Celtic Frost… oh aye.
Get up outta’ that with yer Darkthrone’n’Subhumans.
Wait until around eleven and cut the mix with a drop’o’Nick Drake. ‘Gonna see the River Man’ and all the swelling hearts and strings that go with it.

Fatalistic and magic in turn. That fucking thing has spooked me for years, rearing up every now and then when it knows I can’t sink any lower or help digging it out and pressing play. I was a young drunkard when a friend pulled out the vinyl in a dirty hovel in Belfast circa 1999, we were full of pills and Buckfast and it made me deeply upset to hear at first. I was a hateful, close-minded person…. happily just like today.

“Who’s this bleeding heart bastard?”
”Nah maaaaaan, you’ll like this”
“Nah maaaaaan, it’s worse than Neil Young”
“You don’t like Neil Young maaaaan?”
“No I don’t like Neil Young maaaaan.”

I seem to remember that apart from enjoying ruining my mates’ awestruck face, something about the middle section really started to gnaw at me and when he went to bed after subjecting me to Primal Scream or something equally ghastly for hours I dropped the needle on it again.

It was there.

Everything I wrapped up in sarcasm and smart-arse remarks was in there. In the strange opening chords, the massive orchestral arrangement, the hushed vocals, those broken young man lyrics. I reckoned “This is something I can’t admit to liking”
“I mean, what would people say?”

On the Monday I bought two records by Drake and kept the whole affair very quiet. They were Five Leaves Left and Pink Moon. I was drugged to the gills and smitten. For the first time I realised that heaviness was not about the kind of amp you ran a fuzz pedal through or how much a band was influenced by Sabbath, Pentagram, Dust or any of the proto-metal outfits I loved.

I later bought Bryter Layter and although it has great songs in there, it’s flowery and warm for the discerning miserable cunt. When he was on the money he had deeper desolation in a line than most could conjure with ten minutes of hard riffing. A perfect blackness in the most frail and fragile delivery.

Over the years I started to sneak in his music at the arse-end of parties when folk get that blue-sky staring look at around six a.m. Y’know, where they could die and they wouldn’t care. It seemed to have an effect and on one memorable occasion a man who barely spoke in general, took filth for his veins and watched it all go by, told me that what he was hearing was what he couldn’t play or sing but had wished someone would.

It’s all a large shining gash in the compact disc collection. Sad, towering, beautiful notes running through the shitey Prozac and sleeping tablet mirage.

If you have a bit of a facial blemish, a bad attitude as regards sun and it’s cold out, the narrow confines of ones room is the way to blue and it’s a good thing a man like him got rid of himself before the industry wolves got a hold of him like they did his friend John Martyn in the soul-raped eighties.

Imagine Nick withered away, not able to play gigs with one leg, out of his mind drunk at thirty stone like I saw Martyn do or wear a baseball cap like Scott Walker does and create the bleakest, poignant stuff out there.

Bullshittery for a sometime genius.

“You’re either weird or lonely”