Think about people in their season and time
Nick Drake - 'Saturday Sun' (Five Leaves Left - 1969)
There are a very select group of artists where you can put your hand on your heart and say, “They’ve never made a bad album.” there are obvious acts in that list, like The Sex Pistols or Joy Division, that have one or two albums making the job easier. Once you get to three or more, it gets harder. You can argue that someone like Portishead and My Bloody Valentine haven’t made a bad album, but can you argue that those bands’ self-titled efforts come close to the other two? I say not quite. So that leaves Big Star, The Jimi Hendrix Experience and Nick Drake as acts where I would confidently tell anyone who asked that you need to hear all those.
I got into Nick Drake roughly the same time as many other people; they were exposed to the title track of his final album, Pink Moon, via an advert for VW in the US. I first heard Nick Drake's ‘River Man’ on a Chill Out complication cover-mounted CD from Q magazine in Nov 2000, having read about it in a Mojo piece on songwriters two months before. I still prefer Drake’s second album, Bryter Layter, but his first, Five Leaves Left, is one of the best debut albums of all time.
The album is a classic that captures the late 1960s sound of whatever the British equivalent of Americana is1. It contains some prophetic songs for an artist who died at a young age without his talent and work being acknowledged to the degree that might have satisfied him. ‘Man In A Shed’ covers his fragile emotional state, other songs cover the passage of time and concerns about how to lead a good life, and he prophetically dwells on the possibility that his music and legacy will outlive him on ‘Fruit Tree’. These songs veer from upbeat to hopeless and downcast, and on the final track, Drake reflects on this duality.
‘Saturday Sun’, like most of the album, features Danny Thompson on double bass, but more unusually, there is no string arrangement from Robert Kirkby2, and Drake also plays the piano alongside Tristan Fry, a percussionist who played on The Beatles’ ‘A Day In The Life’.
Fry is responsible for one of the great moments on the record; his playful splash entry around twenty seconds is the equivalent of the sun that Drake sings of, streaking in through the curtain. The song’s focus is again about the passing of time, something Drake seems to feel more acutely at 20 and 21 than I do now at almost twice that age. Much like Boethius3, the 5th/6th century Roman senator and philosopher, says
It's my belief that history is a wheel. 'Inconstancy is my very essence,' says the wheel. Rise up on my spokes if you like but don't complain when you're cast back down into the depths. Good time pass away, but then so do the bad. Mutability is our tragedy, but it's also our hope. The worst of time, like the best, are always passing away.
We take the rough with the smooth, the bad times come along and remind us how good the good times were, but both are fleeting.
You can be forgiven for thinking that doesn’t sound very much like the Nick Drake message if you aren’t familiar with all of his work, but it is a key theme on this record, and revisiting it one more time on the final track, which allegedly almost won out as the title of the record4, is tying together what he sings about elsewhere.
Saturday is usually a day of rest from work but not as much as focused on relaxation (or possibly religion in late 1960s England.), it’s a day for leisure for many. In this song, Drake is gently encouraging us to live life in the moment, tell the people you care about that you care about them, go after that crush, and do the things you enjoy. Live your life like it’s a Saturday, not a Sunday. This is also a Saturday when we can bask in the sun’s rays and not worry about the inevitable rain that Sunday will bring.
Drake's discography is like that. If you stand back from the story of his life and career and listen to the music for every ‘Way To Blue’, ‘Black Eyed Dog’ and ‘Time of No Reply’, there is something more upbeat and at least slightly positive like ‘Hazey Jane II’, ‘Fly’ or ‘Northern Sky’.5
Drake finishes by touching on those days that don’t seem to click right when he sings of Saturday sun not coming to see him today. Still, by the outro, even Sunday is sitting in Saturday’s sun, weeping for a day gone by as the delicate and melancholic forty-one minutes that preceded it comes to a close.
See Fairport Convention and Pentangle for more examples of this.
Or Harry Robinson, who tackled ‘River Man’.
Or Christopher Eccleston in Twenty-Four Hour Party People.
The actual 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”, as a prompt to buy another packet soon.
In fact, at our wedding in 2015, my wife and I’s first dance was to ‘Northern Sky’.
Lovely write up. It has been decades since I’ve played a Nick Drake album in its entirety and your post is a reminder that I ought to do so. I hadn’t seen his albums as split half full/empty (not your words, but the gist) before and that likely is due to my lack of lyrical attention.
As a lover of a gorgeous sentence, your last -- “even Sunday is sitting in Saturday’s sun, weeping for a day gone by as the delicate and melancholic forty-one minutes that preceded it comes to a close” -- is sublime.
"I first heard Nick Drake's ‘River Man’ on a Chill Out complication cover-mounted CD from Q magazine in Nov 2000." Aha, I had almost exactly the same introduction, although mine was "One Of These Things First", possibly on am NME CD, but definitely late 2000.
"Northern Sky" is a beautiful, beautiful song. That must have been lovely.