Nick Drake

by Patrick Humphries

  Nick persevered with his guitar-playing, and while in Aix took the first serious steps towards writing his own songs. Among his earliest known compositions were ‘Birds Flew By’ – which he never lived to record — ‘Time Of No Reply’ and ‘Strange Meeting II’, both of which appeared posthumously.

  ‘I certainly don’t remember Nick writing anything at Marlborough,’ says Simon Crocker. ‘We did instrumental stuff, but they were tied on to blues things. I do remember him writing in Aix, because I can clearly remember holding a microphone while he sang into the tape recorder … It was when we went to Jeremy’s parents’ house, which was somewhere near Avignon, that I became really conscious of him writing his own songs. I remember that weekend was certainly the first time we recorded some of his songs — Jeremy did have that tape, but lent it to somebody and it got lost — and they were certainly the basis of two songs on Five Leaves Left. I wouldn’t swear to it, but I’m pretty sure “Time Has Told Me” was one of them.

  ‘That was the first time one became aware that he was, you know, a songwriter … It wasn’t surprising, but one was surprised at how good they were. Up until then we’d all been doing cover versions, just mucking around, and here was Nick obviously doing something seriously.

  ‘I don’t remember him ever talking about writing songs. My memory is that it was just something he did … He was there, playing all the time … it was just one of those things: “Oh, Nick’s done a song. It’s rather good. Let’s hope he’s got another one.” I never really thought of asking him about them. I don’t think he had any specific plan about what he was going to do with them. I don’t think he thought that someone from his kind of background would necessarily go on and make it his career.’

  Hitching back to Aix from his parents’ house in Avignon, proved a difficult journey for Jeremy: ‘Nick and I stood outside Avignon for about four hours, getting no lifts whatsoever. He said: “The only thing to do is split up — nobody’s going to pick the two of us up. You go first and I’ll sit on the other side of the road.” It was a nightmare. I was picked up twice by homosexuals, one of whom I had to escape by getting out while the car was moving … and as I picked myself up, Nick went by, with a bird in an open-top car, with the guitar stuck in the back.’

  Back in Aix in one piece, and desperate for cheap entertainment, Jeremy remembers that a seance was suggested: ‘Childishly, we had a very big session, which Nick did get very involved in. He got carried away by this and discovered something from the table-turning … some uncle he didn’t know existed. He actually rang his parents from a café — which in those days took three hours — to ask, did this uncle exist? Why did I not know about him? He became very involved with that, and went off and did it with other people as well. But they had an incident which frightened him off, and he stopped.’

  Simon noticed a gradual change in Nick while they were together in Aix: always shy, he seemed to grow even more contemplative in France during the first months of 1967. ‘I don’t remember him becoming moody or difficult … He became more serious I think, and to a degree lost some of his light-heartedness. But that is partly because, in the English crowd there, there were some guys who burned the candle at both ends, and Nick was quite taken with them, I think. They were the well-cool cats, the Chelsea kids, sons of rich Chelsea people. They were pretty hip … There was a kind of split in Aix … and Nick did get sucked into the slipstream. And certainly, yes, that was the camp where there were more drugs. I don’t think there were any excessive … it was recreational. I don’t know, but it wouldn’t surprise me if there had been acid around.’

  After three months the holiday was coming to a close, and Jeremy feels sure that towards the end of this period a sea change took place in Nick: ‘While I waited for this girl to come down from England, which was the disaster of my life, Nick decided to go to Morocco. I’m not quite sure who he went with, but I think it was a Swedish chap who I met in London … And Nick disappeared for two, three, maybe four weeks … Then he came back, and I think he was much more drug-orientated … We had an old guitar he smashed up and set light to, and he hung it from the ceiling and looked it at it like “Wow, man!” ’

  Marrakesh was an oasis of liberation for European visitors. Joe Orton was infamously attracted to the city by the Arabs’ relaxed attitude to homosexuality, while the easy availability of kif drew busloads of hippies keen to score some dope. Jeremy is convinced that in Marrakesh Nick fell in with The Rolling Stones and their party. Mick Jagger, Keith Richards and Brian Jones were certainly in Morocco in March 1967, which fits in with Jeremy’s timescale. In Tangiers, The Stones stayed at the El Minzah Hotel, where the pale, gaunt forms of Jagger and Richards were lovingly photographed by Cecil Beaton. The Stones’ party on that turbulent trip also included Anita Pallenberg – who arrived with Brian Jones and left with Keith Richards, Marianne Faithfull and art dealers Robert Fraser and Christopher Gibbs, who had been busted along with Mick and Keith at Redlands, Keith’s Sussex home, on 12 February.

