We took our time finishing
Five Leaves Left
, taking stock after each session before planning the next. I had worked with Danny Thompson a few times by then. He is a large man with a formidable technique on the double bass who brings an inimitable energy to a session. His drive propels ‘Three Hours’ and ‘Cello Song’ and his 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.
Blackwell made me a present of John Martyn. He had released a couple of LPs on Island but Chris didn’t really know what to do with him and thought I ought to. I admired his playing but had never been a huge fan. When John started living and performing with Beverley Kutner, an ex-Denny Cordell artist Tod Lloyd wanted to sign to Witchseason, I was stuck with him. I recorded an album with the couple in America using a New York pianist named Paul Harris as musical director. I thought Paul’s style would work for ‘Time Has Told Me’, so when he came to London to finish John & Beverley’s
Stormbringer
, I introduced him to Nick.
Paul spent hours talking to Nick, visiting him and working on ‘Time Has Told Me’ and ‘Man In A Shed’. He kept scratching his head, as if trying to figure out what planet this kid was from. This was typical of the responses musicians had to Nick: they couldn’t figure out how to categorize him. Some, like Harris, recognized the fragility of his genius and became extremely protective of him.
Richard Thompson would listen to a song of Nick’s, ask to hear it again, then again, frowning in concentration, then come up with a great part. He would stand in the door of the control room listening to a playback, concentrating quizzically. Richard likes to figure out every kind of music he hears, but Nick puzzled him. Where did that
come
from?
Five Leaves Left
’s final piece fell into place when Kirby announced that he was not up to ‘River Man’. He had tried, but just couldn’t manage what he knew Nick wanted and what the song deserved. John Wood immediately suggested Harry Robinson, aka Lord Rockingham. When rock’n’roll first invaded British television with
6.5 Special
the resident band was Lord Rockingham’s Eleven. Harry had also been on the board of Island Records in the early years but had sold his shares years before. As a composer he had scored all those Hammer horror movies starring vampires-in-chief Christopher Lee and Barbara Steele. After telling us these colourful but irrelevant facts, John came to the point: as an orchestrator, Harry was a master mimic. You want Sibelius? He could give you Sibelius. Since Nick wanted ‘River Man’ to sound like Delius, Harry, said John, was our man.
Nick and I went to visit Robinson at his house hidden in the middle of Barnes Common, just below the tree that was to kill Marc Bolan ten years later. Having heard a tape, Harry was already intrigued when we arrived. Nick played the song through, then strummed chords as the tape played, showing Harry the textures he wanted for the string parts. I had never heard him so articulate or so demanding. Harry made notes and nodded. The result was a track which – next to the Volkswagen ad’s ‘Pink Moon’ – is the most often played and discussed of all Nick’s songs. Whenever I saw Harry in later years, he would talk about the day we recorded it, with Nick surrounded by the orchestra, playing and singing while Harry conducted – just like Nelson Riddle and Frank Sinatra.
Five Leaves Left
was released in the summer of 1969. My expectations, like my production approach, had been influenced by Leonard Cohen. His first album sold over 100,000 copies in America while Cohen refused all offers to perform. But when Nick’s album was released in Britain, we had no radio outlets like the American free-form FM stations that played ‘Suzanne’ so often. John Peel played Nick’s album, but he was one of the few; Radio One was all about ‘pop’ in its myriad British guises, none of which bore much resemblance to Nick. And many critics were dismissive: ‘an awkward mixture of folk and cocktail jazz’, said
Melody Maker.
Island had no US office in those days, so Chris and I had made deals with A&M for Fairport Convention and Warner Brothers for John & Beverley Martyn. Some American A&R men liked Nick, but none actually made an offer; they said they needed to see him perform. David Geffen loved Nick, but somehow a deal with Asylum never materialized.
