Nick Drake

by Patrick Humphries

  There is a roll-call of Nick Drake disciples that musters Kate Bush, REM, The The’s Matt Johnson, Mark Eitzel, Beth Orton, Lucy Ray, The Cardigans, Belle & Sebastian (‘They sound like Nick Drake fronting the BMX Bandits,’ said the NME), Folk Implosion (‘Nick Drake goes Trip Hop’ – Mojo), Tom Verlaine, The Black Crowes, The Cure’s Robert Smith, Nervous’s Justin Travis and September 67. Stephen Duffy, who had flirted with Duran Duran and pop success as Stephen ‘Tin Tin’ Duffy in the early 1980s, came back in 1987 with a new band, The Lilac Time, who took their name from a line in Nick’s ‘River Man’.

  Everything But The Girl were particularly keen on the legacy of Nick Drake. Selecting Five Leaves Left as one of his all-time favourite albums, Ben Watt told Q in 1994: ‘It’s the art of understatement – English folk-rock understatement I suppose. I love them as mood pieces as much as anything else, and again the fact that they have influences that are not directly from rock ‘n’ roll, and an unembarrassed ability to mix almost semi-classical string arrangements with acoustic basses and acoustic guitars. I also like what I’ve read about Nick Drake – that he was terribly frustrated that he wasn’t more popular than he was. He genuinely believed that what he was doing was potentially intensely commercial, which I find quite charming, because it so obviously isn’t. But he really felt that he was saying something that was direct and would appeal to people in an open-hearted way. Rock ‘n’ roll needs grander gestures, unfortunately.’

  Without carbon-copying Nick, one way to pay homage is to cover one of his songs, but to date, incredibly few have been covered. It is not as if they are unwieldy word-orgies, like Dylan’s ‘It’s Alright Ma …’ or wilfully arcane like Richard Thompson’s ‘Don’t Sit On My Jimmy Shands’. Nick’s songs are open and accessible, melodic and rhythmically memorable. The lyrics are not challenging or abstruse. Yet, aside from the 1992 tribute album Brittle Days, Nick’s catalogue remains largely unplundered.

  Five years after ‘My Boy Lollipop’, Millie became one of only two acts to cover a song by Nick Drake during his lifetime, when ‘Mayfair’ appeared on her Time Will Tell album in 1970. Nick’s former labelmates Tir Na Nog included ‘Ride’ on their 1973 Chrysalis debut, Strong In The Sun; and singer-songwriter Lucinda Williams recorded ‘Which Will’; but otherwise, covers of Nick Drake songs are rarer than rocking-horse droppings.

  For years, Joe Boyd has cherished the idea of a Nick Drake tribute album, on which contemporary acts would cover their own favourite song of Nick’s. The concept reached its high watermark in the early 1990s, when tributes appeared to Leonard Cohen (three times), Elton John, Jimi Hendrix and Richard Thompson (twice), among others. Among the names pencilled in for the Nick tribute were REM’s Peter Buck and The Psychedelic Furs’ Richard Butler together on ‘Pink Moon’, John Cale and Britain’s premier pedal-steel player, B.J. Cole (‘River Man’), All About Eve (‘Clothes Of Sand’), The Black Crowes (‘Black Eyed Dog’) and Everything But The Girl (‘Northern Sky’). Plans have been in the air since at least 1990, but at the time of writing, the Nick Drake tribute remains unreleased.

  The kudos which is wrapped around the late Nick Drake manifests itself in the oddest ways and the strangest places. The 1996 catalogue for Polygram/Island music, representing the publishing interests of some of the greatest songwriters of the rock ‘n’ roll era (Elton John, Bob Marley, U2, Van Morrison), boasted a reproduction of Nick’s original handwritten lyrics for ‘Fruit Tree’.

  In Record Collector’s poll of collectable artists, the second highest-climbing name in 1997 was Nick Drake, up 138 places to number eighty-seven. A sharp-eyed Mojo reader noted that the back sleeve of Five Leaves Left was just visible in a scene in the film Grace Of My Heart. But surely the most bizarre rumour recently to attach itself to Nick Drake was that one of his songs had been used as background music for a Nike ad screened on MTV; according to Nike’s advertising agency, there is absolutely no truth in the rumour.

