Nick Drake

by Patrick Humphries

  Schoolfriends from Marlborough who recalled the self-assured and talented performer of only a few years before were baffled by accounts of Nick’s increasing terror of live performance. Simon Crocker: ‘When I read stuff about Nick in performance and mumbling, all I can do is look back and remember that Nick was a natural performer. He was bloody good: he was the band leader, he projected well. He was a confident performer. And I heard about this particular performance at the Queen Elizabeth Hall from people who’d been there who said he mumbled. And I remember saying at the time: “That doesn’t sound like Nick at all, he must have been ill.” It just didn’t connect.’

  Perhaps it was after Nick signed to Island, with the realization that he would have to confront audiences by himself, that the chill set in. All alone on-stage, just him and his guitar, with no back line of bass and drums, no horn section, no one else to share the vocals or harmonize with. Certainly at Cambridge, Nick had seemed to enjoy playing for friends and even, on occasion, performing in front of an audience. He was never outgoing on stage, but by all accounts had a certain still, calm confidence, and even enjoyed performing. But something had changed.

  By 1970 the fear was there for everyone to see—it was almost tangible. In performance and alone, he seemed so exposed that audiences found it painful to watch. For Nick, it was a waking nightmare.

  Nick Drake was never comfortable with the label of folk singer, but the mere fact that he wrote his own songs and accompanied himself on guitar, typecast him as a folkie. For guitar-picking hopefuls like him, the folk clubs which had sprung up in such abundance were the obvious live venues, and following the release of Five Leaves Left, it was on to the folk-club circuit that Nick was dispatched.

  Folk gave you a freedom, but it also gave you nowhere to hide. Folk clubs were ideologically sterile, with none of the ‘showbusiness’ trappings. The atmosphere in folk clubs during the 1960s owed more to Bertolt Brecht than Sunday Night At The London Palladium. A stage was anathema – why should the performer be elevated? These were fiercely competitive venues at which to cut your teeth as a performer. You had to have stamina for the lengthy journeys from town to town, and you had to have guts to get up before an audience who frequently owned every album from which you had filched your repertoire.

  The British folk revival had its own figureheads. Like many fledgeling folkies, Nick was fascinated by the richness of John Renbourn’s playing, and his ability to draw on all manner of influences, from courtly madrigals to the blues. An even bigger impact on Nick as a teenager was made by Bert Jansch. On the tape he recorded at home at Tanworth during his first university vacation, Nick included two songs, ‘Courting Blues’ and ‘Strolling Down The Highway’, which Jansch had recorded on his 1965 debut album. Jansch’s striking gypsy good looks and apparently effortless fluency on the guitar, made a mark on all those who heard his records or saw him play in the folk clubs of the mid-sixties. Neil Young cited Jansch as being as much an influence on his guitar-playing as Jimi Hendrix.

  Pete Frame, legendary draughtsman of rock family-trees, jacked in his job as a surveyor with the Prudential Insurance Company to run a folk club in Luton, where Jansch performed. ‘Bert Jansch was like the fountainhead of it all, to my mind. Nobody had ever seen anything like it. His songs – the structure of them, the feel of them, the melodies, the words … There was no precedent, you couldn’t tell what his influences were. Just amazing stuff… he played guitar like no one else had ever heard it before.’

  In the days before videos, before the national press was interested in pop music, before monthlies like Q, Mojo and Record Collector, the chosen route for young singer-songwriters was to start in the folk clubs, graduate to tour support for a fellow Island act and finally headline in their own right.

  Ralph McTell remembers diligently treading this path: ‘I just went wherever I was sent … I was probably doing 200 dates a year, all over the country, for eight, ten quid a night, driving myself… I’d be going up to Sheffield for about a tenner a night… I can’t speak for Nick, because he didn’t do that many gigs, but people like John Martyn, myself, The Humblebums, were not quite folk and not quite pop. And we worked all the time … Because it was a youth thing, and the folk clubs were Dylan and all that, it naturally spilled off the universities, which is what really elevated the thing into equal status with what a lot of the pop singers were doing. We could get as big a crowd.’

