Nick Drake

by Patrick Humphries

  The twenty-fourth was a Sunday, the day of rest. It seemed for ever autumn, for around Tanworth the lightly rising Warwickshire hills kept the worst of the wind at bay. Over to the east, the countryside around Cambridge was flat and exposed; the wind whipping off the North Sea came all the way from Russia, the Fenland residents boasted. Tanworth was spared the worst excesses of the English winter, but with less than a month to go until the shortest day, the days were already dark. That November Sunday the sun rose at 7.46 in the morning and had set by 4.04 in the glowering afternoon. It didn’t leave much opportunity for daylight to shine through. The Birmingham Post’s weather forecast for that day was: ‘cloudy with rain. Some bright intervals’. In meteorological terms, brighter later …

  Sunday in England was always a dull day. A vague feeling of tasks left undone or a reluctant return to work the next day, the paucity of diversion, everything closed: a typical English Sunday in the late November of 1974. Radio 1 had been up and running for seven years, but was still forced to split its programming with Radio 2. That day on ‘the nation’s favourite pop station’ Between 5 and 6p.m., it was My Top 12 with Uri Geller. Manfred Mann’s Earth Band were in concert in Sounds On Sunday, then between 7.30 and 10 it was ‘as Radio 2’, before Radio 1 returned to close with two hours of jazz.

  The Drakes’ local commercial channel, ATV, broadcasting from Birmingham, began its mid-evening programming with the lachrymose Stars On Sunday at 7p.m. (Joseph Cotten and Moira Anderson were the special guests). There was a film, The Professionals, at 8.20, and at 10.45 jazzman turned critic Benny Green hosted Cinema, reviewing the week’s big film, an all-star version of Agatha Christie’s Murder On The Orient Express. A rerun of Marcus Welby MD ended ATV’s evening schedule.

  BBC1 was dominated by nearly three hours of The Royal Variety Show, boasting the timeless talents of Perry Como, Roy Castle and Paper Lace. There was an Omnibus profile of the author Jean Rhys at 10.10p.m., followed by Christopher Chataway talking to the head of British Steel. Closedown came at 11.35. BBC2 began its evening with the natural history series The World About Us, followed by a screening of the film The Asphalt Jungle. Broadcasting ended at 12.15, with a reading of Dylan Thomas’s poem ‘Fern Hill’: ‘Oh as I was young and easy in the mercy of his means, Time held me green and dying, Though I sang in my chains like the sea’ …

  ‘He went up to bed rather early,’ Molly Drake remembered in a 1979 interview for Dutch radio. ‘I remember him standing at that door, and I said to him: “Are you off to bed, Nick?” I can just see him now, because that’s the last time I ever saw him alive.’

  No one will ever know what thoughts went through Nick Drake’s mind in the long and solitary, dark hours before dawn. Both Rodney and Molly said that they would not have been surprised had Nick committed suicide some months before, but in recent weeks he had seemed happier. More than anyone else, his parents observed the ebbs and flows of his life.

  The world spun on. National and local news continued to be dominated by the killing of seventeen people by IRA bombs which had destroyed two pubs in the centre of Birmingham the previous Sunday. The Prime Minister of the recently elected Labour government was Harold Wilson. The police were ‘anxious to interview’ Lord Lucan about the murder of his nanny. Helen Morgan, who was briefly 1974’s Miss World, was forced to stand down when it was discovered that she was an unmarried mother.

  Conservative middle England opened their copies of the Daily Telegraph at breakfast on 25 November 1974 and noted that there was ‘Support for Mrs Thatcher as leader’; MP John Stonehouse was still missing; following the Birmingham bombings, Home Secretary Roy Jenkins had banned the IRA; Cornelius Ryan, author of The Longest Day, had died; and in Cambridge students had thwarted ‘left-wing manipulators’, with student leaders calling it ‘a vote of confidence for moderation’.

