The Cambridge University Footlights Club, which was founded in 1883 as a forum for university entertainers, came into its own during the 1950s. Peter Cook, the John Lennon of the Fringe quartet, arrived in 1957 and blitzed the town. Cook hitched up with Alan Bennett, Jonathan Miller and Dudley Moore, and went Beyond the Edinburgh Fringe in 1960. British comedy was never the same after their foray; in their way, the Fringe four had as much impact on British society as The Beatles. Following Cook, Cambridge Footlights became the comedy equivalent of the Cavern, spewing out a series of household names: John Bird, Eleanor Bron, David Frost, John Cleese, Michael Palin, Eric Idle, Terry Jones, Clive James, Graham Chapman … Interestingly, both Nick Drake and his friend Robert Kirby auditioned for the club during their time at Cambridge, but neither was accepted.
Trevor Dann, who compiled the 1985 Nick Drake retrospective Heaven In A Wild Flower and is now in overall control of popular music coverage on BBC TV and Radio, was, in 1971, a student at Fitzwilliam College. Dann, who had bought Five Leaves Left as a teenager, was delighted to find himself reading history at Nick Drake’s old Cambridge college, but the college buildings were far from homely: ‘It’s worth remembering that at the time Nick was there in the sixties, it was an even worse building than it is now. Only half of it was built, the bit by Huntingdon Road, everything the other side of the monstrous café block wasn’t there. And also, the A14 wasn’t a motorway, so all the lorries coming to the port used to come up Victoria Road, hang a right past the college, and the windows used to rattle something horrible. Every term I came back from holiday, I used to have to put Plasticine round the windows to stop them shuddering.
‘I was just a lad who liked Nick Drake, who was at the same college. Then I met a bloke there called John Venning, who was a postgrad, and he had known Nick Drake. So I spent the odd evening in the college bar, trying to get him to reminisce. I suspect it was through him I found out that Nick had briefly had a college room. Somebody told me it was R24, so I managed to get myself into R24.’
Fitzwilliam College grew out of ‘an institution which became the home of non-collegiate students in Cambridge who could not afford membership of an established college’. Its first buildings were occupied in 1963, but the buildings the college now occupies, designed by Denys Lasdun, architect of London’s National Theatre, were inaugurated in 1966. Cambridge City Council’s official guide describes Fitzwilliam College codedly as ‘strikingly modern’ and ‘a riot of sculptural invention’.
When you read that Nick Drake studied at Cambridge, images spring to mind of punts gliding on the Cam and gowns flowing as cyclists scuttle across Jesus Green. The reality was, and is, somewhat different. Architecturally, Fitzwilliam has more in common with the boxy modern hotels which proliferate on industrial parks close to major motorway exits than with the traditional Cambridge colleges which grace the heart of the city.
Fitzwilliam College sits a good mile out of Cambridge, on the Huntingdon Road, its red-brick buildings and plain rectangular window-panes jarringly at odds with the public image of the city. Despite beautifully kept gardens and well-appointed lawns, Fitzwilliam looks less like a Cambridge college than a 1960s day-care centre. Victoria Lloyd (née Ormsby-Gore) remembered visiting Nick at Fitzwilliam when she spoke to Mick Brown: ‘He was profoundly disappointed by it. He had this wonderful vision of going to Cambridge – the dreaming spires, the wonderful erudite people. We went up to visit and he was in this grim, redbrick building, sitting in this tiny motel-like bedroom. He was completely crushed. He just sat there saying “it’s so awful”.’
