Paul Wheeler remembers Nick being impressed by Lennon’s work even before he visited the house: ‘I remember when he wrote “Cold Turkey” late in ’69, Nick heard it and said what an amazing thing to do, to write about that … it’s a really tough song. And I was quite surprised to hear Nick saying it was a really interesting thing to do, because I didn’t associate Nick with that kind of pain.’
There is a striking incongruity in the image of Nick Drake stalking the corridors of Tittenhurst during 1971. From an early age Nick had been no stranger to home comforts, but surely even he would have been impressed by the opulence on display. The long corridors gleamed with gold records. The interior was so white that a casual visitor might have imagined he had strayed into an asylum – even the grand piano was white. No noise intruded. Here was the tranquillity of Tanworth and the beguiling other-worldliness of Cambridge, but on a scale which mere mortals could barely comprehend.
With record sales that scarcely registered, a career that hardly merited the name, and a darkness which seemed set to fill his horizons, Nick Drake wandered around the empty mansion of a millionaire rock icon who would never return.
‘John and Yoko had gone,’ Paul Wheeler recalls, ‘and Nick seemed to fit in with the “ghost house” image of Tittenhurst, the empty palace. It always stuck in my mind as an allegory of the times, this abandoned estate … They hadn’t definitely gone for ever, which is why we were still there, they could have come back any day. When he came to see us in Ascot, there were people he met there who were fascinated by him, by his presence. “Who is this guy?” He had very, very strong presence. There is this idea that he was just this shimmering, ghost … No, no.’
Fashionable as it has become to seek out conspiracy theories to explain Nick Drake’s lack of success during his lifetime, at a distance of twenty-five years you gain a perspective lacking at the time. By 1972, Island Records were enjoying their most successful year ever. Island had been very much an album-based label in the late sixties, but they had made the transition and were now making substantial inroads into the pop charts, selling singles to teenagers.
Some may feel uncomfortable remembering just how popular Cat Stevens was at his peak. Now, as Yusuf Islam, he is best known for condoning the fatwa passed on British author Salman Rushdie in 1989; but during the early 1970s he released a series of compelling and enormously popular albums which came to epitomize the sweeping appeal of the introspective singer-songwriter.
David Betteridge remembers Island being bullish about their chances in the American market at the beginning of the 1970s: ‘In the States, Traffic went out on United Artists; Free and Cat Stevens went out on A&M, we were placing act by act, which is why Nick finished up on Warners.’
Asylum Records founder David Geffen was known to be a fan of Nick’s work, and was keen to ensure Nick’s product was available for the American market. Geffen knew a thing or two about promising singer-songwriters, having graduated from the post room of the William Morris Agency to manage Laura Nyro, Joni Mitchell, Jackson Browne and Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young. With Asylum, Geffen had championed Tom Waits, David Blue and Judee Sill. He thought Nick’s records were ‘fabulous … I thought Nick Drake should have been a star, and that I could help him.’
Only a compilation of the first two albums – imaginatively titled Nick Drake – was released in America during Nick’s lifetime. The cover was the ‘running man’ shot from the back sleeve of Five Leaves Left and the album garnered a glowing review from Stephen Holden in Rolling Stone of 27 April 1972: ‘British singer-songwriter Nick Drake’s American debut album is a beautiful and decadent record. A triumph of eclecticism, it successfully brings together varied elements of the evolution of urban folk rock music during the past five years. An incredibly slick sound that is highly dependent on production values (credit Joe Boyd) to achieve its effects, its dreamlike quality calls up the very best of early Sixties’ jazz-pop ballad. It combines this with the contemporary introspection of British folk rock to evoke a hypnotic spell of opiated languor …’
Holden went on to draw the inevitable Cat Stevens and Astral Weeks comparisons, picked out Nick’s ‘softly seductive’ singing and his ‘densely textured guitar’ and suggested a ‘head cocktail … in a pool of sweet liqueur after a couple of downs and a few tokes’. Asking if this could be ‘the Muzak of 1984’, Holden goes on to find similarities with the work of Donovan and Astrud Gilberto, before concluding: ‘Drake’s greatest weakness – one he shares with all too many of today’s male lyric troubadors, especially those from England – is the lack of verbal force in his song lyrics, which by and large could be characterized as art nouveau. In the case of Drake, this is less serious a liability than it is for the artists who are more up front vocally. The beauty of Drake’s voice is its own justification. May it become familiar to us all.’
