Shrinking Violets by Joe Moran

Author:Joe Moran
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Yale University Press
Published: 2016-07-27T16:00:00+00:00

Nowadays a snatch of video on YouTube of music made in his bedroom might have been all Drake needed to build a following. In his era the options for a shy performer were more limited, especially since Chris Blackwell of Island Records, Drake’s parent record company, was reluctant to advertise music directly via a separate marketing department. British radio played mostly chart music, so live shows were the only way for an artist like Drake to build an audience—which forced him to face down his stage fright.

His first big concert, supporting Fairport Convention at London’s Royal Festival Hall, came in September 1969, a few weeks after Five Leaves Left was released. This venue was about the worst place for a nervous performer to do his first major gig. Its auditorium is like a giant airplane hangar: three thousand seats sweep uninterrupted down to the front, with no separating pillars between performer and audience. If you are playing solo, it seems like a very long way from the wings to the center of the massive stage. The hall’s famous egg-in-a-box design, in which the curved auditorium floats on stilts above the foyers, was supposed to cut out external noise but in fact made it hard to hear at the back and the sides. Drake’s feathery voice barely carried. He had brought only one guitar, and because each song required bespoke retuning, he needed long gaps between songs to twiddle the machine heads, during which time he completely ignored the audience. His only admission of their presence came as he walked off and waved his guitar vaguely in their direction. According to David Sandison, Island Record’s press officer, he could have been a roadie doing a sound check.33

Smaller gigs in bars were worse, as Drake’s ethereal sound fought a losing battle against the clinking glasses and low conversational drone. He wasn’t bold enough to tell people to shush. The sound equipment in these venues was invariably poor, with just one mic for his voice and one for his much louder guitar, and no foldback monitoring to allow him to hear himself. The mic picked up the sound of his chair squeaking and his jacket buttons hitting the guitar, but his voice sounded dampened and distant, not helped by his habit of turning his head away from the mic as if he had changed his mind about being heard. Halfway through songs he would lose his nerve and start again.

The nadir arrived when he was booked for the Guest, Keen and Nettlefolds Nuts and Bolts Apprentices’ Annual Dance in Smethwick, Birmingham at the end of 1969. About fifteen people gathered in front of the stage as he began, but most of his audience were still cleaning up after the meal and stacking chairs to make way for the disco to follow. There is nothing lonelier-looking than a musician playing for a crowd that isn’t listening. Drake’s sister, Gabrielle, said later that he had “a skin too few” for a creative artist, because “you

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