I once played an ice-breaking game at a staff training session where you had to describe yourself to the other participants in the first five words you could think off. One of those I chose was psychedelic, which drew a few confused (and some concerned) stares from my colleagues. Still if anyone has seen my music collection they’ll know it is a very appropriate word.
That said, nick nicely (usually written in lower case) came as a bit of a shock to me when I discovered him at the Green Man Festival in 2009. Little elsewhere was happening on the other stages that grabbed my fancy that evening so I decided to head over to one of the side-tents to give this unknown a punt. With his head hidden behind an Elephant Man cloth mask, the stage bathed in proper psychedelic light show (including oil projections and films), I was completely blown away by the fresh modern sounding psych-rock from this mad man’s band. Full of swirling keyboards, loud guitars and pulsing bass lines I knew this was the real deal. During the whole set I stood there with my mouth wide open just drinking in the sounds. Afterwards I just had two questions – who was this guy, and how come I hadn’t heard about him before?
Back from the festival, I ordered nick’s Psychotropia album from Amazon and after a couple of days, it dropped through the letterbox. Reading the liner notes I was quite shocked to find that nick nicely wasn’t some hot new act on the scene, but had been recording music since the late 70s. In fact in the early 80s he had a couple of minor hits in Europe with his modern versions of 60s pop-psych, but shortly afterwards decided to end music as a full-time career. Over the next decade he’d resurface occasionally to play the odd-gig or record a new song, which meant that the 18 tracks on the CD were the result of a lifetime of work All this explained why I’d never heard of the guy.
Hilly Fields the most famous nicely track isn’t included here. While it is a masterpiece of faux-60s pop-psychedelia, my heart belongs to On The Beach (The Ladder Descends). With its dreamy pads and throbbing bass guitar, this song always teleports me back in time a couple of years, to a large tent somewhere in the Welsh mountains where the elephant man is playing some engrossing psychedelia in one of the best festival sets I’ve seen.
Listen to On The Beach (The Ladder Descends):
