FEATURE:
At the Chime of a City Clock
Nick Drake’s Bryter Layter at Fifty
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AMONG the wonderful albums turning fifty…
this year, I wanted to mark the anniversary of Nick Drake’s Bryter Layter. Drake would be unaccompanied on his third and final album, Pink Moon, of 1972. It is an album that sounds very different to Five Leaves Left, and Bryter Layter. For the masterful Bryter Layter, Drake was accompanied by part of the British Folk Rock group Fairport Convention and John Cale from The Velvet Underground, in addition to Beach Boys musicians Mike Kowalski and Ed Carter. Initially scheduled for release in November 1970, with U.K. promotional copies being sent out at the time, unhappiness with the artwork meant that the album was held over into the following year. Three of my favourite Nick Drake songs are on Bryter Layter: At the Chime of a City Clock, Fly, and Northern Sky. I think Bryter Layter is such a beautiful and rich album, one can come to it new and discover so much. I will finish by bringing in a couple of reviews for the album. Before then, I want to bring in an interesting article that talks about the recording and release of Bryter Layter. It makes for interesting reading:
“Bryter Layter remains my favorite album of Drake’s, and I’m far from alone in singing its praises. Drake’s first English-language biographer, Patrick Humphries, calls it “Drake’s masterpiece.” Both Boyd, and the album’s engineer, John Wood, told journalist Arthur Lebow, who wrote the liner notes to Drake’s Fruit Tree box, that Bryter Layter is the only perfect album they made. “It’s one of those albums that I can listen to without ever thinking, ‘I should have done this better,’” Boyd has said. “I enjoy it every time I hear it.”
Thanks to Boyd and Wood, Bryter Layter is Drake’s most sonically rich album and a prime example of the late-’60s, early-’70s British folk sound that both Boyd and Wood — who also worked with John Martyn, Fairport Convention, and the Incredible String Band, among others — were so instrumental in shaping.
But the true greatness of Bryter Layter lays in Drake's songwriting. On his second release, Drake produced some of his most evocative lyrics and captivating melodies. As Unterberger put it:
Critics…identify Drake’s “peak” at their peril, but it may be that Bryter Layter was his most accessible work. From a purely musical viewpoint, it’s his most diverse, with Dave Pegg and Dave Mattacks from Fairport Convention providing most of the rhythm section work, and appearances by John Cale and Richard Thompson; female soul singers Doris Troy and Pat Arnold even do backup vocals… [and] Robert Kirby again adds some beautiful classical-influenced orchestral arrangements.
Despite the impression among some fans that Bryter Layter’s more accessible sound came about over Drake’s objections, those who worked with him make clear that Drake’s single-minded focus on his music meant that little was done without his full approval, particularly by the time the recording for Bryter Layter commenced. “Since Five Leaves Left, I think Nick had become a little more assertive in the studio,” Wood explained in the liner notes to the reissue of Fruit Tree. “He was laying down a bit more what he wanted when the takes first went down. When we did Five Leaves Left, he wouldn’t come out initially and state what he felt. I think he as a little bit more upfront when we did Bryter Layter.”
“I know I shouldn’t, but I still get depressed by supposition that Joe and myself somehow destroyed this album against Nick’s wishes,” Kirby has said. “Nick always had the final word. He made the decisions…. [Bryter Layter] was a conscious effort on his part to be more commercial…. Bryter Layter is 100 percent Nick’s work and how he wanted it at that time.”
Part of Drake, Boyd, and Wood’s shared plan to make Bryter Layter more accessible was the addition of rhythm section, which was lacking on Five Leaves Left. “There was an underlying feeling that Bryter Layter needed to be a bit more accessible in some ways,” Wood told Uncut. “Five Leaves Left is fairly formal in its structures. A rhythm section would give the album a wider appeal.”
According to Pegg, the sessions for Bryter Layter were loose and happy:
It was a very exciting record for me to be involved in…you got things like a brass section, people like Ray Warleigh there. There were some really interesting players on some of that stuff. Most of it was done live, and it was done fairly quickly. You'd have the benefit of the arrangements that Robert Kirby did — he was a fantastic arranger, who had a really original approach.... It was a noticeable development from learning the stuff at The Angel, which was all very skeletal. Joe was more or less in charge of it in the studio. It was very much Joe and John Wood and Robert Kirby. It was actually a very fun thing to do. All those Bryter Layter tracks. You got a real buzz off what was happening, which is not always the way with recording. Moments of great joy in the studio very rarely happen…. Bryter Layter was certainly one of my best and most enjoyable experiences at Sound Techniques.