  ‘I’m pretty sure Nick did take LSD,’ Jeremy told me nearly thirty years afterwards. ‘I came in one evening, and we had a balcony with a sliding glass door, and my bed had been moved to block it. Presumably he’d heard, or somebody had said, that one has the temptation to throw oneself off balconies … I myself never took drugs, but there was a lot of talk of it around. I didn’t, though not because I thought it was bad – I didn’t give it any thought whatsoever. But this, I think, is where we parted company in the end, over this. Not in any sense with animosity … as far as I was concerned we were friends until the end.’

  However, Richard Charkin, who was with Nick in Morocco and has very clear memories of much of that trip, doesn’t remember LSD being on the agenda: ‘I don’t think Nick took acid in Morocco. I would say not. I certainly didn’t, and I’m sure if he’d had some we’d have shared it. That was March, April 1967.’ While Nick was in Aix filling in time between school and university, Richard Charkin was in Paris doing pretty much the same: ‘Paris was pretty cool then, particularly if you were English – Donovan and all that. Coffee and dope were cheap.’ A friend of his called Mike Hill came up from Aix to Paris with Nick in tow, and introduced him to Richard, who recalls: ‘We drove down to Aix and decided to go to Morocco together, in this Cortina GT. There were four of us: me, Mike, Nick and some other guy … We drove all the way, from Aix, through Spain down to Gibraltar and across to Tangiers …

  ‘Nick was very nice, a nice, quiet guy who played guitar a bit. In Tangiers there was an amazing crowd in the street, and the rumour was that The Stones were there, and indeed we saw Keith and Brian, who were with Cecil Beaton, the photographer. We worked our way round, went to Meknes, Casablanca, Rabat, Marrakesh, and while we were in Marrakesh, Jagger was there with Cecil Beaton; they were recording these guys. So that was very exciting. Then one evening we were in some restaurant in Marrakesh and Jagger was there with a couple of the girls, and we persuaded Nick, who was very shy, to go and play for them, which he did. I can’t remember what – the usual Dylan and Donovan probably. And they were more than polite …

  ‘After Marrakesh we decided to go to Chad, which wasn’t a very bright idea for four young lads who knew not what they were doing, and shortly after leaving Marrakesh we left the road unintentionally … We then had to get towed to a place called Meknes, the car was a bit of a right-off, we didn’t have much money, and the guy at the garage was, surprisingly, perfectly happy to repair it without asking for too much money upfront. All he wanted was to have a photo of us with the car, for a before-and-after photo …

  ‘We went back after a couple of days to pick up the car, and all he wanted was another photo, and would we play a song for him? So Nick played a song, and he was quite ecstatic … We paid a small amount of money and drove off. We got to Tangiers to go back, and were surrounded by police … we had appeared in the local Meknes newspaper as The Rolling Stones. They knew there were a bunch of English rock stars around – and there weren’
t many Europeans there – and the fact Nick played the guitar just convinced them. So they tried to bust us for dope.’

  Back in Aix after Morocco, Nick tied up the loose ends and prepared to return home to Tanworth. He was no longer the shy teenager, fresh out of public school, who had set off only four months before. The observations of friends who had known him since school and saw him daily in Aix certainly suggest that something had changed. Perhaps it was during those early months of 1967 that Nick Drake first experimented with drugs. David Wright recalls him rolling a joint in London during October 1966, but it seems probable that in France four or five months later he began to dabble more deeply in drugs. It was in Aix that Jeremy first felt that Nick was becoming immersed in a drug lifestyle. And it was toward the end of his stay there that Simon noticed him beginning to run with a different crowd: ‘the camp where there were more drugs’. But balancing all this is the verdict of Richard Charkin, who went to Morocco with Nick and is convinced that he wasn’t taking LSD at that time.

