Nick Drake producer Joe Boyd on the 50th anniversary of Five Leaves Left

English musician Nick Drake achieved little commercial success before his death in 1974 at the age of 26, but these days he’s considered an essential artist who’s influenced some of the biggest names in music.

We spoke to friend and producer Joe Boyd on the 50th anniversary of Drake's debut album Five Leaves Left.

American record producer Joe Boyd signed Nick Drake in 1968 and produced his first two albums Five Leaves Left and Bryter Layter. He speaks to RNZ Music's Trevor Reekie about Drake's shy and delicate nature, his incredible music, and how he's become such a beloved figure.

Can you tell us about meeting Nick Drake and hearing what he’d recorded?

He came in. He was tall and very good looking, but very self-effacing. He was looking down at his hands and feet all the time and stammering a bit. He handed me this tape, and just walked out the door.

At the end of that day, when everybody else had gone home, I cranked up my old reel-to-reel tape recorder and played it. It had three songs. The first one was ‘Time Has Told Me’.

I mean, I think I listened three straight times because I was just stunned. In those days, I was a bit cranky about the new wave of white middle-class singer-songwriters. To me, Dylan was great, but Nick was just completely different.

It just wasn't like anything else. You can talk about how his unique musical spirit shone through whatever influences he may have had, but obviously, musicians have to have influences.

And years later I discovered the tapes of his mother.

If you listen to his mother Molly's piano chords, you could kind of imagine that those unique sounds Nick got on the guitar were his attempt to replicate, the kind of chords that his mother played on the piano.

Five Leaves Left was recorded between July 1968, and June 1969, at Sound Techniques studio in London. Did you know what songs he was going to record, and what other musicians you were going to use in the recording process?

We didn't just go haphazardly into the studio. I remember early on in my relationship with Nick, I went over to his flat where he was living, and basically sat there while he played me every song he'd written.

It was just incredible. I mean, it was just so many great songs, that were so different from each other, and there were so many rich possibilities that were opening up as I was listening to them.

A month earlier, if somebody had said to me, "You're going to record an artist, and you're going to put strings behind him," I would have said, "You're nuts." I was very against, in a way, that kind of aesthetic, of a singer with strings.

And yet, when I heard some of the songs, I said to him, "Could you imagine strings?" He said, "Oh yeah."

He was shy, so he didn't mention that he knew a guy at Cambridge, [string arranger] Robert Kirby, So I ended up wasting money on a session with Richard Houston, who’d done arrangements for James Taylor. Peter Asher [of Peter and Gordon], had recommended him to me.

He's a good arranger, but I was very disappointed, and I could tell Nick was disappointed.

The fact that I said I was disappointed, and John Wood, the engineer, said he was disappointed, gave Nick the confidence to say, "Well yeah, actually I'm disappointed too."

Finally, he said, "Well, I have this friend in Cambridge, and he's done some arrangements for me before." John and I looked at Nick like, "What? He's done arrangements for you before? Why didn't you say so?!"

It turned out that Nick had played at a May Ball in Cambridge, with a string quartet that Robert Kirby had organized, and written the arrangements for.

The next day, I got into my car, and I drove up to Cambridge, and Nick introduced me to Robert Kirby, and I really liked him. The greatest thing was, it was clear that he just adored Nick and Nick's music. That he understood how wonderful and original this was.

Can you tell us about the deal you got for Nick with Island Records?

Island wanted to work with [another band Boyd had discovered] Fairport Convention, so they gave me a cross-collateralized production deal – a deal that meant if I lost money on one artist, Island recouped that loss from the profits on the other… the successful artist.

So, Fairport was selling well, but I was ploughing the profits into recording Nick, and Nick didn't sell … I think Island didn't really know how to sell him, and I guess I didn't either. I mean, we failed, really.

Some of those songs on Five Leaves Left are incredibly revealing songs – ‘Day is Done’ for example. It's quite a dark song for a guy so young to come up with. Did you think that at the time?

Yeah, I mean, ‘Fruit Tree’ really was kind of startling, as a lyric.

“Fame is but a fruit tree / So very unsound / It can never flourish / 'Til its stock is in the ground.”

I asked Nick about it. I think he muttered something about it being more about Buddy Holly, or the artists and the poets like [precocious English poet] Thomas Chatterton.

Nick was an upper middle class, well-educated boy, and there's a kind of reverence for the language and a depth of education.

He had a very sophisticated literary background, and to me, you can sort of feel it in the way that he approaches even the most personal lyrics. I mean, you know, he is a product of a certain type of education, and a certain period in history.

On the songs ‘Three Hours’ and ‘Cello Song’, you used the percussionist from the Stones' Sympathy for the Devil’ – Ghanaian percussionist Rocky Dijon. Tell me about working with Rocky. Who made that call?

I knew Rocky. He'd played on a couple of other things of mine. He was very close to Island Records as well. He played with [British rock band] Traffic I think, so he was kind of around.

I think Danny Thompson [bassist on Five Leaves Left] had played with him too somewhere, and he was great. He came, and was full of energy, and brought some life to the session, not that it needed it with Danny.

Danny was a great figure in those sessions. He's such a great spirit, and he adored Nick.

A lot of us who are very fond of Nick were very careful of him, because he seemed very delicate, and so we kind of tiptoed around him a little bit. But Danny would come into a session and clap Nick in the middle of the back very hard, "Wotcher cock" and give him a Cockney rhyming slang greeting, and tease him. "Come on Nick, speak up," and Nick loved it. Nick adored Danny.