Strangely, though, when Simon Crocker visited he felt that, far from hating the modernity of Fitzwilliam, Nick was frustrated by the hidebound nature of the whole institution: ‘I think for Nick Cambridge was a bit too … old-fashioned. I think he would have enjoyed one of the other universities better. I think he felt quite stifled. He didn’t like the customs …’
Roger Brown, who went up to Fitzwilliam in October 1969, at the beginning of what should have been Nick’s final year, wrote to me with his impressions of the place. Roger remembered Nick being spoken of fondly by contemporary musicians, including Fred Frith, who went on to join the band Henry Cow. More intriguingly, he wrote about the college as it was in Nick’s time: ‘In theory, a college such as Fitzwilliam with an active social life and back-up such as individual tutors, ought to offer an ideal environment for the transition from home and school to independent life as an adult. In practice however, many students were too young and not self-reliant enough. Nick Drake was not the only Fitzwilliam student to have difficulty in adjusting … It was not unusual for people to crack-up and spend time at the local mental hospital (Fulbourn, as I recall) … At the time, Fitzwilliam did not admit women, so the atmosphere was rather monkish and not helped by the emphasis on engineering, science, chemistry, law, rowing, rugby etc …’
So this was Nick Drake’s Cambridge college: a suburban dormitory building, efficient and municipal, with little in the way of camaraderie, comfort or college spirit. The undergraduate rooms were cubicles, practical but cramped and impersonal; the whole place an outpost, far removed from the life of the city and the heart of the university.
Paul Wheeler met Nick and fellow-student Robert Kirby when he went up to Caius College in 1968: ‘The way that Cambridge works is like a big club, and when I arrived at Caius, because I played music, they said: “Oh, you should meet this person”, and Robert said: “Oh, you must meet Nick” … Caius was in the centre of town, and it had more of a traditional image of Cambridge. So I think this link between Caius and Nick is quite interesting, because in some ways he was on the border of a Cambridge life – he was living outside the town, and Fitzwilliam is quite a way out – whereas coming into Caius, which he did quite a lot because of Robert and me and quite a group of us … so in some ways there was more of a link between Nick and Caius than there was between him and Fitzwilliam.
‘At Caius we had this dining club, which is very Cambridge, called The Loungers. And the only thing you had to do was “lounge by ye gate for one hour every day and observe what straunge creatures God hath made!” Every week or two we had a Loungers’ Breakfast … and Nick was the “odd fellow” in this group, they had one or two people from other colleges … and that was the way we used to officially meet.’
Unlike Marlborough, on which he left a real and lasting impression, Fitzwilliam College has precious few memories of Nick Drake. He never completed his degree, quitting twelve months ahead of Finals, to journey down to London and seek a career in music. His departure, like his two-year residence, went largely unnoticed. Two years after Nick left Fitzwilliam, Trevor Dann went up and found that not a trace remained: ‘The only person who knew about Nick Drake at Fitzwilliam was me, and I would tell people, and they’d go: “Who?” ’
However, by 1994 the slow-burning flame of posthumous fame had begun to take hold. A notice appeared on the college notice board headed ‘Calling All Guitarists’. A second-year student, Ewan C. Kerr, was organizing a guitar concert ‘in recognition of the number of guitarists there are in college who never get around to playing in front of anyone’. The notice continued: ‘You may or may not be aware that Fitz was home to a singer-songwriter legend (well I think so!) of the 60s called Nick Drake. The concert will be in memory of him (he died on November 25th 1974 – just 20 years ago last Thursday).’
Like most students at Fitzwilliam, Nick spent his first year living in, with ‘bedders’ to clean up his room and meals in hall on tap. But when he returned to Cambridge after the long vacation in autumn 1968, he moved into lodgings outside the college. It was during his second year, while he was living in rooms in Carlyle Road, that Paul Wheeler met him for the first time: ‘It’s just slightly outside the main university territory, Carlyle Road, just by this little bridge which leads on to Jesus Green, so that every time Nick came into town he would cross over the river, and I’ve always considered that “River Man” had to do with this …’
Paul Wheeler: ‘I remember Nick playing “Time Has Told Me” at Cambridge. The first one that really struck me was “River Man” – that to me is the one that stands out. To be honest, I found a lot of his stuff a bit too … clean, too twee, whereas “River Man” had an extra dimension to it. I remember him playing those Jackson Frank songs, some standards of the time … but he’d certainly play something if he’d just written it. They weren’t performances — Nick would play something, I’d play something, somebody else would play something. But what was so noticeable about Nick was that he was so … perfect! Other people would start and stop, tune up. He would never do that …’
Nick’s mother, Molly, always regarded Brian Wells, who studied medicine at Selwyn College, as her son’s best friend at Cambridge. Brian was an exact contemporary of Nick’s at the university and provides a poignant picture of Nick during those two years. He remembers a college party where both he and Nick were struck by an outgoing girl who was dancing the night away. Nick was mesmerized, but Brian tired of the pursuit and returned to his rooms at Selwyn, only to be woken by Nick much, much later that night.