  Nick’s wariness of live performance can only have been compounded by the isolation of working the folk circuit. In a band, you had company, but as a solo singer-songwriter you were out there on your own – frequently rolling up at a gig alone, with no minder or record company support. However, there was an unseen record company machine waiting to spring into action, and curiously what triggered it were those tiny, apparently insignificant folk-club gigs. Martin Satterthwaite was on the sharp edge, as a member of one of Island’s first Field Promotion Teams: ‘It meant visiting the local record stores, making sure they had product, telling them which artists were coming to town. We made sure there were window displays, and visited local radio, which then, of course, was only the BBC”

  In those days touring was what you did to interest people in buying your work — a write-off against record sales. There were no tour publicists, masseuses or manicurists; no limos, tour riders or merchandising. Just look at the back sleeve of Pink Floyd’s Ummagumma, from 1969: two roadies, surrounded by a phalanx of the Floyd’s state-of-the-art live equipment, all capable of being squeezed into the back of a transit van, were pictured to amaze fans with the band’s high-tech sophistication.

  Martin Satterthwaite: ‘We’d have boards at the venues advertising the latest product. This was long before merchandising, of course. The only T-shirts that Island would manufacture then, in the early seventies, were for us to give away to DJs, record dealers – there was nothing for sale to the public. It was long before tour publicists or anything, so if a band was playing, you’d liaise with local media, try and arrange an interview backstage.’

  Nick’s reluctance to gig is widely believed to have sprung from a single unsettling experience which soured him for future live performances. Robert Kirby’s memories of seeing Nick immediately afterwards have cast doubt on the apprentices’ Christmas party most often held to blame, but Joe Boyd believes he knows when the watershed came: ‘Then, the next thing you know, he’s playing a student centre at Warwickshire, and everybody’s drinking at the back, people are talking. He was very upset, couldn’t handle it. He came limping home, he said I can’t go on with the tour. So we cancelled the other dates.’

  Nick’s reluctance to go out and perform effectively cut off the prime avenue of exposure for any new act, a fact which did not escape his record label. David Sandison explains: ‘There was interest from a few people while Nick was alive, but it was limited. It was “Yeah, that’s nice, but so what?” … And that’s understandable. There wasn’t any profile. There wasn’t anything to grab on to. There wasn’t even explaining the songs in interviews. There wasn’t any gigging, so that you could make that live connection. And there wasn’t radio play. There weren’t any slots for the promotional people to get for people like Nick, apart from John Peel, and his time was limited. There weren’t local radio stations. There wasn’t any commercial radio. There was Radio Luxembourg, but they certainly weren’t going to play Nick Drake.’

  Even when Nick did get out and gig, it was never a comfortable experience. Ralph McTell remembers Nick opening for him at Ewell Technical College, Surrey, on 25 June 1970: ‘That’s the only conversation I remember having with him, in the dressing room beforehand. I am a dreadfully nervous performer, still, and I’m always clucking around before a show. But to allay my nerves, I would cluck around other people and say: “Are you all right?” Nick was monosyllabic. At that particular gig, he was very shy. He did the first set, and something awful must have happened. He was doing his song “Fruit Tree”, and walked off halfway through it. Just left the stage.’r />
  Bruce Fursman was still at school when his group, Folkomnibus, supported Nick at a gig in Middlesex. The Upper Room Folk Club was held at the Goodwill To All pub, a red-brick thirties roadhouse on the corner of Harrow View and Headstone Lane. This gig, on 4 October 1969, could well have been Nick’s first-ever folk-club date, and certainly marked his first listing in Melody Maker’s Folk Forum.

  An audience of around fifty had paid to sit in the room above the pub. Bruce remembers that he bought matching pink denim shirts in an attempt to make Folkomnibus look ‘less like schoolboys and more like professional artists’. These would also have contrasted markedly with Nick’s customary dark outfits. Folkomnibus played a set consisting of Simon & Garfunkel, Spinners and Corries covers; some Irish jigs and reels; and their own ‘instrumental attempts at being teenage versions of the string-bending John Renbourn or Bert Jansch’.