Unfortunately, Nick’s resistance to gigging even wrecked his chances of making it across the Atlantic, for as David Betteridge pointed out: ‘Generally speaking, you’ve got to break it in your own territory before you can break an act overseas … and touring was the way to do that.’
So if Nick hadn’t been so shy and hadn’t so obviously hated live performance, the plan would have been to release his records in America, tied in with a prestige showcase gig around the time of release, at the Troubador in LA, or New York’s Bottom Line, and then to land him some prestige support slot with, say, Carole King or James Taylor, where he could reach an audience sympathetic to his sort of music? ‘Yes, precisely. That’s exactly the way it worked. But not with Nick.’
Peter Buck thought back to being a teenager growing up in Athens, Georgia, and remembered just how little Nick was appreciated in America then: ‘I don’t think Nick’s albums came out here in the States while he was alive, and if they did nobody reviewed them, but then journalists, particularly music journalists, are great ones for rewriting history. Everyone says: “Oh yeah, Exile On Main Street is THE Stones album”, but you go back to the original reviews of 1972, and they’re all “Well, Side Two doesn’t rock”, “It’s kind of a muddy sound” … Go look for a review of the first Velvet Underground album, everyone thought they were these circus freaks from New York. At best they were irrelevant, at worst, a total con job, junkies, Andy Warhol’s puppets. If today’s journalists went back to 1968 and said: “We’re from the future, we’re going to tell you the names of the important artists – James Brown and The Velvet Underground” – they would all drop fucking dead.’
In his essay which accompanied the posthumous Fruit Tree box set, Arthur Lubow wrote of Nick Drake’s American launch: ‘When a compilation album was released in the US … the reception at the Troubador featured a cardboard cut out of Nick on stage as the record played. If he wouldn’t tour, perhaps his reclusiveness could be commercial.’
The fifteen months which separated the release of Nick’s second and third albums was the period of the most marked decline in his health and state of mind. Still living alone in Haverstock Hill, Nick was drawing further inward, curling up foetus-like in his own world, a world bordered by the four walls of his room.
Brian Wells: ‘He never said: “I’m utterly pissed off and I wish I’d sold more records”, you know – that wasn’t cool. I think he was very aware of what was cool, and I think he found safety in actually appearing to be withdrawn. And I think he was quite uncomfortable around people. In Cambridge he wasn’t one for sitting round and just shooting the shit. It would run out of steam, and then he would look nervous, and then say, right, I’ve got to go. And you knew that he wasn’t going to anything. He just wanted to withdraw from the situation. That went on in Cambridge, and I think became more and more the norm for him. I think he would withdraw from situations, but still feel awkward having done so. And he’d go back to his room on Haverstock Hill and stare at the wall for ages … A guy called Rick Charkin went to Morocco with Nick before Cambridge, and he once said to me that he went round to see Nick in Haverstock Hill, rang the bell and
no one answered, so he went round the back and there was Nick in his room staring at the wall, just not answering the front door …’
A record as bleak and initially intimidating as Pink Moon was never going to get radio play, aside from the odd spin on John Peel’s late-night Radio 1 show; and with Nick refusing to perform live, the chances of anyone even being aware of the existence of the third album grew more and more remote.
Linda Thompson: ‘I saw him around the time of Pink Moon, we were doing Bright Lights around that time. We were both in the same studio. Nick did those sessions very late at night, so he’d be going into the studio as we were coming out … I would grab him and tickle him, but he was … incommunicado.
