Paul Wheeler, who had innumerable opportunities to observe Nick and his guitar technique, smiled when he remembered those Cambridge days: ‘There was a professionalism about Nick … I don’t remember many gigs, but even just sitting round people’s rooms, if he’d written a new song or something, if he played through something, he would always get it absolutely right. He would wait until people were listening before he played it. He would never play it twice. There was always a sense of professionalism. He never played a bum note. He wouldn’t do the washing-up because it might break his nails. So he was conscious of his reputation.’
As a fellow guitarist, Paul Wheeler studied Nick’s playing closely; he too felt that the unique strength lay in his right hand: ‘As a guitarist, Nick used his right hand in a way that I don’t think anyone like John or Bert used it … You see, even someone like Richard Thompson doesn’t use his right hand that subtly … Speaking as a guitarist, it’s his right hand that’s interesting. Synchronizing your fingers, most guitarists only use two fingers on the right hand. Nick definitely used his whole hand, and he used it in a very interesting way. Listen to “River Man”, and get a guitarist to explain to you what’s happening, and he won’t be able to!’
Over the years, Nick Drake’s inimitable guitar playing has contributed hugely to his enduring appeal. While the songs are timeless and beguiling, for musicians Nick’s tunings, his fluent fingering and playing are transcendent. An accomplished singer-songwriter and nimble guitarist himself, Clive Gregson is fascinated by Nick’s playing: ‘I cannot figure out the guitar tunings, I don’t know what the guitar’s tuned to 99 per cent of the time; the chords, the fingerings, the way his voice sounds that good, it’s so dry. It’s a complete mystery. But at the end of the day, it’s just a bloke playing the guitar and singing. But it doesn’t sound like anything else I’ve ever heard.’
Just what is it about Nick’s guitar tunings which continues to fascinate people?: ‘I think it’s incredible technique, for a start. He’s finger-picking in really odd rhythms … “River Man” is in 5/4, and the rhythmic part, the playing on that, is just astonishing. And in some ways it sounds simpler than it really is. I can sit down, and pick out certain things, but it never sounds … right. It’s a technical facility way beyond … I guess it’s a very musician thing, and a lot of the latter interest in Nick is from musicians and players. It’s terribly understated, it’s very tasteful. “The Road”, off Pink Moon, that is just rhythmically so complex, and yet it’s not hard chords. There are aspects of it that are simple … There’s a little instrumental called “Horn”. The way he plays it, tiny little thing, most people wouldn’t even think that way. The comparison with Richard [Thompson] is interesting, because having worked with Richard, I can rationalize, I can understand what Richard does, because I’ve seen him do it a lot – I can’t do it, I can’t begin to do it – but I kind of understand it. Whereas with Nick, there’s a lot of it that I don’t understand.’
No mean guitarist himself, Nick’s friend John Martyn was equally fascinated by his guitar tunings. Martyn had watched Nick firsthand, but was still baffled by just how he did it. He spoke in 1986 of his memories of watching him hunched over his guitar, endlessly tuning and retuning: ‘Nick was extraordinarily secretive about all that. I could probably work them out for you … he used seconds quite a lot, very strange tunings, diminished as well, so when you applied just two fingers you’d change the thing in a very radical way. I remember his fingering here – he had the most beautiful fingers when he played, and they were made even more beautiful by the fact that the shapes that he’d play were not those you would normally see when other people play. Very interesting little shapes … I just never asked him, I was too busy toddling off on my own and doing my own stuff. He’s a much-underrated player.’
Jeremy Mason was there, in early 1967, as Nick Drake developed his guitar tunings. Nick had learned the basic guitar chords from David Wright at Marlborough only a few years before, but in Aix, Jeremy was driven mad by Nick’s endless tuning and retuning of his guitar. Because there was nothing else to do, Jeremy began drawing, and because there was nobody else to draw, his first subject was the teenager on the bed opposite: ‘What was probably my first attempt at drawing was a drawing of Nick playing his guitar, which I turned into a linocut. And bad as I was, that was the way I remember him sitting. He always wore those moccasins. He always looked at the guitar. The guitar picking, the sound that you hear now on the records, he developed in Aix … He sat for hours on his bed. I knew then he was getting pretty serious about it.
