Nick Drake

by Patrick Humphries

  If Five Leaves Left – released a scant three years before Nick made this final album – is melancholy, but with the comforting glow of a November bonfire for comfort, Pink Moon is Manderley without lights, burned and razed, a hollow shell where once had dwelt happiness. Talking to Connor McKnight for his Zig Zag appreciation, John Wood recalled the sparse sessions which led to Pink Moon: ‘He arrived at midnight and we started. It was done very quickly. After we had finished, I asked him what I should keep, and he said all of it, which was a complete contrast to his former stance. He came in for another evening and that was it. It took hardly any time to mix it, since it was only his voice and guitar, with one overdub only. Nick was adamant about what he wanted. He wanted it to be spare and stark, and he wanted it to be spontaneously recorded.’

  Singer-songwriter Clive Gregson first worked with John Wood a decade after Pink Moon was released: ‘I knew his name from Richard and Linda records, John Martyn, Fairport, Nick. We’d got a deal, and the record label wheeled in producers and said who do you like? They’d brought John in because he’d done the Squeeze stuff, which had just done so well – “Cool For Cats”, “Up The Junction”, great, great pop records. As soon as they mentioned his name, I just thought, yeah, great. I realized I probably had more records with his name on than anyone else.

  ‘He did the first and last Any Trouble records, then left the record business. He came out of retirement briefly in 1995 to do Boo Hewerdine’s record. I think he got to a point in the mid to late eighties, when records were so dismal … The kind of records John liked doing were: you get a band who could sing and play, who had good songs, and you mic it up right; they perform, and you get it on tape. But by then, you could take any old bollocks and make it sound glossy.

  ‘Talking to John about Nick, it was always how the records were made, and I think that he felt very proud of those records. I always got the impression with John that he felt Nick was probably one of the most talented people he’d ever worked with – and that’s very high praise when you look at the people he did work with. I got the impression that he admired the way Nick could translate the ideas and arrangements that were in his head.

  ‘Around the time of Pink Moon I think Nick’s health was obviously failing. John told me he thought Nick was having problems writing songs. I mean, Pink Moon is an incredibly short record. He just said: “That’s it. That’s what I’ve got. That’s how I want it to be. No overdubs. No nothing. Voice and guitar.” John always said that Nick had a very clear idea of what he wanted to do.’

  As the last album Nick ever recorded, Pink Moon’s status is ensured. But like the house on the cover of Led Zeppelin’s Physical Graffiti, it is ever-changing, never static. Nothing is certain, there are few glimpses into the lives behind the blinds. The names on the doorbells bear little relation to the current occupants of the rooms.

  Nick’s final album issued forth from a well of despair, a cell of isolation. Its songs were fashioned in an anonymous north-west London bedsit warren. The shifting, transitional nature of the location left its mark on Nick and the songs he was writing. There is no permanence on Pink Moon. It is too uneasy and restless.

  Nick’s voice never sounded more consoling than here. But, knowing what was behind him and fearful of what lay ahead, it is in the fragmentary instrumental ‘Horn’ that he encapsulates Pink Moon’s terrible, desolate beauty. You can picture him bent over his guitar in a recording studio late at night – long, sinewy fingers moving slowly and deliberately across the neck of his guitar, evoking his own desolation in a way words never could.

  Knowing this to be the final album, you search for those omens and portents which seem to so dog Nick Drake’s career. Here is a bleakness and unspoken tragedy to match any found in the blues. Here is raw grief and unassuaged anger. ‘Horn’ is music communicating the incommunicable, inarticulacy articulated. Here is Drake groping for a thread to guide him out of the maze of despair. Maybe the music could do it. Or maybe it would desert him, and leave him as alone and isolated as before.

  For all its bleakness, and the outright despair of the voice begging, pleading for comprehension and understanding, Pink Moon concludes on a note of optimism. The final track, ‘From The Morning’, speaks of a beautiful new day dawning. Is it simply hindsight which finds us snatching at straws of hope? Or is there a real sense that, bad as things get, low as you can go, there is always a way up, always the brightness of a new day to follow even the bleakest night?

