Nick Drake Laughs!

The Making of Five Leaves Left

When I first heard Nick Drake, in late 1990, the orchestrations of his first two albums put me off. I was playing in Galaxie 500 and listening intensely to 60s and 70s bands like Can and Soft Machine, deep into rhythm sections and songs built around their grooves. I remember precisely when I first heard Nick Drake because Galaxie 500 was asked to contribute to a tribute album, and at the time we didn’t know any of his records – the LPs were scarce, so the people proposing the tribute had to send a cassette dub in order for us to hear the music. Naomi and I picked “Cello Song” off that tape for Galaxie 500 to consider - it seemed like the only one we might approach as a band. But then the band broke up, and the proposal was moot.

In the depressing aftermath of that breakup, not only did the tribute album eventually come out but so did a CD reissue campaign for Nick Drake from Rykodisc, and next thing we knew Naomi and I were as obsessively listening to Pink Moon as we had been to Can. It suited our newly current mood, and the direction our music as a duo started to take. We listened to that album so incessantly that when our car’s CD player was stolen, the disc of Pink Moon was in it - we had to replace both at once. Nevertheless, the orchestrated albums still eluded me. It would take several more years, encounters with the Japanese band Ghost (who had a flautist!), and a newly expanded instrumental palette for our own music before those first Nick Drake records opened up for me. But then they, too, became obsessive listening. (Somewhere in our outtakes, we have basic tracks recorded as a trio with Michio Kurihara for a version of “Northern Sky” – a second unrealized idea for a cover.)

Still, I clearly remember how the orchestrated albums used to sound wrong to me. The elegance of their arrangements seemed out of synch with Nick Drake’s thumping guitar and intimate singing. And then there are the lyrics – the mysterious, fragmented poetry of his songs felt intense to me when unaccompanied on Pink Moon, but precious when backed by strings. Now I find myself going back to Bryter Layter more than any of the others, precisely because I love the orchestrations on that album. Maybe I’ve come to accept my own precious inclinations - or maybe it simply took me time to grow into that record. It’s a mature album, despite being only his second and in some ways last attempt at a formal recording.

Pink Moon has always stood apart from the rest of Nick Drake’s discography precisely because it feels so informal – solo, direct, live-to-tape, as if he is playing for just one listener (in fact he was: John Wood, the engineer for all three of his albums), or perhaps just for himself. It has the feeling of an internal monologue, as much as an album can.

Now an elaborate archival release, The Making of Five Leaves Left, would seem to recast the songs from Nick Drake’s debut album in that same Pink Moon light. On a remarkable demo tape preserved by singer Beverley Martyn, we hear Nick Drake’s solo, direct, live-to-tape recordings for a set of his early songs played, again, to engineer John Wood who was this time accompanied by A&R/producer Joe Boyd. And yet… it is no Pink Moon. The six-song set from March 1968 opens with Nick Drake’s lightest, slightest work: “Mayfair,” an almost jaunty 2/4 vamp with rather expected lyrics about one of the more exclusive areas of London: “Even trees are wealthy here.” There’s a hint of discontent - Mayfair is “Full of fame but lacking love” - yet nothing like the fog of sadness that envelops his more characteristic material. At the end of the take, Joe Boyd says, “Just keep going,” apparently not even bothering to stop the tape. And Drake immediately launches into a truly beautiful tune, “Time Has Told Me,” that no one else could have written and which would eventually be chosen to open his debut album. Boyd and Wood must have been floored.

But does this solo version reveal the song more than the finished album arrangement we all know? As much as I love hearing Nick Drake’s unaccompanied guitar – all the better to appreciate his idiosyncratic, hyper-rhythmic technique – the song feels sketched here more than fully realized. Unlike the deliberately solo performances of Pink Moon, the Beverley Martyn tape is truly a demo, and remains one after all these years. Returning to the finished album, even Drake’s guitar performances there feel more groovy, more varied, more of what he was capable of and likely more of what he intended.

Another remarkable set of previously unheard tracks on the new box set directly addresses this question of intention. On a tape made in a fellow university student’s room at Cambridge, Drake plays his early tunes and talks through ideas of arrangements for Robert Kirby, who was also at Cambridge and was making plans with Drake for a live performance with an ensemble of strings and wind to be held on campus in February, 1968. Drake uses just his guitar and voice but as he plays indicates parts for bass, for flute, and gives Kirby various verbal directions for “expansive” or “celestial” orchestrations. Evidently, a broader palette of sounds for his early songs was already in his head, before he ever entered a professional studio to make an album out of them.

