Nick Drake

by Patrick Humphries

  Brian Cullman remembered seeing Nick in London towards the end of 1970, and how he seemed to phase in and out of groups: ‘Over the next few months, I’d run into Nick at John and Beverley’s or sometimes see him on the streets of Hampstead. He’d appear and disappear from rooms, from restaurants (I had dinner with a group of musicians at an Indian restaurant once and only realized that Nick was there with us when he got up to go) always by himself, always quiet, deep in his own world.’

  Throughout 1971 Nick grew more introspective. His friends and his family discerned the changes, but felt powerless to do anything. Linda Thompson: ‘It seemed almost like a kind of autism in a way. It just got progressively worse and worse … One didn’t see the signs in those days, we just thought he was really cool… People would say, oh, you’ve got a relationship with Nick, that’s unbelievable. He put his arm round you? That’s practically frenzied lovemaking for Nick. At the time I was playing the field a lot, and I’m ashamed to say I don’t much remember what went on. But I remember I used to get quite cross with him, because he didn’t talk enough …

  ‘He did the odd gig … But it really wasn’t very good. It was like watching somebody who was very ill in public … It wasn’t enough. He didn’t talk. It was OK on record, but for live gigs, you can’t really cut off your audience that much. I was around Sound Techniques a lot and he was fairly, well, not animated, but he had fairly strong feelings in the studio. He knew what he wanted.’

  His family recalled with fondness a streak of determination which would reveal itself in certain circumstances, and which he had shown occasionally since childhood, but except in the recording studio, that too seemed to be fading away. Far away from it all in Tanworth, Rodney and Molly Drake were increasingly concerned at their son’s withdrawal. ‘Then, of course, came Pink Moon,’ recalled Rodney. ‘Where and how and when he wrote that is difficult to say. He was beginning to get very withdrawn and depressed then. He was very down when he wrote Pink Moon. But some people say it was his best thing …’

  Chapter 12

  ‘Pink Moon does remind me of Robert Johnson,’ says Peter Buck, ‘and the fact that they recorded him in a hotel room, facing the wall, too shy to look at the people recording him; and I understand that’s pretty much how they recorded Nick for Pink Moon. There is that loneliness. Close up, intimate. Scary.’

  Buck, REM’s guitarist and the band’s musical archivist, is only one of a new generation of musicians who are coming to appreciate Nick Drake. He also made that fascinating connection between Nick and the late Robert Johnson. Although he only ever recorded twenty-nine songs, at five sessions between November 1936 and June 1937, such was the passion and intensity of that music that Johnson’s position as the King of the Blues remains unassailable.

  King Of The Delta Blues Singers, a sixteen-track album released in 1961, was the record which marked out the parameters of the British blues boom which followed: Eric Clapton, The Rolling Stones and Led Zeppelin were just some of the white boys who hailed Robert Johnson’s influence as seminal.

  To the sheer quality of Johnson’s music, you must add a palpable sense of mystery, for his short life and hard times were shrouded in an impenetrable mist of myth. Columbia Records’ A&R chief, John Hammond, was intrigued by the blues he heard on Johnson’s recordings and went looking for the man in 1938 so that he could highlight him at his Carnegie Hall ‘Spirituals & Swing’ concert showcase. But by the time Hammond’s interest had been piqued, Johnson was already dead.

  Johnson only ever made it to twenty-six, the same age as Nick Drake. But otherwise, their lives could hardly have been more different: Johnson was born in poverty, black and illegitimate – some say it’s a miracle he lasted as long as he did in the lynch-happy, Jim Crow American South of the thirties. As Peter Buck pointed out: ‘Blues is the music of the outsider, and you can’t get to be much more of an outsider in our country than a poor, black guy in rural America in the 1930s, which is where Robert Johnson came from.’

  In view of the enigma that was his life, it is little surprise that the circumstances of Johnson’s death were also mysterious; though it now seems certain that he was murdered by the jealous lover of a woman who was showing too much interest in the bluesman. Before his death in August 1938, Johnson transferred some of the visions which haunted him in life on to shellac. Vocalion’s Don Law was the man who tracked down the bluesman and lured him into a makeshift recording studio.