‘I didn’t get off with that girl,’ Nick woke Brian to tell him. A less than sympathetic Wells watched from his bed as Nick drunkenly ambled around his room, finally selecting a massive medical textbook from the bookshelves. From somewhere else, Nick found a candle, which he lit and ceremoniously placed on the flat surface of the book, before proceeding off down the staircase.
‘One of my fondest memories of Nick,’ recalled Brian Wells thirty years later, ‘was looking out of my window, and seeing him teetering off on his bicycle across the college, balancing that huge book on his handlebars. He was shielding the flame, and with the candle still flickering, he cycled off.’
‘Cambridge was a very radical place,’ Ian MacDonald recalls. ‘I remember when we arrived in ’68, meeting a friend who had been a year ahead of me at school, and when I arrived for my first term he recognized me and came up as the new intake were having their photograph taken, and he was laughing and said: “I thought we were weird when we arrived, but you lot look like the Mothers Of Invention.” ’
Ian went up to Cambridge in 1968 and met Nick Drake on various occasions: ‘I wouldn’t say I knew Nick at all, really. Though I was in the same places as him quite a few times … I actually spoke to him on only two or three occasions.’ He went on to become Deputy Editor of the New Musical Express during the 1970s, and in 1994 his acclaimed Beatles book, Revolution In The Head, was published.
In the wake of The Beatles, Harold Wilson and gritty Northern cinema, classlessness was venerated, but it was still largely the children of the middle classes who made the trip to Oxbridge. Once there, though, the accents which had been so carefully and expensively chiselled in public schools and comfortable drawing rooms were swiftly flattened into nouveau-working-class tones. Clive James, who also studied at Cambridge, recalled the inverted snobbery of that period: ‘There was a real pretension to inarticulacy, which I felt I couldn’t share. There were an awful lot of university students running around in the sixties pretending they’d never been educated, a grotesque sound coming out of their mouth.’
In the late sixties, the connection between a hash reverie, psychedelic art and rock music was self-evident. Paul McCartney’s admission in 1967 that he had taken acid sent shock waves across the nation; the Mick Jagger and Keith Richards bust that same year convinced everyone, particularly the readers of the News Of The World (then the world’s best-selling newspaper), that all these pop stars were drug addicts.
Nick Drake was evidently no stranger to drugs by the time he arrived in Cambridge. There are accounts of him smoking dope during 1966, and strong indications from friends that he had tried LSD during the early part of 1967. In that, he was certainly not unique. A wave of drug-taking swept through the teenagers of Britain’s middle classes during 1967. Most saw it as the beginning of a great odyssey, a trip to the centre of the psyche. Many made the journey, but some never came back.
Robert Kirby: ‘There was always the undercurrent of the people who had gone, or wanted to go, a bit further, the acid side of it, I suppose … I’m not trying to ascribe the whole thing to drugs, but what I’m saying is that even then there were the people who put their toe in the water but didn’t go the whole distance … You always got the impression that maybe Nick wanted more than just to put his toe in the water …’
The joy of long-playing records had much to do with the size and design of the twelve-inch sleeves, which were so convenient for rolling spliffs. Sleeves became iconic tokens: Sgt Pepper was the stained-glass window of 1967; Dylan’s John Wesley Harding the maze of 1968 – turn the sleeve upside down and The Beatles and Lee Harvey Oswald appeared in the tree above Dylan’s head. Tentative psychedelia was apparent on album sleeves by The Incredible String Band and Pink Floyd. The Small Faces’ Ogden’s Nut Gone Flake sleeve was as revolutionary as Sgt Pepper, but its circular sleeve made rolling up a nightmare.
