STRANGEFACE
A friend of mine called my attention to this project she read about in The Guardian because it deals both with Nick Drake and Photography, two subjects I quite like!
“The Strange Face Project is the story of a lost Nick Drake recording and how the man who found it chose to share it in an extraordinary way.
In the 1970s, when working as a post-boy at Island Records, television composer Michael Burdett rescued a tape from a rubbish skip.
It was over 20 years before Michael played the tape. When he threaded it on to a tape machine, he was astonished to hear an unknown version of Cello Song, one of Nick’s greatest works.
Realising it was not his place to copy, release or broadcast the recording Michael put the tape aside as a curiosity until some years later, when he decided to set off on a strange adventure: with a CD player and headphones in hand, for nearly two years he travelled the length and breadth of Britain with the aim of offering random individuals an exclusive opportunity to hear the recording.
City workers, farmers, scientists, hairdressers, musicians, tattooists – he asked them all. Randomly stopping them in the street, at their places of work and in their homes, whether they knew of Drake’s material or not.
Michael photographed everyone who listened, people from the age of two to 96, and recorded their thoughts on the newly discovered recording.”
