All the Madmen

by Clinton Heylin

  The first July session demonstrated that Barrett, knowingly or unknowingly, had fallen in line with Gilmour’s plan, as he ran down solo takes of ‘Effervescing Elephant’, ‘Dolly Rocker’, ‘Love Song’, ‘Let’s Split’ and ‘Dominoes’. The whole of the following day was then spent overdubbing ‘Dominoes’, the one first-rate new original he had brought to these sessions; contributing his legendary backward guitar solo, achieved by turning the tape over and letting it play in reverse. At the third and last session, he returned to ‘Effervescing Elephant’, a ninety-second-long piece of Lear-like nonsense he’d been carrying around for the last six months, to provide a fitting end to the recording career of a man who had made the nursery rhyme such an integral part of the late-Sixties pop sensibility.

  Yet even at the end of this 17 July session, it is doubtful whether anyone in attendance thought they had an album in the can. Certainly EMI engineer Alan Parsons, who presided over tape operations at the February and June sessions, carried no such conviction: ‘If it hadn’t been for dropping in and out and cutting up tapes and doing things it would have just been laughable. There would just have been nothing releasable there at all . . . just a series of “madcap laughs”.’

  It now devolved to Dave Gilmour to salvage the album by applying a palette of overdubs to the twelve songs he had picked out as Madcap’s successor. Over nine sessions in just four days he had available before leaving for France with Floyd – 21–24 July – Gilmour bounced from tape to tape, sculpting something that was more than a set of demos, but less than a strong second LP. Barrett turned up for the first couple of sessions, after which, according to Parsons, ‘he was discreetly told, “Thank you very much Syd, we don’t need you.”’

  The result was another album that fell short of what Barrett continued to believe he had in him. He confessed to Michael Watts the very week Barrett was released that the songs ‘are very pure, you know; the words . . . [but sometimes] I feel I’m jabbering’. That was pretty much what the music press thought, too, and Barrett now decided to leave them to it. But some months later, in conversation with Beat Instrumental’s Steve Turner, he revealed just how disappointed he had been with the released artefact: ‘[The songs] have got to reach a certain standard, and that’s probably reached in Madcap once or twice . . . On the other one only a little – just an echo of that.’

  Nonetheless, whatever Syd thought of the failings inherent in his own effort, it was as nothing to what he thought of the Floyd’s continued attempts to supersede their psychedelic past. Floyd’s first 1970s album, Atom Heart Mother, had been released a fortnight before his, so the subject inevitably came up in conversation with Watts. Barrett again proved unsparing in his assessment of their work to date: ‘Their choice of material was always very much to do with what they were thinking as architecture students. Rather unexciting people . . .’

  And he did not confine his investigations on their ‘progress’ to the just-released platter. Syd was still keeping tabs on them, at some point visiting the sessions themselves, probably in early June, when Ron Geesin was wrestling with arranging Atom Heart Mother’s side-long title track (still at that juncture called ‘The Amazing Pudding’). Geesin, on the verge of a nervous breakdown from the strain, says he ‘just thought he [Syd] was a nutter. He didn’t know what was going on.’ But Geoff Mott, who accompanied Barrett to the session in question, insists: ‘There was nothing sad about Syd’s behaviour. I can still see him keeping an eye on proceedings, sitting on his hands with that quizzical smile on his face.’

  Actually, try as Syd might to continue dismissing Floyd’s current work as simply their way of ‘working their entry into an art school’, the quartet were finally on the right track, producing music that was not only architectural, but instantly identifiable. Over the next year they would become one of the more interesting live acts in the world, building their set around two side-long songs – ‘Atom Heart Mother’ and ‘Echoes’ – that would start to cement their post-Barrett reputation as one of the more adventurous exponents of English ‘prog-rock’.

  At the same time, Barrett’s own influence would diminish in almost exact proportion to his dissipating presence from the public arena. And it wasn’t all down to the failure of his commercial output. In part, he simply lacked that necessary work ethic – inspiration came quick or not at all, and when it slid away, he let it slide (hence the perfunctory technique in much of his ‘art’). It was one thing that set him apart from the others in the Floyd family. The Floyd, month on month, year on year, remorselessly worked on building their reputation as a live act, refusing to be collectively dissuaded even when individually convinced that they were ‘blundering about in the dark’. Barrett preferred to mention in passing how awfully nice it would be to get up and do something, then leaving it at that.