‘Sound Techniques itself was fairly big … You walked in, and you went up a very windy staircase, and then there was a big studio, a big ground-floor studio, the control room was set up, so that you could look down into the studio. Then you went up some more windy steps to the kitchen. It was a lovely studio, in two parts, a front part and a back part; mostly they used to do vocals in the back part. Nick liked that studio. He was always very close to John Wood. John had a sixth sense about what you wanted for the record.’
Trevor Dann was still at Cambridge when Nick’s final album was released, and remembers how uneasily its sombre mood sat with the times: ‘Pink Moon I didn’t care much for when it came out. I’d gone all Mahavishnu Orchestra, if I wanted to be cerebral, and Roxy Music if I wanted to dance, and Pink Moon was just so bleak. The other bloke of my acquaintance who was completely besotted by Nick Drake was another guy from my school, Dick Taylor, who was also at Cambridge, and we used to spend nights arguing which was his best record. Dick would always plump for Pink Moon, ‘cos it was the darkest, the most in touch with the psyche. Dick was a fairly boisterous, rather upper-class bloke, the same age as me, and when he was thirty-eight he shot himself. I hadn’t seen him for ten or fifteen years, I had no idea what had been going on, but almost my first thought about it was – Nick Drake! That Dick had been so obsessed by that really dark stuff.’
To their credit, Island had not given up all hope. Garrell Redfearn was a young assistant to Muff Winwood in radio promotion, who remembers being dispatched to Hampstead to try to interest their most retiring act into doing something, anything, to help awaken interest in his new album. The idea was to get Nick along to the BBC’s Maida Vale studios – where he had gone in such high spirits barely two and a half years before – to record a session plugging Pink Moon on one of the nightly Sounds Of The Seventies programmes. One day during the early part of 1972 Garrell went along to Haverstock Hill. He was one of the last people from Island ever to see Nick Drake: ‘By broadcasting a session, you could get more than one track played from an album, maybe three or four in one broadcast. As he was known to be very difficult about performing at that stage, and I can’t quite remember why, maybe because we were about the same age … I was asked to see if I could chat to him and persuade him to do a session. I think it was a request from one of the producers to try and get him on.
‘I went along to the big, old run-down house on Haverstock Hill, the bottom end, near to Chalk Farm Tube … I don’t think he said an absolute no, but we never did get him into the studio again. I remember the flat being extremely grotty: tatty, filthy bits of fabric covering the windows as curtains, keeping the light out. All dark inside … There was a big, heavy, old Victorian sideboard. It was on the ground floor, as far as I remember. It wasn’t a bedsit, because he’d got up and out of bed to let me in, and the bed wasn’t in the room that we sat in.
‘He sat in a chair with very long hair, head down, hair falling over his face so I couldn’t even really see his face. A few mumbled responses. He wasn’t being difficult or unpleasant, he really just had difficulty talking to anyone, just making that contact. I just explained the situation, how it would really help if we could get him to do a session because it would mean a lot more exposure for the album … He said something like “I don’t think so at the moment, maybe in the future” type of thing.
‘It was almost down to nods and shakes of the head, grunts. I remember saying to him: “Do you want the album to sell?” … It seemed illogical to me that you take all this trouble to record your music and you don’t make any effort to try and help it get exposure, for people to hear it. But I think he may have got to a stage where … if it was important, it wasn’t important enough for him to overcome whatever the inhibitions were that stopped him performing and promoting it.’
Alone and isolated, Nick rarely left his hideaway. He would venture out occasionally, but otherwise he waited, and let the world come to him. And waited. And waited. With no involvement on Nick’s third album, and his own career as an arranger burgeoning, Robert Kirby had seen less of his friend since the release of Bryter Layter. But he was quite used to Nick just turning up, a silent visitor: ‘I think Nick regarded groups of people and places as bolt-holes. After I left Cambridge, I lived for a long time in Cranley Gardens in Muswell Hill. Nick lived on Haverstock Hill, and then towards the end – his very last place in London – was a very grim bedsit on Muswell Hill Road. It was only about 100 yards from where I lived. That was very grim …
‘He would arrive at all hours, quite unannounced, totally unexpected. He’d stay for one day. One week … And then he’d be gone. Then you’d find out he had gone to John Wood’s house, out in Mildenhall in Suffolk. He’d stay there. Then you’d find he’d gone home. Then you’d find he was staying somewhere near Brian [Wells] … and I’m sure there were other totally independent groups of friends that we didn’t know anything about at all. I think he did compartmentalize them a bit. Maybe by the time he got bored with one group he’d move on.’
