Nick Drake

by Patrick Humphries

  ‘Furthermore, Nick himself expressed dissatisfaction with the four songs he recorded late last year, consequently John Wood has destroyed the 16-track master tapes – with our full approval.’

  As Sean Connery so wisely said: never say never again.

  Before working for Island, Rob Partridge had been at Melody Maker and the trade paper Music Week. On his arrival in London in 1969, one of the first artists he saw performing was Nick Drake: ‘The first thing I did when I got to Island as a press officer was suggest that perhaps we could put together a retrospective on Nick Drake – the studio albums plus whatever else was there – which eventually became Fruit Tree. I wasn’t necessarily expecting massive vaults with millions of tunes, live recordings or whatever, but there was very little …’

  The original press release announcing the Nick Drake box set came during 1978, headed ‘Nick Drake The Complete Collected Works’, and talked of a November release: ‘If he won any battles in his short life, Nick Drake mastered the challenge of authenticity. He was of one piece. His songs, like his clothes, were melancholy to the point of morbidity. Yet somehow he escaped self indulgence. Elton John, who as a young studio musician cut a demo tape of Drake’s songs, recalls their “beautiful haunting quality” … “listening to music so beautiful, you are shamed by the ugliness of the world” commented the prestigious American magazine New Times.

  ‘Nick’s three albums – plus four previously unreleased tracks, “Voice From The Mountain”, “Rider On The Wheel”, “Black-Eyed Dog” [sic] and “Hanging On A Star” – have now been compiled in a three-album box-set, called The Complete Collected Works (Island NDSP 100), released on November 10. The box-set, which will retail for £9.50, comes complete with an eight page booklet. Nick Kent of the New Musical Express has been commissioned to write the text for the booklet, which also includes Nick Drake’s lyrics plus photographs and illustrations. The box-set also features three pencil drawings of Nick Drake.’

  Nick Kent’s sleeve notes were never used for Fruit Tree. Since arriving at the NME in 1972, he had been itching to write about Nick Drake, but the only opportunity he got was a posthumous appreciation: ‘I was always waiting for a chance … Then he went back in ‘74 and recorded some songs with Joe Boyd, and we were just waiting for something to tie it all together so we could write about him.

  ‘ “Black Eyed Dog”, it’s all about mental illness, isn’t it? It’s about being there, and seeing your whole psyche overwhelmed by something that you can’t control, and is sending you straight to a catatonic hell. You can’t do anything about it and the very few moments of any kind of lucidity you write a song which expresses how you’re feeling … It’s like Syd Barrett’s “Dark Globe”, where it’s obvious the guy knows what’s happening.

  ‘Even in the songs on Bryter Layter, this guy just doesn’t seem to be able to relate to anybody. There’s not even a flesh-and-blood woman that he is sexually or emotionally tied to. These are just images or dreams that he has of other people. I did write an 8000-word piece for Fruit Tree … It’s not that much different from the piece I wrote for NME. The conclusion I came to was that he was this confused guy who was … a little confused and too sensitive for his time.’

  Rob Partridge: ‘Nick Kent was originally commissioned to write the booklet which he duly delivered; it was an extraordinary piece of journalism – if you’ve read his piece in NME on Nick, which questioned the verdict of suicide – but was felt to be inappropriate for a box set which celebrated the life and work of Nick Drake. I think we felt it would have been distressing to the family. It was completely legitimate to ask those questions in a magazine piece, but possibly not appropriate to appear in a box set.

  ‘At that time an American journalist called Arthur Lubow was in town – there were always two or three journalists in the press office over from America every year in search of Nick Drake. I’d introduced Lubow to Molly and Rodney, and also to Gabrielle, and at the last minute, commissioned him to write the essay.’

  What became Fruit Tree was one of the first-ever box sets devoted to the work of a single artist, in an attempt to put that artist’s work into some sort of perspective, as well as allowing the release of previously unheard material.

  There had been records in boxes before – George Harrison’s All Things Must Pass and The Concert For Bangla Desh – but Fruit Tree was the first to try to gain an overview of a life and work, and could be seen as a template for what followed. Box sets are now seen as setting the seal on an act’s integrity. Since Fruit Tree, Dylan, Clapton and The Who are just some who have seen their work remade and remodelled. But few artists have had a box set built on such a small body of work as Nick Drake.