That autumn saw the re-emergence of Fairport Convention and the release of
Liege and Lief
. To honour the occasion, Roy Guest booked the Royal Festival Hall and we made it a Witchseason night: John & Beverley would open, then Nick would finish the first half. Never having seen him perform in front of an audience, I was nervous; Nick remained his usual monosyllabic self. I introduced him to scattered applause. The emotion surrounding Fairport’s fatal accident meant that the audience was very respectful. They listened in silence while he sang ‘Three Hours’, then erupted in applause. Nick looked at them suspiciously, not sure how much to smile. The silence resumed during Nick’s wordless retuning. Finally, he played the opening chords of ‘The Thoughts Of Mary Jane’. As each song was rewarded with huge applause, I could feel the affection surging towards the stage. When he finished, the cheering soared and I pushed him back on stage for an encore. As I stood watching from the wings, my mind was racing:
Nick can
tour. He can play concerts after all. It doesn’t matter that
he can’t talk to an audience. He’ll learn how. He can have a
real career. I’m not whistling in the dark, after all.
Everyone in the Witchseason office adored Nick and was thrilled by his performance. The next morning we started booking his first British tour. Two months later he set off for a series of club and university dates around the country. I was busy in the studio but planned to see one of the shows later in the tour. When he called me from the road after the third date, his voice had the crushed quality of defeat: ‘I, uh, I don’t think I can do any more shows, uh, I’m sorry.’ He just wanted to come home.
I spoke to the promoter of one of the shows. He said people talked a lot and when Nick started tuning between songs they talked more and bought more beer. The noise of glasses clinking and conversation became louder than Nick’s music. He never said anything on stage, just tuned and sang, and when the noise became too much, looked at his shoes for a minute then got up and walked off the stage.
I felt briefly angry with Nick.
Why can’t he just say
something? Why can’t he be more professional?
By this time he had left Cambridge and had no supporting group of friends near at hand. After the abandoned tour he retreated to his room in Hampstead. He had always smoked hashish, but that now became the pattern of his days: play guitar and smoke joints, go out for a curry when he got hungry. He came to life when we started recording the second album but between sessions he went back to his isolated existence.
I was aware of only three regular social outings. One was to Bob Squire’s to play liar dice, another was home to visit his parents and the third was up the road in Hampstead to John and Beverley’s. Beverley took on the role of Jewish mother, making him chicken soup, chiding him about his hair and sometimes even washing his clothes. She loved him and was tremendously kind to him. John is a complicated character who certainly admired Nick and even said that he loved him. But I doubt any guitar player could watch Nick play without envy. I joined Nick at John and Bev’s for dinner sometimes and we would all get high and listen to records. Even in these relaxed surroundings, Nick remained guarded and quiet.
Françoise Hardy, the long-haired chanteuse ruling the French charts, sent word that she was a fan. Letters and messages were exchanged about a collaboration. Nick and I travelled to Paris and climbed the ancient stairs to take tea in her top-floor flat in the Ile St-Louis. The entire time, he barely uttered a word. I think she found him too strange and nothing came of it.
Despite the lack of sales, the absence of an American deal and the failure of the tour, I couldn’t wait to make another record. I looked forward to being in the studio with Nick more than with any other artist. We started creating more rhythm tracks with Nick’s vocal and guitar plus electric bass and drum kit, adding an instrumentalist or an arrangement afterwards. Robert was stretching out, writing for brass as well as strings. When I heard ‘Poor Boy’, I thought of ‘So Long, Marianne’ on the Leonard Cohen album and its mocking chorus of girls’ voices. When I suggested it to Nick, he looked at me for a minute, unsure how to respond, but didn’t seem entirely convinced.
I was virtually living at Sound Techniques by then, with more artists joining the Witchseason roster and none being dropped. The day we recorded the track for ‘Poor Boy’, I had spent the morning mixing a record by the South African jazz pianist Chris McGregor. When Nick and the other musicians arrived, Chris asked whether he could stick around to listen. Chris had grown up in the Transkei bush, smoking dagga with the Xhosa boys from the village. That day he sat at the back of the control room in his dashiki and pillbox cap, stuffed his pipe full of grass and listened. After the morning mix, my ears were full of Chris’s piano. When Nick, Dave Pegg and Mike Kowalski started running through the song, I turned and saw Chris grinning. I asked whether he was thinking what I was thinking. While John went to get the microphones, I buzzed down to the musicians in the studio, ‘You’re getting a pianist in a minute,’ then introduced Nick to Chris. He had a look at the chord sheet Nick wrote out and we turned on the tape. That first-take piano solo on ‘Poor Boy’ is one of my favourite moments in the studio.
