The Nice: Davy O’List & The Thoughts Of Emerlist Davjack

Ron Counte

In 1967 it was the height of cool to be endorsed by John Peel. So enamoured was he with The Nice’s debut single, The Thoughts Of Emerlist Davjack, Peel even took to waxing lyrical about the band on a sampler disc issued to promote the album of the same name.

The Nice had been put together by Rolling Stones manager Andrew Oldham as a backing band for PP Arnold who had just released a single, The First Cut is the Deepest, written by Cat Stevens and produced by Mick Jagger. Guitarist Davy O’List, keyboard player Keith Emerson, bassist Lee Jackson and drummer Ian Hague were recruited on the premise that they would be free to play a set of their own material in addition to backing Arnold on the subsequent tour.

O’List had come to Peel’s attention earlier in the year when he was impressed by his playing on Any More Than I Do with The Attack. It was co-composed by O’List and appeared on the B-side of their version of Hi Ho Silver Lining. Peel gave it plenty of air play and for a time it became his signature tune. A measure of O’List’s potential can be gauged by the fact that he was offered the chance to join John Mayall & The Bluesbreakers as guitarist following the departure of Peter Green, an offer he inexplicably passed on to join The Nice.

Hague left the group towards the end of the first tour and was replaced on drums by Brian Davison. The arrangement with Arnold came to an abrupt end shortly after and the band began work on their first single.

The Thoughts Of Emerlist Davjack was an impressive debut. It starts with an almost Beach Boys-like choral refrain before some harpsichord and organ work by Emerson leads into an excellent O'List lyric telling of a yearning for lost youth.

I’m going back, going back to be young again

To find the time to develop my mind, and be kind

To really see, to really hear,

To really live to really love and be kind

The song expresses the desire to correct past mistakes, a powerful sentiment that still resonates…

When I was young, I knew that I was right

Then everything changed, I wandered out of sight

There is a church organ interlude, sporadic bursts of what sounds like cannonball fire, and some heavy guitar thrown into the mix. There are some beautifully played harpsichord accompaniments too. Not bad for just under three minutes. Such a sonic cocktail placed the track firmly in psychedelic territory and it sits comfortably alongside Floyd’s See Emily Play, released a few months earlier, in tone and variety.

Incidentally, the curious Emerlist Davjack was a portmanteau created by combining parts of the last names of the four group members. It is not mentioned in the lyric.

In November 1967 The Nice embarked on a UK package tour the nature of which seems remarkable to us today. They appeared nightly on the same bill as The Move, Pink Floyd and Jimi Hendrix.  As Floyd frontman Syd Barrett was becoming increasingly unreliable at this point, O’List was called on to stand in for him on several occasions.

Back in the studio The Nice completed their first album. Peel sang its praises. After telling us that the single ‘alerted a considerable number of wise people to the exciting sound of The Nice’, his comments were interspersed between clips of various tracks from the album, including the following pearls of wisdom: ‘Their influences are many but they are indebted to no one’; ‘If you don’t buy this record there is a strong possibility I will stamp my foot’; ‘Your drab miserable lives will be brightened considerably if you race home bearing this record.’ And most famously, ‘The Nice will still be here when the others are in pantomime in Wolverhampton.’

This was in January 1968. Davy O’List left the band later that year. Ironically, given his prior involvement with Pink Floyd as a stand-in for the erratic Barrett, the band claimed that his increasing unreliability and errant behaviour was the reason for his departure. O’List denies this. Journalist Chris Welsh claimed that O’List’s drink had been spiked with some powerful hallucinogenic during a tour in the US and this led to severe behavioural issues. O’List puts the parting of the ways down to manager Tony Stratton-Smith bearing a grudge against him and wanting more control of the band. Either way, he was fired in the dressing room backstage after a gig in Bournemouth. He was only 20 years old.

O’List was invited to audition for a job with Jethro Tull to replace Mick Abrahams, but the rehearsals didn’t work out and he spent a few years in the wilderness, at one point working in a belt factory, before becoming a founder member of Roxy Music in the early 1970s.  His tenure there was short-lived as were his stints with a couple of unsuccessful bands.

In the 80s he changed his name to The Big Seal for a time but this didn’t improve matters for him. He released solo albums Flight Of The Eagle in 1997 and Second Thoughts in 2015. He is still around today but he never again hit the heady heights of rock superstardom he experienced with The Nice.

Steve Howe was lined up as his replacement in The Nice but changed his mind at the last minute to join Yes.  Eventually the band decided to continue as a three-piece which meant that they became dominated by Emerson. This resulted in a shift in musical direction. Live they became almost a backing band for Emerson’s lengthy keyboard solos. More classical adaptations appeared and the band composed their own orchestral piece, The Five Bridges Suite. This is a theme Emerson would return to in his later career as he increasingly saw himself as a classical composer.

Though The Nice’s later work is dominated by Emerson, the work with O’List is more balanced and in my view more interesting. His vocals are clearly superior to those of Jackson. In the same way that Floyd changed direction after Barrett’s departure towards the ideas of Roger Waters, The Nice were never the same afterwards.

Fast forward to less than two years after O’List’s departure and we have Emerson, Lake & Palmer’s performance at the Isle of Wight Festival which Peel labelled ‘a tragic waste of time, talent and electricity’. He described the band as ‘the most awful ever, of all time’ and claimed their output was ‘transcendental in its awfulness’.

It is true that albums about robotic armadillos (Tarkus), though technically brilliant, are a very long way from the melodic spark and psychedelic flair of The Thoughts of Emerlist Davjack. In Peel’s mind at least, the overshadowed and almost forgotten O’List might have been the crucial ingredient in making The Nice a nicer memory. You might add that some of his former bandmates did indeed end up in a kind of pantomime.

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