Watching Shane Meadows’ excellent Stone Roses EPK, Made of Stone this week reminded me of a time 24 years ago and a meeting with Ian Brown in Manchester to do an interview for London’s Time Out magazine. It was November 1989 and I’d had to work hard at getting permission from the magazine’s normally astute music editor Nick Coleman (who had interviewed Linda Ronstadt for that week’s big feature) to get the piece into the magazine. Hard as it is to believe, despite their having sold out the 7000 tickets for the Alexandra Palace gig on November 18, at the time the Roses were considered something of a purely Northern phenomenon akin to Frank Sidebottom or Bernard Manning, and weren’t considered a ‘big thing’ in London.

I’d been enjoying the 12″ vinyl singles and album sent to me by the Roses PR, a lovely man named Philip Hall, since late 1988, and had seen the Roses at a far from packed Dingwalls in May of 1989 in the company of a friend who happened to be one of Denmark’s premier psychedelic/jazz drummers, Jens Otzen (that’s him on the right, above, with Hurdy Gurdy in 1968). Both of us had come away from the gig raving about the band’s drummer, Reni. I was similarly impressed watching Made of Stone. Without Reni the Roses might have been an also-ran psychedelic rock band who never achieved as much as the American bands who’d burned out playing similar material around that time (Dream Syndicate, Rain Parade etc). Reni made and continues to make the Roses move in a truly unique way, he is what the Happy Mondays never had, a truly soulful, sinuous rhythmic presence. His real drumming stood out from the creeping ubiquity of drum machines and synth percussion on most stuff played at parties at the end of the 1980s.

In November of 1989 only Brown came to meet me at Manchester’s central train station. We found a cafe and spent a good half-hour talking about boxing—Herrol Graham, Michael Watson, Chris Eubank—which loosened him up a bit. Naturally wary of soft Southern journos, Brown had become adept at making droll statements that were swiftly taken up and repeated in the NME or Melody Maker as examples of his (to me put-on) superiority complex. It seemed to me back then that Brown and the Roses were, like only the Pistols before them, great contrarians and not as dumb as they’d been made to seem. (Mick Middles’ book is very good on this.)

On a half page at the front of an edition of the NME earlier in the year, the Roses had filled out a fax form for something called ‘Material World’. In it they quote Oliver and The Bicycle Thieves among the films they love; Georges Bataille, Albert Camus and The Compendium of the World’s 600 Greatest Crimnals in books; Jackson 5 ’45s’, Isaac Hayes, CSN, Elvis Presley, Sly & The Family Stone and Muddy Waters in music; Mike Tyson in beautiful people (along with Catherine Deneuve and Dennis Hopper) and under ‘Best Ever Dream’, ‘that we owned an autographed copy of the last Supper menu’. The Roses were never dumb nor uncultured.

Re-reading the interview (which follows) the sense that the world was a very different place emerges slowly along with revelations of what Made Of Stone demonstrates to be Brown’s false hopes and predictions. However, while Shane Meadows’ fawning documentary fails to get even close to the band members, it does capture the special chemistry that the musicians have and that is so powerfully displayed in their music making. It also strips bare the queasy, desperate sense of longing among fans of a certain age and location for whom the Roses represent something about their own failed hopes and dream, and that they (the fans) can’t put into their own words—and so use Brown’s ambiguous, pseudo-prophetic lyrics instead.

Time Out, Preview section front page; 14 November, 1989.

Here they come, walking down the street, and yes, they get the funniest looks from everyone they meet. Ian Brown, singer with The Stone Roses, glides into Manchester Piccadilly station on scuffed 21-inch flares and brown suede Kickers, his hands buried deep in the pockets of his buff parka, which is zipped to the neck. ‘All right Mal, sorry I’m late.’ The handshake is firm, his baby-brown eyes gaze over my right shoulder. The voice is pure Arthur Seaton in Saturday Night, Sunday Morning. So is the attitude.

