Nick Drake

by Patrick Humphries

  Interpreted by Charles Trenet, Juliette Greco, Charles Aznavour, Jacques Brel and Edith Piaf, chanson is timeless and ineffably French. On moving to France, Petula Clark couldn’t believe the impact of seeing Piaf in concert. Familiar with light-hearted English music hall and variety songs, she was stunned by the gritty realism and the honest, coruscating nature of the songs Piaf sang. The haunting existential beauty of Juliette Greco carried the chanson tradition into a new era. Stalking the bustling streets of St-Germain-des-Prés in the late forties, rubbing shoulders with Sartre and Cocteau, the black-clad Greco epitomized a new type of teenager.

  Chanson embodied world-weariness, the realization that life was not sweet, but a rather bitter cup of black coffee. It was this air of melancholy and mystery which found its way into the songs Nick Drake would soon begin writing. Songs which, at their best, sat somewhere between the traditions of folk, the blues and chanson.

  Throughout his life, Nick loved France. The landscape, the language, the food, the wine all held a strong attraction for him. As well as being home to the wistful, enduring art of chanson and the smoky sensuality of Juliette Greco, St-Germain-des-Prés provided a haunt for Jean-Paul Sartre. There in the smoky fug of the Café de Flore, Sartre mapped out the defiantly lonely life of the existentialist: ‘Hell is other people.’

  Sartre’s work was widely available in paperback by the time Nick left Marlborough and went up to Cambridge, and his doomed anti-heroes were familiar to the postwar generation, as was the work of another of Sartre’s contemporaries, Albert Camus. Camus, who died at the age of forty-seven in a car crash in 1960, was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, having become a landmark figure for a generation of disaffected young people with classic novels of alienation like The Outsider (L’Etranger). His The Myth Of Sisyphus was the last book Nick would read before his death.

  The end of Nick Drake’s education at Marlborough came in July 1966. He had switched from History and Classics to study English rather late in the day, but it seemed to suit him much better. He continued to play a full and robust part in the life of the school, at the same time as pursuing his own extracurricular interests, and this was recognized when he was made Captain of his House. His final months at Marlborough were also marked by distinction on the athletics track, when he had the honour of competing in the Wiltshire Junior Athletics Championship. Nick’s housemaster wrote about him at the time: ‘a most talented athlete, who was never really deeply interested in breaking records which were well within his grasp. He is probably one of the best sprinters we have had at Marlborough since the war, and yet he would much more often than not be found reading when he should have been training.’

  Throughout his years at Marlborough, Nick had enjoyed the pubs of the nearby town. The local beer, Wadworth’s from nearby Devizes, was a potent brew, and frequently Nick and Jeremy Mason, David Wright, Simon Crocker and Michael Maclaran would sneak off to the Bell in nearby Ramsbury, or pubs in Marlborough like the Cricketers or the Lamb, to drink beer, smoke cigarettes and put the world to rights. But none of Nick’s friends or acquaintances from school remembers any evidence of drugs during their time there. David Wright: ‘I don’t ever remember any dope at Marlborough, but interestingly enough, I was chatting to a friend who was there the year after Nick and I left, which would be 1967, and it was around then.’

  In his final term Nick took A-level exams again. He had sat some the previous year, but the results had been disappointing. This time around he brought his tally of passes up to four – History, English, Latin Translation with Roman History, British Constitution – and managed to improve his grade in English to a B, making a university place likely. The Marlborough College Register lists ex-pupil N.R. Drake simply as ‘a guitarist, and composer of folk music for the guitar’.