Listening to this tape made for Robert Kirby is somewhat more of historical interest than aesthetic, it must be said. It is thrilling for a fan of Nick Drake to hear him speak on tape in this informal manner. (And for Drake’s sister Gabrielle, it was emotional - “A sudden light thrown onto the Nick of my youth,” she told Rolling Stone.) Nevertheless, these performances are literally sketches, with parts indicated more than fully played. These were audio notes for Kirby to work from as he created the versions Drake hoped to present.

Nick Drake was famously soft-spoken and is often described as shy. But he clearly had strong ideas about how he wanted his music to sound, even before he started recording his debut. The tape made for Kirby makes an old anecdote about Drake’s first album more understandable: when Joe Boyd called in a slick London arranger, Richard Hewson, for an initial session with strings, “Nick started getting hotter and hotter under the collar,” John Wood recalled. He told this story to Arthur Lubow for liner notes to the first collected reissue of Nick Drake’s albums, a 1986 box set called Fruit Tree.

“He was very young, and he had struck me as a person you could push about. Some people in a recording session will do what you tell them. But he was getting more and more aggravated, and in the end, he dug his heels in and dismissed the arrangements. He said he’d got this friend at Cambridge, Robert Kirby, he thought would be much more sympathetic to what he was doing. Robert had never before done anything in his life in a recording studio. But two weeks later we booked him together with a bunch of musicians – a smaller bunch than the first time, I remember. And we were flabbergasted, he was so good.”

The Making of Five Leaves Left includes one of these initial takes with Richard Hewson’s arrangement, and we get to hear what set Drake off. “Day Is Done” in this version is slower, weightier, and a bit middle-of-the-road: like a well-crafted ballad from any number of mid-sixties British pop albums. Add a catchy bridge or an uptempo repeat of the chorus and you might have a B-side or even a minor hit for a charismatic pop singer. (Add a heavy rhythm section and a white blues singer, and you might get “Stairway to Heaven.”)

But Drake knew that Hewson’s type of pop balladry wasn’t for him, and he knew it before anyone else did. The untested arranger he insisted on instead, Robert Kirby, made settings that matched Drake’s musical goals for these songs. Their type of preciousness, as I first judged them in 1990, was evidently his own. So much so, that he had to throw a bit of a fit to get them recorded.

The two previously unknown tapes – the demo preserved by Beverley Martyn, and the homemade tape recorded at Cambridge for Robert Kirby – are what sells this pricey box set, and dominate its reviews. But there’s a third tape here that spoke more to me, musically: a set of recordings that Nick Drake made as a duo with the great bassist Danny Thompson from Pentangle, in the course of working out basic tracks for what would become the first album. These are album session outtakes, or alternate takes, and appear in the box set alongside others that include additional musicians. But there’s something special about the duo performances captured here, especially at the two musicians’ first meeting in November of 1968. Five tracks included in the set come from that initial session together – “Day Is Done,” “Time Has Told Me,” “Strange Face” (which would become “Cello Song”), “Saturday Sun,” and “Fruit Tree” – all songs that made the final cut. In these recordings, unlike the Beverley Martyn demo, I hear Nick Drake’s full musicality in advance of the album. Danny Thompson is drawing him out, inviting his rhythmic and harmonic individuality to take center stage. Drake rises to the challenge of the moment (they don’t seem to have had much if any rehearsal before the tape started rolling), and the songs blossom.

Danny Thompson’s bass is as fundamental to the sound of the completed album as Robert Kirby’s string arrangements – indeed he is a part of those too, blending in by playing with a bow but, according to the box set liner notes, deviating from the written scores:

“These arrangements were a real marriage between the composer and the artist,” says Danny Thompson. “I was feeling intimidated. I looked at the bass parts and I said to Robert Kirby, ‘Is it OK if I do my own thing?’ He said, “Well… don’t take the mick.”

But what these isolated duo performances indicate to me is that, alongside Robert Kirby, Danny Thompson was fundamental to the development of Nick Drake’s songwriting at this early stage of his short career. Their combination is dynamic. Joe Boyd describes this more in terms of personalities than music in his memoir, White Bicycles, writing that Danny Thompson’s “no-nonsense attitude worked wonders with Nick. Most people, myself included, were too careful, wary of disturbing his silences. Danny would slap him on the back, tease him in rhyming slang, make fun of his self-effacement and generally give him a hard time. Nick would crack a hesitant smile and be relaxed and laughing by the end of the session.”

Is that what I hear in those duets: Nick Drake laughing? If so, I think that’s also what I now appreciate in the Robert Kirby arrangements, and precisely what confounded me when the darkly solo Pink Moon seemed to me like the only true Nick Drake. In the polished arrangements of Five Leaves Left, I feel Nick Drake’s delight at the realization of his songs as he imagined them. He knew what he wanted for his albums, from the first to the last.

Listening to: Thank You, Guitar by Cyrus Pireh

Cooking: tomatoes, tomatoes, tomatoes (with lemon and salt)