Nick Drake

by Patrick Humphries

  Even at the time, Anthea Joseph was acutely conscious of an almost total lack of media interest in him: ‘Nobody was interested in Nick at all; it was just Joe’s passion. He felt that the young man really was a bit special, and he was determined to make these records, and he made them. If they’d sold ten I wouldn’t have been surprised. They were all beautifully produced, the sleeves were wonderful. And blow me, here we are the best part of thirty years later, and it’s a cult.’

  The 1970 Melody Maker Poll was dominated by familiar names: LP Of The Year was Led Zeppelin II, followed by Let It Be, Live At Leeds, Abbey Road, Ummagumma, Live Cream, Tommy, McCartney, Deep Purple In Rock and Liege & Lief. The Brightest Hope category, where the stars of tomorrow were signalled, is where the likes of Nick Drake should have been noted. Once again though, he was conspicuous by his absence. Some of the names were predictable: Mungo Jerry had enjoyed a massive, summer feelgood hit with ‘In The Summertime’, Emerson Lake & Palmer had been long touted, and Ginger Baker’s Airforce had risen from the ashes of the still much-lamented Cream. Both It’s A Beautiful Day and Flock had featured on recent CBS samplers and made acclaimed appearances at the massive 1970 Bath Festival. But Wild Man Fischer? Burnin’ Red Ivanhoe?

  It wasn’t for want of trying that Nick’s name was missing. Island had as much faith in Nick Drake as anyone, but in those antediluvian times before videos, the only way audiences got to see an act whose record they liked was in performance. Although albums were the method of communication back then, time was rarely lavished on their recording. It was usually a simple laying down of the tracks which constituted your stage set, before going back on the road to promote your recently recorded product. And playing live was something which Nick was beginning to have a serious problem with.

  For him, the very idea of ‘promoting product’ was probably anathema; but it was essential for acts to be seen, not just heard. Martin Satterthwaite, whose job was promoting Island acts, feels that Nick’s reluctance to play live was the major factor in his lack of success: ‘I really don’t remember any interest in Nick. The Field Promotion Team created as much interest as possible in artists that were out on the road… and of course Nick was one of the artists who was never out on the road, and Island had so many acts who did tour …

  ‘Live work, and all the promotional aspects that went with it, were what helped sell records. There was local radio, some local TV, local press. Nationally, there was The Old Grey Whistle Test, John Peel, the music press … Most of the Island artists would be appearing on the university circuit … Someone like Nick, the route would have been working the folk clubs, then getting a tour support. We’d go out armed with posters, point-of-sale boards, which would feature the sleeve of the current album, with “Appearing At” at the bottom, you know — Cambridge Corn Exchange, Leeds University.’

  Joe Boyd was also beginning to worry about his protégé’s unwillingness to perform live: ‘The sales were low, the first two albums didn’t do more than 5000 … Five Leaves Left came out and we were very excited about it, it got very good reviews, John Peel liked it… It didn’t sell a lot, but for somebody completely unknown who hadn’t worked around, it got what I felt was a satisfactory start. To my view, that was a launching pad for him to start working.

  ‘But he felt he couldn’t work. He’d been spoiled, his first major appearance was with Fairport at the Festival Hall, where you had a seated audience, very respectful and hushed – it was the first Fairport appearance after the car accident – so that you had a very receptive atmosphere, nobody was going to get impatient. Nobody was going to say: “Tune your fucking guitar, man.” It wasn’t that kind of an atmosphere. I think John and Beverley [Martyn] went on first, then Nick came on, and it was magical. The audience loved him. He went back on to do an encore, which I remember was “Things Behind The Sun”, which was mesmerizing. He didn’t say a word, but he absolutely captivated the audience. So I got carried away. I thought, oh great, let’s book him around the world.’

  Chapter 9

  ‘It was very much the era of all those desolate souls playing at Cousins,’ Jerry Gilbert recalls. ‘In that sense, Nick would have fitted in perfectly – the Al Stewarts, Cat Stevens, Paul Simon, John Martyn – all singing into their soundboxes. I would have thought that would have been Nick’s natural ambience, his habitat.

