Nick Drake (14 page)

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.