1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die: 181. Nick Drake – Bryter Layter (1970)

 

What a contrast between the last album and this one. Can you imagine Nick Drake and Black Sabbath on the same bill? What fun that would be.

Drake is one of those musicians that people that have heard him have to tell their friends about, mainly because he is, or was, too obscure for one as talented. He’s probably better known now, though, than he was in the almost thirty years ago when I first heard him on Mark Radcliffe and Marc “Lard” Riley’s late night radio show, deservedly so.

I said in my comments for Five Leaves Left that perhaps Drake relied too much on other musicians for that album. Now, there are a lot of other instruments involved on this album too – strings, flute, even some spicy soul horns, but it all seems better integrated. Maybe it’s just that the songs on this album are just a little bit better than Five Leaves Left?

The album opens with the first of three instrumentals, aptly named Introduction, that introduces the strings motif that recurs in At The Chime Of A City Clock. If this, and the next instrumental Bryter Layter sound like the soundtrack to a film, it may be because Drake’s music has come to often be used in film and TV soundtracks, notably Fly from this album in the Wes Anderson film The Royal Tenenbaums. The album closes with the third instrumental, Sunday, and Drake’s music in general is like the soundtrack to a Sunday – both relaxing yet wistful, where having time to do nothing can merge into ennui, and where there’s a growing sense of anxiety over the coming Monday morning.  At The Chime Of A City Clock is probably the strongest of these sentiments, calling to mind Rupert Brooke’s poem The Old Vicarage, Grantchester with its final stanza “Stands the church clock at ten to three, and is there honey still for tea?” Wonder and melancholy at the ordinary.

I wish that Drake’s lyrics carried the profundity of his music, but to be brutally honest they are a little “cat/sat/mat” and so couplets feel more like they are written purely as a vehicle to deliver the final syllable, but sometimes they work – “Do you curse where you come from?” he asks “Jane” in the delicate Hazey Jane Part I. Which comes, with a wrongness I find oddly delicious, *after* Hazey Jane Part II, a much more upbeat tune with soul horns.

Listening to this album with a more critical ear, I was taken with how much of the backing music uses jazz, on One Of These Things First, for example, with an almost Dave Brubeck style piano, or how Poor Boy carries elements of jazz and a bit of gospel in the backing vocals (by Doris Troy). Perhaps because Fairport Convention alumni Dave Pegg and Dave Mattacks are involved. Other musicians such as Paul Harris on piano and Lyn Dobson on flute are well-travelled session players, who have already played with some of the artists on this list, and will play with many more to come.

I feel like I could go on at length about this album, but I won't. Just to say that it contains one of my favourite tracks of all time, the gorgeously romantic Northern Sky, expressing absolutely the completion of finding a soul mate – “But now you’re here. Brighten my northern sky.”