‘He used to sit on his bed, and loosen the strings on his guitar, completely, as I recall. I think he had now obviously started to smoke – marijuana – and he would strum away, and tighten them up as he went. I think he formulated it there, because the sound I hear on the records now is the sound he was getting then.’
At Cambridge and at Sound Techniques, Robert Kirby watched Nick develop his unique guitar style. He was also one of the few people with whom Nick ever discussed the actual mechanics of songwriting. For Nick, the genesis of a song came from playing the guitar, and finding a phrase which he could make his own and develop. With memories of Nick in London and Cambridge, Kirby remembered: ‘What he’d do is play for fifteen or twenty minutes, non-stop, moving from figure to figure, and the figure that I’m thinking of is the introduction to “Things Behind The Sun”. That was going for years before he recorded it on Pink Moon. I think a lot of Nick’s writing came from the fact that he would experiment with a detuning, experiment with a figure within it, and that would give him the basis for a song …
‘He did talk about the music, when we were at Cambridge, or when we were doing Bryter Layter. He would come up with strong guitar phrases, harmonic sequences, tunings … He would have these parts in his head for a long time, and then as lyrics came, he’d got a library of parts that would go with that. It makes it sound a bit mechanical, but I believe that’s the way they came … I’m sure there must have been plenty of songs when he was sitting there and a lyric came, and then he wrote some music for it, but all of his experimentation came with the guitar. He took the guitar to extremes.’
Both Rodney and Molly Drake were delighted with what Scott Appel had achieved with Nick’s music on Nine Of Swords and they continued to correspond for years. When Molly moved to a smaller house after Rodney’s death in 1988, Scott suggested donating Nick’s manuscripts to a museum archive, but Molly’s reply confirms what many still fail to understand: ‘there is so little that Nick left behind him – apart from the legacy of his music. He never wrote anything down, never kept a diary – hardly even wrote his name in his own books. It was as if he didn’t want anything of himself to remain except his songs – to quote from one of those songs – I have always described him to myself as “a soul with no footprint” …
‘The only written thing I have of Nick’s is one exercise book (from Cambridge University) in which he put down the words to most of his songs. This is one of my most precious possessions and I could not part with it… Apart from this all I have are his letters from school – Marlborough College – every single one of which I have kept. But these are just schoolboy letters talking of football, hockey and cricket matches, athletics, lessons or lectures etc – and nothing about music whatsoever, except an occasional reference to a classical lesson.’
At the beginning of their correspondence in 1986, when the Drakes sent Scott Appel the tape containing over four hours’ worth of works in progress, which Nick had recorded but never released, his mother Molly noted poignantly that ‘Bird Flew By’ was ‘one of Nick’s earliest songs, played on his old original 20 dollar guitar. It has never appeared on any record – I love it and it reminds me of the very young – and still happy – Nick before the shadows closed in.’
Chapter 21
As you trawl through the life, at the end and in the end, in Churchill’s words, ‘the terrible ifs accumulate’. If Nick had sold more records while he was st
ill alive, it might have tempered his depression … If the anti-depressants hadn’t been dished out as freely as chocolates at Christmas … If Nick had been born with a thicker skin … In the end, though, Nick Drake was born, and died, the way he was. The sadness and introspection gave birth to the music. Had he been less contemplative, it is unlikely that he would have produced such inimitable music. And music was very important to Nick.
Was it the music industry which killed him? It is a popular scapegoat – an industry which is venal in its pursuit of profit. There have been sacrifices, but they are outnumbered by the survivors. For every Janis or Jimi, there have been hundreds who made it through: from Wee Willie Harris to Keith Richards, and back. Friends who knew him during the early stages of his life, right up to the time he began making a career of music, emphasized the normality of the Nick they knew, but somehow I think it is too easy to blame an industry for his very personal problems.