  The main attraction of the original box set was the four previously unheard songs from Nick’s final session, which were tacked on to the end of Pink Moon. The original sequence was restored on the revised and reissued four-LP Fruit Tree released by Hannibal in 1986, which incorporated the posthumous Time Of No Reply album.

  The musical temperature had undergone severe changes in the seven years between Pink Moon and the release of the Fruit Tree box. Acts like Led Zeppelin, David Bowie and Bruce Springsteen, promising newcomers when Nick was still alive, now straddled the decade as its most visible icons.

  The cosy camaraderie of mid-seventies pub-rock was just making an impact as Nick died, and from the remnants of pub rock came the Rottweiler impetus of Punk. Nothing could be further from the introspective, contemplative, balanced wistfulness of Nick Drake than the howling, cataclysmic, seething Zeitgeist of Johnny Rotten. A howl of discontent, Punk shaped the seventies and brought rock ‘n’ roll back to its roots.

  In the incendiary wake of the Sex Pistols came The Clash, The Jam, Elvis Costello and all that America liked to christen ‘New Wave’. Punk rewrote the musical rule book. It was a revisionist movement all by itself. The only music that the punks had any time for apart from their own three-chord manifestos was reggae. ‘No more Elvis, Beatles or Rolling Stones in 1977’ sang The Clash. Of Nick Drake, there was no mention from Punk lips, but his contemporary singer-songwriters had not weathered the storm any better. John Martyn continued to plough an idiosyncratic and increasingly solitary furrow; Cat Stevens converted to Islam, as did Richard Thompson, effectively removing himself for three years during the late seventies.

  The fact that Television’s Tom Verlaine could name-check Nick in Fruit Tree’s essay was not without interest at the time. Many of the Punk bands sprang from nowhere, fully formed, with no preconceptions of, nor appreciation for, rock history before Punk’s year zero, so to see Tom Verlaine listed alongside Elton John and David Geffen as an admirer of Nick Drake was significant.

  With the release of Fruit Tree came the realization that interest in the music of Nick Drake was just not going to go away. The set was put together in conjunction with the Drake family, by Joe Boyd and Island press officer Rob Partridge: ‘In Nick’s lifetime, there were probably more review copies around than there were actual sales. They were released at a time when Island had big hitters like Cat Stevens. Nick Drake was not a big hitter.

  ‘I never met Rodney or Molly, although we had a great telephone relationship over the years. Whenever there was a journalist who wanted to interview them, I’d check it out, and they’d always be enormously accommodating. Nick’s room was left exactly the way it was, which I guess is one way for them to deal with it.’

  Molly: ‘When I heard that they were going to make this compilation thing of all his albums, I said to Rodney I think it ought to be called Fruit Tree, because that to me is a terribly prophetic song. Several months later, Joe came and had lunch with us in London and was talking about this album, and he said I tell you the title I think it should be: Fruit Tree.’

  Reviews for Fruit Tree were not widespread; the weeklies were preoccupied with disco frenzy and albums such as Blondie’s Parallel Lines, Supertramp’s Breakfast In America and Rod Stewart’s Blondes Have More Fun. The anticipation of Led Zepp
elin’s first UK shows in two years was tangible, and there were new bands like The Police, Dire Straits, The Pretenders and U2 to contend with.

  In his NME review of Fruit Tree, David Hepworth wrote: ‘This box set brings together the three albums that he recorded for Island with four tracks put down near the end when his vulnerability had got past the point of melancholy and had become a crippling disease … Most songwriters use their sadness but with Nick Drake it was the sadness that used him and even music as rare and honest as this is never worth such tragedy.’

  Rodney Drake did notice a slight dip in the sales of Nick’s records around 1981, following the release of Fruit Tree in 1979, but apart from that sales remained steady and the three Island albums remained on catalogue, available for the curious of each successive generation.

  The next upsurge of interest came in 1985 courtesy of Dream Academy, a trio consisting of Nick Laird-Clowes, ethereal oboist Kate St John and multi-instrumentalist Gilbert Gabriel. Their fifteen minutes of fame began with a haunting single, ‘Life In A Northern Town’, which was dedicated to the memory of Nick Drake. The single reached number fifteen on the UK charts in March 1985, and the following month Dream Academy were profiled in Melody Maker, where Nick Laird-Clowes explained about the dedication: ‘I just felt the song has a strong connection with Nick Drake in a way I can’t even explain. I held him in such high esteem – and still do. Mike Read played our single on the radio and mentioned that it was dedicated to Nick and since then he’s apparently been deluged with letters from people who said they were fans and could Mike please play some of his songs for them!’