‘Most people are out of time, so obviously out of time, chasing their tails, don’t know whether to dance or stand still hahahahaha’. Brown laughs quickly, almost silently and, if there were no huge, cheeky grin to go with it, you’d think maliciously. A young man (23) with a sharp tongue, he and his band have been called upon to speak for their generation (and for those who are past it but refuse to admit it). ‘There’s this thing now, where people are afraid to stand still in a club in case people think they aren’t groovin‘. It’s laughable. We just walk around  laughing at people ahahahaha’. There’s the grin again.

The Stone Roses are a phenomenon. Only they and fellow Mancunians Happy Mondays can be considered a real, live, flesh-and-blood embodiment of the acid-house movement. The people who go to a Roses gig would not be seen dead at any indie gig or, God forbid, a rock gig. Live music is an alien creature to acid-house crowds, yet for the Roses outr come the kickers, acid-teds and false muslim hats. Why? ‘Because people who go to acid-house parties just wanna have a good time, get out and about, mixing with people, that’s what Stone Roses gigs are about,’ says Brown. But it’s not the only reason. Beside the fact that the Roses are as aware and hip to the scene as the crowd they carry with them wherever they play, their life-style, look, and most importantly, attitude is the same.

In an NME piece earlier this year, the band named ‘quality sulphate’ as their favourite drug [along with Thai sticks; 'couldn't think of anything funny for that']. Other music journos, eager for a story have labelled the band as ‘Acid-taking Scallys,’ says Brown. They refused to support the Rolling Stones on the Canadian leg of their tour because ‘they should be supporting The Stone Roses’. The same goes for Bros, who wanted the Roses to join them at Wembley in Aughust. Says Brown, ‘We don’t have to support anyone. Our music’s too important to us to be part of any wanky things like that.’ The attitude is young, arrogant and fuck-you-pal.

It is, however, an attitude that is beginning to present problems. Their eponymous debut LP has sold more than 70,000 copies for Andrew Lauder’s SIlvertone label, and they sold out the 7000 tickets for the Alexandra Palace gig on November 18 in a matter of days. What they say is becoming important. Brown says he’s ‘hopeful’ of a big police presence at the forthcoming ALexandra Palace gig, because ‘it gives it a bit more of a feel, makes it more of an event with the police there.’ But, he also adds, ‘We don’t want you to talk about drugs’, then coyly, he relates how he and his pals used to ‘get on other levels without drink’ as teenagers, before telling me how sulphate can be had ‘for £5 a gram in Manchester at the moment, and it’s good stuff, too. Nobody wants it’.

FRISKED AT CUSTOMS

There’s little wonder that the customs men frisked Brown thoroughly on his way to Japan recently. ‘I had this apple pie with me’, he smiles, ‘An’ they ran it through the X-ray and I were yellin’ “Ere, be careful, you’ll squash it!” Then he had his hands down me trousers for five minutes ‘cos some batteries in me pocket set off the detector bell!’ There is a danger that The Stone Roses may have more in common with the young Rolling Stones than just their haircuts.

The other major problem for the band is the strongly partisan crowd they carry everywhere with them. At a gig in Paris recently, one spectator remarked how strange it was that there were more Manchester accents artound than French. ‘Regionalism is bullshit, it’s dangerous,’ acknowledges Brown, adding, ‘we want to stop it—but how do you go about it without turning into Sham 69? There’s t-shirts sold here saying “Born in the North. Exist in the North. Die in the North.” Who the fuck wants to stay here all their life? You’ve got to get out and about. There’s another shirt which says, “On the 7th Day God Created Manchester.” I think that’s just fucking dumb.’ This will be the toughest battle the band face in their journey up the ladder. Roses fans are almost as fervently dedicated to their cause as Manchester’s other renowned travelling ‘fans’, United’s Stretford Enders. So far there have been no reports of violence at Roses gigs, but the last London performance brought a heaving mass of lads yelling ‘Manchester, Manchester’ to Dingwalls, and a stiff rebuke from Brown, normally reticent on stage.

