LaRM day 115 (Nick Drake-Dressy Bessy)

Ah, now we're talking - a morning of everyone's favourite troubled genius, Nick Drake. Although we start with the bootleg, Tanworth-in-Arden (for which big thanks to Alex) which although a genuinely fascinating curiosity, is essentially a basic insight into what informed Drake's taste and songwriting rather than a marvellous listening experience in its own right. These are basically press-play-and-record home tape recordings that Drake made in 1967/1968 before Joe Boyd brokered his record deal. A mixture of Drake's less impressive original compositions and variously famous and obscure blues songs, it is extremely revealing about Drake's development, particularly in terms of his rather ornate and singular finger-picking guitar playing style (which was already extremely accomplished, by the way) and light, slightly fey, shy vocals. Bearing in mind that the debut album built on Drake alone singing and playing guitar, Tanworth-in-Arden is an enlightening document, and despite it's necessarily very rough sound it is of course a lovely thing, but it certainly isn't something that you can imagine Drake himself would be particularly pleased about being available for us all to hear.

Five Leaves Left (1969), Nick Drake's first album, is a masterpiece of studied introspection, a languid and faintly melancholy work which draws both folk and blues influences together and completely remoulds them both to create something quintessentially English. The gentle beauty of the album often serves to obscure just how clever and unusual it is, with Drake's quiet distracted vocals drifting over the guitar and piano accompaniments. Pretty much every song on the album is a true wonder but each one lends itself so perfectly to notions of isolation that you can't help but feel that Drake's sad fate was written in the stars. The other thing that is genuinely remarkable is Drake's utterly unique and scarcely replicable style of guitar playing. It's alternately jagged, forced and fluid but it never sounds any of those things, it sounds completely relaxed, at ease, and it's both astonishingly complex and astonishingly clever. Is it worth pointing out highlights on an album that grazes perfection throughout? If forced I suppose the delicate melancholy of 'Cello Song', the calm grace of 'Time Has Told Me' and the sinister folkisms of 'River Man', but honestly there's not much point in singling anything out.

Second album, Bryter Layter (1970), despite the terrible name is in some respects better, in some worse, than Five Leaves Left. There's a jazzy tone to some of the album which lifts it wholly out of the folk genre, but it's this element that I personally find doesn't always entirely fits with Drake's songs and general approach. Nonetheless, the songs that are good are beyond exceptional here, with the innate discomfort, the innate sadness at the heart of Drake's work bleeding through everything and giving it the most astonishing intimacy. Some of the songs are structured in a way that's not entirely divorced from classic pop songwriting, but the mood, the tone, the performances are entirely dissimilar. This is folk music played with a jazz tinge, but with no ostentation, no pretension, no adornment, and it's quite, quite beautiful. The really astonishing highlight for me is the three song run that closes off side 1, 'At the Chime of the City Clock', 'One of These Things First' and 'Hazey Jane I', but that's because I prefer the gloomier end of Drake's work. The brisker, jazzier numbers are still superb but there's something that doesn't seem quite right about them to me. In any event, any carping is essentially irrelevant as Bryter Layter is easily one of the best records ever made.

Drake's last release was 1972's Pink Moon, a record that defines the word "despairing" musically speaking. It's a missive from a deeply unhappy place and it's ultimate triumph is in not only being emotionally devastating but also inexplicably beautiful. There's none of pop music's narcissistic desire to be self-indulgent in the name of emotional truth, this is simple honesty, from someone who was genuinely troubled. These songs have every element that can be stripped out of them, leaving Drake and his guitar ekeing out the bare bones of songs and presenting them as skeletally as possible. The instrumental 'Horn' for instance is essentially just three notes played on the guitar and repeated, and what should be either tedious or pretentious or meaningless, or all three, is in fact absolutely heart-rending. It's astonishing stuff. In fact the whole album is a cleansing experience, emotionally, musically and intellectually and while it serves as an example of how to make something monumental from almost nothing, it doesn't help in listening to it to know that it didn't cleanse Drake's own mind at all. If anything it may have merely consolidated what he already knew to be desperate truth. The jury will probably always be out as to whether he intended to kill himself, but the evidence makes a fairly compelling case in favour. The saddest thing of all is that although this is art, or as close as this genre can get, Drake wanted it to be successful and be famous. Well, he got there in the end.

As a contrast we now have the debut eponymous album by The Dream Academy. As lush, soft-focus 80's guitar-pop music goes, this is the business. Grandiose, over-reaching, silly even, the Dream Academy brought a studied intellectualism to a kind of post-Prefab Sprout world and made it even more bookish. Big hit 'Life in a Northern Town' sets the template, ringing 12-string acoustic guitars, woodwind, big chorus, it's all there. The production by Floyd's Dave Gilmour is dated certainly but also makes the whole thing now sound entirely appropriately nostalgic, particularly appropriate considering the pastorally elegaic feel of the whole album. It's a fine, if pompous, rock record, and song for song it's as arch and deliberate as smart-arse pop music can get. The charming Kate St John's woodwind and percussion really lays the foundation for the songs and creates the constant tone-setting ambience and without her it really would be a record of good songs, but little texture. And as an interesting coincidence, the fact that the Dream Academy comes directly after Nick Drake is very aposite as head Dream Academy chap Nick Laird-Clowes is a Drake fanatic and actually owns the acoustic guitar that Drake is pictured with on the cover of Bryter Layter. Sew a button on that one fact fans.

And so to move even further away from accusations of miserabilism, it's the super-charged guitar pop of Dressy Bessy. Now this is as sunny day as guitar-pop will ever, ever get. Sharing members with the Apples in Stereo, Dressy Bessy made some of the most up and charmingly sweet records, like, ever. I once saw them play four times in one week. I love Dressy Bessy. Apart from anything else these are brilliantly put together records and debut Pink Hearts, Yellow Moons (1999) is charm personified. The melodies are superb, the tunes absolutely fizzing and the hooks are the definition of infectious (not as in illness infectious, as in, you know, fun infectious), and Tammy Ealom's enthusiasm is absolutely undeniable. The 60's derivations are scarcely disguised, the girl-group melodic set-ups even less so, but so what? The band were to get consistently less impressive with each successive release, but Pink Hearts, Yellow Moons is just a really, really great time.