Nick Drake: The Life by Richard Morton Jack

Author:Richard Morton Jack [Jack, Richard Morton]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781529308082
Publisher: John Murray Press
Published: 2023-06-07T16:00:00+00:00

18

People Didn’t Really Listen

AS NICK FINESSED his new material Joe had been producing Fairport’s pioneering new album, Liege & Lief, which set traditional folk to contemporary rock arrangements. Shortly before its release in early December 1969, Ashley Hutchings and Sandy Denny announced that they were separately leaving the band. Whilst dealing with this crisis Joe was also making albums with the Incredible String Band, Geoff and Maria Muldaur and Vashti Bunyan, and restructuring Witchseason.

His intention had always been to provide as large an umbrella as possible for his acts to shelter under – ‘I do like to be totally involved with the artists I record,’ he said at the time1 – but not nearly enough money was coming in. As he encapsulates it, Witchseason ‘was struggling with too many nice reviews and too few sales’.2 At the start of the new decade he renegotiated the terms of his deal with Island, giving them first refusal on Witchseason recordings for the next four years (outside the US and Canada) in exchange for a lump sum for every finished master he delivered.

The arrangement assured the company’s future to an extent, but also created an incentive for it to deliver as many albums as possible.

The cross-collateralisation in my deal with Island was brutally simple. We used the advances to pay studio costs, royalties and overheads, and the money was recouped by Island from royalties owed to us. We never really got to that point, though – advances always ran ahead of royalties. Paying Fairport royalties would clean me out, so my response was to make more records and hope to have a hit. The bills kept coming, so I was spending more and more time in the studio to try to pay them – I’d owe five grand to the travel agent, pay them two to keep them quiet for a while, then before I knew it the debt was back up to five.

Unsurprisingly, Joe became frazzled. ‘He was always being pulled in several directions at once,’ says John Wood, who was unconvinced as to the wisdom of Joe’s ‘total involvement’ policy.

Part of the problem with Witchseason offering an all-round service to its acts was that they were nannied – no one forced any of them to do anything they didn’t want to. In fact, Joe was very supportive of them when they didn’t want to do things. Some of Joe’s acts were sloppy in performance, but I don’t think he would ever have told them to tighten up. To be successful, artists have to have a work ethic. Maybe some of them felt that their middle-class status meant they were exempted from getting their hands dirty – John Martyn was the only Witchseason artist who really didn’t get along with Joe, and he was from the least comfortable background.

Ultimately, though, the problem was that they simply weren’t selling enough records. ‘I valued the creative relationships I had with the Witchseason artists so highly that I was always willing to rob Peter to pay Paul in order to keep the show on the road,’ says Joe.

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