All of this, though, would be of marginal interest if it were not for the fact that The Stone Roses have a real asset: their music. The band can actually play. They are lively, loud and melodic, capable of appealing to a wide cross-section of the music-buying public (one senior record company executive remarked recently how she can be heard singing along with ‘Waterfall’ at full voice as she cruises the motorway). There are, of course, references to music that we all know but that doesn’t worry Brown. ‘There’s never been anyone making music like us before’, he says, and he’s right.

A new single will be released on Monday, entitled Fool’s Gold. It will enter the charts in the top 30, without a doubt, and might even make the 20. A shiny slice of post-coital funk-and-pull, it deserves to be the band’s first smash hit single. If it is, it will be the start of something big. ‘We’ve always known that we’d be huge stars, and it’s all we wanted, so it won’t surprise us when it happens. We don’t want to be known as some fucking spaced-out Mancunians who’ve got nothing better to do than take drugs and make music’. No chance.

History, as the cliché (or truism, depending on your viewpoint) goes, is written by the victors. Which makes Syd Barrett something of a victor, since his history as been somewhat radically rewritten—though not by the man himself. Because of a distinctly revisionist music press, it is now generally considered that Syd and Pink Floyd were instant successes, widely acclaimed musical and cultural innovators, that their sound, stage show and attitude played a key part in the development and maturation of psychedelic London of the mid-to-late 1960s.

Syd was certainly innovative and the two albums he made with the Floyd are ground-breaking, but not everyone thought so back then. This month is the 45th anniversary of the release of A Saucerful of Secrets, the second Floyd long player, the first and only album to which the five members of the band  contributed, and the last on which Syd appears. Today it is regularly cited as being a masterpiece of rock music, the bridge between the Floyd’s blues-inflected psychedelic beginnings and Dark Side of the Moon, the album that made them the biggest selling band of the early 1970s.

However, if you look closely, you’ll find that on its release Saucerful of Secrets was considered to be something of a disappointment by the agenda-setting and culturally defining undergound press. But you do have to look closely at contemporary publications, ignoring revisionist opinion.

It has become a commonplace of pop music writers, when attempting to capture the essence of a period that they may well not have known personally, to run through a kind of checklist of items that will let the reader (and increasingly the viewer of pedestrian television documentaries) know about the world before the internet, mobile phones and man-made fibres. Oh yes, in 1968 the world was black and white, Brits wore bowler hats if they were old and Lord Kitchener’s Valet fancy dress if they were young, the French were all revolting, the Mini car and dresses were ubiquitous on UK streets and marijuana was dangerously exotic—stop me if you’ve heard all this before…

Of course all of that is based in a kind of reality that Syd, the Floyd and many people experienced, but it’s all essentially irrelevant. The world of psychedelic London was small, and basically part-time. Nights at happenings, gigs and parties of the time have been elevated in the public’s false memory to levels of cultural importance that are preposterously out of proportion. Memory plays tricks on us all, but revisions of history set down in words (printed or virtual) stick around and prompt us into believing things were not as they were.

Syd’s Pink Floyd were not the untouchable darlings of the London underground that we are led to believe by some way, for instance. Reviewing A Saucerful of Secrets in IT in June 1968, Miles wrote of the title track that is is ‘too long, too boring, and totally uninventive’. While there are many who would have us believe that International Times was almost a Floyd fanzine, the truth is far from that.

In America, the then uber-hip underground music magazine of note, Rolling Stone proved to be far from fans of Saucerful. In a review that begins with faint praise for their debut release, Jim Miller goes on to note that on Piper At The Gates of Dawn, ‘Syd Barrett (vocals and lead guitar) displayed a minor talent for writing as well as a not insubstantial ability to prepare special effects and production work. If much the Floyd did was based on gimmicks, Barrett at least had a keen ear that rather successfully structured gimmicks into a sort of pleasant “psychedelic chamber music.” ‘

That sets Miller up to continue that, ‘Unfortunately the Pink Floyd’s second album, A Saucerful of Secrets, is not as interesting as their first, as a matter of fact, it is rather mediocre. For one thing Barrett seems either to have left the group or to have given up actively participating in it: only one Barrett composition is on the new album (“Jugband Blues”), and it hardly does credit to Barrett’s credentials as a composer.’

