Nick Garrie

Nick Garrie first earned notice among psychedelic enthusiasts thanks to his 1970 debut album The Nightmare of J.B. Stanislas, a Baroque pop gem that sank without trace because of nonexistent distribution and promotion. He entered the world on June 22, 1949, in Yorkshire, England, the son of a Russian father and a Scottish mother, and passed most of his teenage years at a French boarding school. While studying at Warwick University he began composing songs, yet his chief passions remained surrealist literature and poetry; only in 1968 did he start performing, playing bars and restaurants during a backpacking journey through the south of France.

Several well-attended Amsterdam shows later brought him back to St. Tropez, where he secured a deal to record an LP in Brussels. That project stayed unreleased, and by late summer 1969 he had returned to Warwick to resume his studies. Months afterward, a friend of his mother introduced him to the Paris-based label DiscAZ, which offered a recording contract. He first cut the then-unreleased single “Queen of Spades” with American-born producer Mickey Baker (of “Love Is Strange” renown) before joining forces with producer Eddie Vartan on The Nightmare of J.B. Stanislas. Vartan, against Garrie’s preference, brought in a 56-piece symphony orchestra; the artist himself later regretted how that opulent string section overwhelmed his fragile, uncommonly literate material. Worse still, DiscAZ president Lucien Morisse took his own life within days of the album’s release, ensuring it never reached the public.

A discouraged Garrie went back to university and left music behind for several years. Using the pseudonym Nick Hamilton (a reference to his mother’s maiden name), he resurfaced in 1976 with the single “Un Instant de Vie,” a collaboration with Francis Lai, only to step away again and manage a ski resort in the Swiss Alps. Unaware of the growing cult status of The Nightmare of J.B. Stanislas, he kept the Nick Hamilton moniker for his 1984 return, Suitcase Man, made with former Cat Stevens sidemen Alun Davies and Gerry Conway. That record reached the top of the Spanish pop charts and earned him an opening slot on Leonard Cohen’s Spanish tour later the same year.

When the Stanislas track “Wheel of Fortune” surfaced on Phil Smee’s influential psychedelic pop rarities collection Circus Days, interest in Nick Garrie intensified; with scant reliable information available, the fanzine 117 ran a deliberately fabricated biography as a joke. Many readers missed the prank, however, and treated the invented story as fact, further clouding the record. While running a ballooning company he issued a second Nick Hamilton album, 1994’s The Playing Fields, and after moving back to France to teach at a comprehensive school he released Twelve Old Songs in 2002. Late in 2005 the British reissue label Rev-Ola brought out The Nightmare of J.B. Stanislas to widespread praise, appending the “Queen of Spades” single plus several previously unheard Belgian demos. Over the following years Garrie performed more frequently, making his first U.S. appearance and playing dates across Europe. Teaming with Scottish indie figures Norman Blake (Teenage Fanclub), Duglas T. Stewart (BMX Bandits), and Ally Kerr, he recorded new material that appeared on 2009’s 49 Arlington Gardens, issued by the Elefant label. The next year Elefant issued its own expanded edition of The Nightmare of J.B. Stanislas, loaded with unreleased and rare bonus tracks. In 2012 Garrie performed the album complete, backed by a string section and members of Scottish folk-rock band Trembling Bells, at Barcelona’s Primavera Festival. He finished his next full-length in 2017, a leaner set produced by Ladybug Transistor’s Gary Olson and Kyle Forester; The Moon and the Village appeared that November on German indie Tapete Records.