  ‘Nick was only wheeled out to play the big shows, he never seemed to play the folk-club circuit at all. I think that is a really important point: he didn’t ever seem to gravitate around the folk clubs, which all the other Witchseason acts did, and the Island acts generally — Cat Stevens, John Martyn, Sandy Denny, The Incredible String Band. The whole Witchseason thing was linked to the folk club tradition. But not Nick Drake. He came out and did the concert-hall thing, the opening act, then vanished back into wherever he vanished back into.’

  The performing career of Nick Drake was incredibly short. Once signed to Island, he only ever gave a couple of dozen concerts, which were, according to eyewitness accounts, largely desultory and inconclusive affairs. As with so many aspects of Nick’s life, specific dates and places are elusive. Nick’s friend John Martyn, for example, knew of only two gigs, and in 1986 he spoke to Musin’ Music about what he obviously believed was the most crucial gig in Nick’s career: ‘He never felt comfortable in front of an audience. It was embarrassing to go and see him, because he was obviously in such utter discomfort. He just didn’t like going on and playing. He primarily played for his own amusement … one of the things that contributed to his utter detestation of the whole thing was that he was once booked to play at a Coventry Apprentices Christmas Ball … in those days, “Purple Haze” was “in”, and there he was singing “Fruit Tree” and all those gentle, breezy little ballads, and I can just imagine them swigging back the Carlsberg Special and giving him an awful time. I know that gig lived in his mind, he’d talk about it quite regularly … I’d hate to be affected that badly by one social experience … dreadfully sensitive fellow, dreadfully sensitive.’

  Nick’s long-time friend and arranger Robert Kirby has given a lot of thought to the problems facing Nick as a performer: ‘When he was performing, in the studio … it was his whole life, but even that was compartmentalized. I don’t think he ever had a problem performing well. So it wasn’t a question of nerves. And as I said, he practised.

  ‘I have always respected Joe and everything he’s done, but I don’t think Witchseason ever claimed to have agency networks set up, that kind of management. Fairport were self-promoting. Within their group, there was one of their friends who would get the gig and organize it, get the van. Nick didn’t have any of that support. I think Nick did get angry, and resented the fact that he wasn’t getting the help he should have. What I felt would have helped is if he had an agent. Marcus Bicknell at Rondo, through his relationship with me, got Nick gigs wherever he could. He was representing bands like The Climax Blues Band, Genesis, so wherever he could, he’d put Nick out.’

  Popular myth has long held that Nick was so soured by his experience at the Christmas dance referred to by John Martyn, that it put him off live performance for ever, but Robert Kirby has different recollections: ‘It was the Nettlefold Nut & Bolt Apprentices’ Annual Dance. He and Marcus … knew it was going to be the pits, but it was a gig … I can remember they came back to Cranley Gardens after the gig, which was in Sheffield or Derby or somewhere up North … This one was a riot anyway, it wasn’t Nick particularly they were moaning about. It was just pints of lager thrown everywhere. He came back and was laughing and joking about it — and he’d got paid!

  ‘I don’t believe that was the occasion, but I can perfectly well accept that he went somewhere where he was expecting to be listened to, and wasn’t listened to, and might have felt that afterwards. I think there was one in London that did sour him. I think they were Hooray Henrys who he would have expected to have listened. And they weren’t in the slightest interested — “boo-ha”, “get off”, that sort of thing.�
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  The concerts Nick Drake is definitely known to have played number no more than a few dozen. After the Roundhouse gig in February 1968, where Ashley Hutchings discovered him, the most significant date was on 24 September 1969, when Nick supported Fairport Convention at the Royal Festival Hall. Then, on 21 February 1970, he was back on the South Bank supporting John and Beverley Martyn at the smaller Queen Elizabeth Hall, and the same month he opened for Fairport Convention at half a dozen dates. The following month Nick was opening for Sandy Denny’s Fotheringay on a five-date UK tour – the other act on the bill was a duo undertaking their final dates together, The Humblebums, featuring Gerry Rafferty and Billy Connolly.

  In an interview quoted in the fanzine Pink Moon, John Martyn remembers seeing Nick before the Fotheringay show at the Festival Hall: ‘It was a good place for him, but he was cripplingly nervous. I mean, he was distraught before the gig. It was rather embarrassing in fact to see him. He was distinctly uncomfortable on-stage. I mean, the music was fine, but he just didn’t like being there at all … I got the impression it was costing him too much to go on the stage. It was just like no amount of applause or anything else would ever have paid him back the mental effort and energy he had to expend.’

