Chapter 13
‘He was the most withdrawn person I’ve ever met,’ John Martyn said of Nick. To Andy Robson he said: ‘We were never that close. Except, I was as close as anybody could be. He was an impossible man to get close to … In another age he would have been a hermit.’ Martyn and his then wife Beverley, near neighbours to Nick in Hampstead, were among the very few who were ever really close to him. Martyn, three months younger than Nick, was always one step ahead of him during his early career, and was the first folk-related signing to Chris Blackwell’s Island label.
His early albums – London Conversation, The Tumbler – were cut from the folkie cloth, but soon Martyn got the hump, and working with bassist Danny Thompson, switched direction: ‘I was actually very shy and retiring,’ he told Q, ‘and ever so sweet and gentle until I was 20 then I just got the heave with Donovan and Cat Stevens and all that terribly nice rolling up joints, sitting on toadstools, watching the sunlight dapple through the dingly dell of life’s rich pattern stuff … I’m not really that nice, and I very consciously turned away from all that.’
That change was marked by 1973’s Solid Air, which Colin Escott in his booklet to accompany 1994’s double compilation Sweet Little Mysteries described as ‘John’s masterpiece’. Escott went on to explain that ‘The texture of the title song was dictated by Danny Thompson’s bass, mixed way up. Inasmuch as the lyrics offered themselves up for interpretation, they were for, or about, John’s Island labelmate, Nick Drake. Nick lived near John for a while, and died mysteriously, if not altogether unexpectedly, the following year.’
Martyn’s song was a cautionary note to Nick. Knowing him now to be unreachable, perhaps he hoped Nick would respond to a message written in a form he understood. Talking to Zig Zag, while Nick was still alive, Martyn said: ‘Solid Air was done for a friend of mine and it was done right with very clear motives and I’m very pleased with it, for varying reasons.’
In 1986 Martyn told biographer Brendan Quayle: ‘Nick was a beautiful man, but walking on solid air, helpless in this dirty business, an innocent abroad. He was killed, like [Paul] Kossoff, by the indecent, parasitic opportunism that pervades the music business.’
When I approached Martyn about being interviewed for this book, he rang to say that he felt he had said enough about Nick Drake over the years and was reluctant to run the risk of turning his memories into anecdotes.
Chas Keep, who is currently working with Martyn on his authorized biography, wrote to me in June 1997 with a memory of Martyn’s response to Chas’s profile of Nick in Record Collector: ‘I think the thing that sticks in my mind the most is the image of John reading my article on the day it was published in 1992. Driving back to his house, he sat in the passenger seat reading, with tears in his eyes, the silence only broken by his occasional muttered “Poor Nicky, poor Nicky …” Poor John, he does so blame himself for being unable to prevent Nick from withdrawing from the world.’
Following their move from Hampstead, John and Beverley Martyn relocated to the sleepy South Coast town of Hastings, where Nick became an irregular visitor. Fond as the Martyns were of Nick, it seems that by the time he visited them during 1972, he was in a place that they could never hope to reach.
David Sandison: ‘John Martyn told me a story about when Nick was staying with them, and they were all sitting round watching telly … and Nick got up and left the room, and he thought he’d gone to have a pee, or make a cup of tea, but then he suddenly realized that an hour had passed, and Nick hadn’t come back. He was slightly concerned – he didn’t suspect he was going to kill himself or anything – but just wondered where the hell he was. And Nick was sitting in a foetal crouch outside the door, and it kind of freaked John, because he said that it was almost like he was listening to see if we were talking about him. There was a hint of paranoia. There was also that kind of … vague insult that we were his friends, but he didn’t want to be with us.’
Rodney Drake wrote that Nick was ‘very close’ to John and Beverley Martyn during 1971-72, and that he was living near them in Hampstead around the time he was recording Bryter Layter. He had fond memories of Martyn, and recalled him visiting the Drake family home in Tanworth when Nick was at his most withdrawn: ‘They knew each other very well, and when Nick was up here, and was pretty bad, we got John Martyn to come up. We’d never met him, and he came up here, and he was a very charming person.’
