Nick Drake's image as a paralysed depressive serving as a conduit for existential angst is never proven more wrong than with Bryter Layter. The best part of a year in the making, it called on the talents of some of the biggest hitters in the UK folk rock scene. Richard Thompson, Dave Pegg and Dave Mattacks from Fairport Convention contributed, and the incomparable Joe Boyd produced it. It was even graced by the presence of an ex-Velvet (John Cale, who arranged and played on Northern Sky and Fly). Drake's performance was incredibly assured for someone so young - he was just 21 when recording commenced.
The commercial failure of Five Leaves Left, Drake's previous album, had stung him deeply. As Joe Boyd told a BBC documentary in 1998, Nick was determined to make his next record even better. To this end, Boyd was given free reign to experiment with new arrangements and groups of musicians.
That meant bringing back Nick's Cambridge friend, Robert Kirby, whose string arrangements had blessed the debut. Danny Thompson, whose jazzy stylings on bass had underpinned Five Leaves Left, was replaced for the most part by Dave Pegg, who along with Dave Mattacks leant the album more of a rock feel on some tracks. John Cale, so the story goes, called up Joe demanding to work with Nick, and virtually kidnapped him until they had concocted a suitable result. Cale's mournful viola playing and tinkling Celeste became highlights of the album.
Drake would later strip his music of the lush arrangements on his third album, the bleak Pink Moon. But on Bryter Layter Boyd makes equal use of craft and accident to create something ineffably beautiful. Chris McGregor's startling piano solo on the slyly self deprecating Poor Boy is a live first take - the jazz pianist happened to be dropping by the studio on other business, and was persuaded to sit in, with remarkable results. Listen to the clip below for evidence.
It's sometimes remarked that Bryter Layter is Nick's city album, as opposed to the pastoral tones of the debut. An atmosphere of urban alienation certainly hangs over At the Chime of a City Clock, with it's meandering sax . During the making of the album Nick was living in Hampstead, a shadowy figure on the London folk scene. It was during this period, according to his mother Molly, that Nick's youthful introspection soured into the crippling depression which eventually claimed his life in 1974.
Perhaps the benefit of hindsight causes us to read more into the lyrics than we should, but there is a tangible sense of an observer on the edge of reality in them, sitting on the fence watching the world pass by. This detachment lies at the heart of the album's best known song, Northern Sky, once called the greatest love song ever written by the NME.
Of course most people know the story. Bryter Layter was another commercial failure, stymied by zero airplay and Drake's reluctance to play live to promote it. Failure hit him even harder this time, and frustration turned to depression. Drake is the quintessentially English cult hero - his appeal doesn't lie in monumental drug use, excessive womanising and compulsive hellraising. Instead, he's renowned for being young, gifted and miserable. But then, these days, Drake is often no more than a lazy journalistic shorthand for anything acoustic and slightly fey (preferably sung by earnest young waifs from Bergen or Oslo or some such Nordic locale with unruly fringes and ill fitting polo necks). Any new listener's perception is coloured by Drake's status as the #1 pin up boy for clinical depression and its particular sepia toned English variety. And yes, his music is quintessentially English, even if Drake's idiosyncratic guitar tunings often move him far from his native folk tradition. In their dedication to craft, structure and precision, Drake's songs are every inch the product of a society built on deference, restraint and suppressed emotional turmoil, particularly in the genteel middle class background from which he emerged.
However, listening to Bryter Layter or any of his albums, free from the clouding influence of Drake's tragic biography, all that is left is the art, passion and spirituality at the heart of it all. It's this which gives Drake's music, for its delicacy, a gravitas missing from the countless imitators, and which explains why his records sell more today than they ever did in his lifetime.
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