  Nick Laird-Clowes was obsessed by the minutiae and memorabilia of the sixties. On hearing that the Guild guitar which Nick holds on the cover of Bryter Layter had surfaced, he immediately purchased it. Another of Nick’s guitars now belongs to Brian Wells, who was given it by Rodney after Nick’s funeral: ‘I own Nick’s Martin D28 … I don’t think it ever appeared on an album, because I think a lot of Pink Moon was done with a gut string, I don’t think it was done with a steel string … I think he bought the Martin after Pink Moon, because when he died it was quite new – perhaps he sold the Guild to buy it. It had a normal tuning, which was quite rare, as most of Nick’s guitars were tuned to some funny tuning.’

  Brian was also able to scotch another rumour concerning Nick’s guitars: ‘I actually talked to Eric Clapton about Nick, and he had never heard of Nick … I know Eric quite well because we’re on the same charity things together, we’re both in recovery from addictions, so Eric helps out by giving my charity some free concerts, and there was this rumour that his guitar-playing had been seriously influenced by Nick … There’s a lot of this stuff: someone said Eric owned Nick’s guitar, but Eric had never heard of Nick Drake.’

  The success of Dream Academy’s single in 1985 prompted Island into action, and within a matter of weeks they announced the first Nick Drake compilation. The title, Heaven In A Wild Flower, came from one of Nick’s favourite poets, William Blake, and his 1802 poem ‘Auguries Of Innocence’. Trevor Dann was asked to compile the fourteen-track collection: ‘A guy called Nick Stewart who was working at Island in the mid-eighties mentioned Nick Drake, and I started waxing on, as I do, and then he just rang me up one day and said we’re going to do a Nick Drake compilation CD, because there’d never been one – there was the box set Fruit Tree, but there had never been a single CD compilation – and would you like to compile it? I said I would be absolutely thrilled.

  ‘So I just went home and recorded the album off my own copies of the records and said this feels nice, like it has “Hazey Jane I” and “II” put together … Even though it was specifically going to be a CD, I remember compiling it so it would work as a vinyl album, so that the beginnings of each side, and the ends of each side, felt good. From memory, it’s completely chronological, except that Joe insisted that they change one of the tracks. He put in “Northern Sky”, and they just plonked it in the middle; otherwise it’s in perfectly chronological order.’

  Paul Du Noyer’s respectful review in NME was typical of those accorded Heaven In A Wild Flower, and demonstrated the sort of reverence Nick was beginning to attract: ‘Rock has known a million morose young poets: bedsit brooders penning their pain, real or imagined, to angst-intensive refrains of frail pathos. What a bloody awful bunch. Yet, by the law of averages, they were bound to spawn at least one genuine genius. They did. His name was Nick Drake.’

  A keen-eyed journalist on the Birmingham Evening Mail noted that Heaven In A Wild Flower was being released at the same time as Gabrielle Drake was making her debut in the popular long-running TV soap Crossroads. Under the headline ‘Record “no link to Crossroads”’, the probing piece continued: ‘Island records’ Rob Partridge denied any element of cash-in: “The Nick Drake album has been a project planned for some years, and its release now has nothing whatsoever to do with the TV series.” ’ Partridge was further quoted, incorrectly, as saying: ‘The group Dream Academy have a hit at the moment with “Life In A Northern Town” which was written by Nick years ago – and its success has sparked a lot of interest.’

  The success of the Dream Academy single and the subsequent release of Heaven In A Wild Flower helped bring Nick Drake’s name to a new decade, eleven years after his solitary death. Since Fruit Tree in 1979, there had been the real sense of a cult developing; it was a cult which, to everyone’s surprise, would only grow during successive years.

  Researching in the Island vaults during the summer of 1985 while he was compiling the Sandy Denny box set Who Knows Where The Time Goes?, Joe Boyd, in the company of fellow American Frank Kornelussen, found the original master tapes of all Nick’s sessions. Master tapes are the first-generation reels, the tapes that roll in the studio, capturing what the artist is actually playing. They are the pristine originals. They are what all CD releases should be cut from. They are what the artist and the producer hear. They are the fly on the wall of the recording studio.

