6/5 - Billy Nicholls

It's raining here on the West Coast today, so I thought I'd feature something lush, warm and occasionally melancholy to match the weather. Billy Nicholls is a woefully overlooked and under-appreciated songsmith from the UK whose late '60s debut LP "Would You Believe" tragically coincided with the collapse of his label, Immediate Records. As a result, the album - a true gem of occasionally folkish psychadelia - wasn't available for consumption until the 1990s.

When I first read about Billy Nicholls in Ugly Things Magazine around about 1998 or so, I embarked on quite a little quest to obtain a CD copy of this album, and after a mere 3 years of looking, ended up instead with a disc of Would You Believe demos called Snapshot before I was finally able, another 2 years down the line to procure a copy of the actual album. Funnily enough, I think I like the sparsity and candor of the demos even better than the slicked-up psych operas of the finished product. But either way, this stuff is good. As well it should be given its pedigree. Billy's studio pals for the album include label mates Small Faces and Steve Mariott.

Thanks to the wonders of the internet, it's a hell of a lot easier to find Billy's work nowadays, and in fact, you can get it directly from his own website: www.billynicholls.com. Sadly, I can't locate my favorite Nicholls song, "Kew," to share with you, but I did dig up these fun YouTube contributions, including my second favorite, "Cut and Come Again," which is exactly the sound I wanted to hear instead of my screeching alarm this wet morning.