Salut! Live

Andrew Curry writes: The BBC Proms, a century old institution whose concerts run through the British summer, likes an anniversary. So last week, for one of their non-classical concerts, they marked the 50 years since the death of the singer songwriter Nick Drake, who took his own life in 1974 at the age of 26.

(Image: BBC Proms)

The conductor was Jules Buckley, the BBC Symphony Orchestra’s ‘Creative Artist-in-Residence’, who often leads non-classical Proms. The orchestra was supplemented by a band onstage: Neill MacColl on guitar, Ross Stanley on keys, Chris Hill on bass, and Dan See on drums. The singers included The Unthanks, Olivia Chaney, BC Camplight, Marika Hackman, and Scott Matthews.

Nick Drake’s sister Gabrielle was in attendance as well, writing the programme notes, doing a reading on stage, and joining the interval conversation. The concert had sold out too quickly for me to get tickets, but fortunately all of the Proms are broadcast live on the BBC’s classical music station Radio 3. It’s easy to forget in then noise about the BBC what a fantastic cultural institution it is.

Of course, if he knew about this, Nick Drake might be bemused.

His life story, like that of Van Gogh, is a kind of cultural myth. The gifted songwriter and guitar player who made three records that barely sold, who attracted a loyal group of committed enthusiasts while alive, but killed himself as his depressive illness grew worse.

And then, over the quarter century after his death, his music finding an audience, slowly, helped along by those enthusiasts, such as his producer Joe Boyd and Island Records’ Chris Blackwell. Boyd often recounts that Drake said to him, later on, “You keep telling me I’m a genius, but nobody buys my records.” Even in 2024, the American band Sunday Shoes can sing

If you like Nick Drake/ It’s a secret handshake.

(Jules Buckley, orchestra, and band at the Nick Drake Prom. Photo: BBC)

Buckley had drawn on Robert Kirby’s arrangements but had expanded them, working with a number of arrangers, including Kate St John, Sam Gale, Jochen Neuffer, Tom Trapp, Adrian McNally and Peter Riley, and Simon Dobson. The Robert Kirby scores have been mislaid for the moment, so the team of arrangers had to recreate them for the Prom.

For those who worry about these arrangements, and have some idea—perhaps drawn from Pink Moon—that these songs should be heard only with guitar, some of Drake’s earliest appearances at Cambridge University were in front of a string quartet.

And some of these songs work brilliantly with the orchestra behind them. Way to Blue, sung here by Scott Matthews, sounds as if was written for a symphony orchestra. And Olivia Chaney sounds as if she was born to sing At The Chime of a City Clock, in a fine arrangement by Sam Gale with quite a lot of wit about it.

There was a song by Nick Drake’s mother Molly in each half of the programme, both sung by The Unthanks, and both accompanied by a reading by Nick Drake’s sister Gabrielle. The Unthanks had recorded What can a song do to you, which they sang here, on their Diversions No. 4 record.

Of course, you can’t tell the story of Nick’s music without Molly in the frame. His unusual chord structures, tunings, and time signatures seem to have been learned, at least in part, from the songs his mother wrote and played at home. And I think this is the reason why the songs still sound undated after 50 years.

The Unthanks came back early in the second half to reprise another of Molly’s songs, Set Me Free, also on Diversions No. 4, again with a reading by Gabrielle Drake.

Although I imagine that every reader of Salut! Live will know plenty about Nick Drake, Radio 3–the BBC’s classical music channel—had to work on the principle that some of those tuning into the Prom might never have heard of him.

And so, right up front, they had Jules Buckley do a quick introduction to why Drake’s songs mattered:

it’s poise, it’s class, it’s deep thinking, it’s storytelling, it’s language, it’s literature. The lyrics are very direct, but they are also quite surreal, and they’re surreal in the best possible way. At the moment when you think you’ve unlocked the song, you haven’t.

The discussion in the interval between Gabrielle Drake and the broadcaster John Wilson was also a good introduction to Nick Drake and the milieu that the songs came out of.

John Wilson had had a hand in the idea for an orchestral Nick Drake concert. He was a champion of Drake’s music in the 1990s, as the singer’s reputation was growing, and the radio documentary he made for BBC Radio 4 is still on BBC Sounds. It has contributions from Nick Drake’s producer Joe Boyd, who has championed Drake for 50 years, his friend and arranger Robert Kirby, and Gabrielle Drake.

Among the highlights in the second half was Scott Matthews singing From The Morning, which—in the spirit of Pink Moon, which it comes from—he played solo on stage with guitar. He’s said elsewhere that it is one of his favourite Nick Drake songs:

These were exciting arrangements. They created a bigger sound, making the most of the orchestra, without feeling the need to reinvent the the songs, and without drowning the subtleties of the originals.

On Fly, for example, for which John Cale famously asked John Wood to rustle up a clavichord, we could hear Ross Stanley’s electric keyboards picking out the notes against the backdrop of the orchestra. Again, the orchestral opening to Place to Be reminded me of Finzi or Butterworth. And some of woodwind work is just lovely.

You expect a decent encore at the Proms, and the concert got a decent encore. A lovely version of Saturday Sun, fronted by BC Camplight, mutated into an orchestral sequence where we heard familiar fragments of Drake’s songs, ghosts, almost hanging out together as if at a cocktail party, before emerging as a solo version of Horn, played on the trumpet. It could have been a version of The Last Post.

I’ve often wondered why it took so long for Drake’s music to reach its audience, and I think the simplest explanation is that it was ahead of its time.

It’s impossible to make the familiar strange and novel again. But in the spirit of the quote about the world being full of magical things, waiting for our wits to grow sharper, in the late 1960s his chord sequences and tunings were genuinely avant garde, and his impressionistic lyrics didn’t fit the expectations we had about what singer-songwriters wrote about. It took two decades or more for our ears to adjust to the sounds of his songs.

For the moment—and for another two and a half months— the concert can be heard on the BBC Sounds app. There are more conventional reviews at UK Jazz News and Arcana.fm. It feels like the sort of Prom that—at least for British viewers—will also have been captured on camera for a screening on BBC4 at some point, but I have no inside information here.

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See also on Salut! Live: Tales from the 1960s: Nick Drake, and ‘a celeste, a Hammond, and a clavichord’