In July 1970 Joe Boyd decided that the songs of his Witchseason acts – Fairport Convention, John Martyn, The Incredible String Band, Nick Drake – needed to be better known. He hired a studio and employed a couple of session singers: his then girlfriend, Linda Peters (later Thompson) and Elton John. Reg Dwight had become Elton John in 1968, and was already carving out quite a living, mostly as singer and pianist for those 14/11d ‘Can you tell the difference between these and the original sounds?’ compilations.
Looking back, with the all the baggage of hindsight, it is hard to remember Nick Drake as anything but a frail, translucent, tragic presence. But there was a time back then when Nick was just another young singer-songwriter, ambitious as any of his contemporaries, and desperately keen to get his material across to as wide an audience as possible.
‘I wanted an album of Warlock Music songs,’ explained Joe Boyd, Nick’s mentor and producer. ‘We did Mike Heron’s songs, a couple of Nick’s songs, a John Martyn song … We pressed up 100 acetates, white labels. I never had any. Always the way!’
So ‘Elton Sings Nick’ were the first covers of songs by Nick Drake? Joe Boyd considered: ‘The only cover I’m aware of during Nick’s lifetime was by Millie. I think she heard it through Chris Blackwell. She covered “Mayfair” on an album, the one with her straddling a banana.’
Robert Kirby: ‘The Millie record came out in 1970. That was one of the first things I did when I left university, thrown in at the deep end with a proper reggae band. That’s the album with “Mayfair” on it. I produced and arranged it, and Nick was very pleased – it was a cover.’
The idea was to have something which could be sent out, for managers to play to music publishers, and on to their clients. It was a Tin Pan Alley tradition, and acetates of freshly written Lennon & McCartney compositions regularly turn up for sale at auction. Even the more established acts (Beatles, Bowie, Dylan) still demoed material, which was then pressed up on to acetates and passed around to interested parties. White-label acetates proved a godsend to bootleggers, and latterly, to the compilers of box sets and CD reissues.
The best-known acetate in rock ‘n’ roll was Bob Dylan’s The Basement Tapes. Culled from six months of loose-limbed jamming with The Band in the basement of their house, Big Pink, at Woodstock during Dylan’s enforced lay-off during 1967, a twelve-track acetate was circulated to interested parties in the UK during early 1968. That acetate achieved notoriety when – as The Great White Wonder – it became rock’s first bootleg during 1969.
Was the idea to get the likes of Tom Jones or Engelbert Humperdinck interested in covering one of Boyd’s protégés’ songs? That sort of crossover was not unfeasible; there had been precedents. The first person to record a Paul Simon composition was Val Doonican; the first commercially available cover of a U2 song was by Barbara Dickson; and the first person to cover a Beatles song had been Kenny Lynch – and John Lennon was only too grateful.
Of the 100 acetates that Boyd had pressed up, six are known definitely still to exist and only two have appeared on the open market, the most recent changing hands for £925. The enduring appeal of the Warlock Demo is not so much due to the handful of Nick Drake cover versions, but rather the identity of the singer who, though relatively unknown at the time of recording during 1970, later became Elton John. Elton’s days as a session singer used to barely merit a footnote, but the release in 1994 of Reg Dwight’s Piano Goes Pop imaginatively collected together the best of Elton’s anonymous vocal sessions, revealing the unmistakable sound of the man who would be king flexing his vocal cords.
Hindsight lends a curious perspective to the Warlock session: here is a man whose best-known records would fill the radio waves for the next quarter of a century – and, at one point during the 1970s, accounted for an astonishing 2 per cent of all records sold worldwide – singing the songs of Nick Drake. Elton was in great demand as a session singer for his interpretative ability, which is what makes his handling of ‘When Day Is Done’, ‘Saturday Sun’, ‘Way To Blue’ and ‘Time Has Told Me’ so striking.
Elton John was ‘unavailable for comment’ when I tried to reach him for his memories of the session, but he has been quoted as being impressed by the ‘beautiful, haunting quality’ of Nick’s songs. It is believed that when, in 1993, he sold off his collection of some 25,000 vinyl albums (with all proceeds going to AIDS charities), he kept only two back for himself: one was the White Album, which Elton had got signed by all four Beatles, and the other was his own copy of the 1970 Warlock Music sessions.