  He had hinted as much at the beginning of 1970, in conversation with Journo Chris Welch, suggesting: ‘I’d like to play sometime on the scene. Got to do something. It would be a splendid thing to get a band together.’ It would take him a further six months to arrange anything, but eventually he agreed to play a short set at Extravaganza ’70, a four-day ‘music and fashion festival’ at Kensington’s cavernous Olympia exhibition hall, the first week in June. When he did take the stage, for the first time in thirty months, the set was shorter than the February 1970 John Peel Session, comprising three of those songs, plus the strongest track from Madcap. As for getting a band together, basic backing was provided by Gilmour and Shirley, the only musicians he trusted to bring to the Extravaganza.

  Yet that final song at Olympia, a fiery five-minute ‘Octopus’, suggested Syd was still capable of some musical pyrotechnics. Containing more than a whiff of its original ‘Clowns and Jugglers’ self, its skidding guitar runs were a flickering reminder of the U-Fo Barrett. But just as Syd started to feel the glow again, he cut short the performance, and with it his London performing career. Without a performing self prepared to promote the product, and increasingly circular in conversation, he was never going to turn Barrett into a viable commercial release. It was destined to remain ‘just an echo’ of former triumphs. Released the first week in November 1970, the album engendered less of the natural curiosity Syd’s solo debut received, and EMI expressed minimal interest in perpetuating this maddening maverick’s recording career.

  *

  Across town at Island HQ they were having a similar problem with Bryter Layter, the second album of their own introspective singer-songwriter Nick Drake, also released that first week in November 1970. Like Barrett, Drake had abandoned playing live before he had even completed the follow-up to his solo debut. The only promotional avenue now open was press interviews, and that avenue was all but bricked up for good the day Drake met Island press officer, David Sandison:

  David Sandison: The first time I ever met Nick Drake was the week . . . Bryter Layter was released. He arrived an hour late, wasn’t very interested in a cup of coffee or tea or anything to eat. During the next half hour he said maybe two words. Eventually I ran out of voice, paid the bill and walked him back to Witchseason.

  If Barrett had never been part of the singer-songwriter scene, and knew little of the circuit of ex-folk clubs and college gigs that provided an ideal arena in which to forge a golden era of English singer-songwriters, for an artist like Drake – who never enjoyed even one 45 in his lifetime, recorded just two early radio sessions (only one of which appears to have survived15), and was chronically self-conscious in person – there was one route and one route alone to recognition. But by June 1970 he had already abandoned performing.

  The one journalist who persisted in trying to get a Drake interview, Sounds’ Jerry Gilbert, got almost the same treatment as Sandison at a prearranged meeting in February 1971, when he tried to push the songwriter to explain the lack of live performances. But Drake finally offered up an explanation of sorts: ‘There were only two or three concerts that felt right, and there was something wrong with the others. I did play [Les] Cousins, and
one or two folk clubs in the North, but the gigs just sort of petered out.’

  In fact, Drake was cocooned from the very start, offered only to audiences who would ‘understand’ where he was coming from and might forgive the more protracted tune-ups between songs. In an era when promoters thought nothing of putting Jimi Hendrix on the same bill as The Monkees, or an acoustic David Bowie with the stodgy boogie of Humble Pie, he was consistently mollycoddled by the Witchseason family.

  And if his introduction to the core Witchseason audience was certainly daunting – third on the bill to Fairport Convention at the Royal Festival Hall on 24 September 1969, the night they debuted their English folk-rock masterpiece, Liege & Lief – anyone else would have seen it as an extraordinary break. No slogging around ‘folk clubs in the North’ for this privileged youth. Even the other act on that night’s landmark bill, John and Beverley Martyn, were in perfect tandem with Drake’s musical direction. The pair soon took Drake to their collective bosom; and when in May 1970 they moved to a ‘traditional house’ surrounded by Hampshire countryside, they provided Drake with an escape from the city (directly inspiring his most idiomatic song, ‘Northern Sky’).

