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Who Is… Billy Nicholls?
In comparison with our first two Who Is features (Carol Connors, and Tony Rivers and the Castaways), Billy Nicholls career has been much less prolific. In actual fact, Billy only has one single (two if you count a single off an album), and one album to his credit. Yet there's a lot more to his story then released product might indicate, So read on and see why Billy Nicholls should be a TRM household name…
Billy's story begins like so many other British kids. He was from pretty much of a middle-class family, and was a rather active school-kid, Billy recalls how he first got into music: "Everytime we had a school break, I'd go down to the music room---we called them cells---and I found a broken guitar down there one day, I never played guitar before, I bought a set of strings from working in a Wimpy Bar, and started to play, I wrote my first song in about ten minutes…"
Billy's father had played in a band, so there was some obvious family-musical influence, Billy would practice and write songs throughout his years through "what you would call High School". At age 17 or 18 he was accepted at a few Art Colleges, but he wanted to pursue a musical career: "My parents gave me a hell of a lot of freedom, When I was young my father used to knock me around a lot, But when I got older and wasn't bringing any money home---I was just writing songs---he let me alone. Then once I did start earning money I left home…"
Billy then hooked up with Immediate Records: "Soon as I left school, I was already writing seriously. I sent some tapes off to Andrew Oldham, and he liked them.
So he hired me as a songwriter---with Del Shannon mainly---and a few other people," (As coincidence would have it, TRM also has Del Shannon and Immediate feature stories in this issue, so be sure to read those for more Nicholls tie-ins...). Billy tells about his writing experiences at Immediate: "I was learning how to write songs, and I used to love Del Shannon. We wrote four songs together. It was a good experience to write with someone else, and I'd certainly do it again. I love to write for other people, and I just love commercial songs." As to the Shannon songs themselves, Billy is a bit hazy: "There was one called 'Led Along'---I think it got to #3 in Pitts burgh or somewhere like like…"
Billy was soon called upon to be a singing artist as well as a songwriter. Strangely enough, his debut for Immediate was not written by himself. It was written by someone credited on the label as "Paul" (last name). Billy explains: "Would You Believe' was a demo that someone sent in, and I loved it. I played it to Ronnie Lane and he understood it immediately. It had been around there for years!"
So Nicholls recorded "Would You Believe" with production and arrangement by Small Faces Steve Marriott and Ronnie Lane: "I did it with the Small Faces---it was good, but Andrew overproduced it, He added all sorts of strings and lots more, I actually had expected it to be a hit, until Andrew overproduced it. Someone once called it the best overproduced single of the Sixties" , Actually even with the "overproduction", it is quite brilliant, It pure British-Small Faces pop, circa 1967/8, There's loads of falsettos, strange instruments, powerful drumming and some amazing backup ravings from Steve Marriott, All these over a nice melody with nifty lyrics, Under the circumstances, Billy did enormously well, The flip, "Daytime Girl" (a Nicholls original), is simpler and more of Billy comes through, His voice has always been distinctive, having that uncanny knack for lilting high range lead vocals, and effectively moving harmony falsetto's.
Nicholls then went on to record an album for Immediate---but it was never released, "At 18 I did an album that cost thousands of pounds, but it never came out, I was really quite fond of it. All the great session men were on it--Nicky Hopkins, John Paul Jones etc. Plus everyone around Immediate would help out. That's what kind of organization it was, I played and sung on so many Immediate recordings, There was loads of stuff, I had, and still have, a high voice, so I used to get called upon a lot. I did alot of voices on the early Nice stuff, There's a couple of songs on my album that still turn me on a bit"," Billy continues to talk about Immediate: "Oldham was producing the album, Immediate Records would have, and could have, been amazing---like Stax, but on a different wavelength, There were people like Chris Farlowe, PP Arnold, and The Faces---we all helped each other. Like, I spent a whole summer on Odgens Nut Gone Flake, just overdubbing vocals and other ideas…everyone helped each other on records."
Continued...
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