Molly Drake attributed Nick’s decline to the solitary years spent living in and around Hampstead: ‘He once said to me that everything started to go wrong from the Hampstead time on.’
‘His parents were wholly supportive the whole of the time,’ Robert Kirby recalled. ‘I was never privy to the family at home, but the phone calls that I had from the dad were … “Have you seen Nick? Don’t get him. Don’t tell him I called, but is he all right?”
‘I think underneath it all, Nick did have a hankering that maybe he should have got a proper job … He did try to please his father. But I didn’t believe that his father pressured him. I remember when his father got him this job working in computers in London, and Nick disappeared, his father phoned quite distraught. “Have you seen him? Ask him to get in touch. Can you try and help?”
‘I feel elements of guilt about not doing more … I was always very overawed by Nick. I always admired him, looked up to him, and so if he wasn’t saying anything, I said to myself: “This is what a genius does.” The first thought wasn’t, oh, he’s ill …’
A particularly painful glimpse of Nick Drake’s decline was provided by Nick Kent. Probably best known as the chronicler of excess during those sybaritic seventies, Kent never met Nick, never saw him perform, but was captivated by the three albums. ‘Requiem For A Solitary Man’, his NME piece about Nick, appeared in 1975 and some years later he got John Martyn to talk about their friendship: ‘I met Martyn, and he was very emotional about the whole thing – you know he wrote that song “Solid Air” – and I tried to get him to sit down and talk on the tape about it, but he was very close to tears whenever the subject was brought up. It was an incredibly emotional thing for him, and so what he did was he said: “I’m going to take you to some friends of Nick’s. I’m going to take you to a place in London. I’m going to introduce you to some friends of Nick Drake’s who knew him up to the end, and you can make up your own mind there.”
‘He took me to this place in Ladbroke Grove, which was kind of a squat. It was not a particularly pleasant place to be in. And these people were mostly … they were all drug addicts … they weren’t heroin addicts, but they had barbiturate problems. They were good people who’d had a bad time with drugs. They basically just told me this story: Ni
ck would come round to their place a lot, and he would just sit there. He wasn’t a drug addict. He wasn’t a big druggie himself. But my understanding was that he had been involved to some degree with obviously smoking dope, and taking acid, not a lot … and these things had turned him. The whole thing had turned him.
‘And what I remember is that there was a woman there who seemed to know him very well, and she spoke very, very affectionately about him … It’s awfully, awfully sad. The thing that she said to me … I just started crying when she said it, because she said he came round to this flat three days before he died, and he said to these people: “You remember me. You remember me how I was. Tell me how I was. I used to have a brain. I used to be somebody. What happened to me? What happened to me?”’
Chapter 14
Muddled and muffled by the anti-depressants as he now was, his career non-existent, and with little hope left for the future, it is hard to imagine what it must have taken to make Nick Drake return to the recording studio. At a time when it seemed to everyone who saw him that he was quite, quite lost, from somewhere deep within himself he found the impulse to write and record again.
In 1994 Joe Boyd cast his mind back twenty years and told me about his memories of Nick’s final recording session: ‘He came to see me when I was in London and he was in a terrible state. That’s when he blurted out a kind of… a direct version of the lyrics of “Hanging On A Star”, which were basically his bitterness and his anger about not having enough money and not having sold enough records, and everybody says he’s so great, but if he’s so great, why is he broke and unrecognized? He couldn’t understand it, he felt very aggrieved about it. I was astonished, because he’d never expressed any anger to me about anything …
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