Twang, Ganglesprocket, Feedback File and Salwarpe gather in the pod to have a hard hitting, narrow eyed look at the life, work and legacy of Nick Drake. Preconceptions are put aside and cold objectivity deployed. After some debate, all agree that it’s all pretty much perfect other than the odd track which is just really good.
The Afterword #75: The Drakecast
by 43 Comments
Seeing this in Updates I initially assumed that this was another post on the Classic Line-Ups thread… which it sort of is!*
(*crawler…)
Always loved “My Boomerang won’t come back “.
here’s a playlist to support the songs we reference along the way (apologies to rest of the pod members if I missed any)
(I misread the title and initially thought it was the Drakeycast…)
I wish. Any time.
I see you still managed to breach the hour mark. Is this podcast longer than his entire recorded works? Must be close.
Sorry they do go on.
You’d better get some throat-sweets ready for the Grateful Deadcast….
Listened to the whole thing now. That’s a lovely cast. I think it helps most of you are guitarists. By God, you know your stuff!
Well done.
Thanks Tig.
And here’s me hoping* it would be about the Canadian Hippity-Hopper.
(*) not really, obvs.
Or indeed the blue-haired sci-fi honey.
This I will certainly listen to. I have always had a prejudice about him, which means I can appreciate the construction and playing of the songs, and love them in covers, but alway find him a little too much bed wetter in his vocal. It’s strange, tho’, I guess I am getting old and sentimental, I am finding a tolerance anew of his voice, even an enjoyment, it being the right voice for the lyrical content. And, lord knows, he had enough angst about his abilities to face the world to explain away the odd wet sheet flapping on a line.
We did get into that – it isn’t a complete love in.
Think this is the best version of Time of no Reply ie no strings. Should have been on FLL in place of Shed !
Thanks
My thanks to Twang for efficiently arranging and genially hosting this and for kindly inviting me to break my podcast cherry – I can recommend it to anyone who’s thought about joining one but hesitated – it really is terrific fun, and enjoyable as much as anything else for listening to the incisive words of wisdom from the other contributors. I thought I’d done my homework for the discussion, but it just made me realize how much the others knew and were able to share on.
There’s lots more I’d like to say, but rather than put it all in one long comment, I’ve tried to divide it into different themes to break it up a bit. As I said in a message “…there were so many unexplored avenues that I would have liked to wander down – inevitable given the limited time and the different perspectives”.
The songs and the covers
When it was suggested, early last month, possibly promoted in part by the Fly post (ha!) that I’d started, I took it as encouragement to dive into all things Drake – not just his 3 official albums, but also the posthumous ‘Time of No Reply’, the ‘Complete Home Recordings’, and ‘A Day Gone By’ – nearly 120 separate tracks.
Then, there were the cover versions – 2 albums which in part did his music justice (‘Brittle Days’ from 1992 and a Mojo release ‘Green Leaves’ from earlier this year), but particularly a concert from Toronto in 2012
One curiosity is ‘In Search of a Master, In Search of a Slave’, of which this is unfortunately the only track on YouTube I could find:
Described variously as ‘Alternative Rock, Noise, Post Rock, Experimental, Indie Rock’, versions by Scumbucket and Blackmail must surely be worth a listen?
Commentaries
There was reading – the Patrick Humphries biography that I took down off the shelf – hadn’t read it in years, a Kindle version of Pink Moon’ by Gorm Henrik Rasmussen, some texts I found online – the 33 1/3 essays on Pink Moon by Amanda Petrusich, Exiled from Heaven by Ian MacDonald, an odd essay on his death (https://www.uow.edu.au/~morgan/drake4.htm), and the Nick Kent obituary that Feedback shared.
There were documentaries – radio (the Danny Thompson-narrated one which Feedback (again) shared was better than the Brad Pitt-narrated one) – and YouTube (Nick Drake – Under Review (https://youtu.be/mMx-oniBsyQ) being the most comprehensive, with interviews with contemporaries building up a picture of the man, and A Skin Too Few – The Days of Nick Drake (https://youtu.be/nrmR_F5XgwQ) being the most poetic, creative and visually charming consideration. There were some entertaining posts on the blog I found, notably this one (https://theafterword.co.uk/a-night-out-with-nick-drake/) – which nicely skewered a few Drake myths, I thought.
