Bryter Layter: An Appreciation

I often tell people who ask me to recommend music to them to look to artists older than my father, who will be 61 in late June. There are always exceptions, but the date has generally worked. Nearly all of the artists that I listen to, or intend to brush up on at a future date, are older than my father or would be had they lived. Right under the wire, a few days before my father's birth in anything but exotic Michigan, English natives Rodney and Molly Drake had their second child, Nicholas Rodney, in far off Rangoon, Burma. I discovered Nick Drake five or six years ago, having been keen on finding an artist with a rather small discography after tackling so many large ones, I stumbled into his and I haven't been the same since.

After returning to England in 1950, the Drake family settled in the village of Tanworth-in-Arden at the country estate Far Leys. Receiving a standard upper-middle-class education capped off by a few years studying great writers at Cambridge, Nick Drake left his studies after a demo of four tracks ended up in the hands of Joe Boyd, the wunderkind American producer, who signed the 20-year-old to his Island-associated Witchseason Productions. After a few false starts in the production stage and a bit of waiting in the post-production stage, September 1969 saw the release of his debut record, Five Leaves Left, titled after the warning inside Rizla rolling papers. The title doubled as an eerie prediction of his own November 1974 demise.

That album rather unfairly flopped upon its release. Perhaps the world wasn't ready for the Nick Drake experience, his busy acoustic fretwork, his downer lyrics and arrangements. Following the disappointing sales of his debut, the next album, Drake figured, had to sound brighter, even if the lyrical contents would tend to verge downward. Bryter Layter, its title taken from a phrase British weathermen would use on dreary days, would end up representing a Drake unlike the Drake that had been or the Drake to come.

Three instrumental tracks allow the listener to be drawn towards Drake's superb guitar playing. Drake almost certainly had extra sets of lyrics, but he insisted on the inclusion of the three lyric-less tracks, making Bryter Layter that much more accessible. The first of these, "Introduction", allows the listener to be brought in to the album gradually instead of having to face the complexity of Drake's words head-on. With Fairport Convention's two Daves, Pegg (bass) and Mattacks (drums) laying way back and Robert Kirby's sweet string arrangement up front, Drake adds a beautiful bright melody.

"Hazey Jane II" expands the Fairport crew to include Richard Thompson on down-home electric guitar. With Kirby adding a brass arrangement and the two Daves shuffling along, Drake strums his acoustic madly and sings lyrics that act as a breath of fresh air, showing that the Cambridge dropout had more to do than depress the listener. "Hazey Jane II" is, dare I say it, a bit cheery, though not without downer lines here and there. The coupling of "if songs were lines in the conversation, the situation would be fine" probably says more about Drake than any other he penned.

I've always felt that Drake could have made it as a jazz guitarist had he wanted. "At the Chime of a City Clock" is a great example of this. The swaying of the strings, the powerful but never domineering alto saxophone of Ray Warleigh and a chugging rhythm section (bassist Pegg and drummer Mike Kowalski) all drive the song along but it's clearly Drake who is at the instrumental helm with his jazz-folk guitar. The descending pattern throughout adds a degree of tension to the sound, complimenting the lyrics perfectly. If you want to meander around a large city at night, taking in the sights around you, "At the Chime of a City Clock" is a perfect accompaniment.

It's easy to see how "One of These Things First" rips off Smokey Robinson with the instrumentation and lyric meter reminiscent of a smoky jazz version of "The Way You Do The Things You Do", but Nick Drake's not one sing to a woman about all the things he loves about her. Instead, he's singing to her about all of the things that he could have been or should have been to her. An ex-lover singing to the love he lost? A figure singing to the love he never had the nerve to talk to? A frustrated soul singing to the world in general? It really doesn't matter. The two Daves were swapped out for Kowalski, keyboardist Paul Harris and bassist Ed Carter (along with Kowalski, a touring member of the Beach Boys).

"Hazey Jane I" may have a similar title to the second track on the album, but it is an altogether different beast with swirling string section and bass intertwining and an almost an orchestral feel to the drums. If "Hazey Jane II" could be from a sibling towards the distant figure of Jane, "Hazey Jane I" could be from a parent. It's a song that effectively describes the complexities of a parent-child relationship from the perspective of a caring parent. Could Drake have been thinking of his own parents? Could he be Hazey Jane? I suspect there's a possibility of that, though the message is a universal one.