No doubt Mr Miller—who has long since established himself as a Foucaultian scholar and academic—might have changed his opinion about “Jugband Blues”, at least. Of course, while we can now appreciate that the song shows a startlingly sharp sense of self-awareness about his declining mental state and distancing from his band mates, in 1968 all anyone knew was that the Floyd were a five-piece band and Syd was ‘wild’.

“Jugband Blues”, written and recorded in October 1967, is also remarkable in that it features the kind of free-form arrangement and approach to making music that Sun Ra was bringing to his Orkestra with less resistance at the same time, undoubtedly because he was a jazz artist, and Syd a pop star. Syd wanted the Salvation Army horn section to play on the song without charts or arrangement, to play what they wanted, to be spontaneous. Studio engineer Norman Smith insisted that the horn players have arrangements, and after an argument, it was agreed that they’d record two versions: one with the horns given musical direction and one without.

Further in the Rolling Stone review, Miller singles out two ‘free-form’ numbers for castigation, wrting that ‘ ”Let There Be More Light” and “Set the Controls for the Heart of The Sun” are boring melodically, harmonically, and lyrically.’ Perhaps it was an American thing, though. The other major underground publication of the period, the LA Free Press said of “Set The Controls For The Heart of the Sun” that is is, ‘almost embarrassingly inadequate’.

In 1968 the future for Pink Floyd was, it appeared to the arbiters of taste, bleak, uncertain of longevity and undeserving of serious consideration. Not only the press of the time thought so, either. The Floyd were at that time ‘managed’ by a smart North London agent named Bryan Morrison. Like the best of music biz moguls, he had nothing more than chutzpah and a fine pair of ears when he started out in the early 60s, booking beat bands into London pubs and clubs run by the Kray twins.

Bryan had booked the Floyd since the early days and had become their music publisher and de facto manager because of that. However, when another management company asked to take the band on, he was happy to let them go, as long as he retained Syd as a solo artist (and kept the publishing rights, too). In 1968 it seemed to Bryan that another of his bands were destined for far greater things than Pink Floyd, and so for the following few years he put his faith and efforts into the Pretty Things.

Reading the final lines of Miller’s review in Rolling Stone at this remove from their original context makes them not just surprising, but also somehow perplexing. The things that mattered to Miller, his concerns. are so far removed from those of music fans 45 years later,that it’s hard to understand his point: ’Pink Floyd are firmly anchored in the diatonic world with any deviations from that norm a matter of effect rather than musical conviction. Unfortunately a music of effects is a weak base for a rock group to rest its reputation on — but this is what the Pink Floyd have done.’

But then, in 1968 no-one could possibly know that a music of effects is exactly what a rock group could—and did—rest its reputation on with enormous success. And no-one could know that those two albums, plus two Syd solo releases helped to create a truly unique and long-lasting reputation. The Syd Barrett psychedelic legend was, of course, just a part of the story of his life, though.

For the true tale of Syd the creative, try Barrett: The Definitive Visual Companion

When is a musical not a musical? It’s unfashionable to be a fan of the musical as defined by Broadway and the West End, even as both survive and thrive on a never-ending stream of musical revivals and the exploitation of the pop music catalogues of once and not so long ago vital and imaginative musical stylists (Buddy Holly, the Beatles, Abba, Queen etc). The musical form is considered embarrassing by fans of all ‘modern’ music, regardless of what genre they prefer. The most commonly given argument against watching one is that no-one ever busrsts into song like they do in musicals.

