WHEN THE CHILD IN YOU MEETS THE CHILD IN ME

Between Garrie’s returning second album 49 Arlington Gardens (2009) and his debut, there was a hiatus of full four decades. The album is a result of occasionally witnessed historical possibility of every artistic generation paradoxically inventing its own ancestors. Making them up if necessary. Finding them in the times that precede them, if possible. Here we have a precious generation of Scottish musicians who chose Nick Garrie as their predecessor that remained unknown to the world. The more unusual the discovered artistic blood relation and the more surprising the family tree, the more valuable the origin. Challenging, inciting and organizing the recording of Garrie’s new songs, these musicians paid back the debt that had never existed in the most beautiful way. They gladly chose to become indebted. Being true fans of Garrie’s work, Norman Blake of Teenage Funclub and Duglas T. Stewart of BMX Bandits, both from Glasgow, had important roles. As an artist evidently admiring Serge Gainsbourg and Brian Wilson, Stewart took part in the production. Rumor has it Kurt Cobain once said that Stewart’s band would have been his choice if he could have chosen what band to play in.

Stewart’s artistic credo does not include only being a music author. He is one of those special, unselfish people the world is always in need of, who find their joy as explorers while digging out buried musical treasures and are then willing to share the discovered fortunes with everybody. Some of the forgotten masters Stewart pointed out were Chip Taylor, Jon Voight’s brother, who wrote Wild Thing (a rock classic immortalized by The Troggs and played live by Jimmy Hendrix) only to give up on music and take up professional gambling. Stewart found it natural to strongly advocate Garrie’s return to recording and performing. He used to say that The Nightmare of J. B. Stanislas influenced him so profoundly that he kept persuading his friends and acquaintances to buy this record when it was reissued, promising to personally refund their money if they did not like it. Eventually, nobody asked their money back.

The support of the Scottish independent but firmly established scene meant the world to Garrie. Truly grateful, he kept talking about these generous people who made him come back to the studio and stage. None of this goes to say that Nick Garrie did not record anything during those forty years between his first and second album. He did, rarely and under the name of Nick Hamilton; he chose his mother’s maiden surname of Scottish origin. He worked with the best French musicians and Cat Stevens’ band, but he was never as happy as when he recorded songs with those Glaswegians. He used to say that they were maybe a bit rough on the outside – after all, they were Scotts – but on the inside they were simply sweet. And they took care of everything because he did not have any money to invest in a new record. 

“When I got married, I stopped writing songs. I spent a lot of years enjoying my children, and then, one day, I woke up and I wasn’t married any more. And I started writing again,” Garrie summarizes the origin of 49 Arlington Gardens in these three short confessional sentences. He uses this simple revelation of newly awoken inspiration during his concerts as well, like a prepared comment between songs. The album title refers to the street in which he shared an apartment with a teammate from his rugby club, who provided him with accommodation during a rough period of life. He vowed then that he would record an album and name it after his sanctuary.

Nick Garrie loves this album dearly. He loves the songs on it. He loves to engage his audience when he performs them; we sang along the chorus from Stay Till the Morning Comes in Novi Sad although it was the first time we had ever heard it, but we learned it right away. It is easy when the song is good, singable and memorable, and that one is all that. Its studio version includes acoustic guitar segments whose sound is seductively Mediterranean. Mediterranean influences, along with expected Francophonic layers, are harmoniously mixed with Garrie’s Celtic roots. He is a British songwriter, but with a continental or European orientation. Garrie’s elegant and understandably chanson-like version of La Pont Mirabeau, Apollinaire’s famous dedication to transience and a Parisian bridge over the Seine, continues the theme developed in Lovers, a true beauty among Garrie’s songs which also sings about the impermanence of human love. The credits for this song, which is probably Garrie’s most beautiful, gracious and gentle track in the years before and long after the record 49 Arlington Gardens, also went to its co-creator Francis Lai, a great French composer who was awarded an Oscar for Love Story, a tragic film story that broke many hearts in the seventies. More importantly than anything mentioned above, Lai was Garrie’s reliable friend who had helped him more than once to stay true to what was more precious than anything: creating.

The songs on this album do not possess an immunity to life’s disappointments and failures, but Garrie was not prone to fatalism and his deepest abysses still offer the possibility of getting out of the chasm. In Every Nook and Cranny paints a disturbing picture of a collective lack of love in the world, but Garrie connects his dark insights with an easy, gentle, and singable melody as if his only answer is singing as a way of healing. In return, When the Child in You presents a virtually eschatological perspective and mythic images of a lifesaving journey through the promised land for the chosen ones who have preserved a child in them. It is a ticket for a boat ready at the dock, it is a ticket which no money can buy, owned only by those who have not given up on their childhood. If the meaning of this image is considered within the context of the making of this record, we will see that the preserved children in Duglas T. Stewart and other Scottish recording partners happily recognized the somewhat lonely child in the already elderly artist, the child who was looking for company on the playground of creative dreams. Finally, the vivacious On a Wing and a Prayer is in compliance with the definition of every artistic act as a form of prayer. No matter how hard it is, no matter how deep the ditches that someone’s luck is in are, Garrie offers a millennial consolation articulated as a prayer which will eventually lift everyone and take them over. His profoundly humane and believable voice, this mighty yet simple human instrument that can affect the character of the person who pays attention to it, that voice, full of dignity and beauty, guarantees that the song will succeed in settling someone’s heart and making their heart bigger and better. With a good measure, this extraordinary album in a French, Mediterranean and British spirit, ends with the miniature The Clockmaker, in which a sweet children’s choir with a neat standard accent accompanies Garrie in his role of an ancient clockmaker who possesses magical powers and can control time, but is slowly getting ready to leave this world.

49 Arlington Gardens, condensed into thirty minutes of music like its successor, was worthy a comeback forty years after the first record about Stanislas. It was valuable as Garrie’s return home after a decades-long odyssey on the way to his personal Ithaca, but it did not manage to make any significant impact on his commercial success and material status. Garrie’s objectivized reality did not change. “49 Arlington Gardens is a really good album, but sold only a few hundred copies. Whatever I recorded didn’t sell well. And then you ask yourself, what’s the point?” was Garrie’s comment about his place on the music industry map, which was not getting any better. What did change was not measureable in sold copies or bigger media presence. The change was in Garrie’s acceptance to come back to his creative work with more focus, to start traveling and performing again, despite the long periods in life when he worked a range of different jobs, providing for his family and himself. He was a ski instructor in the Swiss Alps for fifteen years, then a waterskiing instructor, an English teacher for foreigners, and a rugby player. After his failure with Stanislas he kept trying to get away from music and God only knows – he tried hard. But music would not let him. That is why 49 Arlington Gardens is valuable as the return of a dreamer grounded in his youth to something he could not ignore in himself, to something that always defined him and made him different, to something that was his essence: to dreaming a creator’s dream and to a new attempt at living that dream with dignity in real life. 

Excerpt taken from Legend of a Grounded Dreamer (a story about Nick Garrie, a forgotten genius of pop music)

Translated by Igor Cvijanović