  Is it significant that the song is placed last? Is Nick trying to tell us something? Or is that just the listener hoping that out of all the darkness which engulfed him during the final three years of his life, somewhere, however far in the distance, Nick Drake saw a beacon burning?

  Hearing Pink Moon play, late at night, with the headphones wrapped tight around your head, so that you are isolated and alone, is chilling – and eerily intimate. It is a testament to John Wood’s skill that you feel as though you are part of the mood, and there is nothing between you and those songs, or the man performing those songs.

  Pink Moon has all the hallmarks of a finely crafted beauty, a sombre resonance which finds echo all these years on. The songs are pale and wistful, like the late light of a Warwickshire afternoon. It is like watching smoke coil up from a hand-rolled cigarette, as the chill fog of a late-autumn evening sneaks up and wraps itself around you, like an old friend keen to betray you. Hearing Nick Drake’s voice here conjures up again the lost boy, creating a mood as irredeemable as childhood, as plaintive as unrequited love, as tragic as lost promise.

  The starkness of Pink Moon sets it apart. Along with John Lennon’s Plastic Ono Band, Bob Dylan’s Blood On The Tracks and Syd Barrett’s The Madcap Laughs, it stands as an iconoclastic record. A record made to shatter the myth of the invincibility of the artist. All are albums made at times of great personal stress in the songwriters’ lives. But whether they were cathartic, or simply compounded the turmoil, only John, Bob, Syd and Nick could say.

  Pink Moon is a cri de coeur. There was, transparently, no commercial consideration in its creation. This was not the record of an artist intent on alerting the world to a change in his personal life or private philosophy. This was a record which Nick Drake seemed to have no choice but to make. He had once told his father that there was music running through his head all the time.

  Because of its harrowing nature, and the bleakness of the circumstances surrounding the record, it is no surprise to learn that Nick’s final album was his parents’ least-favourite. Writing to Scott Appel in 1986, Rodney Drake noted that: ‘The material on Pink Moon has always bewildered us a little (except “From The Morning”, which we love)’. Two lines from that song form the epitaph on Nick’s headstone in Tanworth churchyard.

  In a Dutch radio broadcast of 1979, presumably aired to commemorate the release of the Fruit Tree box set, John Wood expounded further on his memories of those sessions: ‘The most startling conversation I ever had with him was when we were making Pink Moon. And as you’ve probably read, we made the record in, I think, two evenings. Nick was determined to make a record that was very stark, that would have all the texture and cotton wool and sort of tinsel that had been on the other two pulled away. So it was only just him. And he would sit in the control room and sort of blankly look on the wall and say: “Well, I really don’t want to hear anything else. I really think people should only just be aware of me and how I am. And the record shouldn’t have any sort of… tinsel.” That wasn’t the word he used, I can’t remember exactly how he described it. He was very determined to make this very stark, bare record and he definitely wanted it to be him more than anything. And I think, in some ways, Pink Moon is probably more like Nick than the other two records.’

  Even the circumstances in which Island Records acquired Pink Moon have become the stuff of legend. The tale runs that Nick delivered the master tapes to Island, but left without talking to anyone, and it wasn’t until days later that the receptionist realized that th
e package she was holding was the new album from one of the label’s acts. It is suggested that Island was indifferent to Nick Drake, failing to nurture him while he was still alive.

  Nick’s press officer at Island, David Sandison, remembers the event differently: ‘I saw him in reception after I came back from lunch … I saw a figure in the corner on the bench, and I suddenly realized it was Nick. He had this big master tape box under his arm, and I said: “Have you had a cup of tea … Do you want to come upstairs?” So we went upstairs to my office … and he just sat in my office area for about half an hour, then said: “I’d better be going …” He went down the stairs with the tapes under his arm, and about an hour later the girl who worked behind the front desk called up and said: “Nick’s left the tapes behind”, so I went down and it was the big sixteen-track master tape box, and it said: “Nick Drake: Pink Moon.” So they called John Wood and said: “What’s this?” and he said it was the new album. So we ran off a safety copy and said let’s hear it.’