Rather like Joy Division, the mythology overtakes the rather more prosaic history. I read Gabrielle Drake’s book and it offers up the perspective from the family. It’s terribly sad. Privileged background, desperately concerned parents trying to fathom out what’s wrong, Nick’s crippling psychosis, his transition from warm, open, loving teen to terrified uncommunicative squalid barely present twenty-something, is really painful to read. He felt furious with Joe Boyd, not only for making Bryter Layter sound too uptempo and jazzy but for moving back to the US.
The Gabrielle Drake book as well as the Trevor Dann bio are two gaps in my reading, but I think from other sources I’d agree that both of those things are true.
As I think was said in the podcast, he played rugby at school. In fact he was head boy at his prep, so life must have been good and he must have been happy. And the parents were sympathetic and supportive, Rodney advising him against dropping out of Cambridge, but not criticizing him for it, Molly regularly getting up in the night to sit with Nick in the kitchen.
Hanging On A Star is, apparently, just the haranguing, Nick gave Joe in his office when he came back from the US, so ‘furious’ would seem accurate. I think it’s fair to say Joe Boyd ‘made’ Nick, as manager, producer, publisher, he took care of all aspects of the business, so Drake could focus on the music – clearly an important crutch for him. But when Boyd went back to the States, Drake had finished Bryter Layter, and he’d also given up playing live – should Boyd have halted his own career, just in case Drake wanted to restart his?
The only thing I’m not sure about is whether Drake was unhappy with the Bryter Layter production, either at the time or after. My sense was that he was a stubborn musical perfectionist – would he really have let those reins be taken from him?
Stories
All these different sources helped to flesh out the picture of a man who was never filmed, interviewed only once and only really communicated through his songs.
There were little scraps of information that tantalised as they revealed – playing to the Stones in Morocco and then getting his car rescued in the Atlas mountains by locals thinking he was a Stone, possibly tripping in Aix-en-Provence, that his college at Cambridge Fitzwilliam) was a modern, brutalist, edge-of-town construction whose rooms were really too small for someone of his size, that he went to school with Chris de Burgh (and wouldn’t let him join his band), associated variously with minor royals and toffs, but also, separately with an ex-convict and drop outs, that in his later years he would go off on long drives across country until he ran out of petrol, he flirted with the idea of a loud rock guitar album and blasted his parents’ house one day with power chords. Were the three albums a trilogy themed around days of the week (Saturday Sun, Sunday, Pink Moon(day))? Did he pick up a heroin habit from John Cale? Was he a shy celibate or did those parceled-off social circles of his life conceal a string of partners?
Looking up his home, Far Leys in Tanworth-in-Arden on Google Maps, I realised he only lived some 20 miles away from where I grew up in Salwarpe, though he would be dead by the time I was 6. A rural Midlands childhood is something I can associate with, as is a private education, an introverted character, and a flirtation with pot (though not to his extent).
Small point: the architecture of Fitzwilliam Hall isn’t actually brutalist, despite being designed by the bloke who did the National Theatre. It is a modern (for 1963) modular flat-roof design in brick, with most of the existing site being additions from 1980s and 1990s.
Drake would have been able to see open countryside from his room. That part of town has only been built on in the past few years.
Churchill college on the parallel Madingley Road is of similar vintage and design, despite being from the pen of a different architect. That must be how things were in 1960s architecture.
You’re unlikely to see either on a biscuit tin lid, though.
Point well made, @fentonsteve. It was just my semi-remembered shorthand for ‘not classic Oxbridge college architecture. But it was still described as being cramped for someone of his stature and guitar.
Reflections on the music
No matter how interesting or illuminating his life might have been, it was his music which absorbed must of my attention, listening to little else for most of the month.
On the evening I was invited to take part, I listened to the main albums back to back for the first time in years, and made notes on my instant reaction, which was, I must admit, quite negative. Comments about ‘easy listening strings’, 70s Ronnie Hazelhurst TV themes (the instrumental track ‘Bryter Layter’) To the Manor Born and Ivor the Engine (Magic), overblown sax playing (Chime of A City Clock), overly quiet vocals overshadowed by the accompanying instruments (Poor Boy), terribly trite, will this do? lyrics (Man In A Shed). But I was also recalling the terrific, intricate guitar playing, from the counterpoint in songs like ‘Three Hours’ or ‘Cello Song’ on the first album to simpler, more percussive later songs like ‘Ride’, ‘Know’ and ‘Black-Eyed Dog’.
