Nick Drake (18 page)

Low sales have been cited as a reason for Nick's growing depression, but they were not uncommonly low for a debut album from an unknown singer-songwriter. The previous year, Ralph McTell's debut,
Eight Frames A Second
, sold barely 3000 copies. To try to boost sales of
Five Leaves Left
, Nick did, reluctantly and sporadically,
go out to try his hand at promoting the album, but the gigs were fragmentary and disappointing.

Folk singer Bridget St John, who was just beginning her career, was working the same circuit as Nick and remembers him as a kindred spirit: ‘We write differently, but in some ways from a similar sensibility. The gigs I did with him were mostly at Les Cousins, on Greek Street in Soho, from 1969 onwards. I have a picture of the two of us one summer evening, sitting quietly on the steps outside a pub a little north of Cousins on the opposite side of the street. We never talked a lot but this night was probably a little different – or it wouldn't have stayed with me. My feeling is that mostly we understood each other without the need to say much. Both shy and best able to say things through songs rather than conversations.'

The end of the first year of the new decade lay bitten and spat out, like an old cigar. All the conflicts and confusion, all the tension and buoyancy which the sixties had raised, remained unresolved at the end of 1970.

The Beatles had been the fairy tale which obsessed the sixties, but the new decade did not bring a happy-ever-after ending, just a bitter, protracted and very public break-up. The deaths of Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin within weeks of each other in the new decade's opening year also seemed to presage pessimism, rather than an overspill of sixties optimism.

Anthea Joseph's working days were spent around the Charlotte Street offices of Witchseason: ‘I was the in-house nanny. My job was looking after Fairport particularly, but if they were off somewhere, and I was in London, I was given someone like Nick to nanny. He needed more nannying than most, because he
loathed
live performing – he was difficult enough in the studio, where he hadn't got an audience, but Joe had endless patience with the most difficult people – Nick in particular. So he was given space to do what he wanted, when he wanted to do it. When he was in the right frame of mind …'

Boyd's idea of a Witchseason family was partly altruistic, in keeping with the communal vibe of the times, but it was also economic. Offering management and agency representation, Witchseason could cut costs by having artists help each other out on record. Late in 1969, Fairport Convention had moved to a converted pub called the Angel, in the village of Little Hadham, near Bishop's
Stortford. A few months later Nick paid a visit to the Angel to rehearse with Fairport guitarist Richard Thompson, bassist Dave Pegg and drummer Dave Mattacks, who would accompany him on his next album.

Dave Pegg: ‘It was sometime during early 1970. It was actually very good fun, because we had a rehearsal room there, which was very rarely used … Nick came down for about three or four days … He was so introverted, you could never tell if he liked stuff or not, but we got an awful lot done in that time. It was just running through arrangements for
Bryter Layter
. He had all the songs, and fairly positive ideas about how he wanted them done. His songs were fairly guitar-based, and he was a great guitarist. That was enough, really, on a lot of those things – they were so complete with what he did, and it was early days, we were only learning rhythm-section things.'

In London, Robert Kirby was aware that Nick lived in a succession of different places: ‘I remember Nick in a flat down in Earls Court that someone had lent him. There was a monkey that used to sit on the record player going round … That was one of his bolt-holes. Nick used to have a lot… Certainly he was in Haverstock Hill while we were recording
Bryter Layter
. His was the back room on the ground floor overlooking the garden on the corner … french windows opening out… Very imposing, large, Gothic house which has been demolished … Bare floorboards from what I remember; a record player, a few books, a guitar, a single bed, posters on the wall. He got more minimalist as time went on.'

It was in this big, rambling, Victorian house near Chalk Farm Tube, in his ground-floor room, sparsely furnished, that Nick wrote the songs which would form his second album,
Bryter Layter
.