  Nick’s Royal Festival Hall gig in September 1969 was probably the most prestigious he ever played. This was the much-loved Fairport Convention’s first concert since the crash six months earlier, which had taken the lives of the band’s drummer, Martin Lamble, and Richard Thompson’s girlfriend, Jeannie. It also marked the debut of Fairport’s new direction, as instigators of English folk-rock, which would characterize their seminal album Liege & Lief, released later that year. It was an important moment for all concerned.

  Fairport were too nervous to be nervous about their opening act. Even without the extra anticipation which presaged this particular appearance, the Festival Hall was an intimidating room to play. Advertisements for Fairport’s keenly anticipated appearance (Tickets 25/-, 21/-, 17/-, 13/-, 10/- and 8/-) detailed the support acts simply as ‘& Friends’. There was no mention of Nick Drake.

  Witchseason’s Anthea Joseph was backstage to witness first-hand Nick’s terror of live performance: ‘Nick was sick with fright, which I can understand … you can’t live on glucose and lemon juice for ever. We got him on stage, I think he did four numbers and then fled. That was it — four numbers and off. He was shaking all over. Some people can perform and some people can’t, and he was one of those … he didn’t enjoy the adulation. He couldn’t carry it at all.

  ‘The other gig was a club of some sort … He just hated performing. In a room, if you had him in your own sitting room, he’d sit in the corner and take up the guitar and play you something, and it was lovely, no problem – he did that for me a couple of times. But performing was totally different… I remember him sleeping on my floor in Islington, because he didn’t want to go home. He crashed there a couple of times, we’d sit up all night, but he still didn’t talk, and in those days the meaning of life was all. We’d sit there and I’d be rolling joints, and cups of tea, endless cups of tea … Next morning, he’d shamble forth and vanish into the morning.’

  Eighteen months after first seeing Nick Drake at the Roundhouse, Fairport’s bassist Ashley Hutchings was in a such a state of nerves that he remembers little of that landmark Festival Hall appearance, let alone his ‘discovery’, the opening act: ‘It was our first gig since the crash, the first time we had played the Liege & Lief material. It was one of the most anticipated events of my life … Nick apparently opened, but it was such a big thing. It wasn’t just the resurgence of the band after the crash, it was the beginning, if you like, of folk-rock. So it was such a big event for us that we were all nervously pacing about backstage.’

  More municipal than the larger, baroque Royal Albert Hall, the Festival Hall, which was opened in 1951 as part of the Festival of Britain, accommodates an audience of up to 3000, sitting in serried rows, sweeping down to the stage, which is open and exposed. Even from the auditorium, it seems like a mighty long walk from the wings, particularly when you are occupying the platform alone.

  Unbeknown to their son, sitting proudly in the audience that September night were Nick’s parents. Molly: ‘Of course the very first big concert was with the Fairport Convention at the Festival Hall. We didn’t dare tell Nick that we were going. We crept along there, quite the eldest by about ninety years. Nick came on first, followed by John and Beverley Martyn, then Fairport Convention were the whole of the second half of the programme.’

  Rodney: ‘He did very well, all by himself, sitting on a stool. He got a lot of applause, and he just got off his stool, waved his guitar to everybody and wandered off. And they couldn’t get him back again.’

  Molly: ‘He was wearing his same old black trousers that he wore every day.’

  Rodney: ‘I think he found it pretty difficult appearing in public, and it became more so. Of course Island always wanted him to go round doing these … “gigs”, is that the word? And he didn’t like that. He didn’t really enjoy performing … He became very withdrawn.’

  Although the majority of those who witnessed Nick’s performances, or talked with him about them, have a vivid recollection of his extreme unease on stage, there are those who were more favourably struck by his stage presence. Joe Boyd and, particularly, Gabrielle Drake, remember being impressed by Nick’s Festival Hall performance.

  ‘Well, I read all these reports, about how Nick shambled on-stage at the Festival Hall,’ recalled Gabrielle. ‘I was there. I am a performer, I know something about it. It’s true he didn’t do the pre-chat. He came and sat on a stool and played. And he electrified the audience. What he did have was a tremendous presence. Sometimes that presence could be black and very negative when he was deeply depressed, but he was a charismatic figure, there were no two ways about that. There wasn’t a smattering of applause from a bewildered audience, this wasn’t true. They were enraptured.’