  In the dangerously deep waters of analysing what Nick Drake’s records ‘mean’, there is much to be gleaned from Pink Moon. The title track, particularly, lends itself to ominous symbolism: the ‘Pink Moon’ which is going to get the singer is widely taken to be the harbinger of Nick’s own death. The Dictionary Of Folklore, Mythology & Legend notes that during eclipses of the moon, ‘the earth’s shadow casts a dark reddish colour on the moon, dimming its light or blacking it out altogether. These “bloody” moons, or other aspects of the moon when the atmosphere makes the moon’s face seem red with blood, are evil omens, portending catastrophes. The Chinese, for example, see in an abnormally red (or an abnormally pale) moon, a warning of evil.’

  Pink Moon, released on 25 February 1972 as ILPS 9184, appeared in a busy month for Island re-releases. The label was more concerned with re-promoting Emerson, Lake & Palmer’s Tarkus, Jethro Tull’s Aqualung, King Crimson’s Islands, Sandy Denny’s The North Star Grassman And The Ravens, Mott The Hoople’s Brain Capers, Mountain’s Flowers Of Evil and Fairport Convention’s Babbacombe Lee than the new album by Nick Drake.

  In an extraordinary move, Pink Moon’s official full-page advertisement, which appeared in the music press in the month of the album’s release, took the form of an open letter from David Sandison under the heading ‘PINK MOON – NICK DRAKE’S LATEST ALBUM: THE FIRST WE HEARD OF IT WAS WHEN IT WAS FINISHED’. The letter included a warts-and-all account of Nick’s Queen Elizabeth Hall gig, before telling the tale of the new album: ‘The last time I saw Nick was a week or so ago. He came in, smiling that weird smile of his and handed over his new album. He’d just gone into the studios and recorded it without telling a soul except the engineer. And we haven’t seen him since.

  ‘The point of this story is this: why (when there are people prepared to do almost anything for a recording contract or a Queen Elizabeth Hall date) are we releasing this new Nick Drake Album, and (if he wants to make one) – the next?

  ‘Because, quite simply, we believe that Nick Drake is a great talent. His first two albums haven’t sold a shit. But, if we carry on releasing them, then maybe one day someone authoritative will stop, listen properly and agree with us. Then maybe a lot more people will get to hear Nick Drake’s incredible songs and guitar playing. And maybe they’ll buy a lot of his albums, and fulfil our faith in Nick’s promise.

  ‘Then. Then we’ll have done our job.’

  Dave Sandison – December 1971

  Island’s Press Officer.

  It was as if the sheer naked honesty of Nick’s record had simply made hyperbole impossible. But perhaps even more strange is that a record company would simply accept the tape, press it up and release it immediately, exactly as it was, without any attempts at interference. In that context, the ad begins to seem quite ordinary, though Sandison does admit now that it was a bit of an admission of failure: ‘I don’t know what else I could have done. It was a statement of faith as much as anything: we’ll stay here as long as he wants to make records. Whether long-term and realistically, it would have been like that, I don’t know. Probably not.’

  Gabrielle Drake was touched by the concern Island Records displayed over Nick during this dark period; Chris Blackwell particularly wanted to ensure that Nick was looked after. But as David Betteridge pointed out, the label did have other priorities at that time: ‘So many things were happening at Island. Nineteen seventy-two was an extremely busy year for Island. We had Sparks, Roxy Music, Cat Stevens … I mean, Cat Stevens amounted to something like 20 per cent of our sales that year. Worldwide, he was huge.’

  No one at Island was really clear just what was wrong with Nick. Many of the people I spoke to who saw him around this time assumed it was a drug-related problem. His increasing isolation meant that even keeping the lines of communication open was a nightmare, as Sandison pointed out: ‘He was very difficult to contact. He was living in one of those places, four floors of flats, a couple of flats on each floor, and people only stayed for three weeks. It wasn’t a squat, but it wasn’t far off … so when you called, nobody was really sure whether Nick was there. Somebody would tramp off, and come back about ten minutes later and say: “Well, I’ve knocked on the door and there was no reply.” But that didn’t mean anything. You didn’t know if he was there or not.