Despite Drake’s push for a contemporary sound and commercial success with Bryter Layter, he wasn’t exactly thinking in the mainstream pop idiom. According to friends and family, the albums that inspired Drake were somewhat esoteric: Robert Johnson’s King of The Delta Blues Singers, Randy Newman’s debut, Love’s Forever Changes, Tim Buckley’s Goodbye and Hello, and Van Morrison’s Astral Weeks. With the exception of the spartan King of the Delta Blues Singers — whose sound would factor into Drake’s final album, Pink Moon — all the records that influenced Drake blended folk and jazz influences with pop and orchestral instrumentation in eclectic and unpredictable ways.
“All the strings and the flutes and horn arrangements, he and Robert worked those out together,” Boyd told Classic Album Sundays’ Colleen “Cosmo” Murphy in 2013. “He definitely [wanted it that way]. There’s no question that Nick was fully engaged in that process with Robert. And when Robert an arrangement, [Drake] was always happy. [It was] gone over in great detail before Nick brought it in [to the studio].”
Wood remembers being thrilled with the material that Drake earmarked for his second album. “I thought the quality had upped,” he said in the Fruit Tree liner notes. “I loved it. It was just great fun to record…. It’s the quality of the playing and the quality of the people you’re working with that matters, and Bryter Layter has that quality in spades”.
I have brought in a lot of that article, but I would recommend people read the entire thing, as one get real insight into a magnificent album. I think Bryter Layter is still moving and hugely impressive fifty years after its release! All three of Nick Drake’s albums have won a lot of praise, though I think Bryter Layter was the first that got more widespread acclaim. Many prefer the simplicity and bareness of Pink Moon, though I love the additional instruments and layers of Bryter Layter. In their review, this is what AllMusic observed:
“With even more of the Fairport Convention crew helping him out -- including bassist Dave Pegg and drummer Dave Mattacks along with, again, a bit of help from Richard Thompson -- as well as John Cale and a variety of others, Drake tackled another excellent selection of songs on his second album. Demonstrating the abilities shown on Five Leaves Left didn't consist of a fluke, Bryter Layter featured another set of exquisitely arranged and performed tunes, with producer Joe Boyd and orchestrator Robert Kirby reprising their roles from the earlier release. Starting with the elegant instrumental "Introduction," as lovely a mood-setting piece as one would want, Bryter Layter indulges in a more playful sound at many points, showing that Drake was far from being a constant king of depression. While his performances remain generally low-key and his voice quietly passionate, the arrangements and surrounding musicians add a considerable amount of pep, as on the jazzy groove of the lengthy "Poor Boy." The argument could be made that this contravenes the spirit of Drake's work, but it feels more like a calmer equivalent to the genre-sliding experiments of Van Morrison at around the same time. Numbers that retain a softer approach, like "At the Chime of a City Clock," still possess a gentle drive to them. Cale's additions unsurprisingly favor the classically trained side of his personality, with particularly brilliant results on "Northern Sky." As his performances on keyboards and celeste help set the atmosphere, Drake reaches for a perfectly artful reflection on loss and loneliness and succeeds wonderfully”.
I will end things by quoting from Pitchfork and their thoughts regarding a Nick Drake masterpiece:
“Ironically, it was initially conceived as his "up" album, a poppy rejoinder to Five Leaves Left. Five Leaves was pastoral, written in the wooded confines of Cambridge. Layter was written in London, and was meant to reflect urbanity. It did, but only from the perspective of Drake's one bloodshot eye, peering out cautiously at the world. Over woolly saxophone on "At the Chime of a City Clock", he confesses "I stay indoors beneath the floors and talk with neighbors only/ The games you play make people say you're either weird or lonely". Over the peppy horn charts of "Hazey Jane II", Drake sings lightly of how it feels "when the world it gets so crowded that you can't look out the window in the morning." The city, on Bryter Layter, is one long harsh unpleasant noise occurring outside. Nothing good or stimulating seems to happen there.
The music, however, is brighter—this is the Nick Drake you can hear reflected in latter-period Belle and Sebastian. He rehearsed with a band for the first time, including other members of Fairport Convention, and the result is the most fulsome studio recording he ever managed. Some of the arrangement decisions remain bewildering—the gospel backup vocals, jazz-comping guitar and noodling piano crowding the space on "Poor Boy" remain as jarring now as they were when the album was released. On "Fly" and "Northern Sky", Drake worked with John Cale, and you can hear a more natural dynamic in their collaboration. It's either a shame or a relief they didn't work together longer: "Fly" and "Northern Sky" are the two most affecting songs on Bryter, but it's also likely Cale introduced Drake to heroin”.
Happy fiftieth anniversary to the stunning Bryter Layter. I think that we will be discussing and dissecting it fifty years from now. From the perfect opening of Introduction, the brilliant conclusion of Sunday, Bryter Layter is ten tracks of wonder and some of the most astonishing lyrics ever penned. Go and check out Bryter Layter and let the songs…
ENVLOPE you in their wonder and beauty.