  ‘He didn’t often get up early – he sometimes had very bad nights,’ Molly Drake remembered, ‘and I never used to disturb him at all. But it was about 12 o’clock, and I went in, because really it seemed it was time he got up, and he was lying across the bed. The first thing I saw was his long, long legs …’

  Nick was prone to sleepless nights, frequently prowling the house in the small hours. His mother, alert to his movements, would often get up and sit with him in the kitchen until he returned to bed. But that night, when Nick woke and went down to the kitchen, Molly slept on. He had a bowl of cornflakes, then returned to his room. Sometime before dawn on the morning of Monday 25 November 1974 – probably around 6a.m. – the extra Tryptizol he had taken that night caused Nick Drake’s heart to stop beating.

  An announcement in the Birmingham Post on 28 November read: ‘DRAKE – On November 25 Nicholas Rodney (Nick) aged 26 years, beloved son of Rodney & Molly, dearest brother of Gabrielle. Funeral service Tanworth-in-Arden Church on Monday December 2 at 12.15 p.m. No flowers please.’

  The funeral took place at the church Nick had known all his life. Canon E. Willmott, who himself lies buried in St Mary Magdalene’s graveyard, conducted the service, and afterwards the body was taken seven miles to Solihull Crematorium, where the mortal remains of Nicholas Rodney Drake were consumed by fire.

  Rodney: ‘Of course we thought the fact that he couldn’t communicate with us was possibly something to do with the generation gap and all that… his world and our world, which he used to talk about occasionally. But when the sad day of his funeral came, a lot of his young friends came up here, we’d never met many of them. They were wonderful people, and they all said to a man really, in effect, that it really wasn’t anything to do with you – we were just the same, we could never get through to him either.’

  Molly: ‘They said he just went away into a world where none of us could reach him.’

  Rodney: ‘There was a very close friend called Brian Wells …’

  Molly: ‘I think he was closer to Nick than almost anybody, but he couldn’t really get through to Nick’.

  Brian Wells: ‘I missed the actual funeral. We got to Tanworth just as everyone was coming out of the church. There was Gabrielle in the doorway of the church as everyone was leaving. So we followed everyone else to the crematorium … and then went back to Far Leys afterwards, where there were all these different people, from Marlborough or wherever. The only one I knew was Robert Kirby … Rodney gave me Nick’s guitar at that post-funeral thing. There were about fifty people there, none of whom seemed to know each other.’

  Nick’s funeral was the first, and final, occasion when all the diverse strands of his life were drawn together. Gathered at Tanworth that December day were friends from school, university and the music industry, all gathered to remember the boy who had barely had time to become a man.

  Anthea Joseph stayed away: ‘I didn’t go to the funeral, but Joe went. I’d had enough of funerals by that point. I just felt that Nick had had enough of this life, which was not getting any better. Again, maybe if, if, if … some shrink had got hold of him, sorted him out, but it was physical as well as mental. You know, he was let free.’

  Chapter 17

  Rodney Drake had been sufficiently worried about Nick to write to his friend and erstwhile family doctor before Nick’s death, asking for advice. On the first day of the new year, barely five weeks after his son had died, Rodney Drake wrote another letter to my uncle, James Lusk, thanking him for his opinion and breaking the sad news of Nick’s death.

  Written in fountain pen on Far Leys headed paper, Rodney’s letter is dated 1 January 1974, although he wrote it on New Year’s Day 1975 a common enough mistake to make with your first letter of the year. The first part of the letter reads:

  My dear Lusko,

  Thank you so very much for your most interesting letter and for the time and trouble you took to give us such a helpful opinion about Nick.

  I am very sorry to say that we have lost poor Nick. On the morning of November 25th Molly went in to his room to wake him as it was nearly midday and found him collapsed across his bed and the doctor w
hen he came said he must have been dead for six hours or more.

  The cause of death was given as an over dose of tryptizol which was one of the three things he was taking on prescription the other two being stelazine and disipal. You can imagine what a stark and numbing tragedy this has been for us both and of course a dreadful shock for Molly finding him. What made it even worse was that he had seemed so much better during the previous two months; he had been staying with some very kind and understanding friends in Paris where he had seemed to be happy for the first time in three years and after he came back he had been talking about getting back to his music. He had seemed quite all right the night before when he went to bed fairly early but the next morning there were signs that he had had a bad night (as he sometimes did) because he had obviously been down to the kitchen some time and had some cornflakes. More often than not when this sort of thing happened Molly used to wake up and go down to talk to him but alas on this occasion neither of us woke. However we didn’t think anything of it at first and left him to sleep late. It must have been done on impulse in the early hours of the morning and, as I said, he was lying right across the bed on top of the bedclothes.