Molly Drake recalled: ‘Nick, having said he could come, then went into the most awful torment of worry, because … Nick always went on about his two worlds, and he thought John Martyn’s one world, and you’re another world, and it simply won’t work. But in actual fact, it worked like anything, we absolutely loved John Martyn, we got on dreadfully well …’
Rodney: ‘He kept us both entertained, and Nick was very amused, and the next morning, Nick wanted him to go …’
Molly: ‘Nick was very bad, and John Martyn is a tremendously vivacious, ebullient character, and at that stage, it was more than Nick could take. It was all right for one evening, and the next morning he couldn’t take any more of it.’
Interviewed on Radio 1 in 1985, Martyn remembered Nick: ‘He came and lived with me in various locations, and was just distinctly unhappy in all of them. I think he distrusted the world. He thought it had not quite lived up to his expectations.’
Joe Boyd had settled in Los Angeles, and after years of scraping by with his Witchseason acts was finally on a regular salary from Warner Brothers. But in London, in the early 1970s, with Boyd gone, Nick felt even more isolated. Nick’s decision to record Pink Moon without the lavish Boyd production which had been such a feature of Bryter Layter meant that Boyd could leave for America with a clear conscience, though in later years he admits to wondering if Nick did in fact feel abandoned: ‘Bryter Layter took a very long time. It was very off and on, doing little bits here and there, over the course of a year. And so by the time it was released, I was on my way to Los Angeles, so when it actually came out and didn’t sell, I wasn’t around as a manager … I guess I feel badly that I couldn’t totally follow through on it.
‘I think he did feel abandoned. You can look back and see how … I didn’t think of myself as being that important to the people you were dealing with. You were young, you think things go on and you do this and you do that. I was a little frustrated, because a lot of the groups, and Nick, wanted to do things that I didn’t feel necessarily involved me that much. Nick had already announced that he wanted to do his next record stark, so I said, well, you can do that with John, you don’t need me for that.
‘Nick loved Five Leaves Left. I don’t know what he thought of Bryter Layter. Whether he thought that his music was being a bit overwhelmed, by the arrangements, by the visiting artists, by John Cale, by Pat Arnold and Doris Troy … I just don’t know. But definitely by the end, when we finished Bryter Layter, he said: “The next record’s going to be different. It’s going to be very simple.” This was before I left, before Bryter Layter came out and didn’t sell, before any of that. And that was one of the things which added to my feeling of well, why not take this job with Warner Brothers.’
Simon Crocker had lost touch with Nick since the release of Five Leaves Left, but assumed that, signed to the prestigious Island Records, with his third album just out, things couldn’t be better for his old schoolfriend: ‘Then I met Robert Kirby … and we had a long chat about Nick and he told me everything, and I was absolutely flabbergasted. One of the things was, Joe Boyd going to America really caught Nick on the hop. Basically he depended very heavily on Joe … and he was kind of lost after he went. I don’t think you can point the finger at Joe: he did what was right for him at the time … I don’t think there’s any blame to be placed. He can’t be responsible, but in a way the impression I got was that Nick didn’t really grasp what was happening until it was too late. He didn’t realize the gap that was going to be there.
‘What amazed me looking back was that Nick never had a manager. Nick n
eeded people to get his act together. Nick was just not someone who was going to do that by himself … Anyone who knew him would realize that he needed someone to really help him, to structure his life … I’m sure if he had had the right manager with a bit of money, and he could have had other musicians playing with him, he could have performed very, very well indeed. Is it because Nick said: “No, I don’t want it?” I don’t know that.’
Another friend from Marlborough and Aix was Jeremy Mason. He was equally shocked when he saw Nick for the first time in two years: ‘He had changed completely. This would be early 1971. We couldn’t get anything out of him at all. He didn’t like the pub. He said it was a class of people he was not interested in any more – it was a pub for the Chelsea set, what you’d call yuppies today.