These days that argument seems more and more bizarre given that we are surrounded by people on public transport, in cafes and public spaces who, with their ears stopped up, apparently are unaware that they hum, tap their feet or hands and occasionally burst into ‘song’, or at least, snatches of a chorus. However, a movie can be a musical without the actors in it bursting into song, and that’s why perhaps we need to reconsider the idea of what makes a musical.

When Fred Astaire sings ‘Isn’t This A Lovely Day’ to Ginger Rogers on the bandstand in Central Park as rain pours down, in Top Hat (1935), we understand that the couple will fall in love despite her resistance. When Ann Miller jumps onto a coffee table to tap dance and ululate her way through ‘Too Darn Hot’ in Kiss Me Kate (1953) her performance tells us how sexually provocative and uninhibited her characters are (she plays an actress playing Shakespeare’s Bianca). Neither scene needs dialogue in spoken form because the lyrics, music and dancing do it all, and more, for us. Unlike Irving Berlin or Cole Porter though, viewers of musical movies are often ill equipped to turn their feelings and thoughts into clear expression.

The great British playwright Dennis Potter understood perfectly the power of songs to express the inner emotional turmoil of unsophisticated people better than a thousand incoherent mumbles and gestures could ever do. John Turturro’s brilliant modern musical Romance And Cigarettes (2005) took a lead from Potter in that he has his working class characters sing songs that best represent their emotions. Turturro’s genius is to include humour and pathos in his surprising stagings. James Gandolfino’s opening number, sung along with Englebert Humperdinck’s Man Without Love is balletic, hilarious and touching. The montage cuts during Susan Sarandon’s singalong with ‘Prisoner of Love’ by Cyndi Lauper feature dancing pregnant women and Gandolfini undergoing circumcision, as well as Christopher Walken dancing with an umbrella (not quite like Gene Kelly).

Martin Scorsese makes great musical movies. Not in the traditionally accepted style of ‘musicals’—something he attempted and failed spectacularly at with New York New York in 1979—but in a way that now seems almost prescient. Ever since Mean Streets (1973) Scorsese has filled his movies with soundtracks that capture the essence of a character, a mood and a time while also moving the plot forward in a traditionally accepted definition of what makes a musical. It’s primarily Scorsese’s gangster movies that have the best and most involving soundtracks, and perhaps that is because he draws on personal memories in making them all. So Mean Streets (1973) includes 1940s recordings of Italian tenors such as Giuseppe di Stefano that would have been listened to by his parents, which are contrasted with early 1960s doo-wop and R&B hits by the likes of the Nutmegs, Paragons and Marvelettes.

Scorsese uses music in his movies to best effect when insinuating the passing of time. Just as the generational clash in Mean Streets is made plain by the musical journey through the film (watch how The Stones’ ‘Tell Me‘ is used in the scene set in the club as Harvey Keitel works his way around the room before settling his attention on a black dancer), so the development of wiseguy culture is made explicit in Goodfellas (1990) via music. In the brilliant, chilling scene in which established wiseguy Billy Bats (Frank Vincent) is killed by Tommy De Vito (Joe Pesci) and Jimmy Conway (Robert De Niro), the music used emphasises the passing of time and attendant disintegration of the Mafia ‘code of honour’.

Bats is having a coming home (from jail) party at the bar, and as he celebrates The Crystals’ ‘He’s Sure The Boy I Love’ plays on the jukebox. The song was a hit in 1962, before Billy went to prison. Enter Tommy, all grown up since Billy last saw him, and unwilling to pay due homage to the older wiseguy. The two argue and as the song ends, so Tommy exits, saying he’ll be back. Cut to later in the now almost empty bar, and the jukebox plays Donovan’s ‘Atlantis’ (1968) while Billy, drunk, talks to Jimmy and Henry (Ray Liota). Tommy storms in and attacks Bats; Jimmy joins in and they stomp and beat him to death as Donovan repeats an increasingly frenetic refrain about going ‘way down below the ocean’ and celebrating the creation of a ‘new Atlantis’.