  There had been a time a year ago or more when we had feared that something of this sort might happen (when he was really badly depressed) and anyway we always kept sleeping pills and aspirins locked up. I’m afraid we had not realised that tryptizol was dangerous and we’re not sure that Nick did either but he certainly did take a heavy dose according to the pathologist.

  So now we’re trying to come to terms with what’s happened and of course it is some comfort to know that all the suffering we’ve watched Nick go through over the past three years is now over for him and perhaps it is really the best thing for him.

  We have had some remarkable tributes about his music from various quarters. There was a very long article in a magazine about three months ago and his name was mentioned in an article in a recent issue of the Listener and this three years after he has produced anything. He told me once that music was running through his head all the time and I think that recently the fact that he could no longer produce it was one of the main causes of his unhappiness.

  I’m afraid I have written rather a lot to you on this sad subject but I was encouraged to do so by your very sympathetic response to my last letter and it is nice to unburden oneself to an old friend particularly when he happens to have been one’s family doctor as well!

  The letter continues for several pages, with news of Gabrielle and other family members as well as ‘the ex Burma brigade’, and poignant details of Rodney and Molly’s saddest Christmas, spent with friends ‘the first Christmas we have been away for many years’. Finally, after offering warm congratulations on the birth of a third Lusk grandson, it concludes:

  ‘Molly and I send our love to you both and thanks again so much for all you wrote about Nick.

  ‘Ever, Rodney’.

  An inquest into Nick’s death was held on 18 December 1974, after which H. Stephen Tibbits, Coroner for the Southern District of Warwickshire, recorded a verdict of suicide, with the cause of death given as ‘acute Amitriptyline poisoning self administered when suffering from a depressive illness’. Unable to obtain a certificate of his son’s death until after the Coroner’s inquest, it fell to Rodney to officially register, on Christmas Eve 1974, the death of ‘Nicholas Rodney Drake, Musician’.

  The verdict of suicide was challenged by Nick Kent in his piece for the NME which appeared in February 1975; and has subsequently been vehemently disputed by many people. Gabrielle Drake, however, is less certain; talking to Kris Kirk in Melody Maker in 1987, she explained: ‘I personally prefer to think Nick committed suicide, in the sense that I’d rather he died because he wanted to end it than it to be the result of a tragic mistake. That would seem to me to be terrible: for it to be a plea for help that nobody hears.’

  No one will ever know what sad, solitary thoughts preoccupied Nick during his final hours on earth, or what misery and corrosive unhappiness he took with him to the grave. Even the facts of the matter remain stubbornly elusive; the number of Tryptizol he took that night has been variously estimated as anything from three to thirty tablets, neither figure apparently based on any hard evidence – though the tone of Rodney’s letter would suggest that a fairly large dose was taken. Curiously, Coroners’ reports are not a matter of public record, and the relevant document may not even have been kept this long.

  It is easy to get caught up in attempting to understand what went through Nick’s mind that night, trying to guess whether it was a bleary, befuddled accident; a rash impulse with little thought for the consequences or the future; or a deliberate, calculated decision to gain control over something which he perceived as spinning, slowly and pointlessly, out of control. The absence of a suicide note only poses more questions. But Nick’s Cambridge contemporary Brian Wells, now a consultant psychiatrist specializing in substance misuse and addictive illnesses, makes a very powerful case for focusing purely on the intent, when trying to decide whether the overdose was deliberately suicidal: ‘Personally, I don’t think he had the kind of depressive illness that should have been treated with anti-depressants; and secondly, I don’t think Nick would have … you don’t commit suicide … I think this was an impulsive episode, one night, frustrated, probably didn’t sleep very well, took a few, took a few more, thought, fuck it, took a few more.

