pre-motorway roads, swerving from university campus to campus. But Boyd was keeping his ears open for something fresh, and Ashley Hutchings was able to provide that freshness.
Anthea Joseph: ‘There were the Incredibles, John and Beverley [Martyn], Fairport, Dudu Pukwana … and Nico (“Get me a television show.” “Where are you, Nico?” “I’m in a telephone box on Tottenham Court Road.” “How long are you in town for?” “I leave tomorrow to see my friend.”) … All sorts of odds and sods used to pass through there, but those were the core – Fairport and The String Band were really the serious ones, and of course Nick.’
Struck by the sounds he had heard on the reel-to-reel four-track tape, Joe Boyd signed Nick to Witchseason in 1968. Witchseason offered a unique three-tiered package to its act: management came through Boyd, as did the company’s record production, with Boyd as producer and John Wood as regular engineer. The company also offered music publishing through its Warlock Music arm, with offices in Oxford Street. Boyd even had a finger in the visuals – Osiris Visions, who produced a lot of material for the Island acts of the day, were linked to him.
The timing proved fortunate. In 1968, the year that Nick Drake signed his first professional contract, UK sales of long-playing records overtook singles for the first time. It was a sea change which would bring real benefits to artists like him. In 1968 the margin was only slight – 49,184,000 LPs to 49,161,000 singles – but it was sufficient to make the music industry far more inclined towards album-oriented acts. That Nick was perceived in this way is confirmed by the fact that during his career he never released a single.
Anthea Joseph recalled Nick’s earliest days at Witchseason: ‘I remember him arriving: this tall, thin, very beautiful young man … who didn’t speak. He could just about say hello to you, once he’d decided that you were a human being. And he wrote these extraordinary songs. He’d come in and he’d sit, just sit, doing nothing, reading the paper, watching the world go by.
‘Nick was signed to Witchseason … We had our own label, but Joe, as ever, was running out of money, and he and Chris Blackwell got together – like-minded persons, very similar sorts of people – and Chris, who was making it relatively big in this country at the time, suggested that he take over the Witchseason label. Joe said that he could do that, provided he had the Witchseason logo on the disc. So it was Witchseason, although Island controlled the work, and Joe remained the boss man as far as Witchseason was concerned. And it worked very well.
‘They were all on a stipend … It must have been something like £15 or £20 per week. It was a lot at the time; it was enough to live on without starving to death and you could pay your rent.’
Nick had written the ten songs which constituted his debut album over the preceding eighteen months. Friends from Marlborough recall hearing songs which appeared on Five Leaves Left for the first time in Aix during early 1967, and Cambridge contemporaries heard the same songs played in college rooms during Nick’s time at university.
The one weakness of Nick as a writer, the fundamental flaw, is the adolescent obsession with loneliness and the inability to communicate, which betrays his extreme youth when he wrote the songs. He wrote songs such as ‘Time Of No Reply’ and ‘I Was Made To Love Magic’ at an age when most people feel that no one understands them and that really meaningful communication is impossible. It is a landscape Bob Dylan recognized on ‘A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall’: ‘where black is the colour and none is the number’; a place the majority of us visit, but soon leave. For Nick, though, it became home, and he stayed there far too long.
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.’
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 dexterity 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 …’