After that, as I listened more and more, while reading, listening and watching about him, the cycle of his life made me enjoy some songs more, re-evaluate others and theme some together.
‘Time Has Told Me’, the first song I listened to, being the first song in the first album, struck me as a remarkable encapsulation of his life, foreshadowing what would occur to him and giving a caustic self-description of his personality and temperament:
“a rare, rare find’, ‘a troubled cure for a troubled mind’, ‘I’ll leave the ways of making me be what I really don’t want to be’, ‘a soul with no footprint”, ‘there’s really no way of ending your trouble with things you can say’, ‘stay by my side to keep on trying ‘til there’s no more to hide’.
Even the title is interesting – what has time told him? Or is it, to quote Chumbawamba”s Timebomb – ‘You don’t tell time, time tells you’.
This is possibly my favourite cover of a Nick Drake song – a female version of his own timbre and phrasing, with a sweet folk inflection to the vocals, undeterred, yet expressive, it draws you in like many of the originals do.
Yes it is beautiful and does draw you in. Joan Shelley’s vocals are always nuanced and exquisite.
Poor Boy
In some ways this is my favourite Nick Drake track. It’s not because it got such a negative reaction from the other podcasters, although like with Ganglesprocket’s enjoyment of Black Eyed Dog, l quite enjoyed the buck to the general view. I like BED too, though I think I prefer the instrumental version, which brings the attention to the brilliantly dynamic guitar playing, which, without the lyrics and vocal tone, is more existing then chilling.
In some ways, it’s because I didn’t like it at first that I like how it grew on me. Some songs were easy to like instantly – Cello Song springs to mind. But Poor Boy seemed too busy – so many instruments and vocals all going of at once – and too full of contrasts – between Drake’s quiet, pity me vocals, the regular motoring hum of bass, drums and rhythm guitar, the supper club jazz tinkle of the piano, the sassy riposte of the backing vocals, the rasping, saucy interruption of the saxophone which stirs the piano into that out-of-nowhere solo. It’s almost as if the unfortunate introvert is being harangued on all sides by these insolent uninvited top flight musicians.
But, no matter that he returned to the simpler form of vocals and guitar with one piano overdub for his last album, I find it unlikely Drake didn’t have the final say on this song, and that this wasn’t what he wanted. In many of the texts, writers said that though he might have lacked drive, with regard to his music, he had ambition, and that they could quite imagine him playing up to and laughing at the image of the unapproachable artist ‘Oh poor boy, so keen to take a wife. He’s a mess but he’ll say yes, if you just dress in white’. The lines ‘Nobody knows how cold it grows’, ‘Nobody knows how cold it blows’ always make me laugh, just because I want to insert the phrase “Tiddly Pom’ before the next line – Pooh Bear, not Poor Boy.
Some introverts, and I count myself in this number, like being with people, but without joining wholeheartedly and fully into the melee of conversational repartee, enjoying the interaction as an observer and throwing in the occasional apercu – as long as we’re not perceived as or don’t have the paranoid awareness of being rude for not contributing enough, it can be fun. With that in mind, I could imagine Nick, on stage, hunched over his guitar, whispering into his mike centre stage, but with the spotlight on the other musicians as they each take the lead for part of the song and the attention and heat from the audience. Would that have worked for him more than all those harrowing solo spots in raucous folk clubs?
It’s his experience of the noisy, hectic city after the calm of the Warwickshire countryside and the measured peace of Cambridge, isn’t it? And though he might not have got used to the daily urban jolt, I like the unholy mix of sounds and clash of genres in this song. See how much fun these guys have with it:
Bryter Sooner, Two Leaves Left, Punk Moon
In the second album, I wanted to reorder the track listing as follows:
Introduction, Fly, Hazey Jane 1, Hazey Jane 2, Poor Boy, Chime of A City Clock, Northern Sky, Sunday
After the opening instrumental, this puts up front his self-motivating request to his audience for a second game -‘Please give me a second grace, please give me a second face’, ‘I’ve fallen far down the first time around’, ‘it’s time for recompense for what’s done’. It ‘gets right’ the sequence from 1 to 2 of the Hazey Janes, in which the questions in the first continue to the halfway point in the second and the sound great gets louder and fuller until the final couplet, where his confidence in song in contrast to his reticence in spoken form is directly pointed out. This prepares for the centerpiece of the album, the big band ‘Poor Boy’, before the confidence shatters in City Clock. The album rounds of with mirror of a second Cale-infused track and one more instrumental. It conveniently and discreetly drops the two weaker tracks.
