Patrick Campbell-Lyons of Nirvana Remembered

By Jason Barnard

Patrick Campbell-Lyons, guitarist, songwriter and co-founder of Nirvana, has died at the age of 82. Though the name would later be commandeered across the Atlantic in the 1990s, Campbell-Lyons and his partner Alex Spyropoulos got there first, and their influence in music holds up against the grunge namesakes.

He was born in Ireland, into a world of Christian Brothers schooling, Latin lessons and the sound of Glenn Miller records. Arriiving in London at 18 to work summer shifts at the Walls ice cream factory in Perivale, his initial plan was to save money, go back to Dublin and start university.

However, he didn’t go back and West Ealing and the emerging London music scene got him. In the early 1960s there was the art school, the girls, and most of all the music bleeding out of Jim Marshall’s nearby shop and the Ealing Jazz Club.The neighbourhood was packed with musicians – John McVie, Ronnie Wood, Speedy Keen, Pete Townshend. Campbell-Lyons shared a bill with the Rolling Stones two or three times at the Ealing Club.

His first major collaborator was Chris Thomas, bassist in The Second Thoughts, later to work at Abbey Road and enter music production. In those early days, the two recorded together as Hat and Tie. Their track “Finding It Rough” turned up on many psychedelic compilations and was also recorded by the Everly Brothers.

On Denmark Street, Campbell-Lyons ran into a Greek-born musician called Alex Spyropoulos and the two clicked. Campbell-Lyons and Spyropoulos would write all day, then sometimes head into Soho at night to catch other groups at the Speakeasy or Middle Earth. They signed to Island Records as Nirvana and released The Story of Simon Simopath, a song cycle about an office worker’s interior life that preceded The Who’s Tommy by two years.Their songs were inward without being navel-gazing, sometimes dark without being overly bleak. “Pentecost Hotel” had that beauty.

Chris Blackwell gave them creative freedom at Island and they used it in ways that cost them. They abandoned the idea of a touring band after the first few recording sessions. In retrospect Campbell-Lyons thought this was an error. “If we’d had a proper group I do believe we’d have been a world famous band very quickly,” he said. “Instead we took the 40-year road to cult status.” “Rainbow Chaser” reached the top five in Scandinavia and several other European countries, stalling at around 24 in Britain. Mickie Most was the one who suggested flipping it from the B-side. The song kept turning up in other people’s work for the next 50 years, including a sample by Rizzle Kicks in more recent years.

Their third album, issued as “Dedicated to Markos III/Black Flower,” had a troubled release. The American rights holder went bankrupt and the remaining copies became collectible items. Blackwell had already passed on it, telling Campbell-Lyons it reminded him of the soundtrack to the French film “A Man and a Woman.” Campbell-Lyons said he took that as a compliment and if listen to the album today and you understand why. It is orchestrated pop songwriting had almost little precedent in the British and Irish music.

After the band dissolved in the early seventies Campbell-Lyons moved into A&R at Vertigo, put out records as Nirvana and under various names, and joined together again with Spyropoulos in the 1990s. When Kurt Cobain’s band came to prominance, Campbell-Lyons and Spyropoulos spent close to a year fighting the name in court. They won the right for both bands to use it. “It’s ironic,” Campbell-Lyons said in 2012, “that they don’t exist now and we still do.”

As he told me at the close of one of his final interviews in 2021, sitting alongside Spyropoulos in Greece where he had made his home; his life and music are understood through his song “Lord Up Above.”

“I am a born and baptised Catholic.. and I believe that God has helped me a lot in terms of creativity and with [the 1972 album] “Songs of Love and Praise” I found my way back. In a way it’s my tribute song to my deepest beliefs. Lord up above I’m so glad that I’m in love. In love with everything, in love with everybody.”