photo: Tina Carrfrom New Musical Express 13 feb 1982 p4
OUT OF HIS
TREE - NICELY
photo: Tina Carr
LET ME take
you down, cos I'm going to . . . Hilly Fields?
Quite why this
obscure South London park should have inspired the best psychedelic record made since the
'60s, well, that's a mystery known only to its maker, a man named Nick Nicely. His EMI
single, 'Hilly Fields (1892)' to give it the proper title, is a beautiful and baffling
exercise in DIY weirdness.
Multi-layered,
lovingly-crafted and endlessly complex, the song could come straight off 'Magical Mystery
Tour', and the truly shocking thing is that it's every bit as good. Like, far out.
Nick Nicely is
an enigmatic figure who prefers to forget his past, although the press release goes so far
as to reveal he was born in Greenland. Most of the '70s saw him holed up in his suburban
bedroom, laying the fantasies of his imagination on to tape. By 1980, he'd scraped the
finance to put out an indie single - the quirky, electronic 'DCT Dreams'. But soon after,
he was entranced by a new project. Putting all his meagre resources ('everything in my
flat that wasn't nailed down, I sold’) he spent six solid months on 'Hilly Fields
(1892)'. EMI picked it up, the reviewers put it down, but I love it and it's getting
airplay too.
A
single-minded individualist, he knew nothing of London's ''psychedelic revival'' but
pursued his own obsessions, privately. The song's lyrics are vague, but intriguing and
ghostly - Nick can't explain them, but tripping into a late-Victorian psychedelic
time-warp gets you some of the way there - a mix, to my mind of Picnic At Hanging Rock and
that old, old David McWilliams classic 'The Days Of Pearly Spencer' (remember it?).
Having worked
this elaborate homage to '67 Beatles out of his system, Nicely has gone back to his
bedroom, his synthesizers and drum-machines (and the odd cello-playing friend) to work
with fingers crossed. Future tunes will be more openly electronic, ''but still random, not
all pre-programmed''.
I'll be
waiting.
- PAUL DU NOYER