  ‘Nick took to the floor, or should I say the low chair at the front of the audience,’ Bruce recalls. ‘He sat, stooped, hunched over his guitar, an almost reverential silence in the place and this low, dark, almost drowsy voice — almost one of the audience, only he was facing the other way. His hair covered his face, and as far as I can remember, there were no in-between song comments – quite spooky in some way. The image of the figure – almost like on the cover of Bryter Layter – is very strong: dark, hunched shape, face hidden by hair, voice, audience intently listening.’

  Before the gig, Nick was fascinated by Bruce’s cheap Italian round-backed mandolin, and picked it up. Bruce remembers him ‘holding the delicate, pear-shaped body in his delicate hands, as if it were a new-found antiquity’. When Folkomnibus came offstage, Bruce even remembers Nick laughing good-naturedly and saying: ‘You’ve stolen my set.’

  Another handful of confirmed gigs came when Nick opened for Fairport early in 1970, as the band endeavoured to recover from the departure of founder member Ashley Hutchings and cynosure Sandy Denny. Fairport’s Dave Pegg remembered those dates: ‘He did about six gigs with Fairport. I remember we did the Bristol Colston Hall with Nick. He was very well received, the audience liked him. They loved it, he’d go on and play the songs, he didn’t have any spiel. But the songs were strong enough to get people’s attention, and in those days people were into listening to music anyway. He didn’t have much stage presence … he was the opposite of somebody who gets up and tries to gee the audience up, but the fact that he was that way, people had time for him, because the music and his voice were so good, and they’d probably never heard much of it before. It was early days for him.

  ‘He was quite sociable. I remember we went for a curry round the corner from the Colston Hall, and he was very friendly … I never saw him lose it, I never saw him become that depressed that he’d walk off the stage.’

  Fully qualified survivor Michael Chapman saw Nick perform at a folk club in Hull in 1969. Chapman, who was seven years older than Nick, had given up his job as an art and photography teacher in the mid-sixties, for the life of a travelling folkie. He made his debut with Rainmaker in 1968, but it was his 1969 set, Fully Qualified Survivor, which marked his card. Recorded for Harvest, EMI’s ‘progressive’ subsidiary, the album is remarkable for Chapman’s inimitable, gritty ‘Postcards Of Scarborough’.

  While ploughing around the British folk circuit in the late sixties, Chapman met Bridget St John, who had just made her debut album for John Peel’s Dandelion label. ‘I’m pretty certain it was Bridget who turned me on to Five Leaves Left, and that was an album I loved,’ Chapman told me. ‘I saw Nick was on at a folk club in Hull, so my wife and I went down. It must have been sometime in 1969, as I remember the album had just come out. It was at a pub called the Haworth. They were a real silver-tankard and finger-in-the-ear crowd. The folkies did not take to him. Nick came on and played his own songs, but they wanted songs with choruses. They completely missed the point. They just didn’t get the gentleness, the subtlety. He played beautifully.

  ‘I don’t know what the audience expected. I mean, they must have known that you weren’t going to get sea-shanties and singalong songs at a Nick Drake gig! I remember he didn’t say a word between the songs. I suppose they were all his own songs, I recognized some from the album. He didn’t introduce any of them; he didn’t say a word the entire evening. It was actually quite painful to watch. Nick should never have been there. It was obviously not in his nature to perform, especially to a crowd like that. But back then, if you played acoustic guitar on your own and played your own songs, folk clubs were the only places that you could play.’

  The folk scene in London was centred on Les Cousins, in the basement of 45 Greek Street. Cousins, as everybody called it, was run by Andy Matthews, a folk enthusiast whose parents ran the Dionysius Restaurant upstairs. The club, which was tiny, had begun life as The Skiffle Cellar during the DIY music boom of the mid-fifties. When Cousins first opened its doors in 1965, it charged ‘2/6 membership, entrance 5/- and 7/6’. Cousins was the folk venue in London during the sixties, the club to which every tyro folkie who could string together more than two Bob Dylan songs gravitated. It was where guitar wizard Davy Graham held court; where Paul Simon visited.

  Ralph McTell had made his recording debut a couple of years before Nick and was a regular performer at Cousins at the height of the folk boom: ‘Very, very small. You were playing to the wall. There was room for three tiny rows of seats before the back wall. There was a dark corner, a tiny stage not big enough for a stripper. A microphone and a domestic amplifier and speaker … A little coffee bar, because it wasn’t licensed, although there was occasionally a light ale in there!