Following his work on Nick’s first two albums, Robert Kirby found himself producing and arranging a number of records during the early 1970s. Grateful for the start given to him by both Joe Boyd and Nick, he did his best to return the favour. Besides managing to place ‘Mayfair’ on the Millie album which he arranged, Kirby also remembers managing to get Nick some much-needed session work: ‘Everybody was a singer-songwriter. I did very well at that time … There was a guy called Mick Audsley on Sonet, a bluegrass player. I produced two of his albums, and Nick did session guitar on them. He’s not credited, but I got him some sessions playing rhythm guitar on those. The first album was Deep The Dark And Devilled Waters. He then brought out a single on Sonet called “The Commissioner He Come”, and I know Nick played an extra acoustic guitar on that. The second session for Mick Audsley was 1972, in Sound Techniques. I produced “Sugar Me” for Lynsey De Paul, the only thing I’ve ever earned a reasonable sum of money on, but Ralph McTell played rhythm guitar on that!
‘Arranging in those days was heaven. Everybody wanted strings! “Eleanor Rigby” and “Yesterday” were very English styles of string arrangement… I love American stuff, American orchestrations, like “Bridge Over Troubled Water” … but this country was different. Very little in America got string quartets, they always got the full Hollywood treatment… They always approached it differently … lush. The UK has always been more prepared to accept a chamber sound. I put that down to what George Martin did …
‘The other session I got Nick was for Longman, the educational publishers. I was singing, pretending to be a swagman, Nick played guitar, and a childhood friend called Rocking John played banjo … I was going out with a girl who was an editor at Longman, and it was recorded, I think, at their offices in Harlow. It was done within a year of us leaving Cambridge, so 1970/71.’
Interplay, The Longman teaching anthology record, is an intriguing and previously unsuspected addition to the known recorded works of Nick Drake. Nick plays on three songs: ‘Full Fathom Five’ and ‘I Wish I Was A Single Girl Again’, both sung by Vivien Fowler; and the traditional Australian pioneer song ‘With My Swag All On My Shoulder’, sung by Robert Kirby. The accompanying teachers’ notes for ‘Full Fathom Five’ reads: ‘This dirge, which has so many different musical settings, is here sung in folk style … Pupils could also suggest “modern” settings of traditional songs or tunes: the Top Twenty usually has at least one example’. Released in 1972, this Longman double album is probably the rarest of all Nick Drake’s recordings. So rare that even Robert Kirby does not own a copy.
‘Another thing I know Nick played on was a musical I wrote, which was never released … A guy had got a lot of money, and had a friend who wrote lyrics, and they needed twelve songs to go with them, which I wrote and linked them together. We had this grand design, it was going to be the new Hair. Nick came in and played acoustic guitar on that. I was trying to turn it into a medieval Mystery Play – it started with birth and ended with death … It never got as far as having a title.’
As a teenager, Nick grew up listening to the pirate radio stations, particularly Caroline and London, both of which first went on air in 1964, broadcasting offshore from ships outside territorial waters, to escape stringent government regulations. As a performer, though, Nick came too late for pirate radio, which was finally forced off the air by the Labour government in 1967. That same year saw the launch of BBC’s Radio 1, which was the only national channel playing pop music. Exposure on Radio 1 was crucial for any act hoping to happen. If you lived in Kirkcaldy or Bodmin Moor, you might be able to read all about the latest pop sensations in the music press, but likely as not, the only way you would ever get to hear them was on Radio 1.
To ensure that only music of the highest quality would be heard over BBC airwaves, acts had to submit to a trial by jury. The panel of BBC producers could approve a new act in two ways: either by assessing a recording by a producer who felt strongly enough about a new act to book them for an inaugural session; or by listening to a tape sent in by the artist concerned when they applied for a BBC session. Nick Drake’s BBC audition was his Radio 1 debut, which he recorded on 5 August 1969. Three of the four songs broadcast were then submitted to the BBC panel on 14 October, and six days later received a unanimous pass.
The panel’s report on Nick stated the obvious (‘sings his own songs and accompanies himself on guitar’), noted his ‘professional behaviour’ and ‘attractive vocal quality, somewhat reminiscent of Donovan’. Another anonymous producer saw Nick as ‘the type of artist who would appear on a John Peel record label’, finding the music ‘good of its kind, but limited appeal’. The report concludes: ‘At last, something that holds one’s interest from the start.’ Nick fared considerably better than David Bowie, who four years before had been rejected by the BBC panel as ‘a singer devoid of personality’.