  ‘But then he would just pop up. He would arrive at Witchseason, out of the blue … or he would swan off to Paris. He was together enough to organize that sort of thing. Whether after having become a “recording artist”, he just didn’t want to do it. And because he was so incredibly lucky to fall into Witchseason’s hands, and then Island, where this sort of thing was indulged. I mean, any other record company that might have signed him at the time wouldn’t have pursued him past the first album, given the fact that he wasn’t going to do any gigs or interviews.’

  With the benefit of hindsight, you can see why Pink Moon and Nick Drake were so marginalized. The same issue of Melody Maker which carried Sandison’s letter down a whole page featured advertisements or reviews of other albums released that week – Paul Simon’s solo debut, Jethro Tull’s Thick As A Brick, Neil Young’s Harvest, Ry Cooder’s Into The Purple Valley, Carly Simon’s Anticipation, Al Stewart’s Orange, as well as debut albums from singer-songwriters John Prine, Steve Goodman, David Blue and Judee Sill. The number-one album that week was from Nick’s labelmate, Cat Stevens: his breakthrough Teaser & The Firecat.

  The music industry was biding its time, treading water, following the break-up of The Beatles and Simon & Garfunkel, Bob Dylan in hiding and The Stones in tax exile. No one was sure if Glam was a flash in the pan, or how much longevity you could expect from Savoy Brown or Jonathan Kelly. Wherever the bright lights were shining, though, Nick Drake was well out of sight, edging into the shadows.

  In his Time Out review of Fink Moon, Al Clark was clearly aware of the problems surrounding Nick: ‘Sadly, and despite Island’s efforts to rectify the situation, Nick Drake is likely to remain in the shadows, the private troubador of those who have been fortunate enough to catch an earful of his exquisite 3a.m. introversions.’

  Even Nick’s most loyal supporters in the press were hard pushed to be unequivocally enthusiastic about Pink Moon. In his review of the album for Sounds, Jerry Gilbert wrote: ‘Island appear to have forgotten about Nick Drake until he ambled into the offices one day and presented them with this album. No-one knew he’d recorded it except the engineer and it’s a long way removed from the mighty sessions that Joe Boyd used to arrange for him. Nick Drake remains the great silent enigma of our time – the press handout says that no-one at Island even knows where he’s living, and certainly he appears to have little interest in working in public again.

  ‘The album consists entirely of Nick’s guitar, voice and piano and features all the usual characteristics without ever matching up to Bryter Layter. One has to accept that Nick’s songs necessarily require further augmentation, for whilst his own accompaniments are good the songs are not sufficiently strong t
o stand up without any embroidery at all. “Things Behind The Sun” makes it, so does “Parasite” – but maybe it’s time Mr Drake stopped acting so mysteriously and started getting something properly organised for himself.’

  Within a couple of months of the release of Pink Moon, Nick had suffered a breakdown, and was hospitalized in the Warwickshire countryside. Like an ocean liner, slowly and inexorably, he was slipping the ropes which connected him to the shore. David Sandison’s poignant press statement had only confirmed the rumours which were already percolating around the music industry. With so much else happening – the first post-Beatles hysteria accompanying Bowie and Bolan; the increasing interest in the progressive movement epitomized by ELP and Yes – the absence of the already shadowy Nick Drake wasn’t exactly headline news.

  In Melody Maker, Mark Plummer’s review of Nick’s last album was strikingly foreboding, given that Nick was still alive and only believed to be temporarily absent: ‘John Martyn told me about Nick Drake in ecstatic terms and so it seemed the natural thing to do, bag the album when it came in for review that is. It is hard to say whether John was right or not. His music is so personal and shyly presented both lyrically and in his confined guitar and piano playing that it neither does or doesn’t come over. Drake is a fairly mysterious person, no-one appears to know where he lives, what he does – apart from writing songs – and there is not even a chance to see him on stage to get closer to his insides. The more you listen to Drake though, the more compelling his music becomes – but all the time it hides from you … It could be that Nick Drake does not exist at all.’