Nick Drake

by Patrick Humphries

  Linda Thompson was another who was not surprised when the news of Nick’s death was broken to her: ‘The last time I saw him he was looking really awful. Those incredibly long fingernails. He couldn’t possibly play the guitar, which was maybe why he did it. He couldn’t have played at all. He was filthy, like a hobo really. I wasn’t surprised when Nick died … He looked at death’s door for a long, long time. I don’t know how you can live through life not speaking to anybody. It was really a downward spiral… It was very sad, there was obviously this extraordinary talent, but also this inability to deal with life.’

  The industry which had offered Nick Drake something resembling a career was even less surprised. High-profile rock ‘n’ roll casualties were no longer unexpected; by 1974, Brian Jones, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Jim Morrison, Duane Allman, Gene Vincent and Gram Parsons had already gone.

  Ralph McTell: ‘I wasn’t at all surprised when I heard he died. Not at all. The illness, the going deeper and deeper into himself, only having his back photographed for his albums. I had a family by then, two kids, and when I heard I just thought, you poor sod. I hadn’t seen him, but I knew he’d got more and more dependent on mind-controlling stuff … and more or less vanished.’

  Zig Zag’s Pete Frame remembers: ‘At that time you kind of got used to rock stars dying, in a sense it was part of the trip. It used to happen with alarming regularity.’ In January 1975 Zig Zag carried a heartfelt piece by David Sandison, Nick’s press officer at Island, entitled ‘Nick Drake: The Final Retreat’, which began: ‘The amount of coverage Nick Drake’s death had in the weekly musical comics just about sums it all up really. Jerry Gilbert did a beautiful piece for Sounds and they cut it down to half a dozen paragraphs. No-one else mentioned his departure with much more than a cursory nod of acknowledgement.

  ‘OK, so the guy did no more than a dozen gigs before more than 150 people, and they’d raised no ripple you’d notice. He released three albums in four years, and together they probably didn’t sell enough to cover the cost of one. What the hell do you want? front page in The Times? …

  ‘But. The biggest three-letter word in the dictionary, that. But Nick Drake was a lovely cat. But he wrote songs that’d tear your soul out if you relaxed for a second. But in a world full of bullshit, hype, glittery horrors with the talents of dead oxen and the integrity of starving rats, Nick Drake was a man of sincerity, an artist of tremendous calibre and one of the few entitled to be called unique. But what the hell do they care?’

  The Sounds piece to which Sandison refers, a quarter page by Jerry Gilbert headlined ‘Nick Drake: death of a “genius” ’, was the only contemporary obituary; it began: ‘Nick Drake died in his sleep two Sundays ago, leaving a legacy of three superb, stylised albums on the Island label. He had been ill – perhaps weary is a better expression – for some time, but at the time of his death his enthusiasm had never been as high, for he was totally immersed in the prospect of completing his fourth album.’ It ended by quoting Robert Kirby: ‘He was ready for death all right, I just think he’d had enough, there was no fight left in him. Yet I get the feeling that if he was going to commit suicide he would have done so a long time ago.’

  Talking to me more than twenty years after Nick’s death, Kirby was not alone among Nick’s friends in wishing he had done more to try to help, and regretting that he hadn’t fully recognized the depths to which Nick had sunk: ‘My memories looking back on Nick are predominantly happy, but stained with guilt and remorse that I didn’t do anything. But in 1974 I was twenty-six, and what can a twenty-six-year-old do to help someone like that?

  ‘There is a great element of guilt. I wish that between 1972 and 1974 I’d rung him up and said: “Are you working on anything?” And if he’d said: “Well yes, I’m working on this on my own”, I’d have said: “Well, can’t we try a few ideas and see if it works?” He would almost certainly have said yes, but I don’t think people ever pushed him because they always thought it was going to come from him, because they admired him so much.’

  The issue of Sounds, dated 14 December 1974, which carried Gilbert’s obituary, indicated just how far rock ‘n’ roll had travelled since Nick first set foot on the highway, and just how far removed he had become by the time of his death. It was now the era of Topographic Oceans, the progressive bombast of Yes, Genesis and ELP; the guitar flamboyance of Carlos Santana and Jan Akkerman; the still accessible David Bowie and the silky style of Roxy Music. It was not, and never had been, the time of Nick Drake.