It is conceivable that drugs accentuated and made even more frail an already fragile personality. A precursor was Syd Barrett, the archetypal acid casualty. But with Syd too there is evidence that the drugs simply exacerbated problems that were already there. Drugs were certainly tacitly understood to be part and parcel of rock ‘n’ roll life. Island Records’ David Betteridge had plenty of experience dealing with fragile egos, dealing with ‘young human beings working under very difficult social circumstances’. Island’s Art Director, Annie Sullivan, remembers the last time she saw Nick, at the Hampstead Heath photo shoot for Pink Moon, and assumed his shabby condition was due to drugs. David Sandison, Nick’s press officer at Island, told me: ‘I suspect he smoked a lot of dope – everybody did. But then if you are inclined to introspection, hash certainly is not inclined to make you come out of yourself.’
Simon Crocker had sunny memories of Nick at Marlborough. He also saw him six months before he died, and was shocked at his deterioration. By then, Crocker was in the music business himself, managing Pete Atkin, who had fashioned a career singing the lyrics of Clive James. As he had been around the music business and was aware of the drug question, I asked him if he assumed Nick’s condition was drug-induced. ‘Yes, at the time I did …’he told me. ‘But I don’t know how involved in drugs he got at that period. I don’t know how far drugs contributed to his problems … Robert Kirby had seen it all gradually happen; for me it had been this huge jump. He was very shaky … I thought it seemed to be a kind of stoned … He probably wasn’t. Looking back, he’d been taking anti-depressants, which have the same kind of effect, making you … confused.’
Nick is known to have smoked dope, suspected to have dropped acid and rumoured to have tried heroin. The only difference between Arthur Lubow’s piece on Nick Drake for New Times in 1978 and his essay which accompanied the Fruit Tree box set in 1979, was the four lines excised for the latter (‘He told one friend he was “looking to score – the big one”. Heroin? “I’ve tried everything else,” he said. “There’s nothing else left.” He never got any’). When the censored lines were spotted, it only fuelled the rumours that heroin was a contributory factor. It is easy to understand how such rumours sprung up: in those days people – particularly music-business people – who died of overdoses invariably had taken drugs supplied by a dealer rather than a doctor.
Rumours of Nick’s use of heroin persisted long after his death and the ‘heroin chic’ of the nineties saw them gain even more ground. In fact, the only occasion when Brian Wells remembers Nick showing any interest in heroin, owes more to Cheech & Chong than Trainspotting: ‘I remember Nick coming round to a flat where I lived [in 1973]… with my wife saying: “Look, I really want to try smack.” So I said: “Are you sure?” because neither of us had ever done any … He said: “Yeah, I really think … I want to try it”, and it was all slightly hesitant. It wasn’t: “I’m really determined to try it.”
‘So I said, well, do you want to give this guy a call? I knew someone who was doing smack, and he said: “Yeah, OK.” We’d maybe had a joint … and it was quite late, but he’d suddenly introduced the subject: “I want to try smack.” It wasn’t: “There’s nothing else left for me, I want to do it.” It’s just: “I’ve been thinking about it, and I think I want to try the big one.”
‘I was a bit wary of this, because I was smoking dope and getting drunk, but not into taking heroin. And I phoned this guy who’d got a flat in Soho, and they picked the phone up and I was looking at Nick and said: “There’s nothing to worry about”, and this guy said: “What do you mean, there’s nothing to worry about?” I was saying to Nick: “Just relax, man.” And this guy, whose number I’d got, was getting really freaked out at the end of the phone … Nick started laughing and I just put the phone down. We fell about laughing.
‘I said I didn’t ask him for any gear, he just freaked out at the other end of the phone, God knows what he’s stuffing himself with … So I called back and said: “Look, I called a minute ago …”, and the guy says: “Who the fuck are you?” I said: “Look, I’m sorry, I didn’t know what to say to you. I just wondered if you’d got any smack.” He said: “Don’t ever ring this number again. Never, never, never ring this number again!” and he slammed the phone down. And so that was that… As far as I know, Nick never took heroin. He wasn’t really a big drug user.’