In the contrast between The Crystals’ gauche, essentially naive, brash big beat, Spector-produced hymn to eternal love and Donovan’s slack, naive, acoustically orchestrated, confused idealisation of a myth, lies the extent of the difference between Bats’ generation of and Tommy’s. When Billy went to prison he was an untouchable. On his return, he still thought that he was a made man, not to be messed with. On his first night back he found that the world had grown harder, crueller and less conformist, even for those who live by their own laws.

Goodfellas opens in the immediate aftermath of Bats’ stomping, with Henry driving Tommy and Jimmy and what turns out to be Bats’ undead body in his trunk. A caption tells us it’s 1970. After stopping the car and opening the trunk, Tommy stabs Bats and Jimmy shoots him. Henry then begins a movie-long voice-over narrative with the line, ‘As far back as I can remember, I always wanted to be a gangster’, and he slams the trunk lid closed as the opening strains of Tony Bennett’s ‘Rags To Riches‘ kick in. All honking horns and resounding echo, the song sets us up for the story we’re about to see and hear. Every song in the movie helps us to understand a little bit more about what is going on in one way or another.

At the centre of Casino (1995) is a doomed love affair between Robert De Niro (Sam Rothstein) and Sharon Stone (Ginger McKenna). Their whole relationship is played out and predicted in the three songs we hear when he first sees her in his casino: Little Richard’s ‘Slippin’ And Slidin’ segues into Mickie & Sylvia’s ‘Love Is Strange’ and the film goes into slow motion as their eyes meet; cut to them kissing as Mick Jagger begins to sing ‘Heart of Stone’; Sam peels money off a roll and gives it to Ginger.

Scorsese’s three big gangster movies—Mean Streets, Goodfellas and Casino—are all, essentially, musicals. Like the best of their kind, their soundtracks help to evoke a time, feeling and immediacy that only music and a syncopated beat can. As each song begins we re-live the moments in which we first heard the number, adding a little bit of ourselves to the world on the screen, and in turn having the screen moment added to our store of memories.

The fact that sales of vinyl records is on the increase was brought home to me this week, when my teenage daughter stated that she wanted a ‘record player’, so that she could ‘buy records’. Ignoring the fact that there is a record deck and over 2000 LPs sitting in my room at home, she wanted something in her bedroom all of her own, on which to listen to vinyl records and pore over their cover art and sleevenotes.

Which reminded me of the tatty Dansette record player that I used to have in my bedroom when I was a kid.

I was lucky as a small child growing up the 1960s, in that the family radiogram, a huge, fake-walnut thing with hefty doors behind which hid the stacking record deck and long-dead tube radio, was left standing in the room at the back of our house designated as ‘playroom’. Along with the radiogram there was a pile of 78 and 45rpm singles belonging to an uncle who also lived with us and who was about 12 years older than me. He had recently vacated the room where he had slept on a red vinyl sofa bed, and left the records for me. There was a pile of old rock and roll 78s (Bill Haley, Little Richard, Chuck Berry, Lonnie Donegan), a bunch of very early 1960s 7″ records (Del Shannon, Cliff Richard, The Shadows, the fabulous Helen Shapiro, Elvis, The Everly Brothers) all of the first dozen Beatles singles, some Sandie Shaw, Georgie Fame, Manfred Mann, Rolling Stones and a couple of Who records, among various other pop hits of my childhood and his early teens.

At the age of 7 then, I learned to stack six 45rpm singles on the radiogram in order to be able to dance—or at least move about the room in an energetic, jerky rhythm—until breathless and exhilarated. It was the beginning of what has proven to be a life-long involvement with record players. When the radiogram stopped being the sole property of mine due to the arrival of several younger siblings, I somehow managed to acquire the tatty Dansette, which sat under my bunk in the bedroom shared with my only older brother. He had little interest in music, and wasn’t around the house as much as I (being several years older) and so the supposedly portable record player was my escape within the house, from the rest of the family.

