Skip to main content

Bryter Later

I can't recall hearing anything about Nick Drake until the early '90s, and the release of the Way to Blue compilation. If I'd caught any of his songs on the radio before that, they had failed to register. Previous re-issues and compilations of his music had passed me by. In the late '70s and '80s, his sister Gabrielle's name was undoubtedly better-known than his, owing to her work as a TV actor. Over the last twenty-odd years his posthumous fame has seemed only to spread ever more widely, and was long-established before I belatedly acquired any of his records.

The first one I picked up was Pink Moon. On a rare visit to the HMV shop at the Cribbs Causeway mall a few years ago they had copies of the 2013 re-release on offer, and I thought "why not?" The pandemic was in full swing before it was joined by Five Leaves Left. A copy of Bryter Later - again, from the 2013 release - completed the set last summer. Unlike the other two albums, this one doesn't have a gatefold sleeve, but rather a textured finish on the cardboard, thereby mimicking some '70s re-issues of it.

My favourite tracks are 'One Of These Things First', 'Poor Boy' and 'Northern Sky', the last with John Cale sticking his musical oar in to exquisite effect. If it has a weak point, I think 'Fly' might be it. I was fascinated when I learned, quite recently, that Nick's and Gabrielle's mother Molly had written poetry and songs (though those remained within the Drake family until some time after her death). The similarity between her voice & her son's, though hardly surprising, is really very striking.

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Complete String Quartets

While the string quartets of Nikolai Yakovievich Myaskovsky (1881-1950) were all published in the Soviet era, a few of them had pre-revolutionary origins. Two quartets he wrote in 1911 and '09 while a conservatory student re-surfaced some twenty years later designated as Quartets Nos. 3 and 4.  An even earlier "schoolboy" piece was later re-worked more radically as Quartet No. 10, premiered in 1945. Myaskovsky partook of an ample share of the turmoil and tragedy of his times: he was wounded and shell-shocked after service on the front line in World War I, and his father, who had been a high-ranking military engineer, was brutally murdered by a revolutionary mob. Despite that, his music, even at its most sombre, hasn't the black bile or biting sarcasm of Shostakovich's, or of his friend Prokofiev's. Of the works collected here, in excellent early '80s performances by the Taneyev Quartet, only Quartet No. 1 has any significantly metallic tang of early S...
Post a Comment
Read more

Ein Schattenspiel, etc.

Georg Friedrich Haas is a contemporary Austrian composer of "art music". "Haas's style recalls that of György Ligeti in its use of micropolyphony, microintervals and the exploitation of the overtone series; he is often characterized as a leading exponent of spectral music" says wikipedia. Only a relative few of his many compositions have been issued on CD - many more of them can be found on YouTube. On this 2020 disc are three of his works in which standard classical instrumentation is augmented and altered by "live electronics". Two are string quartets and one is for solo piano. Is a string quartet still really a quartet if there are meanwhile some other people with laptops busily twizzling the sound? There is a live performance video of the 'String Quartet No. 7', the first work on the disc, where the JACK Quartet are supplemented by a trio of sound boffins to realise the composition. Whether it's properly a quartet or a septet is neithe...
Post a Comment
Read more

All Wrapped Up

Here's another of the compilation cassettes I bought this summer, having taken home a Denon twin-deck hi-fi cassette player from the local charity shop. All Wrapped Up is a 1983 compilation of singles by The Undertones, with Side One filled with A-sides, and B-sides on Side Two. A cassette must be the least desirable medium for such an arrangement, with a long rewind required if one just wants to hear the hits repeatedly. The Undertones were unapologetically provincial and anti-fashionable, with their songs sharply-written slices of life that pointedly avoided any mention of politics, or of the then-continuing violence in their native Derry. My favourite tracks are the obvious choices: 'Teenage Kicks', 'Jimmy Jimmy', 'Here Comes the Summer', 'My Perfect Cousin' & 'Wednesday Week'. Their later singles showed increased sophistication but lack the some of the straightforward charm of their earlier work. The B-sides, not unexpectedly, are mo...
Post a Comment
Read more