Haverstock Hill winds up into Hampstead village. To the north, beyond the tall, looming, Victorian properties, lies Hampstead Heath. It is one of the most appealing addresses in London: Martin Carthy had lived there in the early sixties as he began making his mark on the London folk scene — Anthea Joseph remembers Carthy and his wife and a young Bob Dylan chopping up a piano for firewood during the bitter winter of 1962. Richard and Linda Thompson occupied a property just off Haverstock Hill in the seventies, and The Strawbs' song ‘Pieces Of 79 & 15' referred to properties the band once occupied in Haverstock Hill.

Brian Wells remembers how Nick continued to compartmentalize his life even when he was living full time in London: ‘He had all these mysterious friends in London, and he would keep all his friends in
different compartments, and would kind of allude to “Well, I've got these friends in London”. They were rather special people … He would say, I'm doing a record, doing these sessions, but I never met John Wood. I never met Joe Boyd. I never met any of these people. They were names that Nick would occasionally allude to. I guess he was quite good at keeping people at a distance. In Cambridge I felt he and I were buddies, and then subsequently when he was living in Haverstock Hill, I would go and see him, and by then he'd become odd … I think
Bryter Layter
was being recorded around then. I remember being in a room with Nick with Robert Kirby, and Nick was playing Robert some of the songs, some of the tracks that needed to have arrangements on them.'

Nick's Hampstead period boasts all the hallmarks of poetic bohemianism: the artist, alone and suffering for his art (Arthur Lubow had the Hampstead room ‘so cold that he took the mattress off the bed, dragged it near the gas fire, and piled up blankets for warmth'). But Molly Drake felt that it was while he was in his bedsit in Haverstock Hill that ‘the shadows closed in' around her son. It seems that at some point, bohemian isolation gave way to lonely depression.

Anthea Joseph, who spent many hours sequestered with Nick — at Witchseason, backstage at concerts or in radio studios – concluded that he was paranoid: ‘He wouldn't let you in … I felt he was really terrified of the human race. Everything was a nightmare. But he wasn't nasty, not at all. He'd just go and sit in the corner. He wouldn't throw paddies and jump up and down. He'd just say: “I'm going”, and then you'd have to persuade him to come back. He really was frightened. It was difficult, because it's so hard to deal with people like that, because you can't talk to them. Because they won't talk. Richard, Sandy, John Martyn, were all extremely serious — and in their individual ways were equally difficult to deal with. But you could talk to them, which was the difference … I don't remember any “ordinary” conversations with Nick. Never, not one. That's what was so weird, because mostly with almost anybody that you see on a weekly basis, some sort of conversation developed, even if it's only “Where's my beer?” “Can't I have some more money?” Never even that. He'd just come in, and
be
there, but wouldn't talk.'

Nick ventured out sporadically to gig, and fairly frequently to Chelsea – where the Sound Techniques studios were located, close by the Thames – to begin recording his second album for Island. The recording of
Bryter Layter
spread over nine months during 1970, and
one reason suggested for the delay was Nick's unhappiness with the sound of the violins which featured on many of the tracks. Robert Kirby was again called in to arrange Nick's music, with Joe Boyd producing, and John Wood engineering the album.

Robert Kirby: ‘Joe's strength was that he was good at getting a team together who could work together properly … John Wood did fashion the sound, but in the first place, it was Joe who put the team together to get that sound. I think they made a very good pair.'

Joe Boyd:
‘Bryter Layter
is certainly the record I felt most completely satisfied with. The one record I can listen to with unalloyed pleasure, and not think for a minute, oh, I wished I'd mixed that differently. We certainly put an awful lot into it. John Wood loved Nick, and I think took tremendous care, which you can hear in the way it stands up. I think the sound he got on Nick's voice, the sound on the acoustic instruments, is just very, very good. We did have that feeling of real pleasure and excitement about the record. We remixed it endlessly … Whenever I'm stuck in a studio and I can't face listening to a song again, I say: “Remember
Bryter Layter …
and remember how rewarding it is to listen to now.” It was only eight-track, but there were so many layers and different ways of approaching it.'