Perhaps if he had become an engineer like his father, or a surgeon like his grandfather, Nick’s life would have been less troubled. Maybe a less privileged upbringing would have toughened him, made him a degree more street-wise, a little less sensitive. Or was there simply something there in Nick all along? So that whichever path he took, a sense of failure and of worthlessness would have dogged him to the end of his days? There might have been more days, but would they have been better or brighter days? Or maybe he was just a poor, sad, lost boy, brought down by illness, who didn’t find a cure in time.
It is fascinating, but fruitless to speculate. We will never know. Even those closest to him could never know. It seems likely that not even Nick knew. But Nick’s death cannot be elevated to any heroic stature. We have to accept that an overdose of prescribed medicine was the method of his tragically premature death; and by investing false heroism in his death we only undermine the very substantial achievements of his life.
Any valour and heroism in Nick’s all-too-short life came in the courage of his living. It can be seen in his proud but foolhardy determination to try to beat his illness on his own, and in the will to go back and record even after he had apparently given up hope and retreated to Tanworth. It came in the day-to-day battles with despair, the acceptance of a life unfulfilled and empty, and the continued, weary living of that life.
In the tireless quest for an answer, an explanation, Nick’s lyrics have been dissected as systematically and painstakingly as a corpse on a mortuary slab. With the easy wisdom of hindsight, you can sift through Nick’s work and find eerie premonitions and chill forebodings by the bucketload. But this is treacherous territory: analyse the lyrics of any introspective young songwriter, and you are unlikely to divine plump, pragmatic, middle-aged contentment; and yet, for most, that was the more likely fate. John Martyn pointed out the dangers in conversation with Andy Robson: ‘Nick was neither generous nor outgoing. I sound like I’m having a pop at him now, don’t I?… But I’m just trying to deflate the myth. I hate that myth-making. You could listen to my music and say I was a fucking lunatic, or a really romantic soul. Yet neither of those are true. And maybe it was the same for Nick.’
Stuart Maconie’s Q review of Way To Blue also tried to disabuse the myth-makers: ‘Eulogies about Nick Drake often make romantic noises about his being “not of this world” and the like while ignoring the fact that he was mentally ill. To treat him as some super cultural sage rather than a gifted, sick, unhappy young man is both to cheapen his tragedy and undervalue his music.’
The combination of Nick’s looks, body of work and premature death conspires against all rational objections, to reinforce the romantic myth of the doomed
and tragic poet, who in dying young achieved the acclaim which was denied him in life. The very Englishness of his work places Nick in a line which stretches from Byron and Shelley through to Wilfred Owen and Rupert Brooke. These are not easy temptations to avoid.
But no life worth the name is ever that simple, and even the brief life of Nick Drake abounds with contradictions: the boy who seemed to personify the corrosive effects of loneliness, though he never really left his parents’ home; who found communication such an effort, but reached out so fluently, to so many, through his work. The artist who valued integrity above all, yet grew increasingly bitter at his own lack of commercial success. To cast Nick in the role of doomed poet, first you must reconcile that image with his avowed prowess at athletics. To paint Nick as a perpetual outsider, you must explain away his conviviality at Marlborough. To blame the record industry for Nick’s failure, you must consider whether Nick’s own unwillingness to gig was not a major factor in his lack of recognition.
Try as you might, it is hard to reconcile the athletic schoolboy in the C1 House rugby XV with the gaunt and haunted figure pictured on Hampstead Heath only a handful of years later. But always the dark side is taken for the real Nick Drake. The truth of a whole life is sought solely in those last few years, dominated by depression, when Nick himself had all but forgotten who he really was. His death has become his defining moment, like a prism which distorts the way in which we look at the whole short life. And yet his overdose, whether accidental or deliberate, was probably no more than the impulse of one lonely, confused, pre-dawn moment.
Nick Drake Page 33