‘We did go back to his flat. He actually only loosened up when we got back to the flat. Whether he had just moved in, or whether this was it, but it had nothing in it except the boxes in which his stereo had come. You sat on the bed, and had coffee off the boxes.
‘I remember introducing him as my great buddy from school; and realizing that I had nothing further in common with him came as a bit of a shock … He had certainly gone a very different path by then … He had turned, from the time I knew him, from a relatively laid-back chap, with whom I had no trouble communicating …
‘I must emphasize that when we were at school and went to see Graham Bond, and we went to the Flamingo, and we came down to France, played the guitar … he was pretty normal. It was Aix that started it. He became more and more … “obsessed” is the wrong word. More and more interested in the music. It went from a schoolboy thing, to something he did more and more.’
Brian Wells had been close to Nick at Cambridge, and kept in touch when they both moved down to London. Knowing how abrasive the music industry could be, Wells knew how it could impact on such a sensitive individual as Nick, but he also remembered him as withdrawn and reclusive, even during their university days together: ‘It’s difficult for somebody to say he wasn’t depressed – any psychiatrist quite reasonably would have said this is a depression. But I think it was more to do with … you know how Howard Hughes just withdrew? I think it was more like that.
‘I think he was always slightly sensitive, not aloof, but distant from it. I’ve been in pubs with Nick, and he would laugh and joke and things, but he would then go after a while … Whereas most people would hang on for another hour, he would get up and go. From the minute I met him, he would get up and go, because you got the impression that he thought it was uncool to stay there getting pissed, or whatever. It had to do with cool, and image, a lot of it.
‘It’s interesting, isn’t it: Why wasn’t he a well-integrated, well brought-up English public-schoolboy who went off to do the same as everybody else? But, you see, he was. He was, and it seemed to change once he got into the music business. And I think the music business is a great place if you’ve got some rough edges. I think the music business is a much easier place for working-class lads to be…1 think you’ve got to be quite tough and almost ruthless to be successful in the music business.
‘I think he got into this arena with a fine, chiselled talent. I mean his music is not… he was not getting up on-stage and playing loud chords and boogying around or being sexy. He wasn’t into rock ‘n’ roll. He was sitting there, a kind of… timid figure, dressed in black, playing beautiful weird-tuning-type acoustic guitar stuff … He was never a rock ‘n’ roller.’
For those who only knew Nick after he arrived in London to make a career as a musician, the decline was less striking, but nonetheless still shocking. Because of his chosen career, many assumed that Nick’s problems could be put down to drugs. Only a 10/- cab ride away from Nick in London at this time, Linda Thompson remains convinced that his problems were not drug-related: ‘I never saw him do drugs. I saw him smoke dope, but I never saw him do anything else. I suppose he did. But then you know, looking back on him now, right from the start, there was something wrong.
‘If he did take a lot of drugs, he wasn’t an overt drug user. Then as time wore on, he was taking drugs for his depression. It was hard to tell. Then he had his Howard Hughes phase, which was really scary, with the long fingernails and the dirty clothes and stuff. At the time I certainly felt, oh, that’s disgusting – those long fingernails and the dirty clothes – instead of thinking it might be nice to try and help this person.’
‘I’ve known a lot of drug addicts … and I think he was ill. Clinical depression. If he’d been in a rehab, if he’d had lithium or something, maybe counselling, maybe something would have helped. But in those days, vegetarian food and shrinks were still very much fringe things. He must have found that hard, because he had to try and keep himself together on his own.’
At Cambridge, a mere three years before, Nick was fastidious about his nails because of his guitar-playing – Paul Wheeler laughed when he remembered that Nick would never do the washing-up because it might damage his nails. In London, by early 1972, Linda Thompson noticed that Nick’s nails had grown so long that it was hard to imagine he would ever play the guitar again.
It was Nick’s parents more than anyone who bore the brunt of their son’s depression. When he was back at home in Tanworth, Rodney and Molly Drake were the only people he saw regularly, and it was they who watched his tragic decline in his last three years. Rodney: ‘God knows where the depression came from … The experts didn’t seem to know much about it, because he did agree to go and see some very eminent people … and they didn’t seem to know what was wrong with him. They gave him pills to take, one of which, of course, was the cause of his death, and they did seem to help him, these pills.’
