Nick Drake by Patrick Humphries

Author:Patrick Humphries
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Stories
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 1997-10-15T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter 10

In July 1970 Joe Boyd decided that the songs of his Witchseason acts – Fairport Convention, John Martyn, The Incredible String Band, Nick Drake – needed to be better known. He hired a studio and employed a couple of session singers: his then girlfriend, Linda Peters (later Thompson) and Elton John. Reg Dwight had become Elton John in 1968, and was already carving out quite a living, mostly as singer and pianist for those 14/11d ‘Can you tell the difference between these and the original sounds?’ compilations.

Looking back, with the all the baggage of hindsight, it is hard to remember Nick Drake as anything but a frail, translucent, tragic presence. But there was a time back then when Nick was just another young singer-songwriter, ambitious as any of his contemporaries, and desperately keen to get his material across to as wide an audience as possible.

‘I wanted an album of Warlock Music songs,’ explained Joe Boyd, Nick’s mentor and producer. ‘We did Mike Heron’s songs, a couple of Nick’s songs, a John Martyn song … We pressed up 100 acetates, white labels. I never had any. Always the way!’

So ‘Elton Sings Nick’ were the first covers of songs by Nick Drake? Joe Boyd considered: ‘The only cover I’m aware of during Nick’s lifetime was by Millie. I think she heard it through Chris Blackwell. She covered “Mayfair” on an album, the one with her straddling a banana.’

Robert Kirby: ‘The Millie record came out in 1970. That was one of the first things I did when I left university, thrown in at the deep end with a proper reggae band. That’s the album with “Mayfair” on it. I produced and arranged it, and Nick was very pleased – it was a cover.’

The idea was to have something which could be sent out, for managers to play to music publishers, and on to their clients. It was a Tin Pan Alley tradition, and acetates of freshly written Lennon & McCartney compositions regularly turn up for sale at auction. Even the more established acts (Beatles, Bowie, Dylan) still demoed material, which was then pressed up on to acetates and passed around to interested parties. White-label acetates proved a godsend to bootleggers, and latterly, to the compilers of box sets and CD reissues.

The best-known acetate in rock ‘n’ roll was Bob Dylan’s The Basement Tapes. Culled from six months of loose-limbed jamming with The Band in the basement of their house, Big Pink, at Woodstock during Dylan’s enforced lay-off during 1967, a twelve-track acetate was circulated to interested parties in the UK during early 1968. That acetate achieved notoriety when – as The Great White Wonder – it became rock’s first bootleg during 1969.

Was the idea to get the likes of Tom Jones or Engelbert Humperdinck interested in covering one of Boyd’s protégés’ songs? That sort of crossover was not unfeasible; there had been precedents. The first person to record a Paul Simon composition was Val Doonican; the first commercially available cover of a

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.