  ‘Tryptizol is an anti-depressant, but it’s a sedative as well, and I think he was taking it to help him sleep … If he wanted to kill himself … I don’t think he would have done it at home. I think he would have buggered off somewhere. I think if he had wanted to kill himself, he would have driven somewhere and put a hose into his car. Or he would have rung me up and said: “What could I take?” He wouldn’t have taken an overdose of Tryptizol, which he had no way of knowing was potentially fatal, at home, one night. This wasn’t a premeditated suicide, this was an impulsive guy, can’t get to sleep …

  ‘I can see it: “Oh, who gives a bugger if I don’t wake up?” kind of thing. You’re a bit stoned, a bit what the hell. That’s not somebody with suicidal intent. And a coroner should only diagnose suicide in somebody who’s had suicidal intent… I intend to kill myself: that’s suicide. Somebody who accidentally takes an overdose of pills, that’s not suicide. You diagnose murder and suicide by the degree of intent, and I really dispute that there was intent there.’

  I spoke to journalist Nick Kent, who was one of the first to dispute the suicide verdict but was also intrigued by the drug connection in Nick Drake’s life. In the seventies Kent was as much of a star as the people he was writing about. No stranger to the dual addictions of rock ‘n’ roll and drugs, to get close to the fire Kent zonked out with Keith Richards and Jimmy Page. He danced with the Devil, with a short spoon. For all his dark stuff, Kent had a conduit to the lost and the wasted, the withdrawn and the mislaid. Like Syd Barrett and Brian Wilson. And Nick Drake. ‘I’ve taken Tryptizol,’ he said. ‘I’ve taken them once, and they are horrible, horrible drugs, almost overdosed on them, a doctor gave them to me when I was trying to get off heroin once, and I took two and they almost turned me into a zombie for about seventy-two hours, just two of these things. They were supposed to calm you out… but they turned you into a brain-dead zombie. Just taking one or two could do that to you …’

  That Nick Drake died so young is a terrible tragedy; not just because of who he was, but because of what he might have become. The potential of all those years left unlived. But what made the waste even more unbearable for those left behind was the shaft of hope which came immediately before his death, a brief, shining moment of buoyancy which had hinted at a return of the old Nick. In the end, of course, only Nick really knew what happened that night, and that knowledge died with him.

  The death of Nick Drake made little impact on the world outside Tanworth-in-Arden. Friends from Marlborough and Cambridge had scattered, and many were not aware for months that he had died. But
few were truly surprised when they heard; most had chill memories of the last time they had seen him, transformed from the shy, smiling friend to a hunched, withdrawn spectre with whom they could no longer communicate.

  Nick’s old colleague from Marlborough’s C1 House, Arthur Packard, told me: ‘My memories of Nick were very happy, but when I learned his life ended in tragedy I won’t say I fell off my chair in surprise. Nick was always … you felt there was a very reflective, pensive mode to his psyche. While he joined in the fun and the laughter, he was always a little apart from the crowd.’

  Paul Wheeler: ‘I don’t remember the last time I saw Nick, because you don’t think, this is the last time I’m going to see Nick … But 1974, when Nick died, was, I thought, a crashing point for loads of people. That was like the end of the dream. I have a personal thing, that my son was born on the day that Nick died. He was called Benjamin Nicholas Wheeler, after Nick …’

  Iain Cameron, who, like Paul Wheeler, had known Nick at Cambridge, also recalled the anticlimactic air of the 1970s: ‘I get Pink Moon, and he dies, and I try to make sense of that to myself. And what I see at that time is … like everyone’s having trouble, a lot of people who were at Cambridge at the time … It was more like a cultural trajectory, so you have the optimism, the floweriness of the late sixties, and then people are trying to make it work, and can’t really get it to hang together. It all got very grimy in the mid-seventies. We were a gilded, protected generation. Just look at Cambridge: you’ve got this wonderful built environment, loads of intelligent and articulate people all wafting around. No wonder people managed to write quite well in that environment.’

  David Wright, who had taught Nick his first chords on the guitar at Marlborough, and with whom Nick had planned to journey round the world, recalled the last time he had seen Nick: ‘That time at the Roundhouse, he was stoned, he wasn’t quite with us. I remember thinking at the time, the image which has never actually left me … I remember not being terribly surprised when my father told me that he had died. I remember thinking, oh Christ, the music business has got him …’