Molly: ‘Hampstead was the beginning … He took this room, all alone, and he decided to cut off from all his friends, and that he was just going to concentrate on music. He had a tremendous number of friends and at one stage he was very gregarious almost, and then he suddenly said this is no good, and he went off to Hampstead, which was where he started to get so depressed, and that was when we really started to get so terribly worried about him.’
Rodney: ‘He was depressed about the world … I think he thought deeply about things, but he couldn’t talk to us about it… He did feel that everything was going in the wrong direction … He always thought 1980 was going to be the time …’
His parents were sad, but not surprised that they could not communicate with their son. But even his contemporaries were unable to get through to him. Iain Dunn had lost touch with Nick after he left Cambridge early to record his debut album, but kept buying the records of the boy he remembered playing his songs in college rooms: ‘You could tell in the music as well, as soon as Pink Moon came out, you thought, this is … desperate. Most of the intelligence I got back was from Paul [Wheeler], who was still seeing him quite a lot, and was desperately, desperately worried.
‘I think an awful lot of people got their brains severely fried at that time, because most people didn’t really know what they were taking. All they really knew was that it felt good. I remember after leaving college and getting my first flat, sharing with some guys who worked on the NME… I mean I was the only person there who knew what time of day it was … People matured a lot later in those days, even by the time you went up to university, you didn’t really know what was going on in life. So you were coming to terms with all that; huge changes going on in society; this vast ingestion of all kinds of illegal substances … I don’t think Nick was alone in having his brains done in by this … cocktail. I think there were a lot of people who were just as badly affected; unfortunately for him it was far more severe in terms of where it went.’
On 3 September 1971 John Lennon and Yoko Ono left Britain for New York. Lennon was never to return. For the last two years, the couple’s home had been at Tittenhurst Park, a Georgian house on a sprawling seventy-two-acre estate near Ascot. Lennon’s personal assistants there were Nick’s friend from Cambridge, Paul Wheeler, and his then wife, Dian
a.
Tittenhurst Park played a substantial role in Lennon’s last years in the UK. It was in the grounds there, on 22 August 1969, that the four Beatles gathered for what proved to be their final photo session. During early 1971 the Lennons had much of the ground floor gutted, and it was there, during the course of one week in July, in one enormous white room, that Lennon recorded his best-loved solo album, Imagine.
After the Lennons moved out, Ringo bought the house, and when he in turn moved out in the late eighties, Tittenhurst became a recording studio. Set amid landscaped gardens, the house was everything you would expect of the sixties rock-star aristocracy. From the master bedroom, you looked out over lawns which descended like an enormous green staircase to the sweep of cedars for which the property was famous before the Lennons’ occupancy. Next to the window were a pair of switches for turning on the garden lights; rather touchingly, one was labelled ‘John’, the other ‘Yoko’.
The Lennons’ departure was connected with the long-running custody battle for Yoko’s daughter Kyoko, and there was every reason to believe that they would return to live in verdant Royal Berkshire. While Paul and Diana Wheeler were in residence, Tittenhurst – like Charles Foster Kane’s Xanadu – was kept in a state of permanent readiness in case the whim of the master and mistress dictated a swift return. It was during this time of limbo that Nick visited Paul Wheeler there.
Another Cambridge visitor to Tittenhurst was Brian Wells, who was still studying to be a doctor: ‘We used to eat cannabis, I was getting this cannabis extract… and we’d put it into cookies and eat this stuff, and wander round the arboretum. There was all this Beatles memorabilia – the statues from the cover of Sgt Pepper, the Pepper uniforms and in John and Yoko’s bedroom there was a wall of Rickenbacker guitars. I said: “Oh, there’s John Lennon’s Rickenbacker”, and some guy said come and see this – and there’s a whole wall of them!’
Nick Drake Page 23