Scott Matthews - Way to Blue
If another Monday Morning chasing predatory capitalism's always-moving goalposts around for basic human dignity like a greased, anxious sliptoad hasn't got you feeling old, well then stick around because Nick Drake died 50 years ago today.
Perhaps the greatest exponent of the "I Will Write Entire Tunes About How No One Will Buy My Records Until I Am Many Years Deceased" school of songwriting, his story is oft-repeated as an example of why you never know why it's a good idea not to take your own life, until you're gazing down from the afterlife at serious commercial success.
He lived for 26 years in an anonymous ignominy somewhat of his own making, essentially all but refusing to tour or perform to promote his own music, then a requisite tool of ladder-climbing.
There are less than 75 pictures in existence of him during his short career, as well as one interview and zero film footage of him as an adult.
Yet he is always in the conversation, on the strength of just 3 records, for consideration as the very greatest songwriter ever to live.
He had mouldered 25 years in his place deep in the Earth, before people started to understand what he was really worth.
One silly Volkswagen advertisement in 1999, and the floodgates opened as wide and as dizzyingly as the Autobahn at rush hour during Oktoberfest.
Now, 25 years have again elapsed and he is as recognizable a music face as any of the last 60 years, with nary a Hollywood blockbuster not featuring his music and a trillion subsequent musicians of now claiming that he didn't just inspire them, he saved their lives.
By most accounts he lived to enjoy none of the fruits of his talents, and overdosed on his antidepressants, likely intentionally, on this night in 1974 after a long downward spiral into total despair.
The story goes he knew how good he was, and just couldn't comprehend how his music went nowhere in the wider world, eventually coming to see himself as an Ultimate Failure.
Had he found a way to have stuck around somehow -- perhaps patient and perserverant, waiting for the public monkeymind to catch up with the way-ahead, futurepast baroque-pop sounds he was laying down -- he'd be considered living musical royalty all over the world. I know I'm not alone in wishing he could have lived to see his Fruit Tree prophecy fulfilled, and that eventually people would come around to not just accept, but to revere him.
I covered the 40th anniversary of his passing 10 years ago when this page was first starting and wasn't really planning to revisit it, as there just isn't much evidence of him outside of those 3 LPs and change.
It's a total testimony to the lasting emotional impact of what he did that this summer, five decades after he left us, the BBC Proms devoted a whole Royal Albert Hall concert to a symphonic tribute to him.
The BBC Symphony Orchestra used the occasion to expand upon the string arrangements on the first two records, and even to create brand new ones for a few of the songs on Nick's famously stark, all-acoustic record of psychic devastation, Pink Moon.
This whole evening's event went out over the BBC3 airwaves as it occurred, but I some kinda way snagged the delicious pre-broadcast tape off of Soulseek when it happened and decided I'd use the 50th anniversary of Nick's tragic death to supply it here, in all its sonically sumptuous glory.
Various Artists
BBC Proms 2024: Prom 8
Nick Drake - An Orchestral Celebration
Royal Albert Hall
London, UK
7.24.2024
01 Elizabeth Alker BBC3 introduction incl. Jules Buckley interview
02 BBC Symphony Orchestra - Introduction (Bryter Layter)
03 BC Camplight - Fly
04 BC Camplight - Pink Moon
05 Marika Hackman - Fruit Tree
06 Marika Hackman - River Man
07 Elizabeth Alker speaks
08 Scott Matthews - Way to Blue
09 Scott Matthews - Day Is Done
10 The Unthanks & Gabrielle Drake - What Can a Song Do to You?
11 Elizabeth Alker speaks & program announcement
12 Olivia Chaney - Hazey Jane I
13 Olivia Chaney - At the Chime of a City Clock
14 Elizabeth Alker interview w/John Wilson & Gabrielle Drake
15 interview w/Scott Matthews
16 Northern Sky (Nick Drake)/Elizabeth Alker introduces the 2nd half
17 BBC Symphony Orchestra - Sunday
18 The Unthanks & Gabrielle Drake - Set Me Free
19 Elizabeth Alker speaks
20 Olivia Chaney - Which Will
21 Olivia Chaney - Things Behind the Sun
22 Olivia Chaney - Time of No Reply
23 Scott Matthews - Northern Sky
24 Scott Matthews - From the Morning
25 Elizabeth Alker speaks
26 BC Camplight - Place to Be
27 Marika Hackman - Time Has Told Me
28 Marika Hackman - Voices
29 Elizabeth Alker speaks
30 Jules Buckley speaks
31 BC Camplight - Saturday Sun
32 BBC Symphony Orchestra - Horn
33 Elizabeth Alker BBC3 outro incl. Jules Buckley announcement
Total time: 2:16:40
disc break goes after Track 14
Olivia Chaney - vocals, piano & guitar
Marika Hackman - vocals & guitar
BC Camplight - vocals & guitar
Scott Matthews - vocals & guitar
The Unthanks:
Rachel Unthank - vocals
Becky Unthank - vocals
Niopha Keegan - viola & vocals
Adrian McNally - piano
Chris Price - guitar
and featuring:
Ross Stanley - keyboards
Chris Hill - bass
Dan See - drums
Neill MacColl - guitar
The BBC Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Jules Buckley
preFM capture, of indeterminate origin, of the Summer 2024 BBC3-FM presentation
spectral analysis is lossless past 22 kHz
edited, tracked & boosted +3 dB throughout by EN, November 2024
776 MB FLAC/direct link
776 MB FLAC/direct link
This in an exquisite program, made even more incredible by the resonant sound and the insightful interviews with conductor Jules Buckley and Nick's sister Gabrielle -- if you're into the UK '70s ITV world of Gerry Anderson, she was the purple haired chick on that bonkers sci-fi soap opera UFO -- who performs two of her mother's original compositions with alterna-stars The Unthanks. Yes, as if Nick himself wasn't an intimidating enough songsmith, Nick and Gabrielle's mom Molly was kind of the alpha/omega singer-songwriter, 25 years before Joni Mitchell dropped her D string.
I'll be back on ThanQsgiving with some photogenically filmic funk, in homage to a superstar of everything who passed away a few weeks ago, after a lifetime hyperspeeding music into a future that was completely unimaginable when they first came on the scene.
Today we'll place our hats over hearts, though, and pay respects to Nicholas Rodney Drake, a man who never got anything but woe for his gargantuan talent and effort whilst alive, but who somehow was still well aware and prescient enough to comprehend that his time would surely come when day was done.--J.
6.19.1948 - 11.25.1974
time has told me
not to ask for more
for someday our ocean
will find its shore
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