Review:

on 2011-06-09 CharlesMartel Said:

Nick Drake made only three albums in his brief career and not one of them sold more than a few thousand copies at the time of its release. I have only one - the classic British folk album, "Five Leaves Left". This is an album I encountered in patches over the years  many of the songs were familiar to me - though I had never made the connection in my own mind between those songs and Nick Drake, an occurrence which is probably familiar to many of us.

Drake in many ways personified an artistic tradition (all the arts - not just music) of brooding, depressive artistic genius. His albums were laced with a combination of intricate yet beautiful melodies and depressive introspection. Like many others who only came to be truly appreciated after their deaths, his three albums attracted rejection and tepid interest when released, which caused him to abandon music altogether and then, more than thirty five years ago, commit suicide (or did he?) by overdosing. Whether he would have welcomed the acclaim and adulation his albums have engendered in recent years is speculative - he was a shy, lonely, even reclusive man who may well have been as uncomfortable with fame as he was with the lack of it.

"Five Leaves Left" was his debut album and it draws on various strands of his unconventional life. Born in Rangoon, he moved to his parents home aged three and was a student at Cambridge when he recorded the album. His feeling of not really belonging was reflected in the album as it was in his personality; he suffered from clinical depression for many years. But it seems as if it was through his music that he obtained some form of catharsis in facing his demons and accepting them, reluctantly perhaps, into his life. The personal confidence which he conveys in his songs, exemplified perhaps by the strange chat up line of "Man in a Shed", belied the awkwardness and lack of self-confidence pervasive in his life generally. It was almost as if he could be the man he wanted to be in his music, the man he could not be in his interaction with others. It is not surprising therefore that his music should be laced with such emotion as if it were a refuge from reality.

If there is a word which best described the music of "Five Leaves Left" it is 'lonely'. Never strident and rarely assertive, Drake sang with a distinctive soft voice which conveyed a degree of humility and honesty. The best track on the album, "Three Hours", brings this home, with its ambience of being in between places, belonging really to neither, something which perhaps is an apt description of his life.

Although the acoustic guitar dominates the album, this is not to be regarded as a simple British version of an early, pre-electric Bob Dylan. Drake and Dylan were two different personalities and their styles were as distinct as chalk and cheese. Drake uses string arrangements, such as on "Way to Blue" to supplement the guitar and add body to the songs where he felt they needed more strength. In the same way, percussion is restricted to tabla drums and rattles rather than anything more intrusive. In this way, he put distance between himself and his folk contemporaries who, on the one had were guitar purists and on the other, like Fairport Convention, were adapting folk to modern instruments.

He was able to borrow from a wide range of influences, from hippie psychedelia, through jazz to piano improvisation, but never allowing any one to dominate. In this way he was able to step outside the narrow confines of what was felt to be acceptable as folk music to the purists without ever losing sight of the roots which folk music provided to his sound.

Yet running through almost all the compositions on "Five Leaves Left" is that recurrent theme of loneliness. Perhaps he felt his childhood had set him apart from his contemporaries. Or perhaps it was simply that the devastating combination of self-effacing shyness and depression forced him to exorcise his personal pain through music. But his was a story which was to be repeated, with variations upon a theme, in the lives of others who followed after  be they Ian Curtis or Spike Milligan - or other artists who had gone before such as Van Gogh.

However, though I can appreciate the album for what it is, and see the anguish which lies behind it, I have to say that this is not music for everyone. Many will find it uninteresting, if only because their own musical taste diverges from what this represents, in the same way that some find Mozart or Chopin tedious. I have never been a huge fan of the singer-songwriter school of folk music. There are moments when I will listen to it, but is not something I would reach for as a matter of course. Despite the beauty which truly does lie behind it, this is not an album which stirs me in the way it stirs others. My problem I accept, but it is for that reason that it does not get a higher rating than I have given here.
Rating: 7/10