I had been stunned by John Cale’s arrangements on Nico’s
The Marble Index
and shocked that Elektra failed to pick up its option for a second LP. I convinced Warner Brothers to finance a sequel and after a week of recording in New York, Cale flew to London to help me finish off
Desertshore
. After a session one day, he put his feet up on the mixing desk, waved his arm imperially at John Wood, and said, ‘Let’s hear what else you guys are working on.’ We played him a few things, and eventually got to Nick. Cale was amazed. ‘Who the fuck
is
this guy? I have to meet him, where is he? I mean, where is he
right now
!’ I rang Nick and told him that John Cale would be over in half an hour. Nick said, ‘Oh, uh, OK.’ I wrote out Nick’s address, John grabbed it and ran down the stairs.
The next morning I had a call from Cale. ‘We’re going to need a pick-up for the viola, an amp, a Fender bass and bass amp, a celeste and a Hammond B-3 organ. This afternoon.’ I had scheduled a mix on another project that day but Cale had decided it was time to record ‘Northern Sky’ and ‘Fly’. They arrived together, John with a wild look in his eyes and Nick trailing behind. Despite his domineering manner, Cale was very solicitous towards Nick, who seemed to be guardedly enjoying himself: his only choice was to relax and be carried along.
Bryter Layter
is one of my favourite albums, a record I can sit back and listen to without wishing to redo this or that. The playing of the rhythm sections, Robert’s arrangements and the contributions of McGregor, Cale, Richard Thompson, sax and flute man Ray Warleigh and Doris Troy and P.P. Arnold are a constant source of pleasure. John Wood never got a better sound and we mixed it over and over until we were absolutely satisfied. But when the album was finished, Nick told me he wanted to make his next record alone – no arrangements, no sidemen, nothing.
Looking back, I can see that we were all so enamoured of Nick’s music we moved happily into the vacuum created by his diffidence. Nick, I think, felt left out of his own album. His refusal to include my favourite – ‘Things Behind The Sun’ – and his insistence on including those three instrumentals were his way of stamping his foot. His ghost is having the last laugh: the stark
Pink Moon
is his biggest selling album, while
Bryter Layter
trails in third place after
Five Leaves Left
.
Since then I have listened to more than one man’s fair share of anglophone singer-songwriters. When I ran the Hannibal label, I had a box for demos marked ‘WPSEs’ – White People Singing in English. Many claimed Nick as their primary influence: gentle breathy vocals, sad introspective lyrics and arpeggio guitar figures.
Next!
Few bear comparison to Nick’s form, much less his essence. The only ones who even slightly reminded me of Nick turned out to be unaware of him.
NICK SEEMED HAPPIER AT Sound Techniques than anywhere else (with the possible exception of Bob Squire’s kitchen). I was pretty happy there myself. It was a former dairy – a plaster cow’s head marked the doorway – on a side street off the King’s Road near the World’s End. Across from the studio, where Manolo Blahnik now has his flagship shoe store, was a ‘provisioner’, a throw-back grocery that sold potatoes, onions, carrots and canned or packaged goods. I stopped in during a recording session in 1966 and saw a blackboard listing ‘fresh-cut’ ham sandwiches and cheese sandwiches. Being American, I asked for a ham and cheese sandwich. The two ageing white-smocked proprietors looked at me blankly: they made ham sandwiches or cheese sandwiches, but the combination was not on the menu. I stared back in disbelief. After a brief stand-off, I ordered one of each, threw two slices of bread on the counter, stuffed the ham in alongside the cheese and walked out the door.
In talking about how we used to make records I sometimes feel like one of those ruddy, besmocked shopkeepers who refused to countenance the concept of ham
and
cheese. I have never used a drum machine, never sequenced anything, never sampled. Whenever I pass the old dairy and see the flats that have replaced the studio, I feel a wrench. It is hard to find places like Sound Techniques today. There is a small anti-digital movement, but even studios with this approach rarely have a room that sounds anywhere near as good.