  Rodney and Molly Drake continued living at Far Leys after Nick died, though after Rodney’s death in March 1988, Molly spent her last years at Orchard House, a smaller home, nearer the centre of the village. Canon Martin Tunnicliffe, who came to St Mary Magdalene in 1979, grew used to fans from around the world coming to the church and vicarage. Patiently, he would point out the grave, and encourage comments in the visitors’ book. On Sunday 20 November 1994 a memorial service was held at the church to mark the twentieth anniversary of Nick’s death. Molly had died in June the previous year, but the service was attended by Gabrielle, and a tape of some of Nick’s songs was played.

  As an artist, Nick Drake was thwarted during his lifetime; his glory came posthumously. The tapes of his parents speaking reveal undeniable pride in their voices as they talk of the young pilgrims who make their way to Tanworth, as well as their realization that Nick’s single-minded determination in pursuing his chosen career was justified. The tragedy is that it all came too late.

  Pete Frame: ‘I think he was the archetypal figure who was ignored in his lifetime, and his worth was only seen later. You have to remember that Them could have broken up, and Van Morrison could have gone back to Belfast to be a gas fitter or whatever he was. They had two albums out and split up, and nobody knew the name of Van Morrison. There wasn’t that kind of interest in rock history. That’s why Zig Zag was so unique, because we cared about the footnotes of rock history, which is what Nick Drake was. Because he wasn’t generating millions of dollars, people wouldn’t care so much.’

  How Nick’s life would have developed had he lived, is of course the question which continues to fascinate those who have grown to love his music. If he had conquered his depression, would he have wanted to write and record again? Would he ever have felt capable of returning to his former life? Indeed is it possible to imagine a life for Nick which didn’t involve music?

  When I asked Robert Kirby, long one of Nick’s closest friends, what he thought Nick might have done had he given up music, he told me: ‘He talked about literature when he wasn’t talking about music. In another life, I could have seen him running a very good publishing company … I think he would have been able to select potentially good writers.’ Kirby also confirmed that one of the strangest tales associated with Nick’s last years, a story I had always assumed to be apocryphal, had actually happened: ‘He told me he did go into an Army Recruitment Office. That’s absolutely true, he was quite seriously considering it. Funnily enough, if he’d decided to do that, he could have cut the mustard. If he had made that decision, he could have been officer material.’

  However disenchanted he was with the music business, however angry about his own lack of success, it is surely significant that just months before he died Nick Drake went into the recording studio again. Only four tracks were laid down in that session, but at the time they constituted the start of a new album. Nick may not have been pursuing his career with anything like the hope and enthusiasm which had marked his early years at Island, but he did still consider himself a musician. The prospect of negotiating a contract, a record deal, of being pushed out on tour to promote his records, all filled him with dread; but for all that, music was what he did.

  Molly remembered the trepidation which surrounded Nick’s last recordings: ‘Those four songs were supposed to be the beginning of another album … I remember finding a letter after he died from Joe Boyd saying that this was wonderful and that they’d got to have a proper contract,
and it was all rather businesslike, and I think it scared Nick to death.

  ‘I think he felt, I can’t really cope with this. Joe was obviously very anxious that he should make another record, but I think things had just become too much for him altogether. The idea of having to do all the business of another record, and all the contracts, I think it just was more at that stage than he could cope with.’

  David Sandison believes that sometime after Pink Moon, Nick’s deal with Island had lapsed and with it the weekly retainer. Whether this may in part have influenced his decision to return home is impossible to know. Certainly Island were still interested and Boyd was trying to interest Nick in renegotiating.

  Had Nick Drake survived, it is inconceivable to imagine him battling it out as support act to the new wave of British rock ‘n’ roll attractions. When Nick’s old Marlborough rival Chris De Burgh found himself in the unenviable position of opening solo for Supertramp soon after Nick’s death, he had to face the slings and arrows of outraged punters.