American drummer Mike Kowalski was another musician who worked on
Bryter Layter:
‘Nick was shy, but he obviously knew his stuff. As a guitarist, I'm sure he knew Django Reinhardt and Joe Pass, his jazz playing was strong and rootsy. The drummer's booth at Sound Techniques was tiny, but it was a big, comfortable studio. Joe Boyd hardly said a word. Nick was very much in control. He did all the communicating. He was very demonstrative. He'd demonstrate just what he wanted in the studio, improvise, and let you groove with it. I remember there were quite a few takes. He wouldn't let the improvisation get out of hand. He would recognize certain accents, he would hear you playing embellishments and ask you to accentuate that. “At The Chime Of A City Clock” was like that. “One Of These Things First” I remember as being a special track. Nick had this weird-looking old box, an acoustic guitar which was amplified. There wasn't anything he couldn't play: jazz, waltz, 5/4. Ed Carter played my 1954 Fender Precision bass on “One Of These Things First”.

‘I got on fine with Nick. He was shy, but he came down to stay with my wife and daughter and I one weekend at Chilham. We had a beautiful old cottage in the village, and Nick came down. Maybe because I was American we could communicate. He talked about
music, we were both young … We were kids, you don't think about what's going to happen. We were young, with hair down to our waist, smoking dope.'

Dave Pegg, who played bass on most of the tracks on
Bryter Layter
remembers Boyd playing a more influential role during the sessions: ‘It was a very exciting record for me to be involved in … you got things like a brass section, people like Ray Warleigh there. There were some really interesting players on some of that stuff. Most of it was done live, and it was done fairly quickly. You'd have the benefit of the arrangements that Robert Kirby did — he was a fantastic arranger, who had a really original approach … It was a noticeable development from learning the stuff at the Angel, which was all very skeletal.

‘Joe was more or less in charge of it in the studio. It was very much Joe and John Wood and Robert Kirby. It was actually a very fun thing to do. All those
Bryter Layter
tracks. You got a real buzz off what was happening, which is not always the way with recording. Moments of great joy in the studio very rarely happen … Nick's was one of the most memorable and enjoyable weeks I've ever spent in there. I still play that record all the time … it's one of the few records I've been involved with that I do play, all the time. And that isn't just hindsight, before I had it on CD, I went through the vinyl copies.'

Bryter Layter
was released on 1 November 1970. As ILPS 9134, it was one of the last Island albums to be released with the familiar pink label. It was sandwiched between John and Beverley Martyn's
Road To Ruin
(ILPS 9133) and Cat Stevens'
Tea For The Tillerman
(ILPS 9135).

Even before joining Island, and becoming Nick's press officer, David Sandison was aware of the label's cachet: ‘Island was one of those labels that if you leafed through the album racks, you stopped. It was like Elektra, like Atlantic … Nick's initial sales I'm sure were to do with that thing about Island. I can remember buying Island albums even though I didn't know the act — they just looked interesting … But obviously the hard-core folk lot would have known about Nick via the Fairport connection and Witchseason. He had done some gigs, and word might have spread, which would account for a few hundred sales.'

In 1970 Martin Satterthwaite also joined Island, to work in the promotion department: ‘Island was very strong in the early seventies: they had the folkie stuff, with Nick, Richard and Linda, Sandy; the reggae side, which had grown out of ska and bluebeat; the rock side
with Free; and then there was the pop side with Sparks and Roxy Music. At that time Island had the same sort of impact as Motown a few years earlier: if a record came out on Motown, you went out and bought it, you didn't even bother to listen to it, you just trusted them.'

Although he only released three albums on Island during his lifetime, Nick is irrevocably associated with the label, and appeared on a number of other Island albums. It was actually these other releases which helped Nick reach the biggest audience during his lifetime. CBS had pioneered the budget sampler album in 1968 with
The Rock Machine Turns You On
, but Island were swift to follow in May 1969 with the enticing twelve-track
You Can All Join In
. As many of the artists as could be assembled, gathered shivering, at seven o'clock one cold winter morning in Hyde Park, for the cover shot. Nick has been rumoured to be hiding among the crowd, but at the time of the photo shoot his Island debut was still several months down the line.