  By the beginning of 1997 Heartbeat: Number One Love Songs Of The 60s, which features ‘Fruit Tree’ as its closing track, had sold over 300,000 copies, to become the eighth-best-selling compilation album of 1996. As well as providing a good selection of golden oldies from pop’s most fondly remembered decade, the record obviously sold on the back of the enormously popular retro TV drama. Its success meant that in the space of just a few months roughly ten times more people heard Nick Drake than ever bought his records while he was alive.

  Unquestionably, Nick Drake has been pigeon-holed; safely slotted into the template of tragic, doomed young poet, whose talent went unappreciated by record company and public at large, leading to depression, and ultimately, premature death. But that is all too pat, and it does the life and memory and work of Nick Drake a grave disservice.

  So strong has the morbid myth become, and so delicate the body of work, I asked Peter Buck if he thought that Nick’s death was in danger of suffocating the innate quality of the music: ‘I don’t buy the posthumous appeal thing. The guitar player from Chicago died, and I don’t remember legions of fans going out and buying the first four Chicago albums. The thing with Nick is I couldn’t see him around now, or in the future, aged sixty-five, and doing the fourth farewell tour. I mean, hindsight is a great thing, isn’t it? – all the symbols that are there on the records and in the lyrics.’

  Dave Pegg, who watched Nick opening the show for Fairport early in 1970 and worked with him on Bryter Layter, said: ‘It’s awfully sad what happened to Nick … he obviously did want to be successful, it’s all that stuff, you don’t know anything about people at the time. He was the last person I would have thought would have taken it that seriously …

  ‘Nick was a great talent, and it’s great that people appreciate him. It’s great that young people do; the only cred I get is that I played on a Nick Drake album. Which is quite good when you look like I do. If you were clever enough to analyse why people like something that much, I’d have retired thirty years ago. They are just great songs, and they sound good. Without knowing anything about the personality behind the songs, if you heard Bryter Layter for the first time, and you didn’t know who it was … I think most people would really like it. As a guitarist, he is so complete … He was really good. He could do stuff in one take. There was never a problem, and rhythmically he was incredibly sound.’

  Clive Gregson: ‘It’s kind of hard to imagine what he would have carried on doing … It was totally unfashionable then. It is, in many ways, totally unfashionable now. The fact that so many people come to it, is to do with the timeless quality. It’s just basically very, very good music, very good songwriting. There’s also the air of mystery surrounding his life and his death. There’s so little that’s really known about Nick …

  ‘The cult is certainly associated with the premature death. The fact that there will be no more records. It’s a very finite thing you can look at and say, well, there’s basically three records, a compilation of out-takes … But I do think that Nick was a great artist as well. There is something about Pink Moon. I don’t understand it. There’s something intriguing, it’s fascinating. I can always find something new in it even after listening to it all these years. Nothing feels out of place. To do something so personal, so sparse and simple, for me, I can’t think of any other record that captures that sound.’

  Hidden in the hinterland of Shepherd’s Bush, Nomis Studios is a big rehearsal and recording complex where, early in January 1997,1 went to talk to Paul Weller about Nick Drake. Weller struck many as an unlikely convert to the cause: there appeared to be little to connect the fiery leader of The Jam and epicene co-host of The Style Council with the quietly introspective music of Nick Drake. But since the relaunch of Weller’s career as a solo act in the early 1990s, his own music had taken on a more reflective edge, and Weller is always careful to cite sources. While contemporaries in The Clash and Sex Pistols had railed against what had gone before, in pugnaciously punk fashion, Weller has always shown an appreciation of pop, R&B and soul history
. He was turned on to Nick by hearing ‘River Man’, and when he began name-checking Nick as an influence in interviews, Weller’s fans also began taking an interest in the music of the singer-songwriter who had died before they were born.

  Preparing for his fourth solo album, Weller sat alongside cappuccino compadre and Oasis biographer Paolo Hewitt, and talked about Nick Drake: ‘For me it’s quite simple: it’s the melodic side that attracted me. I only heard his stuff three years ago maybe, that was the first I ever heard of him. The first thing I heard was “River Man”, which I think is just fantastic. The melody is so brilliant. So that’s what hooked me … Intimate, the voice, the guitar, the melody … As a guitarist, I like the open tunings, which is probably a standard folk-music tuning, but I don’t know that stuff, so he was my introduction to that style. I’m not a “disciple” of Nick Drake. I just heard his records and liked them, liked that very distinctive thing he was doing.