  It is possible to imagine Nick staying offstage, but continuing to function as a songwriter, supplying material to sympathetic acts, but even those who admire Nick’s work seem wary of covering his songs, perhaps because they are so very personal and so indelibly associated with their creator. There are precedents for an in-house lyricist (Keith Reid for Procol Harum, Pete Sinfield for King Crimson) and the role of ‘visiting genius’ was precisely what Pink Floyd initially envisaged for Syd Barrett, and the Beach Boys for Brian Wilson, though neither example was a spectacular success.

  As well as being impressed by Randy Newman’s debut album, Paul Wheeler remembers Nick’s admiration for Newman’s refusal to gig, and his awareness of Brian Wilson’s role in the Beach Boys: ‘That was definitely out of step with the John Martyn, Richard Thompson, up and down the Ml stuff. That concept of a private world, which had nothing to do with the stage, or the road, maybe that was more what Nick was relating to … But I could also understand why the road musicians would resent his lack of “paying his dues”. But Nick’s reluctance to gig could be seen as being ahead of its time, maybe it was the very mystique that attracted … Which is why we’re speaking now!’

  Chapter 18

  The fact that there is no film footage of Nick Drake performing undoubtedly feeds the myth. The photos – and there are few enough even of those – freeze-frame the image of Nick, shy and hesitant before the camera, capturing him for ever in the aspic of immortality: half-smiling at half-remembered memories.

  A rumour broke out in late 1997 that there was film of Nick Drake in existence. Not performing, but watching. In October 1970 James Taylor – then at his commercial zenith – was filmed in concert by BBC television; and there, so the rumour goes, in the audience, is Nick Drake. The timing fits, and, yes, that shadowy audience member could be Nick, but then, in London in 1970, there were an awful lot of young men who looked like Nick Drake.

  In the early seventies television outlets for performers like Nick were strictly limited: he was too arcane for Top Of The Pops, too obscure even for The Old Grey Whistle Test. But as we approach the millennium, we look to the moving image to provide veracity. Perhaps if we could see Nick move, he would seem more real, less iconic. Certainly the shock of hearing his drunken teenage voice causes pause; reality threatens to intrude.

  The idea that some fragment of Nick was caught inadvertently piques the imagination. Like the few precious seconds of moving film which captured the glee of a Dutch schoolgirl, caught by chance observing a wartime wedding in Amsterdam. There is nothing remarkable in the footage. She did not know she was being filmed: the amateur cameraman simply happened to sweep sky wards, and in so doing captured on film the only moving images of a teenager whom the whole world would one day know by name – Anne Frank.

  Megastores in every mall on every high street are full of the work of brooding, introspective singer-songwriters – though rather disconcertingly, the music which was once regarded as being on the cutting edge is now, often as not, filed away under ‘Easy Listening’. So why Nick Drake and not one of the many others? Just three albums released in his lifetime, a grand total of thirty-one tracks; even posthumously only nine new tracks have officially surfaced, and the widely available bootleg of home demos is largely cover versions. These are frail foundations upon which to build a myth. But built it is.

  Is it the pin-up appeal? But then pictures of good-looking boys are everywhere, from pre-teen magazines to coffee-table tomes. Is it the premature end which still entices? Sadly, rock ‘n’ roll is not short of victims: everyone from the late, great Johnny Ace to Kurt Cobain has been called and gone before. Whatever the explanation, it is the development from quiet interest (who, please, is the Olah Tunji of whom Bob Dylan sang?) through curiosity (did The Stones really cover Dobie Gray’s ‘Drift Away’?) to out-and-out obsession (‘Dear Apple, Please release everything The Beatles ever recorded …’) which is disturbing.

  With Nick Drake, the obsession can be so strong that it becomes increasingly difficult to separate the life from the myth. He had strikingly good looks, and in photos his innate shyness and reluctance to commit himself to the camera only add lustre. There is something not quite there about Nick in photographs, a suggestion that he is slipping quietly away from the lens, and that when you look again he may have gone. Like trying to photograph a ghost or catch a wisp of smoke.