The thing about the Dansette and its derivatives though, was that while it seemed perfect for playing singles, it felt kind of not quite right for the playing of LPs. I progressed from buying my own singles (T.Rex, David Bowie, Alice Cooper, The Temptations, O’Jays, James Brown) with paper round money, to paying weekly instalments to record clubs for LPs (The Slider, School’s Out, Motown Chartbusters, Pink Floyd’s Relics etc), but somehow the Dansette didn’t sound right when playing them.

After starting at secondary school, I was lucky enough to make friends with a boy who had wealthier parents than I, and who was allowed to use their ‘music centre’. This was essentially a radiogram but manufactured out of plastic, and not nearly so large. In what was a revelation to me (at the late age of 12 or 13) the speakers were separated from the deck, and spread across the living room: listening to Dark Side of The Moon on that stereo was my first experience of true sound separation.

After a summer spent working at a carnival, I bought my very first stereo record player with separate speakers.

In truth, it wasn’t great quality, but it did the separation job and ever since I have owned and used a record deck. I’ve never been a hi-fi snob, and the early Bang & Olufsen consoles that ‘true’ music fans were supposed to aspire to used to terrify me—what did all those buttons do? The brushed steel finish was lovely, but how the hell did it work? Quadraphonics looked complicated, too, and really, was the extra expense really worth it? As long as my stereos worked (the Dansette was handed down to a sister who promptly broke it, by the way—although I thought that it objected to having to play Donny Osmond records and died of shame) and was loud, I was happy.

Regardless of my sometimes precarious and transient lifestyle, boxes of vinyl records and mis-matching stereo ‘separates’ have been carted around with me. I resisted a switch to CDs as late as possible—as a music journalist in the early 1990s I preferred to get vinyl review copies from record companies (what do we call them now, the very few that still exist?) when they had almost completely gone over to digital discs. Today I find myself in possession of MP3, CD and vinyl versions of several of the same recordings, and while MP3 are easier to access, if I want to hear the recordings in a way that will make the hairs on the back of my neck stand up, then I’ll play the record. In my own room.

Looking around for the 21st century equivalent of a Dansette I find that there are several sensible and affordable alternatives out there. My teenage daughter could well get one.

Listening to the radio earlier this week we heard producer Joe Boyd—a presence in so many of our books—talking about the recent release of a special, boxed vinyl edition of Nick Drake’s wonderful Bryter Layter album. Fairport Convention member Dave Pegg appears on pretty much every track, while co-member Dave Mattacks plays drums on both the “Hazy Jane” tracks and “Sunday”. The broadcast prompted the playing of the (vinyl) album in the office and gave us the opportunity to publish this extract from Gorm Henrik Rasmussen’s excellent Pink Moon, in which he imagines the creative process of Drake as he begins to form the sounds and words of the album:

London is grey and overcast, fog and drizzle from morning to night. Rain, day and night, on the city windows. Down the glass facades. Down the walls. Down onto greedy asphalt roads. And into gutters, down to sewers.

Taxis are passing, neon signs flashing, river barges tooting. And the hours are flowing.  Day slips into night and night slips into day, and the distinction between the two is slowly erased. Only the clocks tell time. And the clocks are ticking, the windscreen wipers clicking, and the city bells chiming in the damp air. Late November.

Nick is sitting in his flat on Haverstock Hill in Hampstead, his guitar on his lap, tuning the strings, half listening to the crackle of a transistor radio in the background. The storm warnings. The shipping news. Far away a voice declaring that the weather will be brighter later. Later he leaves his room. He goes out into the traffic, among the pigeons and the crowds of pedestrians teeming through the city, escaping down escalators, into tube stations, department stores, and office buildings. On stairs, in lifts in tall, slim buildings, and long underground corridors: businessmen, messengers, civil servants, and tourists going up and down and back and forth. Crioss-crossing, in all directions, on separate floors in the big city cubes.