  ‘The fact he died young, that always adds to the myth, plus the fact he only ever made three albums, and they’re all really good albums. He didn’t get to make the fourth or fifth shitty one … “At The Chime Of A City Clock”, Bryter Layter, is brilliant. The instrumental stuff on that, mixes it up a bit. “Hazey Jane”, “Northern Sky”, they’re just great melodies, moody and menacing. Great songs, that’s why they’re timeless, that’s why he lasts. There is an Englishness, pastoral … There’s a classical style in his music as well, which is very English.

  ‘With Nick, it was that one particular song, “River Man”, that did it for me. The arrangement, the strings, that alone. I like great melodies, songs. It’s really hard to come up with an original melody, to come up with something that you haven’t heard before. He’s got at least half a dozen that are real classics, as soon as you hear them, so distinctive. I don’t pay an awful lot of attention to his lyrics, because they’re so samey, but on top of the melodies, they take you somewhere else: they transcend a lot of that sadness.’

  Weller was intrigued when I mentioned Nick’s virtual invisibility. With the prospect of recording a new album, resultant promo videos, the endless cycle of interviews and concerts to promote the album … With the next two years of his life effectively bound up, he seemed envious of the way things were back then. ‘So he only ever made three albums, a dozen gigs, never played America and one interview? That’s the way to do it!’

  After Nick’s death in 1974, Rodney and Molly Drake were touched by the continuing interest shown in their son’s music, and were always welcoming to fans and admirers. Far Leys was open house to those who travelled to see the house where Nick grew up and died. Nick’s music was what drew them there, and his parents were clearly delighted by anyone who was touched by it. Only too aware of how neglected Nick felt during his lifetime, their joy in the lasting, even escalating, interest in his music was heartfelt.

  Molly: ‘We always appreciated music, even if we didn’t understand the technicalities – the extraordinary ability on the guitar – neither of us played the guitar, so we didn’t understand. People come from far and wide and say: “How did Nick tune his guitar?” and of course we have to say we don’t know.’

  Rodney: ‘It’s not surprising that we didn’t really appreciate his music, we were of a different generation, and even his own generation didn’t appreciate it at the time. I think he was ahead of his time, wasn’t he?’

  In 1986, twelve years after Nick’s death, a young American guitarist called Scott Appel wrote to Rodney and Molly Drake, expressing his appreciation of Nick’s music. Scott was particularly fascinated by the unusual guitar tunings which Nick had used, and wondered if his parents could help clarify them. Neither could, but his enquiry opened up a correspondence which continued until Molly’s death. Scott was clearly an aficionado of Nick’s work, and both his parents responded to his knowledge of, and enthusiasm for, their son’s music.

  A Daily Express profile of Gabrielle in 1997, published to coincide with her West End opening in Lady Windermere’s Fan, dubbed Nick ‘Britain’s answer to Bob Dylan’ and quoted Gabrielle on the people who made pilgrimages to Far Leys: ‘After he died, youngsters from all over the world would turn up at my parents’ home to talk about Nick. They were welcomed. His fans were delightful. Some had the kind of problems which used to trouble him. My parents were destroyed by his death, but it never dominated their lives. They didn’t become sad. They took pleasure in the interest young people showed in Nick. That was a great help to them.’

  They came from Europe and America, drawn to the neat and tidy house in the tiny village of Tanworth. Rodney and Molly were largely unaware of how valuable Nick’s possessions were to his fans, but they were touched by the continuing interest, and consequently, irreplaceable manuscripts, photos and other items were handed over in good faith, never to be returned. Joe Boyd and Island Records advised them, but they too were probably unprepared for the enduring intensity of interest in Nick’s music.

  Scott Appel’s initial contact with Rodney and Molly coincided with the release of Nick’s posthumous fourth album, and Molly wrote to him just after they had received a finished copy of Time Of No Reply: ‘Knowing that young people still love and play Nick’s music has been our only comfort since he died … Rodney and I feel the more Nick’s music is given out to the world the happier we shall be.’

  In their continuing correspondence with Scott Appel, the Drakes sensed someone with a real affinity for Nick’s music, and they wrote to him about some ‘work tapes’ which Nick had left behind: ‘Some time in 1974 Nick, who was by then very withdrawn and uncommunicative, went over to Suffolk to see John Wood who used to own a recording studio of his own and also recorded for Island and understood Nick and his problems. Nick returned with this tape but never told us what was on it – he just put it away with the other tapes he had. I did not discover it till after his death by which time Island had the recordings of his last four songs, complete with words.’