  When you look at the photos, and listen to the records, it is almost as though he was never there. There is an elusive, illusory quality to Nick. The recording of him speaking reveals a voice that is well-modulated, precise, but waif-like and hard to hear – almost as if he is trying to talk himself out of his life. And in photographs, and from the reports of those who saw him on-stage, it seems as though it were the same: as if he was trying to edge himself out of existence.

  David Sandison: ‘It wasn’t a down, it was just a kind of … distance. A disconnection if you like. He was going on his way, and if it meant he had to bump into people and communicate with them from time to time, then OK. But he’d rather not. I think that’s even true of people who were close to him.’

  Meeting contemporaries of Nick while writing this book was like beating a path to an unmarked door, over terrain which bore no previous footprints, and for which there were no maps. As we sat and spoke of Nick, particularly his days at Marlborough, it struck me that these were Nick’s exact contemporaries: in the same year at school, born within months of him. And as we sat and talked, it occurred to me that this is what Nick too would have been like had he lived: approaching fifty, established in life, possibly married with children, and probably – like his father – balding. But we will never know, because Nick traded all this for enduring beauty, a striking image of perfect and timeless youth. And, with the surviving pictures, we are left with the first bloom not yet faded; and on record, with the breathless voice of young promise.

  Perhaps this begins to explain, at least in part, the degree of obsession. Nick Drake becomes a blank canvas on which admirers can paint their own pictures, project their own lives and troubles; a mirror in which people see their own pain and lost promise. The danger is that in the process, Nick’s own life is lost for a second time.

  Those who shared their memories of Nick with me have come face to face with their own destiny: surviving and ageing and all these bring; but Nick never lived to make those discoveries. As Laurence Binyon wrote in his poem ‘For The Fallen’, which commemorated those who would never return from Flanders’ fields:

  They shall not grow old, as we that are left grow old:

  Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.

  At the going down of the sun and in the morning

  We will remember them.

  Once upon a time there was a photograph of Paris, said to be one of the earliest ever taken, sometime during the 1840s. The camera was placed high on a building and took in all the boulevards, sweeping to the horizon as far as the lens could see. It showed trees lining the ci
ty streets, and a man caught in the act of tying his shoe. He was only there at all because in bending to tie his laces, he had stayed in one place long enough for his image to register on the lengthy exposure. His name will never be known, and he probably remained unaware of his date with posterity, but in the way of these things, that Parisian with the loose shoelace of 150 years ago is with us for ever.

  Before compact discs diminished the imagery of rock ‘n’ roll, album sleeves were truly wonderful things. The sleeves of favourite records were as much part of their appeal as the music they protected. You were drawn to them, to the minutiae, and the strange, hypnotic power the pictures exerted. The images are so enduring, because when they were released, there was nothing else to look at. There were no long discourses on how the albums were made, or lavish coffee-table books celebrating the rock photographer’s craft. There was a record inside, and as it played you studied the sleeve. The covers of favourite albums became so familiar that it is dislocating to find an out-take from the session detailed on the sleeve – like coming home and finding the furniture rearranged.

  The iconography of a sleeve became integral to the music’s appeal, and rarely was that iconography more powerful than on the record sleeves of the late Nick Drake. On Five Leaves Left, a black-and-white picture, perfectly clear and focused, had Nick nonchalantly leaning against a brick wall, quizzical and faintly baffled, while to his right a man dashes past, blurred by his hurry to be somewhere else.

  Keith Morris is the man who did more than anyone to preserve the image of Nick Drake and present it to the world. Still snapping after all these years, Keith doesn’t do much music stuff now. After his work with Nick, he went on to shoot some classic images: John Cale’s Fear, Elvis Costello’s My Aim Is True …, but left rock ‘n’ roll imagery behind him in the mid-eighties. Keith still gets calls from fans all around the world, at all hours of the day and night. They all want to know about Nick Drake. He smiles at the incongruity of it all: two or three photo sessions, barely totalling a day’s work, nearly thirty years before, loom large over anything he has undertaken since.