  In recommending Nick for a university place, Dennis Silk displayed an obvious fondness for him while suggesting that he had yet to achieve his full potential: ‘Nicholas Drake is a boy who has taken a long time to mature scholastically. His IQ, measured when he first came to the school, was high enough to make us hope for a much more dynamic approach than he showed for several years. One always felt there were possibilities here and yet he seemed incapable of producing it …

  ‘He is essentially a rather dreamy, artistic type of boy, very quiet, verging almost to the side of shyness. He loves English and this last year had a timetable especially prepared for him, by which he was able to spend a lot of time reading by himself. His whole written fluency developed enormously and people who had written him off were forced to eat their words …

  ‘He was someone who everybody liked enormously here, despite his reticence and the difficulty of getting to know him well … In conclusion I would say that he is a genuine late developer who is only now growing into his academic potential. For a long time we have despaired of him but now I genuinely feel that given a chance to read English at the university he would prove a great success and in more spheres than the purely academic one. He could give a lot to the community as well as getting a lot. He is a most delightful person to deal with.’

  Nick’s final night at Marlborough was marked by a typical piece of teenage malpractice, and understandably Dennis Silk found him slightly less delightful that night: ‘I can remember having a flaming row with Nick on his last night in school, when he was up at three o’clock in the morning drinking and smoking — everything that boys do on their last night at school which housemasters are paid to try and stop.’

  To celebrate the end of A levels, Nick, David Wright and Jeremy Mason had sloped off into town, where they got spectacularly drunk on beer and wine. ‘On the last night of term he got awfully pissed …’ David recalls. ‘And my abiding memory of Nick is with a bottle of sweet white wine, probably Graves, absolutely out of it, completely cold, by the Music Block.’

  In an often-repeated quote, Nick is alleged to have described Marlborough as a place ‘where the sensitive experience a horrified dissociation from reality that can sometimes never fade away’. The words are those of Steve Burgess, in a May 1979 profile of Nick for Dark Star, in which he seeks to equate his experiences of ‘that evil British institution known as boarding school’ with those of Nick at Marlborough: ‘I know that Nick and I were of a piece …’ The truth is that Nick never expressed such an opinion — indeed all the contemporary evidence points to him having rather enjoyed his years at public school.

  Chapter 4

  By the time Nick had completed his schooldays at Marlborough and was back at home in Tanworth in the early summer of 1966, The Beatles had released Revolver and Dylan unleashed Blonde On Blonde. Hazy and impenetrable as ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’ and ‘Sad Eyed Lady Of The Lowlands’ might be, they were the writing on the wall. Back at Far Leys again, Nick practised the guitar, sitting for hours in his bedroom or downstairs in the living room, endlessly tuning and retuning his guitar, formulating a style which would become his own, lost in a reverie of sorts.

  There was more than a year to fill before he would go up to Fitzwilliam College, Cambridge, in the autumn of 1967. In the limbo between school and university, his friends were still those he had made at Marlborough, and it was to them that Nick looked to occupy the time. With his newly acquired driving licence, a tent and Molly’s quaint little Morris Minor, Nick and three friends set off for France in July 1966.

  One of Nick’s companions was Michael Maclaran, who has clear memories of their journey: ‘Driving a heavily laden and underpowered car was a nightmare, and included such dramas as losing both wing mirrors at once in a head-on near-collision and scraping the entire contents of a traffic island in our path as we ploughed on, wheels locked. At least the Morris’s suspension was up to anything. After many weeks the car finally broke down nearing the top of a climb towards Grenoble. Short of mechanical skills, we stared under the bonnet. Someone spotted a broken spring, which was miraculously replaced by an identical one from a nearby piece of farm machinery.’

  The hours Nick had devote
d to learning the guitar had been well spent, for contemporaries began to notice just how proficient he had become on the instrument. ‘Wherever we went, the evenings were often the same with groups of people gathering around bonfires under the stars, on beaches, in woods or at camp-sites, to hear Nick sing and play his guitar,’ Michael Maclaran remembered. ‘The venues included Remoulins, near the Pont du Gard, where we stayed with some of Nick’s friends … They took us to the bullfight in Nîmes, but only after we had read Hemingway’s vital work on the topic. There we hit a spectacular candlelight “Quatorze juillet” party in the woods, which was a two-day hangover. And at St Tropez, amongst the luxury yachts and private beaches, it was often getting light by the time last night’s party was ending, and Nick would still be strumming away.