Radio 1 was essential for disseminating your name if you were just starting out. The newly formed folk supergroup Pentangle, for example, played eight Radio 1 sessions for John Peel in 1968 alone. Not that there were that many opportunities for a left-field, album-orientated act like Nick, for while the name of producer Joe Boyd and the cachet of Island records guaranteed some press interest, that interest just didn’t translate into those all-important airplays.
Despite the listening panel’s approval, Nick’s radio debut remained a one-off, something with which Ralph McTell could sympathize: ‘We didn’t get any radio play. I got one play on my first album, and that was John Peel. I remember sitting at home and it came on the radio, and I went: “That’s me.” I was so excited.’
David Sandison shared the artists’ sense of frustration: ‘Nick wasn’t being played on the radio, because he wasn’t releasing singles. There may have been the odd John Peel play, but I think Bob Harris is playing Nick Drake more now than Nick Drake was ever played when those albums were out. How were people going to hear about him?’
In the early days of Radio 1, stringent Musicians’ Union regulations limited the amount of airplay which could be devoted to playing records, and what little needle-time there was, had to be shared with easy-listening Radio 2. To fill the remaining hours and ensure that the new sounds were heard, live sessions became the lifeblood of the new network. As marked as the split between Radio 1 and Radio 2 was the division on Radio 1 between the daytime Top Forty pop fodder – purveyed by Dave Lee Travis, Tony Blackburn and Noel Edmonds – and the underground sounds, as relayed by John Peel, Pete Drummond and Stuart Henry.
During the afternoon of 5 August 1969 Nick Drake made his way to the BBC’s Maida Vale Studios. The studios, where the bulk of Radio 1’s sessions were recorded, were only a few hundred yards from EMI’s Abbey Road Studios, where, that same day, The Beatles were recording ‘You Never Give Me Your Money’ and ‘Because’ for what proved to be their final album together, Abbey Road. Nick spent a couple of hours at Maida Vale’s Studio 5, recording four songs for broadcast on John Peel’s Radio 1 programme. Sitting alone, and accompanied only by his own guitar, he performed ‘Time Of No Reply’, ‘Cello Song’, ‘River Man’ and ‘Three Hours’ – the last three from his debut album, Five Leaves Left. When the session was broadcast the following night, 6 August 1969, it was the last time ‘Time Of No Reply’ would be officially heard until it became the title track of Nick’s posthumous fourth album.
Pete Ritzema was the BBC Radio staff producer who booked Nick for his radio debut: ‘I thought the Five Leaves Left album was amazing, so I booked him on the strength of that. I remember being slightly disappointed by the session because rather than come in and do free-flowing spontaneous versions of the songs, he just did the arrangements as they were on the record. So he left gaps for the string arrangements, while he’d just strum away. He was very concerned that he didn’t have the strings, he wanted to do it like the record, which is understandable, but I thought he would be a folkie, and come in and improvise, but he wasn’t up for that.
‘It was just him and an acoustic guitar. I was pleased that he did it, because his voice was so fantastic, but funnily enough I did have that feeling of disappointment at the end of it … I didn’t realize he’d never done another session. I hope I didn’t put him off. He was a gloomy fellow, very, very quiet. I don’t know of the whereabouts of any tape – I haven’t got one.’
Long after Nick’s death, rumours persisted that the Radio 1 tape still existed, and was to be made available on record. Certainly the Strange Fruit label were allowed access to the BBC’s archives during the 1980s, and began releasing half-remembered and legendary sessions on disc. Cult figures and contemporaries of Nick, such as Syd Barrett and Tim Buckley, had their Radio 1 sessions made available. Not the Nick Drake session, however. Radio 1 archivist Phil Lawton told me: ‘The Nick Drake tape doesn’t exist. The tapes were junked. Very few artists have a complete archive, not just Nick, but Pink Floyd, David Bowie, Led Zeppelin … Corporation policy in those days was to reuse tape – they were very concerned about storage space. You have to remember, in those days, and in their eyes, pop was very disposable. Radio 1 started in 1967, and I think that the BBC mandarins rather hoped that in two years they could go back to the Light Programme.
‘Some producers in the sixties and seventies didn’t agree with the BBC policy of reusing tape, so rather than junk sessions, they kept them, and they are filtering back to me. There is also the possibility that somebody could have a tape of the Nick Drake session which they taped off the radio at the time.’
