Tales from the 1960s: Nick Drake, and ‘a celeste, a Hammond, and a clavichord.’
February 24, 2024
Andrew Curry writes: The third part of the conversation between Joe Boyd, John Wood, and Folk on Foot’s Matthew Bannister is about the short but influential career of Nick Drake. Part One is here: Part Two is here.
Nick Drake was recommended to Joe Boyd by Ashley Hutchings, who had seen him play at a very ‘60s benefit event at the Roundhouse in London called Circus Alpha Centauri, just before Christmas 1967. Hutchings was playing there with Fairport, and they swapped phone numbers. Ashley Hutchings rang Joe Boyd and told him about Drake’s music, Boyd heard some demos, and soon they were making a record, Five Leaves Left.
Drake’s songs used unusual chord combinations that he had learnt from his mother Molly, and this meant that when he played live, he’d retune for minutes between songs. But he was introverted and had no stage patter to fill the gaps. In the rough and tumble of a folk club he would die a death.
In the studio, though, it was a different matter. As John Wood said,
Nick’s guitar playing was always perfect. He never made a mistake.
As a result, John Wood, who engineered all of Drake’s records and produced Pink Moon, would often close down Drake’s fader so he could concentrate on the rest of the studio sound.
(Nick Drake in 1969. Photo: Keith Morris. Public domain)
Boyd and Wood were talking about their work with Nick Drake is an interview with Matthew Bannister of Folk on Foot at Magpie Arc’s Indoor Folk Festival at Cecil Sharp House earlier this month.
Boyd produced Five Leaves Later and had commissioned some string arrangements from Richard Hewson, who had done the arrangement on The Beatles’s Long and Winding Road. But no-one liked them, so Drake suggested that Robert Kirby, a friend from university, do some arrangements instead..
Obviously Boyd and Wood had misgivings at this point, but they went along with the suggestion. Kirby’s arrangements were much more in keeping with Drake’s sound and songs. Wood said he always used string players from the English Chamber Orchestra, rather than the pop players you’d get if you asked the typical “music fixer” to supply them, simply because they were better musicians. And they were able to make the most of Kirby’s arrangements.
In response to questions, Boyd and Wood talked about two of the less likely collaborators in the Drake canon, both on his second record, Bryter Later. The first was with the South African jazz pianist Chris McGregor, who playes on Poor Boy. McGregor was a South African exile who led a jazz group called The Brotherhood of Breath, whom Boyd also produced.
He’d been recording at John Wood’s Sound Techniques studio during the morning and was—out of curiosity—sitting at the back of the control room as Nick Drake started the afternoon recording session.
Drake was running through the jazz-inflected piano part for Poor Boy, which is an integral part of the song. As he did so, Boyd asked Chris McGregor if he’d like to have a go at it.
John Cale’s contribution to Bryter Later is a bit more surprising. Piecing together the story from what Boyd said, Cale was at Sound Techniques because they’d been working together on Nico’s record Desertshore, which was mostly recorded there. (Boyd said he was more of a fan of Cale’s work as a producer than he was of Velvet Underground.)
He asked to listen to some of the other things Boyd and Wood were working on. He liked Mike Heron’s first solo record, but when he heard some of Bryter Later, “he went crazy”, said Wood.
Cale asked where he could find him, and when Cale heard he was in London he asked Wood to call Drake to let him know that he was going to go round there straightaway.
In the morning, Cale called John Wood at the studio:
We’re going to need a clavichord, a Hammond (organ), a celeste, and an electric pick-up for a viola.
They were going to record Fly and Northern Sky—rated as Drake’s finest song by his biographer Patrick Humphries.
As Nick Drake’s psychological condition deteriorated, said Wood, you could see it in the studio. Although his guitar playing didn’t get worse, he was no longer able to play and sing the vocal at the same time.
Drake would stay with Wood and his wife at their house in Suffolk, and Wood said that the bass player Danny Thompson—with his extrovert personality—was one of the few people who could get through to him. He wished he’d found a way to get them to work together more.
At the end of the interview, Bannister invited Joe Boyd to reflect on Nick Drake’s lack of recognition in his lifetime, and his huge reputation now.
Boyd could have mentioned, as he does in his memoir White Bicycles, that when he sold his Witchseason label to Island Records he got Chris Blackwell to promise that he’d keep Nick Drake’s records in print no matter how poorly they sold.
But he didn’t do that. Instead, he said,
It happens the other way around as well.
While Boyd was managing and producing the Incredible String Band, they sold out the Fillmore East, the Fillmore West, and the Albert Hall. Now, hardly anyone listens to them.
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Read more: Tales from the 1960s: Listening to Sgt. Pepper in a Cloakroom with Sandy Denny.
Tales from the 1960s: Fairport’s breakout year and John Martyn’s ‘terrible’ rhythm section.
I was living in England between 1969 and 1971. My best friend Joe and I had gotten together with a couple of other American musicians we met in England and were trying to break in to the scene. We met some people who were very big on Nick at the time. I was very charmed by Incredible String Band even heard them at Albert Hall. With my 70+ year-old ears ISB sound dated whereas Nick Drake does not. I find Nick's music timeless and relevant.
Posted by: Rick | February 26, 2024 at 03:20 AM
Chapeau Andrew on a terrific series of articles based on the Magpie Arc festival
Posted by: Colin Randall | February 28, 2024 at 12:02 AM