  ‘Nick was a performer and yet despite the many people who would gather, most of them well lubricated, the sessions never became raucous singalongs; he didn’t play to the crowd. Every string of his guitar seemed to be playing a complementary tune and his repeating melodies cast a mesmerizing spell. Very few left early for home.’

  It was all quite idyllic – to be young and sleep under the stars in France on Bastille Day. To read Hemingway’s Death In The Afternoon and The Sun Also Rises, and then to witness the bullfights of which the grumpy old master had written. St Tropez, made popular by Brigitte Bardot, was the premier summer vacation spot for the demi-monde. As millionaires’ yachts bobbed in the tiny harbour, and the jet set sought their pleasures in the bars and boutiques, Nick and his three friends chitty-chitty-bang-banged their way along the French coast in Molly Drake’s quintessentially English Morris Minor.

  Jeremy Mason was in France that summer too: ‘The year we left Marlborough, in the summer, Nick came down to France with his guitar. My parents had this house near the Pont du Gard, near Nîmes.’ The faded colour photos of Nick during that holiday, taken near Nîmes, show a group of ghostly-white, almost transparent English schoolboys; the jet-blackness of their ubiquitous sunglasses only emphasizing the paleness of their flesh.

  Provincial France was lagging a long way behind the perceived coolness of Britain and America, but it was, nevertheless, an awfully big adventure for English visitors only a few weeks out of school uniform. Jeremy Mason: ‘In those days, the tradition was to walk to the main road, which was about a mile away. Very old-fashioned, 1966 Provence, and every evening all the young of the village used to walk to the main road.

  ‘Nick was a great hit. We used to sit on a wall at a junction of the roads, and Nick would play, and I remember them all singing along – “Michael Row The Boat Ashore”, “House Of The Rising Sun” – all that sort of singalong folk stuff … None of us spoke French terribly well, but there was a bond formed, so much so that we were asked to an enormous village fête. It consisted of long trestle-tables, where Nick and I were persuaded to drink pastis without any water in it, which we duly did. We got so drunk, we ended up running along the tops of the tables and jumping into strange people’s arms.

  ‘We asked them all back to the house. I’d said: “Come back and have a drink; Nick will play his guitar some more.” But my mother came downstairs to shoo them all away … She said: “I could hear this cacophony of sound approaching, led by you and Nick.” ’

  Another conversation with his mother — one that he and Nick had one night towards the end of their holiday in France – stuck in Jeremy’s mind: ‘That’s when drugs came up: I don’t think any of us had anything to do with drugs at that time … But Nick sort of said: “Oh, well, you know, it’s one of those things one tries …” And I remember a conversation we had with my mother, after dinner, doing the washing-up. My mother got quite cross, and it’s always been a source of some irony. Nick was effectively saying it was all right to try drugs … This was the summer of 1966, long before The Beatles admitted to taking LSD or anything. It was obviously discussed, but as far as I know, there were no drugs at school at all. We were just into Disque Bleu cigarettes.’

  Dylan may have been advising that ‘everybody must get stoned’, but drugs and rock ’n ’roll weren’t yet the close companions they would soon become. Being busted for drugs still spelt the end of a career, even for a pop star. The Beatles were still cuddly boy-next-door mop-tops with MBEs. Even The Rolling Stones were deemed largely harmless, rebellious perhaps, but not corrupters of youth via the demon drugs. Most teenagers’ knowledge of drugs was limited to the mescaline trips recounted by Aldous Huxley in The Doors Of Perception. LSD was still legal, but the most widely acknowledged drug song was Peter, Paul & Mary’s whimsical ‘Puff The Magic Dragon’.

  On his return from France in the autumn of 1966, Nick spent a short time in Tanworth before setting off for London to stay with his sister, Gabrielle. It was the year when Time magazine officially declared London ‘Swinging’, England had just won the World Cup, and we all lived in a yellow submarine. Anything, and everything, suddenly seemed possible.

  David Wright, Nick’s close friend from Marlborough, was also in London at this time: ‘I think he came to London at the same time as me, October ’66 … I remember him telling me how the night before he first came down to London, his parents had taken him aside for a pep talk about drugs, and he found it hilariously funny that within twenty-four hours of arriving in Chelsea he was sitting in this flat rolling up a joint.’