  Anyway it would be foolish to attribute the problems which later dogged Nick, simply to teenage forays into drugs. Back in the late sixties and early seventies, youthful flirtation with drugs was the rule rather than the exception. The real question is whether putative experiments — particularly with LSD — might have affected the chemistry of a mind that was waiting to be tripped off-balance. Whatever the reasons, it seems clear in retrospect that towards the end of those rootless months in Aix an already shy and introspective boy turned even further in on himself.

  ‘There was certainly dope around in Aix – we are talking about the late sixties. Dope was everywhere. Christ, we were only just across the border from North Africa!’ Simon acknowledged. But he went on to suggest that rather than the obvious, chemical causes, a number of subtle and more complex shifts in Nick’s life may have caused the dislocation: ‘The change in Aix was … when he’d been at school, like all of us, we had relatively sheltered lives, and suddenly we were out in an unstructured life, and of course it was the time when everything was opening up anyway … All the barriers were coming down … about what was acceptable: the sex, the drugs, the rock and roll… And I think all of us found that difficult to handle ourselves. Our generation had to learn to cope with these new circumstances, which were wonderful on one hand, but also threw up new problems.’

  On his return from France Nick spent some time with his parents in Tanworth, and then, still with five months in hand before he was due to start his studies at Cambridge, he once again gravitated toward London. Tanworth seemed very quiet and parochial after his adventures in Aix and Morocco, and the lure of London, swinging and psychedelic, was irresistible.

  Nick already knew London fairly well, and his elder sister was living there, in a flat where he could stay. Determined from the age of six to pursue an acting career, Gabrielle Drake had trained at RADA and was now busy paying her dues. Film work came early in her career, but was largely forgettable: she was a bridesmaid seduced by Peter Sellers in There’s A Girl In My Soup (1970) and went topless in 1972’s prurient Au Pair Girls, described by one film encyclopaedia as a ‘feeble and dated attempt at a sex comedy’. But it was in the theatre that Gabrielle established her reputation, appearing in West End productions of Jeeves and Noises Off.

  It was some years before she attracted wider attention in BBC TV’s The Brothers, a Sunday-night soap opera which ran between 1971 and 1976. She played Jill Hammond, a popular character who was killed off in a car crash, provoking calls from outraged viewers. Gabrielle also appeared in the popular TV drama The Champions and an acclaimed adaptation of Oscar Wilde’s The Importance Of Being Earnest. Cult-TV aficionados have fond memories of her as Gay Ellis in UFO, Gerry Anderson’s first live-action drama. Gabrielle’s profile peaked between 1985 and 1987, when she appeared in the long-running, four-times-weekly soap opera Crossroads, as Nicola Freeman, ‘the expensively dressed, sophisticated managing director of the Crossroads Motel’. Such was her success that on 9 April 1987 she was the subject of This Is Your Life.

  While staying with Gabrielle in London during the early summer of 1967, Nick fell in with a rich crowd of hip young aristocrats centred around the Astors and Ormsby-Gores – children of the landed gentry who were drawn by the colourful opportunities on offer in London. The mutual fascination of the aristocracy and the rock establishment is an enduring one, but late-sixties London is where it first took root: the late Alice Ormsby-Gore was Eric Clapton’s fiancée and Guinness heir Tara Browne was friendly with The Beatles, while other scions of the Guinness dynasty were close to The Rolling Stones.

  The real exoticism of that period was concentrated in certain select London enclaves, where butterflies like Mick and Paul and Jimi fluttered. For teenagers like Nick Drake’s Marlborough contemporaries, exposure to drugs was frequently second-hand, or at best tentative, attempts to score often resulting in a couple of pound notes exchanged for a knob of Oxo. But in London, with sufficient funds and the right contacts, almost anything was possible.

  Julian Lloyd, whose photograph of Nick wrapped in a blanket appeared on 1994’s Way To Blue compilation, knew Nick in London in 1967, and thirty years later talked about the period to Mick Brown in a Daily Telegraph Magazine piece. It was ‘a life centred on scoring black hash at eight quid an ounce, buying twenty Embassy and a packet of Rizla papers, then getting terribly stoned and laughing a lot, followed by a companionable silence’.