  Johnson’s first recording session took place at the Gunter Hotel in San Antonio, Texas, in November 1936. Johnson was young and nervous, and he mistrusted the motives of any white man who seemed interested in him. Law eventually persuaded him to record, but the singer was so nervous that he asked if the recording engineers could be located in the room next door. Finally, Johnson was coerced into singing, but not before he had turned his back to the engineers. He recorded facing the wall, lost in a world of his own, unobserved, wrapped in the isolation shared only with his music.

  Although Johnson’s music was available in the Deep South during his lifetime, it was only posthumously that it became widely available and appreciated. Aficionados appreciated the high, lonesome quality of his keening singing and the strength of his guitar-playing, which came in part from his astonishingly long fingers. Throughout his life, and in the sixty years since his death, mystery has attached itself to Robert Johnson like wool to Velcro. The most enduring question is how he learned to play the guitar in that eerie, other-worldly way of his. They say that when he came out of Hazlehurst, Mississippi, he couldn’t play guitar worth a whit. Then the boy vanished. The next time Johnson appeared, folks said he must have sold his soul to the Devil to play guitar like that.

  Like many poor boys, he believed that having his photo taken imperilled his immortal soul, and it was only in 1986 that a picture emerged which could be authenticated as that of Robert Johnson. After all those years, if this wasn’t an image of Johnson, then it should have been. Staring at you from a photo from over half a century ago, the eyes are rigid and inflexible, but what compels you to keep staring is not his eyes; rather it is the fingers of his left hand, which grasp the neck of his guitar like the throat of an enemy.

  Nick Drake, like so many young white boys growing up in the 1960s, is known to have loved the plaintive blues which came up off the Mississippi Delta, and he was particularly fond of Johnson’s King Of The Delta Blues Singers. Friends speak of Nick’s penchant for the blues during his lifetime, and it is more than coincidence that ‘Black Eyed Dog’ was one of the last songs Nick ever recorded, and one of his best. It was a song which drew heavily on the blues tradition, and particularly that of the late, great Robert Johnson.

  Johnson’s blues are desolate and windswept, none more so than the chilling ‘Hellhound On My Trail’. Like the music of Nick Drake, you sift through the work of Robert Johnson looking for omens. In his case you don’t have to look far. From his youthful pact with the Devil, chronicled in ‘Crossroads Blues’, to the end-of-life fatalism of ‘Hellhound On My Trail’, life and death are marked out clearly on the sparse recorded legacy of the man.

  A friend who encountered him during the dark days, remembers Nick comparing himself to the doomed Johnson, and claiming that he too had a ‘hellhound on my trail’. ‘A little shiver ran down my back,’ Ben Lacock told Mick Brown. Those echoes eventually become too loud to ignore: a sound of aching loneliness and solitary desolation. Sung by one man and his guitar to an empty wall.

  Nick Drake’s third and final album, Pink Moon, was recorded over two nights at Sound Techniques studios. With only a smattering of piano on the title track, Pink Moon too is the sound of one man and his guitar, pouring out his despair into a studio microphone.

  Though unable to articulate his despair in any other way, Nick was clearly aware that there was something gnawing away at him. Unable to cope any longer on Haverstock Hill, unwilling to answer the door, reluctant to communicate on any level – with his parents, his record company or his dwindli
ng audience – Nick finally left London and returned to his family home in Tanworth.

  Anthea Joseph: ‘When Joe left there was no one really looking after Nick, but he had a family, you see. I mean, it wasn’t as though he was an orphan of the storm really – he may have felt like one, I don’t know. I mean, it wouldn’t surprise me if he did. He wasn’t mentally stable. You can’t take – nobody can take – responsibility for that, apart from immediate family, and he did have a family who loved him dearly.’

  In the period between the release of Bryter Layter in November 1970, and Pink Moon in February 1972, the depression continued to corrode. Despite his distaste for the mechanics of promoting his records, Nick was upset at the poor response which had greeted the release of both Five Leaves Left and Bryter Layter, and the transparent lack of success ate away at him. He saw poor record sales as a personal failure, and could not accept that for any singer-songwriter at the beginning of their career, it all took time. You could not expect to make it overnight: building a career involved doing just that, from the foundations up. Before the video age, touring was what gradually brought your name to a wider audience, and with Nick’s reluctance to perform, that most obvious avenue was cut off from him.