  However, Island’s new press officer, David Sandison, was less than struck by his new charge in February 1970, when he first saw him performing, supporting John and Beverley Martyn at the Queen Elizabeth Hall: ‘The QEH gig, Nick was for everyone who hadn’t taken their seat or wanted to go and have a glass of wine to go and do it, because he wasn’t doing anything that was remotely grabbing your attention … He wasn’t projecting, there was nothing coming over the footlights. I know Gabrielle is really pissed off with me for the description which was quoted in the ad for Pink Moon, but that was how he was.’

  The advertisement Sandison refers to was the official Island ad in the music press, announcing the release of Pink Moon. It took the form of a letter from David Sandison describing the impact Bryter Layter made on him, and how Nick’s third album had come into his possession. He also described seeing Nick perform at the QEH show: ‘He came on with his guitar, sat on a stool, looked at the floor and sang a series of muffled songs punctuated by mumbled thanks for the scattering of bewildered applause from the audience who didn’t seem to know who the hell he was, nor cared too much. At the end of his last song, his guitar still holding the final notes of the song, he got up and walked off; his shoulders hunched as if to protect him from actually having to meet people.’

  Sandison still stands by his description of Nick’s performance: ‘That is how he was: he looked down all the time. Gabrielle’s memory is of a different gig, but that night there was a guy on-stage who … he actually looked mortified, frightened, ill at ease. In a room of about fifty or sixty people, it would have worked and it would have been very intimate, but he never came to grips with that aspect of playing to 2000 people, big rooms. He really had no experience of it, he was undoubtedly shy … it could have been someone doing a soundcheck, to be honest. He didn’t say anything, and at the end of the set he didn’t even say “goodnight” — he just walked off. Some people clapped, but not enough, and they didn’t clap for very long, the lights went up, and we all went off to the bar.’


  The recollections of most of those who saw Nick Drake perform are in agreement: they highlight how ill at ease he appeared on stage and speak of his manifest discomfort when confronted with an audience. Following the publication in early 1997 of a feature I had written on Nick, dozens of readers took the time to write to me with their memories of seeing him in concert. Without exception, they confirmed just how uncomfortable a performer he appeared, alone on the concert platform.

  Paul Donnelly saw Nick at the Liverpool Philharmonic Hall in very early 1970, supporting Fairport: ‘He came on and said nothing audible to the audience, either before or between songs, and when he’d finished he just got up and walked off. True to all other reports about him. I remember “Cello Song” and “Three Hours”, mainly because they were two of my favourites …’

  ‘I was a teenager and had just bought Five Leaves Left and fallen in love with the songs,’ wrote Mick Stannard, who remembered seeing Nick at a folk club – almost certainly Cousins. ‘Suddenly, there he was on a stool a couple of yards away. I think he started with “Time Has Told Me”. It was great, me being a guitarist, looking at his fingers playing those lovely chords. Later, he was in the middle of “River Man”, sitting hunched up, head bowed, not looking up at the audience, when suddenly his capo sprung off the neck of his guitar and fell to the ground. There were a few giggles from some people, but mostly we didn’t really know how to react… He didn’t look up or say a word or … make light of it with a laugh, but simply bent down and picked up the capo, reattached it to his guitar and carried on from where he had left off. He was aloof and awkward. After his three songs he scuttled off round a corner and out of sight.’

  Like many others, Dave Crewe first became aware of Nick from the Bumpers sampler which included ‘Hazey Jane’. He saw Nick open for Fotheringay at Leicester’s De Montfort Hall in March 1970: ‘I do remember the songs “Time Has Told Me” and “Way To Blue”. Each song being warmly greeted and with growing appreciation by the audience. About halfway through the set… midway through a song, he broke a string on his guitar. Embarrassingly, he carried on until he finished the song and immediately and rather nervously began to replace the string, making a few barely audible quips as he did so. After what seemed ages, but was probably only a couple of minutes, he completed his task and received rapturous applause for his efforts. Unperturbed, he continued and finished the set to a standing ovation with cries for more, but he left the stage and never returned.’