  Island had deleted Fruit Tree in 1983, and Boyd had made an arrangement which allowed him to release the box set on his own Hannibal Records, though Island still retained the rights to release all three of Nick’s individual albums. Having discovered enough previously unreleased material to constitute a ‘new’ Nick Drake album, Boyd took the opportunity to revise Fruit Tree. The tapes unearthed at Island would form a fourth, and in all likelihood, final Nick Drake album, Time Of No Reply.

  Rodney, Molly and Gabrielle Drake were concerned that Nick’s reputation should not be sullied by inferior recordings released under his name, and despite constant pressure from fans to release everything, the recorded legacy of Nick Drake remains pristine. What appeared on Time Of No Reply had been cleared by Boyd with the Drake family, and in 1986 it was put out as part of the amended Fruit Tree box set, with Nick’s fourth album appearing as a bonus disc. The following year Time Of No Reply was released in its own right.

  The fourteen-track album consisted of previously unreleased songs from the Five Leaves Left sessions: ‘Time Of No Reply’, ‘Joey’, ‘Clothes Of Sand’, ‘Mayfair’ and ‘I Was Made To Love Magic’, complete with original arranger Richard Hewson’s setting. There were also alternative takes of two songs Nick had included on his debut album, ‘Man In A Shed’ and ‘The Thoughts Of Mary Jane’, with some subdued guitar from Richard Thompson. There were three songs which Nick had recorded at home in Tanworth: a solo version of ‘Fly’, which had appeared beautifully arranged on his second album, as well as two otherwise unreleased titles: the blues cover ‘Been Smoking Too Long’ and his own ‘Strange Meeting II’. The final four tracks were Nick’s last-ever recordings from 1974, which had previously been available on the original Fruit Tree box, tacked on the end of Pink Moon.

  With so much known about so little, it was disconcerting, twelve years after his death, to hear Nick Drake singing again. The little fumble in his singing of ‘Mayfair’ which is laughed off; hearing ‘Fly’ performed solo as Nick committed it to
a home tape recorder, with a recording contract still a distant dream. There is Richard Thompson’s tentative electric guitar on a song only familiar from Robert Kirby’s lavish string arrangement. And best of all were the new songs, ‘Time Of No Reply’ and ‘Strange Meeting II’ particularly, which were quintessential Nick Drake: reflective with a pervading air of melancholy, wistful and oh-so frail. What elevates the songs is that enduring hallmark of Nick’s talent, his undeniable flair for melody. The melodies here flow off the disc and seep into your subconscious. ‘Time Of No Reply’ was one of the songs Nick recorded for his Radio 1 session in August 1969, and had been a regular fixture of his infrequent live appearances. The delay in its official appearance is therefore baffling; one can only assume that Nick was unhappy with some aspect of his performance.

  ‘I Was Made To Love Magic’ does not benefit from its polite alternative arrangement, and lyrically, with the attention drawn to the author’s tragic solitude in the first verse, it acquires an air of self-pity which is uncharacteristic and unrewarding. Similarly, ‘Clothes Of Sand’ adds little lustre to the legend of Nick Drake. The home recording ‘Mayfair’ is widely believed to have been inspired by Molly Drake, an homage to her fondness for the sophisticated Mayfair drawing-room songs of Noël Coward and Ivor Novello. Both Rodney and Molly Drake were delighted with Time Of No Reply, singling out ‘Clothes Of Sand’ and ‘I Was Made To Love Magic’ as their favourite tracks.

  Time Of No Reply was intended as the final Nick Drake album, but following the appearance of a 1994 bootleg of Nick’s Tanworth home recordings, Joe Boyd was asked by reader Paul Hough in Mojo if there were any unreleased Nick Drake songs still to be released: ‘Tricky question,’ replied Boyd diplomatically, and went on: ‘Nick was his own severest editor. The only unreleased songs he tried recording are the ones we put on Time Of No Reply … We put these out because they were all songs that Nick decided at some point that he wanted people to hear. But he never considered any of those very early songs … Everything releasable has been released. The family is very upset about the bootleg. It’s important to everybody involved that what comes out under Nick’s name is up to the same standard as the released material.’