  The Martyns also had an album to promote; and from a similar commercial base point. Although John Martyn already had two Island albums to his own name (London Conversation and The Tumbler), the duo’s debut, the warmly received Stormbringer, had just appeared in the shops. Only now did the new husband’s perceptible talent in those earlier offerings begin to deliver on Chris Blackwell’s faith. Not surprisingly, Joe Boyd was quick to suggest the pair share a further bill with Drake at the altogether more intimate Queen Elizabeth Hall, another potentially prestigious South Bank affair that would hopefully bring further press attention, along with another sympathetic, patient audience.

  The February 1970 showcase, though, only proved that Nick Drake was fast losing what little performing craft he had mustered from months of unbilled performances at Les Cousins. John Martyn, internally fuelled by liberal amounts of alcohol before every performance, was pained to see such a self-conscious performer: ‘When he played live it was just soul-destroying to watch him. It was like watching a man being stripped naked.’ Reports of the show reached an old friend from Marlborough, Simon Coker, who recalled the teenage Drake as ‘a confident performer. And [then] I heard about this particular performance . . . from people . . . who said he mumbled. And I remember saying at the time, “That doesn’t sound like Nick at all.”’ Not the Nick he had known, anyway.

  It had never occurred to Joe Boyd – and why would it? – that he wasn’t doing Drake a huge favour by foisting him on the very folk who bought Witchseason’s assorted Island output. And now, following the QEH showcase, he assigned the fledgling songster the support slot on two short but important tours. The first of these announced the fifth Fairport Convention incarnation in two-and-a-half years (Sandy Denny and Ashley Hutchings having quit on Liege & Lief’s completion, to pursue their own individual visions of English folk-rock); the second slot was on a five-date foray for Fotheringay, Denny’s eagerly awaited post-Fairport combo. Drake didn’t even last the five dates. As Boyd relates in his own memoir, ‘When he called me from the road after the third date, his voice had the crushed quality of defeat, “I, uh, I don’t think I can do any more shows, uh, I’m sorry.” He just wanted to come home.’ And that appears to have been that.16

  If Boyd was nonplussed by this impasse, Island boss Blackwell adopted the stoical view: ‘It was hard to put pressure on someone who wouldn’t tour when their record only cost five hundred quid.’ Both remained convinced that the terrible beauty of Drake’s songs would eventually register with record buyers, and continued to fund further sessions. Displaying remarkable faith (and foresight), the pair coerced the increasingly withdrawn ex-student into turning up at the studio with whatever songs he was still writing, while Boyd persevered in his search for the perfect sonic backdrop to this songwriter’s uniquely English vision.

  The discernible deterioration in Drake’s daily demeanour concerned Boyd, and his Sound Techniques compadre John Wood, less than this indeterminate quest; perhaps because, to them, introspection was now the chosen response of many to the Sixties’ more overt excesses. As Drake’s friend and arranger, Robert Kirby points out: ‘Walking around Cambridge in those days, there were fifty people worse than Nick that you would pass on the pavement every hour.’ And it wasn’t like Boyd and Wood weren’t surrounded by such types. Two equally extraordinary guitarists on the Witchseason roster – John Martyn and Richard Thompson – could be just as withdrawn:

  John Martyn: I was actually very shy and retiring and ever so sweet and gentle until I was twenty and then I just got the heave with . . . all that terribly nice, rolling-up-joints-and-sitting-on-toadstools-watching-the-sunlight-dapple-its-way-through-the-dingly-dell-of-life’s-rich-pattern stuff. Back then, everybody expected you to be like that . . . I very consciously turned away from that. [1990]

  Thompson, already something of an enigma (where did that darkness in those early songs come from?), inspired a sense of awe in fellow musicians that kept most prying eyes at bay. Linda Peters, who before marrying Thompson got to know Drake as well as any lady friend, believes that ‘there was a point when . . . Richard could [have] go[ne] Nick’s way . . . It was very hard for him to pull himself out of that, but he . . . latched onto people who were outgoing enough to pull him out of it . . . He made a definite effort to do that, and Nick didn’t.’ Anthea Joseph, too, found Thompson and Martyn ‘in their individual ways . . . equally difficult to deal with. But you could talk to them . . . I don’t remember any “ordinary” conversations with Nick . . . not one.’

