Driving to Wales to make my recent record Wildfires, I was listening again to a sonic reference album I’d mentioned to my producer: Nick Drake’s Five Leaves Left. The reason it was on on my audial mood board was not just because it’s one of my favourite albums of all time, but because of the apparent sonic relationship between Drake (his guitar, his voice), and the sound of the upright bass driven by Danny Thompson. I didn’t know then that in fact Drake had recorded the songs for Five Leaves Left live with strings, and that Thompson had overdubbed his double bass later: the brilliance of that illusion of reciprocity was down to Thompson’s inordinate skill. So there I was driving along, alone, scared, a car full of guitars and clothes for two weeks, excited, nervous for what lay ahead, listening to this old album I thought I knew really well.