CROSS-CHANNEL MISUNDERSTANDING

It seems nobody has defined the paradoxes of Garrie’s unlucky debut as well as Robert Rotifer, an Austrian musician and music journalist. He noticed that the album sounds really English, but that it is not very related to the English music of the time, simply because it came out of Paris as the result of a heroic act of cross-Channel cultural misunderstanding. “It is the tale of a boy who grew up on both sides of the Channel, forever too French for Britain and too British for France… No wonder The Nightmare Of J.B. Stanislas sounds and feels a lot more like the Tuileries than Hyde Park, more French Riviéra than Brighton pier,” wrote the Austrian about the unusual case and destiny of Garrie’s hero Stanislas.

Garrie never considered himself a classical ballad singer and always saw himself as more of a traveling chansonnier. The influence of French culture on his young personality was enormous. Georges Brassens and Jacques Brel had shaped him as much as the Beatles. However, the Englishness in him stayed just that even in close contact with the French milieu. Today The Nightmare of J. B. Stanislas is an exciting example of a harmonious cultural contact between two significant civilizational paradigms that are geographically separated only by a great channel and centuries of historical conflicts. Long before Arsène Wenger, a French football visionary and evolutionist, came to England and transformed the old-fashioned Arsenal into the most modern club of its time, Nick Garrie had made a similar kind of synthesis. Even today, his record still sounds like an effective encounter of two cultures, two ways of thinking, and two kinds of experiencing the phenomenon of music. Truth be told, if Nick Garrie had been able to choose back then, he would never have made such an album or set up his songs with a fifty-six-instrument orchestra. If his wishes had been granted, only the less obvious French literary influences that had shaped him would have counted (Sartre and Camus) and this would have been just another valuable record in a shoreless sea of similar songwriting albums from the end of the 1960s. But this way, we got an impressive work of musical cultural contact which has no counterpart in the colossal canon of European pop music. Eddie Vartan gave everything he had, and that was … a lot.

Hardly anyone was able to hear Garrie’s debut from 1968. And it stayed like that until its first reissue in 2005, courtesy of the British Rev-Ola Records. Apart from a few added songs from that Belgian session which had preceded the making of the record, the reissue also brought the single Queen of Spades, a cobbled-up rock & roll reminiscence of The Doors meeting the French chanson. The English reissue was the first of three. Soon, the Spanish Elephant Records and the German Tapete Records published their own versions with the bonus single Close Your Eyes and a bunch of demo recordings from a studio session dedicated to Stanislas. These reissues spread the word about the lost treasure of the English sixties music. Stanislas awoke with a start from his decades-long nightmare and jumped out like a genie from the magic lamp. Nevertheless, the omnipresent Internet did a lot too, especially for a now seventy-year-old gentleman who made a record in Paris almost as a teenager, a record which he himself gave up on. And then, one day, he typed his name into a browser and discovered how many people from different parts of this planet loved and celebrated the songs from the record about J. B. Stanislas. A moving cross-channel misunderstanding from the end of the 1960s, this defeat of youth ideals and dreams, became an international online understanding at the beginning of the 2000s which connected more and more of those who found joy of unbound musical treasure on Garrie’s debut record. There were people informing Garrie that his album had saved their lives. One of those who openly adored Stanislas was the famous actor Phillip Seymour Hoffman. The Nightmare of J. B. Stanislas is a truly exciting record, not just because of its destiny. And excitement hits musical aficionados hardest only when they think that nothing else can get them excited anymore.

The Internet brought many comments and impressions too. The album was compared to the classics such as Bryter Layter by Nick Drake and Astral Weeks by Van Morrison. The Zombies and the Beatles were mentioned as well. Nick’s youthful singing was associated and connected with the impressive voice of Gary Brooker. However, the most dominant color on the rich palette of more or less founded comparisons was the collective insight of the majority of this record’s fans: it is a genuine musical and lyrical piece which surpasses genre definitions, a first-class work of creation or what is most often called a masterpiece. Paradoxes suit Nick Garrie well. Despite his awareness of the value of his debut, increased over the years, to all this, he would characteristically admit:

“It wasn’t the album I wanted to make.”

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

Translated by Igor Cvijanović