  The naturally taciturn Thompson was in a particularly traumatized state of mind in the early months of 1970. His songs of the period remain the darkest ever penned by someone who once okayed the release of a compilation of archival recordings entitled Doom and Gloom from the Tomb. ‘Crazy Man Michael’ and ‘Farewell, Farewell’, his two original contributions to the Liege & Lief LP, were songs from the brink – as was ‘Never Again’, another song penned at the time that he did not record until 1974. In ‘Crazy Man Michael’, the darkest from a pitch-black lot, the narrator is driven mad when he stabs a talking raven in a rage (as you do), only to discover that he has killed his true love and is now ‘cursed be’, an outcome previously foretold by the garrulous bird. The depiction of mad Michael fully reflected the way Thompson now appeared to some:

  Crazy Man Michael, he wanders and walks

  And talks to the night and the day-o

  But his eyes they are sane and his speech it is clear

  And he longs to be far away-o.

  In reality, Thompson was channelling some very real grief and guilt; for back in May 1969 he and his girlfriend Jeannie ‘the Taylor’ Franklin had been travelling in the back of the Fairport van on the way home from a gig in Birmingham when the roadie fell asleep at the wheel, and the van crashed into the central reservation. Thompson survived, but Jeannie (and original Fairport drummer Martin Lamble) did not.

  Although in a recent interview with Mojo, Thompson claimed he ‘was never in the studio at the same time’ as Joe’s private project, quarter of a century earlier he described his experience at a 1970 Drake session to Zigzag magazine’s Connor McKnight, who wrote the only profile of Drake published in his lifetime: ‘It was at Trident[!] I think, and I asked him what he wanted; but he didn’t say much, so I just did it and he seemed fairly happy. People say that I’m quiet, but Nick’s ridiculous.’ Thompson’s first experience of dubbing guitar to a Drake song live, which resulted in Bryter Layter’s ‘Hazy Jane II’, might actually have provided him with the kind of jolt he needed; and, as wife Linda Thompson suggests, would continue to need.

  Hoping to make that ‘breakthrough’ album, which might chase away all of Witchseason’s financial problems, Joe Boyd’s concerns remained primarily musical. But even he had to work away at Drake in order to get a clear indicatio
n of what he thought about a particular performance, or performer: ‘I had to cross-examine him to make sure he liked the arrangements. He definitely was a big fan of [Richard] Thompson . . . [but] most people, myself included, were too careful, wary of disturbing his silences.’

  In fact, Thompson seems to have recognized Drake as someone who drained people of their bonhomie even when, as in his case, it was in short supply. When Boyd dispatched Nick Drake to Fairport’s rural retreat in Little Hadham, to work on some songs for his second album with the new Fairport rhythm-section, Dave Pegg and Dave Mattacks, he seems to have stayed largely out of their way. The larger-than-life Danny Thompson, whose acoustic bass played such a part in defining Five Leaves Left’s unique feel, was not being invited back for Drake’s second album, perhaps because, as Boyd says, ‘Danny would slap [Drake] on the back, tease him in rhyming slang, make fun of his self-effacement and generally give him a hard time.’ And so it would be left to Dave Pegg to interpret Drake’s non-verbal signs, playing along to the songs he was shown at Little Hadham for ‘three or four days’.

  Even Pegg, though, had to admit the poor boy was now ‘so introverted, you could never tell if he liked stuff or not . . . It was just running through arrangements . . . He had all the songs, and [some] fairly positive ideas about how he wanted them done.’ Thrown in at the deep end of Drake’s dark sea, Pegg got on with it. As did Mattacks. Even if Drake never really explicated what he wanted done with the music he made up, he was presumably okay with Fairport’s contribution because Pegg’s plangent bass would burble away on nine of the ten songs on Bryter Layter, while Dave Mattacks gently taps his way through half the album. But there were still strings a-plenty to pull.