Various – The Endless Coloured Ways:
The Songs Of Nick Drake
Chrysalis Records
7 July 2023
The cult of Nick Drake is a strange phenomenon. It can be tempting to scoff at the fans who make pilgrimages to his grave in Tanworth-in-Arden or the Hollywood stars who crow about his music as if they had discovered him. Drake fandom often veers close to the romanticisation of the troubled artist, the glorification of mental illness, but casting him as some kind of unstable, doomed Keats-figure is at best tasteless and at worst dangerous. Drake’s music has always been more remarkable, more mystical and unknowable than his biography. It is the music that feeds the myth.
The inscrutable lyrics, the half-whispered singing, the apparent effortlessness of his wholly distinctive guitar sound. In the end, these are the things that keep the myth alive, and everything else is academic. These are also the things that make Nick Drake a very difficult artist to cover. And yet the enduring love for these songs and perhaps the challenge they represent means that thousands of people – from park bench buskers to top-tier rock stars – have given it a go. The Endless Coloured Ways gathers up twenty-three new versions of Drake’s songs, lavishly packaged (vinyl version reviewed) and curated partly by the singer’s estate manager Cally Callomon.
Drake’s influence is best measured in the variety of acts on show here. These range from indie darlings Fontaines D.C. to million-selling nineties chart-troubler David Gray via alt-rock heroine Liz Phair and the experimental folk of Skullcrusher. This works in the album’s favour: straight-up, reverent covers are never likely to match the originals, so it’s best to find new approaches. The Fontaines D.C. song is a case in point: they bring their growly, spiky post-punk gnarl to Cello Song. Vocalist Grian Chatten is less harsh than usual, but the guitars grind satisfyingly up against the strings, while the rhythm section could almost be The Fall or Faust.
The album is characterised by breadth of expression. Let’s Eat Grandma’s arty synth-pop sparkle adorns From The Morning. Bombay Bicycle Club join forces with The Staves for a cleverly arranged take on Road; Katherine Priddy’s I Think They’re Leaving Me Behind begins in stately, piano-driven splendour and branches out into rangy folk-rock, like some long-lost Sandy Denny classic, while Camille’s French accent and conversational style puts a spring in the step of Hazey Jane II. Thankfully nobody falls into the trap of making note-for-note facsimiles of the originals. Even the most ostensibly folky of contributors, the ones you’d expect to sound most like Drake, provide some wildly imaginative interpretations of his songs: Karine Polwart and Kris Drever’s Northern Sky becomes a tender duet, gaining a delicate shimmer and a soft blush of muted brass.
The compilation throws up a few notable collaborations: Aldous Harding and John Parish bring a dark, driving energy to Three Hours. Guy Garvey joins Mike Lindsay for a horn-inflected Saturday Sun, beautifully lazy and full of evocative crackle and hiss. Craig Armstrong enlists the help of Self Esteem for a moving, airy Black Eyed Dog, one of Drake’s most powerful and personal songs. Perhaps the best of these collaborations is Skullcrusher and Gia Margaret’s Harvest Breed: gossamer-light and absolutely haunting, pricked with impressionistic keys and held aloft by a pillowy drone.
The Endless Coloured Ways really hits its stride with the songs that diverge furthest from the originals. Contemporary folk’s most iconoclastic band, Stick In The Wheel, are let loose on Parasite, and the result is dark, drawn-out and full of a sense of weird decay. It sounds both ancient and futuristic, like a robotic trip-hop group performing in a London graveyard. Entirely different, but nonetheless compelling, is Emeli Sandé’s smooth and funky version of One Of These Things First.
Drake’s stranger, trippier side is well-represented here, especially on the gauzy, uncanny beauty of AURORA’s Pink Moon and the spooky clockwork clicks and whirrs the Radiohead’s Phil Selway brings to Fly, a song full of crushing claustrophobia. Liz Phair adds some twisty, psychy guitars and her characteristic vocal bite to Free Ride. One of the most powerful moments is kept until the end: John Grant’s Day Is Done is simultaneously crushing and uplifting, a chilling, slowly unfolding electronic spell that emphasises Drake’s ear for the dramatic.
Next year it will be half a century since Nick Drake died. It’s a testament to the immense power and originality of his vision that so many gifted musicians of our generation are indebted to his influence. Those represented on The Endless Coloured Ways are only the tip of the iceberg, but they have been expertly chosen. It is a brilliantly realised, perfectly sequenced tribute that, because of the sheer creative variety on show, never spills over into hagiography, and always prioritises Drake’s musical heritage over the cult of his personal history.
Order The Endless Coloured Ways: The Songs Of Nick Drake here: https://nickdrake.lnk.to/TECWPR