  Through a mutual love of Nick’s music, Scott and the Drakes began to discuss the idea of Scott working from Nick’s tapes to develop the fragments, a prospect which delighted his parents. They were, however, very clear about how it should be handled: ‘provided the songs are kept the same in essence and not made unrecognizable – and providing too that it is always clear – and I know with you at the helm it always would be made clear – that these are Nick’s songs’.

  True to his word, Scott sat down and began transposing snippets of tape, and trying to figure out the tunings, which were unique to Nick. It was like trying to crack the Enigma code. Nick’s friend Robert Kirby understood the problems Scott faced: ‘I defy anyone to sit down with a Nick Drake song and try to figure out how to play it,’ he was quoted as saying on the sleeve of Scott’s finished Nine Of Swords album, ‘the songs just don’t follow the ordinary rules of composition.’

  Talking to me in 1997, Kirby was still keen to sing Nick’s praises as a guitarist: ‘When he first came into my room … as soon as he played the guitar, I’ve never heard anything like it before or since, in terms of virtuosity. Maybe some people play faster, maybe some people play more complicated pieces, but he never gave a bad performance … I know for a fact that he practised a phenomenal amount. When he was at home alone, he practised and practised and practised. He had to, just to maintain that technique. Even on the first album – something like “River Man”, or something like “Three Hours”, where there is a very complicated guitar part – it was always note for note the same. He might vary tempi sometimes … but every string, every fingernail connected at the same microsecond, each time he did it.

  ‘All five of the fingers on his right hand could be used equally for playing a melody … the thumb would come up and do the tenor part on the D and A strings. But he wouldn’t just get the notes right, he would control the tone and timbre … He’d got the technique of a virtuoso classical guitarist.’

  At the core of Nine Of Swords are Nick Drake originals which he never lived to record. The record op
ens with ‘Bird Flew By’, one of the first songs Nick ever wrote; a wistful lament, and in Scott Appel’s hands, quintessentially Nick, with its rhetorical refrain ‘What’s the point of a year or a season?’ The song evokes the haunted territory which Nick had made his own, with its ‘list of false starts and crumbled broken hearts’. Though long in his repertoire, Nick had never felt happy enough with ‘Blossom’ to record it. It is one of the most optimistic songs in his canon, with the influence of Joni Mitchell’s ‘The Circle Game’ and ‘Both Sides Now’ faintly evident.

  Concerned that the release of Nine Of Swords would sully Nick’s memory, Joe Boyd was reluctant to grant Appel permission to tamper with Nick’s music. Nick’s parents, however, had no doubts: ‘I’m sure there can be no objection whatever to your developing the piece you are interested in – indeed, as far as Molly and I are concerned we should welcome it,’ wrote Rodney in 1986. The following year he confirmed: ‘On the legal position over your making use of Nick’s music (developing his themes and so on) I do not see that there can possibly be any restriction on your using songs that have never been published, beyond getting our agreement, and that you have.’

  There is no knowing how Nick himself would have tackled these works in progress, or indeed if he would have chosen to develop them at all. But Nick’s fans are insatiably hungry for any crumb of unreleased music, and if the only way they can hear ‘Bird Flew By’ or ‘Blossom’ is to hear them interpreted by Scott Appel, then they will happily settle for that.

  Having spent so much time assimilating his unique musicianship, Scott Appel wrote a revealing article on Nick’s guitar playing for Frets magazine: ‘Drake’s right hand technique was considerable. He produced a dreadnought-like sound with a small-bodied Guild M-20 – the only guitar he ever used to record. He fingerpicked with a combination of flesh and nail, and used only his nails for strumming. He never used picks of any kind. The recorded sound of Drake’s guitar was also partly due to the miking techniques of his sound engineer John Wood, who already had recorded British musicians Richard Thompson, John Martyn and Robin Williamson, using a four microphone setup for Drake’s acoustic. One ambient mike was placed all the way across the room. Power was not the only characteristic of Drake’s right-hand technique. He played unusual and irregular patterns with his thumb, contrary to the clearly defined bass rhythms played by the thumb in most fingerpicking patterns (the alternating bass, for example).’