User:Richard3120/Five Leaves Left

Writing and composition

Drake spent the first four months of 1967 staying in Aix-en-Provence in France, where friends first recalled him starting to play his own compositions, rather than songs by other artists. During his stay, Drake began to smoke larger quantities of marijuana, visited Morocco (where he apparently played for members of the Rolling Stones and their entourage), and attended a seance. In his essay on Drake titled Exiled from Heaven, writer Ian MacDonald believed that the events during this stay had a profound effect on the way Drake viewed life and other people. He also agreed with the American singer-songwriter Robin Frederick, one of the people Drake met in France, that "Saturday" became a codeword for this happy period and for Aix in particular, and that "Saturday Sun" on Five Leaves Left was written about this period of his life. MacDonald also noted that the sequence of days could be seen as continuing on Drake's subsequent albums (the track "Sunday" on Bryter Layter and Pink Moon alluding to Monday/"moon day"), and that these represented his diminishing optimism about life as time went on.

In October 1967 Drake went up to Cambridge University to read English, and the majority of the songs on Five Leaves Left were written during his first year at university. By the end of Drake's first term at Cambridge he had written enough material to perform a set of his own songs and secure a booking on the bill of a five-day charity concert held at the Roundhouse in London. In his 1997 biography of Drake, author Patrick Humphries tentatively put the date of the concert as February 1968, but subsequent investigation has shown that the concert was the Vietnam Solidarity Concert headlined by Country Joe and the Fish, and actually took place during 20–24 December 1967. Drake only played a short set during the early hours of one of the mornings, but his performance at the concert caught the attention of Ashley Hutchings of the group Fairport Convention, who were also playing that night. Hutchings approached Drake after the concert and put him in contact with Fairport Convention's producer Joe Boyd. Over the Christmas period Drake recorded a demo tape reel at home of three newly-written songs, "Time Has Told Me", "The Thoughts of Mary Jane", and "Magic", and travelled to the offices of Boyd's Witchseason production/management company in London to deliver it to Boyd in person. The demo was enough to convince Boyd to sign him to Witchseason and gain a recording contract with Island Records. According to Drake's parents, "Time Has Told Me" was about a girl that Drake had met in Cambridge and fallen in love with. Drake's university friend Paul Wheeler claimed that Drake had come up with the song's title while the pair were drinking in the university's Footlights bar.

In March or April 1968 Drake met fellow student Robert Kirby for the first time. Kirby recalled that during their first meeting Drake played him four songs: "The Thoughts of Mary Jane", and three recently completed songs, "Day Is Done", "Way to Blue", and "Time of No Reply". Over the following year Drake played further songs to Kirby, including "River Man".

Recording

Recording for Five Leaves Left began in July 1968 at Sound Techniques in London and continued sporadically over the next twelve months. Part of the reason for the slow progress in recording the album was that Drake was continuing the second year of his studies at Cambridge and only visited London on occasion, but Boyd also remembered that with the perfectionist Drake he had to adopt a different method of recording than with his other artists: "With the other groups or artists we tended to go in, do a record in a concentrated period of time. With Nick, we just went in, did a couple of tracks, listened to them, thought about it, thought what we wanted to do with them, worked on them a bit, put down a few more tracks, wait a month, wait six weeks, think about it some more, perhaps work with an arranger... It was very different, and very reflective." The album cost between £3000 and £4000 to make.

Inspired by the string arrangements on Judy Collins' album of cover versions In My Life, (recorded at Sound Techniques), and Leonard Cohen's recently released debut album Songs of Leonard Cohen, Boyd believed that Drake's songs would also benefit from a string arrangement backing, to which Drake agreed. Boyd contacted Peter Asher at Apple Records who suggested Richard Hewson, their in-house arranger. Hewson and his musicians recorded "I Was Made to Love Magic", "The Thoughts of Mary Jane" and "Day Is Done" with Drake at Sound Techniques, but after Hewson had left Boyd and Wood expressed their disappointment with Hewson's arrangements. Drake then suggested that Kirby would be able to do the job – Boyd and Wood were sceptical of using a student with no professional experience, but noted Drake's insistence and agreed to try out Kirby. Kirby visited Sound Techniques in October 1968 and in a single-three hour session "Way to Blue", "The Thoughts of Mary Jane", "Fruit Tree" and "Day Is Done" had been recorded using fifteen musicians, with Boyd and Wood delighted with the results.

However, Kirby felt he was unable to score "River Man". Drake stated that he wanted the arrangement to sound like Delius, so Wood suggested Harry Robinson, who was noted for his ability to mimic certain composers. Having sent Robinson a demo of the song in advance, Boyd and Drake visited him at his house in Barnes, where Drake played his guitar along with the tape and described in detail how he wanted the song to sound, while Robinson took notes. Robinson and the orchestra then came to Sound Techniques two weeks later to record the song.Engineer John Wood recalled that "[Drake] would track live, singing and playing along with the string section" without the use of any overdubbing. For the song "River Man", producer Joe Boyd described Drake playing on a stool in the centre of the studio while surrounded by a semi-circle of instruments. The studio's environment was also an important factor as it had multiple levels to it which enabled the creation of interesting sounds and atmospheres.

Among his various backing musicians, Drake was accompanied by Richard Thompson from Fairport Convention and Danny Thompson of Pentangle.

The 2013 remastered vinyl reissue of Five Leaves Left states on its back cover that recording of the album was completed in July 1969. However, photographs of the boxes of the master tapes included in the reissue's packaging show a date of May 1969.