Witchseason’s Anthea Joseph, who was still ‘nannying’ Nick as and when required, recalls him recording another Radio 1 session, which appears never to have been broadcast: ‘Joe said to me: “We’ve got Nick in the John Peel prog. You’ve got to take him down there.” It was at the Paris Studio, in Regent Street… I got Nick there, took him out, gave him dinner, and we went down there and he said: “I don’t want to do this.” I don’t want to do it. I’m not playing. It was just in the studio, there wasn’t an audience – but because it was going to be on the radio, in his mind that was like being in the Albert Hall.
‘It took hours to get this twenty-minute session. Bernie Andrews and John were wonderful … endless patience, the kindness – and every now and again Nick would get up and say: “I’m going now”, and head for the door, and I was like a whipper-in. I’d crack the whip on the door, going: “Back, back”, and he went back. We did actually finish it, but it was absolutely exhausting. I had to take him home too, because I wasn’t sure that he’d actually get there if I let him loose.’
For nearly thirty years that August 1969 John Peel session was believed to be Nick Drake’s only radio appearance – by the time independent local radio was introduced to the UK in 1973, Nick was in no fit state even to consider any radio work. Then, in 1997, Iain Cameron contacted me with details of a radio session he had undertaken, accompanying his old Cambridge contemporary: ‘I started doing sessions for Radio 2. Alec Reid had all these funny folkie types coming in … I said to Alec: “There’s a guy called Nick Drake, you should get hold of his record”, so that’s how Nick got the session, and because I’d made the lead, Alec said do you want to play on it?
‘So I went to his flat on Haverstock Hill. I guess it’s summer, so it might be a year after the May Ball, May or June 1970 … I found him much harder to work with in London. There was a … stranger atmosphere around. It’s the sort of thing that’s hard to put into words, but when you’re trying to work like that, you detect quite readily. He wasn’t giving anything …
‘In the studio was a celeste, a little keyboard. Nick saw this, and started fiddling about with it. And he did a version of “Saturday Sun” on this celeste. I didn’t know he played the keyboard, so that was quite a surprise. He had the song down as well on piano as he had on guitar … We did maybe four to eight songs. My impression is that Alec didn’t find him unbearably difficult to work with. He was a bit more communicative in the studio than he was at Haverstock Hill. I sensed that drugs could have been a factor there. That was the climate of the time; it may have been contributory in his decline.’
On 23 March 1970 Iain Cameron and Nick Drake spent most of the day in Studio S2 at Broadcasting House. The session was then cut up and broadcast between midnight and 2a.m. on the night of 13 April 1970. Disc jockey Jon Cruyer hosted that night’s edition of Night Ride, which was broadcast simultaneously on Radio 1 and Radio 2. As with the Radio 1 session, the tapes have long since been scrapped by the BBC, and producer Alec Reid told me he certainly has no copy of the session himself. BBC mandarins at the time were very strict with producers who wanted to keep sessions, reminding them of the illegality of the act.
Nick’s perception of his own failure was a lacerating wound, but with so few people actually getting to hear his music there was little that anyone could do about it. Island themselves, from Chris Blackwell down, were always strongly supportive of Nick, but they were also slightly baffled about what to do with the quiet young man who loathed performing. Blackwell told me: ‘He was very introverted … I liked him very much and also liked his music, although other than John Martyn, Island had never handled his style of music and I told him I was unsure that Island could do a good job for him.’
Tim Clark, Island’s production manager at the time of Bryter Layter, summed up the label’s feel at the time Nick was struggling to gain a foothold: ‘Marketing then was servicing stores with cardboard cut-outs of your acts, advertising in Melody Maker and so on. We knew the market. We knew who was going to buy the stuff, most of all we knew which shops they were going to buy it in … The independent shops were a lot more important then, back before the megastores and chains. There were some extremely good independent shops that stocked this new music; they were very enthusiastic. There were always pockets, London obviously, and university towns played a very important part. The university circuit was very important in those days …’
Meanwhile Nick Drake’s records sold in tiny, tiny numbers to people probably more attracted by the producer’s name than that of the artist. Pete Frame remembers how much cachet attached to the name of Joe Boyd: ‘He was the ultimate in taste and cool. Everything he touched, I thought, was fantastic. I loved The Purple Gang. Elektra Records was the best label ever … The Incredible String Band’s The 5000 Spirits, that was another of those instances of “Where have these songs come from?”, “How do people write these songs?” They were just so original and unique. Fabulous songs, and so off the wall instrumentally. You thought the guy was a genius, everything he had his name attached to you thought was brilliant.’