That's probably what he needed.

It's quite amazing, because by this time, you realize that Five Leaves Left is a brilliant, brilliant album, but you've got an artist who can't play live and doesn't do interviews. I don't know how you got 'round that. You obviously couldn't get 'round it, because the album was greeted with deafening silence, really, wasn't it?

Well, to me, the great influence on my approach to Nick, both in recording the album and in terms of promoting him, was Leonard Cohen.

Cohen had just come out with his first record and I thought it was so well produced. John Simon did such a great job.

Cohen was also an inspiration, in terms of how to sell it – at that time, was very aloof. He was like, "I'm not a performer, I'm a poet, and I don't do concerts." He'd never performed in public, as far as I know, when that record came out and didn't perform until the '70s.

But that record sold 100,000 copies. The way Cohen got famous, was really due to the growth of FM radio in America, and I think that really got him out there.

Once he got famous in America, everybody would write about him with huge respect in England, and even the BBC would play some Leonard Cohen tracks, and the buzz spread across the Atlantic.

But, because Island, in those days, didn't have an American outlet, we had to try and find a label to release Nick in America.

David Geffen was just starting Asylum Records, and he loved Nick's stuff, but he said, "I got to see him live. I got to see him. I'll let you know when I'm coming over to London next."

We waited for a while, and then we tried other labels. Everybody said, "Well when's he touring?" and we just didn't get a release. There wasn't really a British equivalent to the FM radio scene in America.

Five Leaves Left didn't sell anything. I mean, I think we sold a thousand, or 1,500, or something like that in Britain in the first year. It was pretty frustrating.

There's a quote from an English psychologist, Donald Winnicott, who wrote, "Artists are people driven by the tension between the desire to communicate, and equally, the desire to hide." Is that Nick Drake?

Well, I don't know about the desire to hide. I think Nick wanted to succeed. He wanted people to hear his music. He wanted to be a star, and I think he wanted to be able to play in public. He wasn't being Greta Garbo. When he was at Cambridge, I think he was surrounded by Robert Kirby, and the string quartet, and friends. When he took five minutes to tune his guitar, everybody was patient, so there was a supportive atmosphere.

I heard him once at Les Cousins [a folk and blues club in London’s Soho], doing a kind of guest spot. People just started talking. He didn't have jokes, he didn't speak, and he took a long time tuning his guitar.

I mean, today, if you have complicated tunings, you have three or four guitars, and some guitar roadie who tunes the guitar and runs on stage, and swaps guitars with the guy in front of the microphone.

In those days, nobody had ever heard of such a thing, and so Nick would just lose the audience somehow.

But the thing that’s haunting, is that when he opened for Fairport Convention in '69, the atmosphere in the hall was very respectful. It was such a fantastic moment. It was a real hushed atmosphere.

Nick just came out on stage, and everybody kept quiet while he tuned, and he didn't say anything, and it wasn't like a pub or a folk club.

People went crazy. They loved Nick. They gave him a huge ovation, and me and my colleagues at [Joe’s production company] Witchseason stood there saying, "Wow, this is so great. I think this is going to work. It can work for Nick to play live."

But then we sent him out on tour, and it was back to glasses clinking, and people talking and losing the thread while he tuned, and he couldn't ... He’d just get in a downward spiral of bashfulness and depression, the louder the chatter got.

In the middle of the tour, he called me up, and he said, "I can't do it anymore. I'm coming home."

Nick Drake died in November 1974, leaving behind three albums that didn't really sell, and yet, decades later, Nick's slim body of work achieved a remarkable ubiquity. What do you think were some of the defining factors that saw that turnaround grow over the years?

The most important element is that old fashioned thing, word of mouth.

I’d ask people, "How did you hear about Nick’s music?" I tell you, there must've been 10 times I heard the same story. They’d started going out with a girl, or a boy, and on the third or the fourth date, the new love would say, "Have you ever heard Nick Drake?"

They'd say, "No, who's that?" and they’d say, "Okay, sit down," and they’d put on a Nick Drake LP, and make it very clear, that unless you got it, this relationship had no future.

And then, there were some very nice articles. There was a guy called Brian Cullman who wonderful piece about his meeting with Nick. He's an American who came to London in '69, and heard Nick at Cousins and ended up going over to [musician and friend of Drake’s] John Martyn's house and meeting Nick there.

It's a lovely piece, and it's very revealing about Nick, and his personality, and what things were like, what the atmosphere was like when he played, in those days.

Island was willing to make sure Nick’s records were always were in stock, then I persuaded them to put out a box set in about '79 or '80.

That Fruit Tree box set helped a lot because just seeing it in the record shops, people had to realize, "The record company really believes in this guy. They really think this is important music. They've done a deluxe box set. We better take this seriously."

So, I think it was word of mouth, it was a few journalists writing about him, and it was Island's and my commitment to making sure that the record stayed in everybody's face.

I guess, a Volkswagen TV commercial, later on, would've helped as well.

That didn't hurt, but that was in America, it wasn't in England. By that time, in England, he was already selling 10-20,000 copies a year.

By that time, you had a whole generation who knew about Nick Drake.

Related:

When The Day Is Done: the orchestrations of Robert Kirby

Find out more about what Joe Boyd is up to now: www.joeboyd.co.uk