The title track opens the second side of the album. With the two Daves and Kirby's strings driving the track along, "Bryter Layter" is a vehicle for a double melody lines of Lyn Dobson's flute and Drake's gentle guitar, the perfect accompaniment to a sunny, bright summer's day. The second side is a bit weightier, a bit more personal than the first. As "Introduction" gradually brought the listener into side one, "Bryter Layter" does the same for side two.

John Cale was working with Joe Boyd on Nico's third album when he demanded to be a part of Drake's sophomore release. "Fly" dispenses with the drums, leaving Cale's harpsichord and viola alongside Pegg and Drake. Words from a hopeless romantic to their ideal mate that he's almost certainly too scared to talk to outside of song. Drake was uncommunicative towards even his closest friends and relatives, it was only through his songs that he was able to effectively communicate. "Fly" is representative of this.

"Poor Boy" seems to be a portrait of Drake himself, showcasing a sense of humor that was rarely exhibited. With a jazz-folk-samba backing dominated by Chris MacGregor's jazz piano and Warleigh's alto, Drake mumbles his way through telling a tale about a figure feeling so down and out. The vocals of P. P. Arnold and Doris Troy, big enough to blow Drake's fragile tenor right out of the water, mock the self-loathing boy feeling sorry for himself, telling him not to feel so down. The vocal contrast may not be everybody's cup of tea, but I love it as much as Mr. Bun likes Spam.

"Northern Sky" could be the greatest love song ever written, made all-the-more heavenly by the formerly Velvet Cale's piano, celesta and organ. It's all the more tragic that the painfully shy Drake never did find anyone to brighten his life. Why this hasn't become a standard is beyond me for it has all of the makings of one. Perhaps nobody could ever cut a version that could ever hope to be as affecting as the original.

Having laid it all on the line with "Northern Sky", there really isn't anything left to say, so Drake doesn't. Even without words, "Sunday" best evokes the pastoral scenes of Tanworth that Five Leaves Left had tackled. Close your eyes and you can imagine Drake looking out of his bedroom window at Far Leys towards the weeping sky after the saturday sun had gone away for good. With classical strings, Warleigh's lilting flute and Drake's melancholic guitar picking, you don't want the album to end yet you understand that it must. To all of the independent filmmakers out there, "Sunday" could be the perfect exit music for a film...

Of course you know that the album did exactly as well as the first. The American compilation Nick Drake, mixing five tracks from Bryter Layter with three from Five Leaves Left did nothing to introduce the increasingly reticent Drake across the pond, either. Drake went on to record Pink Moon over the course of two midnight sessions in late 1971 and a handful of tracks in early 1974 but they were sparse, every track bar one devoid of instrumentation beyond Drake's quavering vocals and intricate guitar picking ("Pink Moon" has a piano overdub). The textures that Kirby's string and brass arrangements brought to the fold were absent as was the able assistance of a backing group, almost certainly a rebuke by Drake towards the polished sounds of Five Leaves Left and Bryter Layter. I see the later catalogue as one of a frustrated man who seems to laid his soul bare for the listener. While sounding a bit spare (especially the 1974 tracks), one can't deny that the late-period tracks as are effective at tugging at the heartstrings as the tracks that had preceded them.

Nobody seemed to realize Nick Drake was around at the time, his three albums were poor sellers throughout his career and for decades thereafter. If a clause hadn't been written into Joe Boyd's contract to keep them in print, who knows if anybody would remember them? Nearly four decades after the first of them appeared, they are still around for anybody to discover, still in print along with two albums of additional material having followed in the years that were issued after his 1999 discovery with a reissue of a out-of-print third posthumous release supposedly in the works.

It's not a completely foreign concept for an especially sensitive soul at university to have a Nick Drake period nowadays. The title track to Pink Moon got a lot of attention a decade or so back when it was used in a commercial for the Volkswagen Cabrio and gave the eternal 26-year-old some well-deserved recognition. He almost certainly sold more records on that one commercial than on anything else. He's still essentially a cult figure, you've got to go to the indie record stores to find anybody who might be able to put his name to his music (at least I do), but his albums have benefitted from time's passage. He has risen and he is everywhere if only one takes the time to search him out.

It doesn't matter whether it's Five Leaves Left, Bryter Layter or Pink Moon, each of Drake's three studio albums leave the listener satisfied. I've remarked on one, let others remark on the others.