  Nick’s time in London that year was brief. He was back at Far Leys for Christmas, and shortly afterwards set off on his most important trip to France. In January 1967, accompanied by his Marlborough friends Simon Crocker and Jeremy Mason, Nick travelled across the Channel, nominally to improve his French. Simon Crocker: ‘Nick’s parents had always got on well with my parents, and I was being sent to Aix-en-Provence to university, and when they heard this they were casting around for something for Nick to do, and basically Nick said: “Oh God, they want to do something with me. Shall I come to Aix?” And then, when Nick was going, Jeremy said: “Oh well, I’ll come as well.”

  ‘We caught the train from Victoria. Nick had come down to London a couple of days before and was staying in a flat near Knightsbridge with a guy called Mike Hacking, who was one of the real cool cats at school. He was about a year ahead of us, and it’s that time when a year is very important, and he wore a big old leather overcoat and he had an older girlfriend. We got on the train and … thought, what the hell are we doing? We had nowhere to live … we were booked into the Faculty of Foreign Students at the University of Aix-Marseilles, and that was it. None of us had ever really been away that much. We were relatively unworldly. It was a really big adventure for us.’

  It was the year of flower power and the Summer of Love, and Nick spent the first four months of 1967 deep on the South Coast of France, nestling next to the Mediterranean, with the enticing coast of North Africa just a boat ride away. There were other distractions too, as Jeremy Mason remembers: ‘We were going to the Foreign University at Aix. I was by now deeply in love with a frightfully unsuitable girl, and that probably had something to do with why I didn’t follow Nick down one or two paths. We got to Aix, and our parents, for some extraordinary reason, had not fixed up anywhere for us to stay. They had been told that once we got to the university it would all be arranged. We went to the university, and they were completely uninterested … They fixed us up for three nights with a family. Simon and I were in one room, and Nick had to stay with a granny in a flat down at the end of the road.’

  To be young, free and single in 1967 was exhilarating. Nick, Jeremy and Simon, with no great inclination to attend lectures, enjoyed a freewheeling lifestyle in tune with the times. Aix was as good a place as any to spend the first, faltering months of the year which would alter everything. Jeremy remembers going to one lecture: ‘On French colonial life or something. We then got a flat in a part of town that is now very, very chic it was just off the Place Vendôme, which is the centre of Aix. They let us use these flats because the block wasn’t finished, so we were able to rent them cheaply. They were beautifu
l apartments … Nick and I shared a room. So we went and bought a gramophone, I bought some pictures for the wall, stuck up some postcards and proceeded to try and exist.

  ‘It was an odd place, quite a lot of rich people. Somebody who was there with us was a chap called Roddy Llewellyn, who’s become quite well known for having a fling with Princess Margaret. He was the only one with a car. We went to the odd club, but there was always an undercurrent, because Aix has quite an Arab population, and there were always slight problems in the nightclubs with the Arabs at that time – very minor, teenage stuff really, but there had been one or two quite nasty incidents. We appeared to spend a great deal of our time playing pinball at a café called Deux Garçons. We didn’t really do anything. We slept a great deal of the time. I took up drawing, which I still do.’

  Simon Crocker: ‘The idea was to go and learn French, which was the last thing we did. Nick spoke better French than us. There was a £50 limit, which was all you could take outside the sterling area. Aix at that time had a really strange, mixed bunch of people … The English gravitated to each other, and this guy’s parents had a house in St Tropez, and we went there and just busked. All we did was play twelve-bar blues. Nick used to play instrumentals.’

  To hone his playing and to earn a few extra francs, Nick would busk with his guitar around the cafés in the centre of Aix. Jeremy acted as ‘bag man’: ‘He played, and I collected the money. I don’t remember what he played, and it may only have been a few times … It was a funny time, a mixture of a nightmare time and an interesting time … We spent a lot of time in this smart café eating other people’s bread; we never appeared to have any money …’