  Chapter 5

  ‘I think he might have had quite a wild time at Cambridge,’ says Dennis Silk, ‘the restrictions of Marlborough being removed, and him loose in town with his guitar, without his housemaster going round saying: “Drake, for God’s sake put that bloody instrument away.” ’

  Nick went up to Fitzwilliam College to read English in October 1967. After the tightly communal, strictly timetabled life of boarding school, an institution like Cambridge University must indeed have been a liberation for Nick, and thousands of students like him. There was no one looking over your shoulder, no rotas and lists to tell you what to do or when to do it.

  There is something timeless about the melted-candle beauty of Cambridge. The city which has been home to spies and scholars, musicians and mathematicians, choristers and clerics, seems to maintain its other-worldly charm in the face of progress. There is still the beatific charm of an afternoon spent lazing on the Backs, the green stretch which borders the River Cam as it slips, silver, past colleges in the clouds. Willows weep silently over the river banks, but even the boisterous cries of undergraduates cannot overwhelm the quietude of the Cam as it winds its way down to Grantchester.

  Rupert Brooke – another golden boy whose life bears similarities to that of Nick Drake — was educated at Rugby and Cambridge. A socialist poet and radical, he died at the age of twenty-seven in 1915, before he could reach Gallipoli, but not before he had done much to brush away the dust and cant of the Victorian age. His best-known poem, ‘The Old Vicarage, Grantchester’, was published posthumously in 1914 And Other Poems, and in its poignant questions Brooke spoke for all the young men who sailed away to the mud of Flanders and the bloody beaches of Gallipoli:

  Stands the Church clock at ten to three?

  And is there honey still for tea?

  Cambridge has been a university town since 1209, but for all its air of tranquil permanence, life bubbles away beneath the surface. In Market Square the market flourishes today as it has since the early thirteenth century. Among the fruit and veg and clothes are stalls selling joss-sticks, bootleg albums and shawls, much as they did in Nick’s day.

  From all over the country they came in the sixties, as they had always come, and on arrival they put away childish things and settled down to become students and put the world to rights. For relaxation, there were college cinema clubs, or the Arts Cinema on the corner of Market Square. Here, through clouds of cigarette smoke, the imaginative leap was made from the cinema of childhood to the foothills of the avant-garde. Cambridge all-nighters blended th
e anarchy of the Marx Brothers with the solemnity of The Seventh Seal, while tired late-teenagers grappled with the symbolism which came thick and fast by the celluloid mile.

  This was a time before videos, computers and compact discs; before cashcards, mobile phones and mixed colleges. But the conversations were liberating and ideas were cross-fertilizing. To the distaste of some and the delight of many, in the turbulent year after Nick Drake’s arrival in Cambridge abortion and homosexuality were finally legalized by Harold Wilson’s Labour government.

  Key texts of the time were Joseph Heller’s Catch-22, Colin Wilson’s The Outsider and Tolkien’s The Lord Of The Rings. For additional cred, there were the grey-spined Penguin Modern Classics: Hermann Hesse’s Steppenwolf, Jack Kerouac’s On The Road, Franz Kafka’s The Castle, Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast trilogy. Poetry had to a large extent been supplanted by rock ’n’ roll, but no self-respecting ‘head’ left their digs without a well-thumbed copy of The Mersey Poets, and Yevtushenko (‘Do not tell lies to the young…’) was widely quoted.

  This was the city to which Nick Drake came, the year The Beatles released Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. Richard Charkin, who had been with Nick during his month in Morocco earlier in the year, went up at the same time. He laughed when he remembered how they met again: ‘Come October ’67 I’m in my room at Trinity College, Cambridge, there’s a knock on the door and it’s Nick. The astonishing thing is that in a month of living together in Morocco, he had never said that he was going to Cambridge. That’s quite bizarre, but it was very symptomatic.’

  Nick certainly seems to have enjoyed the Cambridge experience, at least some of the time, at least at the beginning … Simon Crocker, his old friend from Marlborough, visited Nick during his second term and found him in extremely good heart: ‘We both went up to university in the autumn of ’67. I went to Bristol, Nick went to Cambridge. In the second term there was an exchange between the Bristol revue group which I was in, and the Cambridge Footlights, and I remember Nick turned up after the show at Cambridge and said: “Right, let’s go” — he had this old motorbike, and we spent the night roaring around Cambridge — “Let’s have some fun.” He was in great spirits.’