For the other two albums, I wasn’t so desperate to reorder the track listing, though I’d remove Man In A Shed and Thoughts of Mary Jane, replacing them with Clothes of Sand (definitely in my top 5 – beautiful) and, probably, Joey. Out would go Parasite (good track, but so disquieting) and Things Behind The Sun (too tricksy with its internal rhymes), taken over by Black Eyed Dog (of course) and Voice From The Mountain.
Punk Moon?
Is she really stayin’ in the shed with him?
Crikey Sal you had a busy night! Reinventing the albums is always good fun but on balance I’d leave BL and PM as is – but how Man in a shed made the cut on FLL is a mystery when clearly there were much better songs lying around. Too much dope probably lying around could be the answer. Will check out that Toronto concert.
A good friend of mine played at the Nick Drake gathering ( annual concert held in the church) in Tanworth this year and trying to tempt me to do same next year – not sure I could handle it tbh. I did visit there a few years ago on the way back from a business trip ( how incongruous). Was surprisingly quite moved by seeing Far Leys and his grave – it was all just as I had imagined .
Will post the link to the Danny Thompson doc later.
Lunar festival has run in Tanworth-in-Arden for 4 of the last 5 years, and makes a big play of the Drake connection.
here is the BBC radio doc from 1998 – still IMHO the best Nick Drake piece that Ive heard/seen
https://soundcloud.com/the-feedback-file/sets/nick-drake-fruit-tree-radio-2-documentary-1998
Now can we have the Duckcast?
Two hours of blokes talking about the bassist from Booker T & The MGs.
I have two things to say about Duck Dunn.
1. Fookin boss bassist, obvs.
2. He says two things in the Blues Brothers film and I’ve never understood either of them.
Fill in the other 119.75 minutes yerselves.
Disapppoint, I thought you meant the american fingerer himself, Duck Baker.
Saw him play a solo gig once at The Bull’s Head pub in Barnes. Audience of less than 10 people. He was amazing. Also saw The Duck Baker Trio (guitar, clarinet, string bass) once at Green Note in Camden, in the tiny downstairs space. Audience of 4 if I remember correctly. Amazing again.
Quite possibly the most amazing acoustic guitarist you’ve never heard of.
(Forty Ton Parachute)
I read about him in a guitar mag back in the 70s and ordered his album from the US which included a tab book of the music. Completely unplayable! I agree, he’s amazing.
As I presume there will be a 50th Anniversary issue of “Five Leaves Left,” it would be nice, albeit belated, if the Peel session was included on the CD.
Well done chaps, some fine observations about Nick and his music. One comment from Gangle that particularly resonated with me was that once you appreciate his music it never leaves you.
The praise heaped on River Man is wholly justified. One thing you didn’t mention was that it was recorded live, with the string section. That fact alone tells you just how much belief Nick had in his own abilities.
The ‘Remembered For A While’ book is actually marvellous on a number of levels. It paints an intimate portrait of one young man’s privileged life, at a pivotal time of cultural change. The musical appreciation by Pete Paphides and others, adds real insight to the songs, the lyrics, the tunings and arrangements. Highly recommended as a reference work.
River Man is a song that I never tire of and i must have heard it another zillion times whilst doing the research for the pod . Agree with you point Nick about ND being very much in control in those early days. By anyone’s standards playing & singing this live with an orchestra would have been mighty difficult – yet it’s seemless. The jazz references I make in the discussion are very much directed at his singing where he almost approaches the lines like Miles Davis with those long drawn out notes and totally non rock/folk timing.
I won’t lie – I love his music.
My Dad got a compilation album when I was 14 or 15 – On the Road Again, supposedly a prog/alternative album (Quicksilver Messenger Service, Blodwyn Pig – it was great!)
It had Northern Sky on it. It was an introduction to a 30+ year addiction, and I maintain that Northern Sky is one of those songs that can’t be improved. In its way, it’s perfect.
Am I interested in his life? Yes, sure. Does it color how I listen to his music? A little. But God I like it. I don’t know a lot about the technicalities of guitar playing, but even when I was young I could appreciate how good and difficult it sounded.
I’ve got some artists who are on perpetual rotation and I will rush to save their albums: Big Country; Scott Hutchison; and Nick Drake. You have to have a heart of stone to not find something to like in his canon.