Later, he turns his back on the crowds and disappears into Regent’s Park. With long, loping strides, his elbows held close to his body, he moves through the deserted gardens, making his way to Primrose Hill where the trees stand on the slope, leaning into winter, naked, crippled with age. When he gets to the top he turns around to gaze at the flickering cones of light down on Prince Albert Road. On the horizon, the endless city looms like a giant electrical relay. And everywhere between Primrose Hill and the southern night sky lies London, shrouded in fog and neon. London on a November night~: a pin cushion of lights, shimmering and flickering in the dusk. He lights a joint, bends down to tie his shoelaces, without quite being able to tell whether he is awake or in the middle of a dream, whether what he sees is a real city or a scenario from a science fiction film without a title, without a director.

Hours later Nick is standing on the side of one of the innumerable approach roads circling the city. Leaning back, dressed in black, with his elbows resting on a rail protruding from an underground stairway. Behind the road the moon comes up, round and yellow like an old brass coin, and between Nick and the moon hovers a car, bathed in the bluish lights of a row of neon lamps from above. A car in the city space, on its way, as in a flash it separates Nick from eternity behind the guard rail.

He is waiting for dawn, waiting for the rising sun to clear the sky of clouds, the city sky as well as his own inner northern sky. And all day long he is working his way around the streets and the squares, waiting for the night, just to stand there on the outskirts of an abandoned neighbourhood, looking for the moon. He is waiting for a diffuse, never realised “later.” A bright spell in the evening, the “brighter later” the meteorologist had promised. Nick steals those two words for a song about his own meteorology and that of the city in November, for a song that will,provide the title for his new album. He spells “brighter later” differently, in a more mysterious, more poetic way, much as one would imagine Shakespeare might have done, or a stoned person with a sense of humour. “Brighter Later” becomes the cryptic Bryter Layter, but it still refers to a form of weather report. Look up at the sky, get a fix on the clouds, and off you go. Out into the city squares and back home again.

And what will happen in the morning when the world it gets

So crowded that you can’t look out the window in the morning.

Nick opens the curtains and looks out in a daze at the world racing by outside his window. The world is waiting, the world demands that you take part in the ever-growing race back and forth, up and down the stairs, in and out the door. Ask no questions, lift your feet off the ground, weigh up your anchor, and for God’s sake never look back.

And what will happen when you come home? Turn around and come back again.

That is the opening of “Hazey Jane II”. Trumpets and electric guitar, up front. In the middle of the big city bustle. Nick is a stranger in the streets. He is watching the faces, in the mirrors, behind car windows, on the double-decker buses shuttling across the city; he is listening to the clanking of typewriters, hurried conversations across tables, on telephones and at ticket hatches, small talk streaming out from open doors and windows:

For the sound of a busy place

Is fine for a pretty face

Who knows what a face is for?

“Bryter Layter” is a song of the city, urban jazz, urban dance. An instrumental soundtrack for an unmade film, enraptured blue ballads reflecting the mental vacuum of the tobacconist after closing time. The band is augmented with a saxophone while drums and percussion feature prominently in the mix. On a couple of songs John Cale, the Welsh wizard who long ago left the avant-garde Velvet Underground, plays along. Cale bows his electric viola and coaxes a double timbre from the instrument. He also plays the celeste and the organ to deepen the dark side of Bryter Layter. It does have a dark side, for the album reflects shadow and light, the rhythm of day and night is mirrored in the changes between inner and outer worlds; between dark visions and open poetry, as clear as day. Big city poetry, the melody of the day, the quickstep of feet across a city square. A track that captures the pulse of London, “At the Chime of a City Clock” is inspired by the numerous bells of London’s many churches. Listen to the rhythm of the melody, fast syncopated pulses, underscored by Ray Warleigh’s fluttering trills on the sax, and listen to the lyrics, a little masterpiece of musical language:

Stay indoors beneath the floors

Talk with neighbours only

The games you play make people say

You’re either weird or lonely.