Artwork and title

The photographs on the album were taken by Keith Morris. Although Morris had previously worked with Boyd on other projects, the pictures for Five Leaves Left were the first time he had ever taken photos for an album cover. Morris and Drake met for lunch and talked about ideas for the album's artwork, and then met up again a few days later to shoot the pictures in various locations around south London. The front cover, which shows Drake looking out of an upstairs window, was taken in an abandoned and derelict house next to Wimbledon Common. After taking the photographs in Wimbledon, Morris drove Drake to his offices at Gunter Hall on Gunter Grove in Chelsea, where Morris worked on Oz magazine, and took some black and white photographs of Drake sat at the office table, one of which featured in the gatefold of the original release of Five Leaves Left. The back cover photo is of Drake standing on a pavement and leaning against a brick wall while a man runs past him in a blur. Joe Boyd believed that the picture was taken near Witchseason's offices in Charlotte Street in the centre of London, but Morris told Humphries that the photo was actually taken next to the Morgan Crucible factory (since demolished) in Battersea at the end of the working day as the employees were leaving the factory, and that the man was running to catch a bus. Other photographs of Drake taken during the shoot at the factory show him standing next to a newspaper billboard with the words "BUDGET SPEECH", showing that the album's photos were taken on the same day as the UK's annual budget speech by the Chancellor of the Exchequer in the House of Commons. Dann states this to be 29 April 1969, although Hansard's parliamentary proceedings show that the 1969 budget was in fact presented two weeks earlier, on 15 April 1969.

Throughout recording the working title of the album was Saturday Sun, named after the closing track, and it was only towards the end of recording that Drake came up with the new title. The title of the album is a reference to the old Rizla cigarette papers packet, which used to contain a printed note near the end saying "Only five leaves left".

Release

The release date of Five Leaves Left is disputed. Advertisements for three albums on Island Records – Fairport Convention's Unhalfbricking, Dr. Strangely Strange's Kip of the Serenes, and Five Leaves Left – appeared in various UK music magazines at the beginning of July 1969 and clearly state a release date of 3 July for all three albums. However, for Patrick Humphries' biography of Drake in 1997, Island Records supplied him with a release date of 1 September 1969, and this date is also on the replica shop poster included with the remastered audiophile vinyl edition of the album released in July 2013 as part of Island's "ReDISCovered" series. Humphries notes the July 1969 date in his book but attributes the two-month difference to an unspecified delay in releasing the record. In Gabrielle Drake's 2014 book Remembered for a While the 3 July date is stated as being the correct one.

Like its follow-up Bryter Layter, Five Leaves Left was not released in the US and Canada until the establishment of Island's US subsidiary company Antilles Records in 1976. The album was first released on CD in the UK in 1989, and remastered and reissued along with Drake's other albums in June 2000 as part of the "Island Masters" series. It was also reissued in 2004 as a CD with a gatefold sleeve, and on audiophile vinyl in 2010 by Simply Vinyl and in 2013 by Island.

Promotion

Live performances

Boyd arranged a concert of his roster of Witchseason artists at the Royal Festival Hall on 24 September 1969, with Drake and John and Beverley Martyn supporting headliners Fairport Convention, who were making a comeback following the motorway crash that had killed their drummer Martin Lamble four months earlier. Boyd recalled in his memoir that Drake's set was well received and that encouraged Boyd to book Drake onto a tour on clubs and universities around the UK. However, Drake did not meet with the same level of attention as he had at the Royal Festival Hall, which undermined his confidence, and he pulled out of the tour after only a few gigs. During the first half of 1970 Drake returned to playing smaller folk clubs, including several performances at Les Cousins in London, and touring as the support act for other musicians, but fellow musicians recalled Drake's acute discomfort at playing live. His last known live performance was on 25 June 1970, supporting Ralph McTell at Ewell Technical College, when he played a few songs and then walked off stage halfway through playing "Fruit Tree".

BBC radio sessions

Drake recorded one session for John Peel's BBC Radio 1 show in August 1969. Four songs were known to have been recorded and played on the show: "Time of No Reply", "River Man", "Three Hours" and "'Cello Song". At the time the BBC did not retain archive recordings of their shows, and it was believed that the session had been lost for ever: Radio 1's archivist Phil Lawton told Humphries that a recording did not exist. However, in August 2014, Drake's estate announced that a complete recording of the session had been located, including a hitherto unknown fifth track, the instrumental "Bryter Layter", and that all five tracks would be made available as a 10" vinyl record included in the Signature Boxed Edition of the Remembered for a While biography of Drake, published in November that year. The biographies of Drake and the record all stated that the session had been recorded at the BBC's Maida Vale Studios on 5 August 1969, and transmitted on Peel's show the following evening. The session appears to have been repeated on the Night Ride programme on BBC Radio 2 on 25 September 1969.

For many years it was believed that this was the only radio session Drake ever recorded. However, during research for his 1997 biography, Humphries was alerted by Drake's fellow Cambridge student Iain Cameron to the existence of a second session. Cameron had played flute with Drake during college concerts at Cambridge, and alongside his university studies, had a job helping out BBC producer Alec Reid. Cameron knew that Reid was interested in folk singers and suggested to Reid that he should book Drake for a radio session. The recording for the session took place at the BBC's headquarters at Broadcasting House on 23 March 1970, and was broadcast the following month on 14 April during Radio 2's Night Ride programme, presented that night by Colin Nichol. No recording of the show is known to exist, and it is not known which songs Drake played. However, Cameron recalled that "maybe four to eight songs" were recorded for the session, and that Drake had played "Saturday Sun" on the studio's celeste while he was waiting.