  The reluctance to face the hard facts of commercial consideration became internalized, and where others might have taken advice or bided their time, he saw no future, only failure. ‘I’ve failed at everything I’ve tried to do,’ he told his mother. A terrible admission from a young man barely into his twenties. Concerned at their son’s unwillingness or inability to communicate, his parents consulted their local GP, who felt that Nick might benefit from seeking psychiatric help. During 1971 Rodney and Molly Drake took Nick to see a psychiatrist at St Thomas’s Hospital in London. His mother later admitted that ‘it never really worked … what do psychiatrists really know? They are fumbling in darkness too.’

  What did come out of those first sessions was a prescription for anti-depressant drugs. Nick was prescribed three types of drug, which he reluctantly began to take daily. Friends recall his embarrassment at taking the pills in their presence. It was a very English, a very middle-class response to a depressive illness: to be seen to be taking anti-depressants was an admission that there was something wrong; an admission of weakness.

  Friend and musical colleague Robert Kirby, who had worked closely with Nick and Joe Boyd on the first two albums, felt that Boyd’s decision to go to Los Angeles to work for Warner Brothers left a significant gap in Nick’s life: ‘That is one important thing: the length of time that Boyd was in America. I think that Nick felt sadly out of touch … He also admired Joe very greatly, and I think when Joe was in America, it did leave a big hole.’

  When Nick did not respond well to the anti-depressants, his father consulted Boyd, who agreed to try to help: ‘I spoke to Nick a few times from LA. He was obviously having difficulties. His parents got on the phone to me once and said they really wanted him to seek help, and that he was afraid that everyone would look down on him if he went to a psychiatrist. He was reluctant, and they would appreciate it if I would speak to him because they said he respected me so much. So I spoke to him and said: “I don’t want to tell you what’s right or wrong, but you should never feel people are judging you. You have to deal with things from your own point of view, and if you need help you should get help.” The guy he went to, I think, was the guy who gave him the anti-depressants, and I think we know a lot more about anti-depressants now. Then, they were doling them out like candy, not aware of how dangerous they are.’

  As someone who remained a close friend until the end of Nick’s life, and has also trained as a psychiatrist, Brian Wells has memories of Nick at the time that are perhaps doubly revealing: ‘My view is I don’t think Nick Drake had what I as a psychiatrist would view as a biological depressive illness. I think he became more and more uncomfortable around people, and withdrew because he felt safety in his own company. A bit isolated, not for any particular reason … I think he got himself in a rut. If you are presented with that as a psychiatrist, there’s nothing else you can call it, other than depression. But I don’t think he had a biological depressive illness of the type we would normally prescribe anti-depressant drugs for. I’m not criticizing his doctor, because I think when his parents brought him to this psychiatrist up in Warwickshire, they were worried [because] he was at home. He’d had all this lively sort of stuff, he’d been at Marlborough, he’d been at Cambridge, you know. What had happened to this guy?

  ‘Psychiatrists are trained to think in terms of diagnosis. What would explain this behaviour? Well, he’s either got schizophrenic illness, which he didn’t have: he wasn’t listening to voices. The most obvious diagnosis to make with Nick was one of depression. I don’t think it was. I mean, it was a depression, but it was more a sort of existential state that he’d got himself into, rather than it being the kind of depressive illness that medical students learn about when they’re training to be psychiatrists. I would not have given him Tryptizol, which was an anti-depressant of that time … You hear stories that “it seemed to be making a difference”. But I don’t think that was the kind of depression he had. I think he was a sensitive, rather precious guy who became increasingly withdrawn. And I think that was diagnosed as depression.’

  For a time, though, it did seem to those around Nick that his mind was made marginally clearer by the anti-depressants, and Nick himself began to feel that a change of scene might help. Following Boyd’s sale of his Witchseason roster before returning to America, Island Records boss Chris Blackwell had maintained a fondness for Nick and his music, ensuring that he continued to receive a weekly stipend. Now, concerned by Nick’s visible deterioration, Blackwell allowed him the use of his villa, in Algeciras, near Gibraltar. Barely seven years before, Nick and David Wright, his friend from Marlborough, had planned to use the area as a springboard for their round-the-world trip.