  ‘The real strength was the all-nighters, because if you got in on a Saturday night in Soho, you had shelter, people used to sleep there. Every boy with a guitar came in … We were all so driven to play, we were all so young. And, of course, just walking through Soho to go to work. When The Incredible String Band were on, the queues used to go round the block, and the working girls around Greek Street at that time were complaining that they weren’t doing the business.’

  An advertisement in Melody Maker’s Folk Forum of 15 November 1969 has John James at Cousins, supported by ‘Nick Drake, a fine songwriter’. Steve Aparicio was a member of Cousins, and remembers Nick’s performance that night: ‘Nick came on and sat hunched up on a stool on the tiny stage. He played only three or four numbers before leaving the stage in some distress, when he was looked after by John Martyn. John Martyn and Al Stewart both got up and did a few songs each.’

  Michael Chapman: ‘Me and Al Stewart, Roy Harper, Ralph McTell, we were all out working the circuit. But that gig in Hull was the only time I ever saw Nick. Whenever we went down to London, we’d all drift along to Cousins to check out the opposition – nick a lick, maybe pinch a gag or a bit of patter, but I never saw Nick there. I assumed — or I think I’d heard — that he was still at school or university, because his name was never around.’

  Folk singer Steve Tilston released his debut album, An Acoustic Confusion, in the summer of 1971, and in a couple of reviews found himself compared to Nick Drake. Steve remembers meeting Nick in Soho: ‘It was a Saturday night in 1971, and as I walked down Greek Street, on my way to Les Cousins, I noticed a group of about four people gathered on the street outside the club’s entrance. One of these was Andy Matthews, who ran the club, and the only other one I recognized was Nick. He was dressed in a white shirt and black jacket, just like in most of his photographs, and stood out in those “tie-dyed” times. We were introduced and pretty soon we got into a conversation. He was very tall and I have this recollection of him having to stoop a little. He startled me by saying that he liked my album, and I remember saying something along the lines of that being good, given that I was supposed to sound like him.

  ‘My memory is of the conversation being relatively easy — given my own then-mastery of the pregnant pause. One question I remember asking him was concerning a small news snippet I’d seen in Sounds … I was convinced that I’d read a pi
ece about Nick about to be doing some recording with one of the old black American blues legends — somebody like Mississippi Fred McDowell or Son House, somebody of that stature – and I remember feeling really envious. I mentioned it and recall him laughing at the somewhat bizarre prospect. I remember liking him a lot; my recollection is of us getting along pretty well. I think we all then moved along to the Pillars of Hercules pub, and then the memory fades.’

  Only one account survives of Nick Drake actually playing at Cousins. It was written by Brian Cullman, who supported Nick that night in 1970, and appeared in Musician magazine in 1979: ‘He sat on a small stool, hunched tight over a tiny Guild guitar, beginning songs and halfway through, forgetting where he was, and stumbling back to the start of that song, or beginning an entirely different song which he would then abandon mid-way through if he remembered the remainder of the first. He sang away from the microphone, mumbled, and whispered, all with a sense of precariousness and doom. It was like being at the bedside of a dying man who wants to tell you a secret, but who keeps changing his mind at the last minute.’

  An American exchange student, who got involved in the English folk scene when he came to London in 1970, and fell in with John and Beverley Martyn, Brian Cullman has kindly expanded his impression of Nick Drake in performance at Cousins: ‘There was a large though not capacity crowd there, and, if memory serves, they were polite, if not overly enthusiastic about my set. If I was amateurish and awkward, Nick was even worse, though in a far more interesting and charismatic way. He made no eye contact with the audience and shrank into himself, looking smaller and more lost and fragile than usual. And he seemed to wander between songs, starting one, then discarding it in favour of another, the way someone might choose between melons at a fruit stand, picking one up after another, trying to figure out which was ripe. He forgot lyrics or, if uncomfortable with what they revealed, he sang away from the mic or simply mumbled. I’ve never seen a performer as deeply unhappy or uncomfortable on stage (and I’ve never seen an audience as rapt and spellbound … there was a genuine affection and admiration, almost a sense of devotion, and the crowd seemed to be willing him through the songs).