Robert Kirby
Robert Bruce Kirby
Robert Kirby (16 April 1948 – 3 October 2009) was a British-born arranger of string sections for rock and folk music. He was best known for his work on the Nick Drake albums, Five Leaves Left and Bryter Layter, but also worked with Vashti Bunyan, Elton John, Ralph McTell, Strawbs, Paul Weller and Elvis Costello.
He was educated at Bishop’s Stortford College an independent school in Hertfordshire, and then Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge.
Patrick Humphries' book Way To Blue gives some details of Kirby’s time at university.
He sang in a group called ‘The Gentle Power of Song’. His tutor once told him that his compositions sounded like a breakfast cereal commercial. This was intended as an insult, but Kirby took this as his high praise: “As good as that, eh?” Kirby went to Caius College, Cambridge and made friends with Paul Wheeler. They were both members of the Caius Breakfast Club, also called “The Loungers”. There were few rules. You had to have a Loungers' breakfast on Sundays, and ‘stand by ye gate once a day and observe what strange creatures God hath made’. There was a rule that permitted an outsider (the ‘Oddefellowe’) to become a member. Robert and Paul were both friends with Nick Drake so they invited him to be the Oddefellowe. There is a line in Drake’s song “Way To Blue” which seems to echo one of the rules of the Loungers:
“We will wait at your gate, hoping like the blind…”
When Joe Boyd recruited Drake to record an album, he already had a string arranger in mind, Richard A. Hewson. Drake rejected the few Hewson arrangements produced and announced that he already had a friend at university who could do a better job—Kirby. Drake had decided to leave university without completing his final year. When Kirby was offered the contract to arrange music for an entire album, he, too, gave up Cambridge university. Though Kirby arranged and conducted strings for the majority of Five Leaves, Harry Robinson was commissioned to arrange the strings for the centerpiece song, “River Man”.
The first strong memory I have of Nick was at the second or third session for Five Leaves Left. Richard Hewson, a well known arranger, and a fifteen piece orchestra had been brought in to arrange Nick’s songs. Nick started getting hotter and hotter under the collar. He was very young and he had struck me as a person you could push about – some people in a recording session will do whatever you tell them – but he was getting quietly more and more aggravated, and in the end he dug his heels in and dismissed the arrangements. He said he’d get this friend at Cambridge, Robert Kirby, he thought would be much more sympathetic to what he was doing. Robert had never before done anything in his life in a recording studio. But two weeks later we booked him together with a bunch of musicians – a smaller bunch than the first time, I remember… We were flabbergasted. He was so good.
Although Kirby had recorded arrangements for over 40 albums by 1978, it was a struggle to make ends meet. In the end he decided to work in marketing industry instead. He was rumoured still to have his scores for Drake’s records in his mother’s potting shed. (He also was for three years, 1975–1978 one of the two keyboard players for Strawbs, touring the UK and internationally, and getting some composing credits on the albums Deep Cuts, Deadlines and Burning for You). He also did some further arranging for Strawbs with Baroque & Roll (2001), Déjà Fou (2004) and Dancing to the Devil’s Beat (2009). He talks extensively about his career in Nick Awde’s study Mellotron, subtitled The Machine and the Musicians That Revolutionized Rock (2008) – the book opens with a quote from him.
One of Roberts lasting associations was with the Legendary Shelagh McDonald. It was Sandy Roberton, Shelagh’s then producer who invited her to visit Robert’s flat, and to introduce her to what was to be one of the legendary associations of all time. Robert’s instant liking for Shelagh resulted in his orchestral arrangements for songs on both Shelagh McDonald’s albums ‘Stargazer’ and ‘Album’….The legacy of these recordings could possibly be regarded today as the genesis of ‘Folk Rock’
On 2 July 2005, Kirby conducted an 18-piece orchestra in Manhattan’s Central Park for a show of Drake’s music, using his original scores. Five Leaves Left was performed in its entirety as well as excerpts from Bryter Later and Made To Love Magic. The show starred guitarist Josh Max and singer Julie James of the Manhattan-based group The Maxes, and was attended by 3,000 Drake fans from all over the US.
Robert Kirby died in a West London hospital following emergency heart surgery after a short illness on 3 October 2009. He was 61 years old