Nick Garrie

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08/11/2010

"The Nightmare of J B Stanislas" interview

Interview: Nick Garrie, singer/songwriter
The rediscovery of Nick Garrie, after 40 missing years, has sparked a hunt for other forgotten talent

• Nick Garrie's career has seen a renaissance despite his apparent lack of confidence: 'I've never known if I was much good'. Picture: Getty Images  In 1969, a young singer/songwriter recorded his debut album in Paris with a 56-piece orchestra he hadn't asked for. The album's producer was convinced he'd found the next Bob Dylan but while the album was being prepared for release, the label boss took his own life and all momentum and appetite for the record seemed to evaporate. The Nightmare Of JB Stanislas became such an ultra-cult collectible that even its creator Nick Garrie didn't own a copy.   And that might have been it for this "lost" album had it not been for its simmering word-of-mouth reputation and the enthusiastic intervention of a handful of new-found fans.   "When the album was finally re-issued on Joe Foster's Rev-ola label a few years ago, it came to the attention of Duglas Stewart, lead singer of Glasgow indie stalwarts BMX Bandits and evangelical cheerleader for a number of overlooked, under-appreciated musicians, who was quickly seduced by Garrie's precocious songwriting and storytelling skills and the album's sumptuous, romantic string arrangements, which recall the baroque pop sounds of The Left Banke and The Zombies.  "It was one of those albums where I immediately felt the need to hang out in record shops and point and say 'I really think you should buy this' when people went near it," says Stewart. He even offered money back to friends if they didn't like the album. No-one asked for their money back. In fact, local singer/songwriter Ally Kerr took his love of the album a proprietary step further by inviting Garrie, now a primary teacher living in a village near Heathrow, to play and record in Glasgow.  The result of this Scottish sojourn was a whole new album, 49 Arlington Gardens, and some new recordings of old songs which comprise some of the bonus material on the recently released 40th anniversary edition of Stanislas, all produced by Stewart and featuring Scottish indie royalty such as Teenage Fanclub's Norman Blake and erstwhile Soup Dragons' guitarist Jim McCulloch.  "I've never known if I was much good," says Garrie, "and that's an honest assessment. What helped an awful lot was going up to Scotland. I met these people and they just seemed to turn up and like the music. And I got such a lift out of that."  Garrie will return to Scotland in January to join the BMX Bandits 25th birthday celebration at Celtic Connections. But Garrie gigs are a rare occurrence.

He has never been a jobbing musician, more of an occasional troubadour. Following his Stanislas misadventure, he taught in Paris, ran a ski club in the Alps and set up a hot air balloon company in England. In the 1980s, he enjoyed some recognition in Spain, where he toured with Leonard Cohen. But he is under no illusions that this latest re-issue of his debut will necessarily herald a brave new chapter in his musical career.

"I've made four or five albums and none of them have sold anything at all," he says. "I've got a big batch of songs and I'd like to work again with the Scottish guys but Arlington Gardens is a really lovely album and it's probably only sold a few hundred copies and so you think what is the point?"

Stewart takes a different view, pointing to the surge in sales of the first two Big Star albums following Teenage Fanclub's endorsement in the early 90s. More recently, folk singer/songwriter Vashti Bunyan was encouraged to kickstart her career again after a 30-year hiatus as her 1970 debut album Just Another Diamond Day steadily acquired a cult following. Stewart himself has also championed neglected 60s performers such as Evie Sands and Chip Taylor, the brother of John Voigt, uncle of Angelina Jolie and writer of Wild Thing who gave up music in the 1970s to become a professional gambler before taking up his guitar again in the 1990s. Even in the course of our conversation, Stewart cannot help enthusing about his latest musical discoveries. "When some people discover things that aren't particularly well known, they want to keep them a secret - and I'm not like that," he says. "If I meet a new friend or hear a new song or taste a new flavour of crisps that I love it's almost like I can't sleep until I've let everybody know about it. Because a lot of good stuff gets missed."

However, in the internet age, more and more long-forgotten artists have been liberated from obscurity as it has become customary to share odd musical passions online. Garrie was heartily encouraged when he Googled his own name a number of years ago and discovered there were webpages dedicated to The Nightmare Of JB Stanislas.

The name of Detroit musician Sixto Rodriguez was barely known outside South Africa, where he had (unknown to him) sold 100,000 albums, until a couple of fans embarked on the Great Rodriguez Hunt a decade ago. Now he has reignited his career and is the toast of artists ranging from Paolo Nutini to Animal Collective. Last year, his cult psychedelic pop album Cold Fact was re-issued by Seattle-based record label Light In The Attic, which specialises in quality re-issues of hard-to-come-by vintage albums by the likes of Jane Birkin, Karen Dalton and The Monks.

They are prepared to go the extra mile to track down the music - and often the artist - they want to release.

Their latest project has been a labour of love which began, like the Stewart/Garrie connection, when label honcho Matt Sullivan heard UFO, the dreamy 1969 folk pop debut by Jim Sullivan (no relation).

Sullivan was a Malibu scenester who hung out with actors Harry Dean Stanton and Al Dobbs and had a cameo role in Easy Rider but never achieved the musical success he was tipped for. In 1975, he disappeared on the outskirts of the New Mexico desert. Over 30 years later, his namesake set out on his own Sullivan hunt to find the singer and the master tapes of UFO, hiring private detectives, consulting local news archives, visiting Sullivan's widow and seeking out the last people to see him alive. He returned empty-handed yet invigorated by his emotional road trip. And the album was re-issued thanks to a digital clean-up job.

There is a romantic frisson about liberating and listening to such lost-then-found albums but it requires music obsessives such as Matt Sullivan to pursue the story in the first place. "With many of these projects, the big hurdle isn't locating the artist, but securing the rights to legally license and release the music," he says. "But the music is always the initial hook. For both Rodriguez and Jim Sullivan, the second I heard the first track on each album I was transfixed.

"These are records and stories that must be told before they slip further into obscurity. There is always a sense of what could have been. Fortunately, Rodriguez is still with us all to experience his long overdue resurgence."

Stewart feels the same about Garrie but is philosophical about those who can't reap their new-found appreciation. "It feels like these people never really die," he says. "I'm linking up with lots of dead musicians and bringing them back to life. Maybe that's what my next mission is."

• The Nightmare of JB Stanislas is out on Elefant Records. UFO is released by Light In The Attic, on 15 November. Nick Garrie plays with BMX Bandits at Oran Mor, Glasgow, on 23 January.

By Fiona Shepherd