This summer, Nick Drake fans can look forward to a windfall of never-before-heard songs and recordings. Drake left just three studio albums behind when he died in 1974 at the age of 26, and while posthumous collections such as 1987’s Time Of No Reply and Family Tree in 2007 swept up a handful of outtakes, home recordings and demos, archival bounty has been relatively scant.
However, July 25 sees the release of The Making Of Five Leaves Left, a meticulously compiled four-disc collection of unreleased recordings harvested from the 13-month period during which Drake, producer Joe Boyd, engineer John Wood and Drake’s fellow Cambridge student and string arranger Robert Kirby intermittently worked on his 1969 debut, Five Leaves Left.
Outtakes from London’s Sound Techniques studio and a newly discovered amateur tape culminate in the original LP. It’s dynamic musical storytelling that not only traces the record’s evolution but gently reframes Drake as a creature of flesh, blood and strong musical opinions rather than an ethereal acoustic ghost.
“In my 30 years of looking after Nick’s estate, I’ve been torn between some of Nick’s fans saying, ‘Why don’t you release everything?’ and Nick’s other fans saying, ‘How dare you release stuff that Nick didn’t sanction?’” Cally Callomon, who runs Bryter Music, the Nick Drake estate, on behalf of Drake’s sister, tells MOJO. “I’ve spent years wanting people just to concentrate on the three main albums, not having demos released because I didn’t want to take the focus off Nick’s approved orchestrated songs that he was so proud of. But we just felt that after all this time, there is a justifiable reason for putting together what I think is an academic study of how the album came about.”
The project was initiated in February 2016, when Neil Storey, former Island Records Head Of Press, was contacted by Universal’s A&R Director Johnny Chandler with a top-secret request. Could Storey help interpret some tape boxes from the vaults?
Five tracks left: Recording notes from Sound Techniques studio
Time-consuming though the task was, it was also “the most extraordinary experience,” Storey tells MOJO. “You’re hearing Nick talking in the studio.” As a result of Storey’s painstaking work correcting entrenched inaccuracies, there was “a proper old-fashioned road map of how those sessions added up to Five Leaves Left.”
“It’s always interested me to find out how such an album came about in 1969 – based on what everyone else was doing, it’s on its own little island,” Callomon says of going over the original sessions. “So Gabrielle Drake and I thought, Time to try to tell the story. That coincided with two completely new tapes coming to light.”
The first of these was not entirely unknown: a tape of Drake’s first session with Boyd and Wood from March 1968. This had spent decades in the care of the singer-songwriter and friend of Drake’s, Beverley Martyn. The first thing you hear is Boyd’s introduction: “OK, here we go, whatever it is, take one.” Whatever it is turned out to be the breezy (and, Drake apparently worried, possibly too Kinks-like) Mayfair, running straight into Time Has Told Me. “We just sat him down with his guitar and wallop – he did that,” recalls Sound Techniques co-owner Wood, who engineered Drake’s LPs,, produced 1972’s Pink Moon. “Both Joe and I were somewhat stunned by it.” Also included are versions of Fruit Tree, Man In A Shed and Saturday Sun.
The second tape – “completely new to us” says Callomon – came from a Cambridge acquaintance of Drake’s called Paul De Rivaz. He took his grey Grundig reel-to-reel round to Kirby’s rooms in Caius College during Lent term, 1968, to record Drake as he prepared for an upcoming live performance on February 23.
While the De Rivaz tape is a repository of intimate versions of Time Has Told Me and Day Is Done, it also offers snippets of the elusive Drake in conversation, clearly describing to Kirby what he wants. For My Love Left With The Rain, he desires “as expansive a sound as possible”. He talks about playing I Was Made To Love Magic at the Roundhouse and discusses how it should sound “celestial”, before running through it twice, using a slightly different rhythm each time. Blossom, he describes as at least a little “corny”. There’s a brooding unnamed instrumental, too, in which he expresses a desire for a violin. “I’m afraid this is proving to be an unprofessional tape altogether partly due to intoxication,” he says with a small laugh, before starting the previously unheard whimsy of Mickey’s Tune.
For Storey and Callomon, judicious editing was vital. “What was the point in putting in 10 versions of Strange Face?” asks Storey. “Gabrielle was absolutely: ‘No, we cannot do it like that.’ It’s not every single thing. That may well satisfy the purist out there, but it’s not doing Nick’s legacy any good.”
“Nick made mistakes,” says Callomon. “He’d stop a take halfway through and say, ‘This isn’t the right tempo’ or, ‘I fluffed that line.’ We didn’t want any of those in because there didn’t seem to be any point. But I was keen to have different arrangements. I wanted people to experience what it would have been like with Danny Thompson coming into the studio and trying out different bass parts on, for example, Cello Song.”
The Making Of Five Leaves Left allows listeners to be in the room, too. “I really used to enjoy recording Nick,” says Wood. “When you’re making records, the buzz, the thrill, is when a group of people sit down in front of you and create something great, something extraordinary. It doesn’t always happen that way. But it did with Nick.”
The Making Of Five Leaves Left is released on July 25 on Island.
Get the latest issue of MOJO to read the full story behind The Making Of Five Leaves Left. Plus! Pulp’s first interview in 23 years, Pink Floyd, Smokey Robinson, Alison Krauss, Sparks, Dire Straits and more! More info and to order a copy HERE!