  On his return from Blackwell’s villa, his mood perhaps slightly brightened by the Spanish sun, Nick began to think about recording again. In the absence of Joe Boyd, who was now installed in LA, he decided to make contact with one of his few remaining conduits to the music industry, John Wood. The mythic version is that Nick turned up out of the blue to record the third album in 1971, insisting that it be sparse and straightforward. ‘No frills’ is Nick’s most frequently quoted comment on Pink Moon. In fact, it seems that as early as 1970 Nick had determined that the new album would be much simpler. Back then, though, he was not to know just what torments lay ahead.

  Even at the time of its release, Nick had felt that his second album erred towards the more lavish production favoured by Joe Boyd, rather than the simplicity he himself favoured. In an interview with Musin’ Music, Boyd remembered: ‘Nick came to see me before we’d even released Bryter Layter, as soon as we’d finished the record, before the cover was done or anything, he said to me “The next record is just going to be me and guitar …” I think he may have found Bryter Layter a little full, or elaborate … I know he liked it, but he did feel, “OK, we’ve done this, now we’re going to do something completely different …” Nick wasn’t somebody you really argued with, but again he could do that with John Wood, he didn’t need me to do a record with just him and guitar.’

  Robert Kirby did not learn until later that there would be no place for his sumptuous arrangements on the new album: ‘I remember after Bryter Layter hoping there would be things for me to do, and I remember him saying: “No, it’s only going to be myself and guitar.” I don’t think this was immediately after Bryter Layter; it was more shortly before Pink Moon.’

  As far back as Cambridge in 1968, Kirby remembers Nick performing guitar pieces and fragments, which he recognized four years later on the final album. One he particularly recalled was the guitar phrase which appeared as ‘Things Behind The Sun’.

  ‘I think at the time Bryter Layter was out, most people said it wasn’t up to Five Leaves Left… I think the decline began with the respo
nse to Bryter Layter. The decline had set in prior to Pink Moon. Nick … took less care of himself. In the early days he always looked immaculate. Towards the end, he looked ill. He looked haggard, unkempt … I don’t think he was eating, which didn’t help.

  ‘Between Bryter Layter and Pink Moon, he would come round, stay for a week, and not say anything. Nothing. I knew him. My friends knew him … He might get the guitar out and play. If we were in the front room, enjoying listening to sounds, he’d come and sit down and enjoy listening. If we went to the pub or restaurant, he might come with us. But he would quite often not say anything.’

  The period bordered by Bryter Layter and Pink Moon marked the almost imperceptible decline of Nick Drake. The outside world showed no real interest in that decline – merely curiosity. But those who knew him well, especially his family, found the change hard to bear. Gabrielle Drake: ‘The public image of Nick really stems from the years of his depressive illness because a lot of that coincided with his record-making. And of course one’s later memories are clouded by this – he was very depressed. But that wasn’t the essence of Nick as I knew him as a child …’

  Formerly dapper and strapping and perhaps just a tad too aware of his own image, Nick now had so many real problems that simply making it from day to day was difficult. There was no longer space for worrying about a public image. Each and every day was a struggle, a period to be endured, to get through with gritted teeth. Nowhere was the grinding determination more evident than in the enormous personal struggle it took to record the songs which became Pink Moon.

  Remembering Nick in happier times, John Martyn told Andy Robson: ‘He was extraordinarily lovable. And the most lovable thing about him was that he was so shy.’ But the sweet shyness had long gone, and now Nick seemed to have gone too. He was so totally withdrawn that he seemed to be teetering on the edge of something horrible, which he could barely discern and was fearful of truly comprehending. But some impulse – to work, to communicate, or to save himself – drove him to record. And determination, though never a part of the romantic myth, was always very much part of Nick the human being. Tremors of uncertainty, jarring discord, nagging awareness, fretful concerns, must have filled Nick’s head, for together they create the mood which saturates Pink Moon.