The sleeves promised access to a closed world, and then there was the music those sleeves contained … Music was probably never more important than at that time, when pop was changing into rock and the single was being elbowed out by the LP. The liberating power of music was felt across the board, in folk, jazz, blues and rock ’n’ roll. Clive James told me: ‘I remember when “I Heard It Through The Grapevine” came out, and I spent the whole week listening to it in a pub in Cambridge on the jukebox.’
Iain Dunn, who was in his first year at Corpus Christi when, as a friend of Paul Wheeler’s, he met Nick early in 1968, also remembers how important the music was: ‘I saw an interview with Sting on the television recently, and he said something I thought was very true, which was that in those days everyone knew what number one was. These days nobody knows, because the whole thing is so fragmented. I think accessibility to material was much more difficult, so there was much more of a sense of belonging to a cult. So if you managed a trip up to London and got hold of a copy of, I don’t know, Mississippi John Hurt, this was like gold dust. People would come round and it would be an event to listen to it … I remember hiring the cellar in my college because I’d somehow or other managed to get hold of a first copy of Tommy, and actually playing it like a concert.’
Ian MacDonald: ‘Everyone took music much more seriously than we do these days. You’d gather together, sometimes people would be floating in and out of a particular room where people were smoking, they’d be playing records all day and people would come in and just sit, listening quite seriously all the way through The Beatles’ White Album, and then drift off.
‘A few years later, I remember – this was after I’d left Cambridge but was typical of the time – I met Mick Farren, who had just come fresh from an extraordinary twenty-four-hour bash at his flat in Notting Hill, where all the heads, Mick and Miles, had just decided that they were going to listen to everything that Dylan had released, including all the bootlegs, in chronological order, and nobody would leave until it was finished. I do remember when we all sat around reading aloud from The Lord Of The Rings. Incredibly embarrassing now, but there was that mad intensity.’
Sgt Pepper, ‘A Whiter Shade Of Pale’, ‘All You Need Is Love’, ‘San Francisco’: dreamy and benign reflections of 1967’s good vibrations. Iain Dunn remembers Cambridge reflecting the turbulence which was manifest throughout the world just a year later: ‘We’d had the Summer of Love, and 1968 was the year of Revolution … So from it all being peace and love and freedom, the agenda for the next academic year, if you like, was revolution. The Garden House Riot, as it c
ame to be called, was part of that, a protest against the Greek Colonels who had come to power by force during 1967. I can’t remember who was in the hotel at the time, but it was something to do with protesting against the fascist junta … Coach-loads of people went up to the Grosvenor Square riot outside the American Embassy, protesting against Vietnam. So they were all highly political agendas. I think it was as much to do with being anti-Establishment as with being particularly committed to a cause. There were obviously those who were committed, but I think for most of us we were just happy to be rioting and rebelling.’
Throughout 1968 the world was rocked by dissent and chaos: in Vietnam, the Têt offensive severely shook American belief in a swift victory. Czechoslovakia briefly celebrated a liberating release from a stiflingly repressive government, before being crushed under the tracks of Russian tanks. Robert Kennedy was assassinated on the campaign trail. Martin Luther King was taken by a sniper’s bullet in Memphis. Enoch Powell’s ‘rivers of blood’ speech took racism on to the streets and into the headlines. In France, Japan, America, Britain, Poland, Spain, Italy and Mexico, students protested and rioted, shutting down university campuses and making their grievances spectacularly public.
Looking back on the period nearly thirty years after leaving Caius, Paul Wheeler was keen to put the period that he and Nick spent at Cambridge in the context of the times: ‘The way that I recall the difference between 1967 and 1968 — ’67 was the Summer of Love; ’68 was much more political. In a sense ’69 and ’70 was the end of all that, more cynical, more depressed times … When I knew Nick, it was still in the flush of the optimistic times … My memories of Nick from that time are very funny, very humorous. He wasn’t this grim, depressed … that came later. And also I would say that was the same for everybody, the turn of 1971/72 was a bad time for everybody. The depression was a sign of the times. Everybody felt down in ’73, ’74, because of the end of that era.’
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