This site started around 2003. Back then I wrote an introduction to the site. Since then, nick has been writing, recording and releasing so much new material that it has made the intro as rendered below completely outdated. nick is a psychedelic artist of today with an intriguing back catalogue. I am however supplying this for historical reasons below.
Perhaps this is also the right place to express my gratitude to nick for his interest in, and contributions to, this site.
===the intro as of 2003 ====
Nick Nicely
remains one of pop’s most intriguing figures. After releasing two singles in the
early eighties, the man disappeared into thin air. Admittedly, there’s many people
who release something and then are never heard of again (in many cases just as well), but
of Nick’s two singles, at least one is considered a psychedelic cult classic, up
there with Strawberry Fields Forever and other acclaimed masterpieces. Trevor Horn and
XTC’s Andy Partridge are among his fans. Nevertheless, his stuff is virtually
impossible to get hold of, there’s never been a re-release on CD [see below], and
there’s nothing on the net about the guy except for some cursory references. This
site tries to sum up the few facts known about the man. But first I’ll try to explain
my own fascination.
I became
intrigued by the NN phenomenon after his first single, DCT Dreams, briefly made it into
the Dutch tip parade, an unofficial list preceding the actual hit parade. It’s
impossible to describe – weird, electronic, psychedelic, unlike anything I’d
heard before. The flipside, Treeline, is just as good. I obtained my copy soon afterwards
from a stack of about 10 in the bargain box at De Bijenkorf department store (Amsterdam)
for a dead cheap 95 cents – the song apparently never lived up to the expectations of
the label. I guess I should have bought all of them; it’s now a real collectors’
item. I never heard Nicks second single, Hilly Fields, when it came out; Dutch radio
stations seemed to ignore this brilliant psychedelic cut. A couple of years later, Nick
was invited to VPRO radio in The Netherlands to speak about his thwarted pop career. This
was also the only time when Nicks unreleased third single, On The Coast, was aired.
When Napster
happened, one of the first things I tried to get was an MP3 of Hilly Fields. A nice chap
called Trev emailed me the MP3s, since Napster cut me off several times. He also sent
along a scan of the article about NN in
Record Collector magazine. This remains one of the best sources of info about Nick.
The article also describes how Jeff Ross, the author, got hold of Nick back in 1997. I decided to follow the same path and call the EMI archives in Hayes. But his file seems to have gone missing – they couldn’t dig up a single piece of info on the guy. I did however get in touch with Jeff Ross, who told me he still spoke to Nick occasionally. We thought it’d be nice if someone (re)issued Nicks music, which NN alluded to in the RC interview.
By the way,
just to give you an idea what Hilly Fields does to people, here’s an excerpt from an
email by someone who got hold of Hilly Fields after looking for it for a decade or two: (I
sent him the MP3)
- “ 'Hilly Fields' has haunted me since I first heard it. I have not heard it since 1982, when it received modest airplay on UK radio. I have been searching for it on the Internet since I fist got online. This morning, I got your message. It was like the proverbial message in the bottle - I shouted out with joy..." - “I have spent the morning listening and re-listening to this psychedelic masterpiece, trying to confirm my suspicion that the song is about a Victorian-era UFO abduction of a junior civil servant on Hilly Fields Park, Lewisham ( I have visited the place three times).[...]Once again, after a day in the office during which time I have played Nick Nicely to death, what can I say except that you have enriched my life!" - Michal, Warsaw
So there we
have it – the man just dropped two brilliant singles into the world and then decided
to go missing. He probably likes the mystery, but in the interview he most certainly gave
the impression he intended both singles to become hits, and was frustrated they
didn’t. So why all the mystery then? Nick Nicely remains of the more intriguing
footnotes of pop history. At least the man now has a website devoted to him...
Since I made this site, several people including Nick have been in touch with me. New info has surfaced, and of course, by some incredible coincidence, a re-release was under way just as I finally built the site. We can finally die happily, as somone put it. Don't miss it.