Nick Drake
Five Leaves Left(1969)

StuartAnthony1 13/05/2009

Five Leaves Left wipes the floor with it’s contemporaries. While they remain in aspic ,Nick, the one who sold barely 3000 copies of this debut LP ,travels easily across time untainted by the years. There is no formula for timelessness. You either have it or you don’t. Using his Cambridge friend Robert Kirby as strings arranger was a stroke of focused genius. Robert was not an industry player and his work gives this album something extra and uncontrived. Before Robert worked on the album the record company got in Richard Hewson, a well known professional arranger to work on Nicks songs. I heard those early arrangements recently and they make Nick sound like a cross between Donoavan and Marianne faithful in a 60’s timewarp. Nick soundly rejected those arrangements and his musical vision proved true.
Highlights of this album are Three Hours which is just the most stunning evocative piece of spine tingling guitar work you are ever likely to hear; Way To Blue, just Nick and stings in beauty; Day Is Done, studied, strong and very English. Flawless guitar backed by almost Eleanor Rigby type strings.
Fruit Tree, in which a 19yr Nick Drake fortells his own fate to beautiful haunting music of the autumnal kind.
Sadly, even the title of the album seemed to incant a prophecy of Nick’s fate, the “Five Leaves” being the five years he had left to live. Over too soon. “They’ll stand and stare when you’re gone…”