by Joe Moran
Gould had loved the radio since he was a boy and had it on all the time as an adult, even as he slept. “It’s always occurred to me that when those first people sat glued or wired to their crystal sets,” he said, “what they really were recognizing was . . . the sheer mystery and challenge of another human voice being five blocks away and being heard.”28 In 1965 he made his first radio documentary for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, The Search for Petula Clark. Through the prism of Clark’s music, which Gould discovered while driving on Highway 17 in Ontario and enjoying its superb wireless reception, the program celebrated the mobile solitude of the long car journey with a radio as your only link to the rest of humanity.
On Lake Simcoe, ninety miles north of Toronto, Gould had a winter-proofed cottage which his family had owned since he was young. As a boy, he had cycled into the nearby farmland and sung to the cows, and claimed never again to have encountered such a congenial audience. He loved what he called the “Ibsenesque gloom” of the North’s wild landscapes and gunmetal-gray skies.29 He associated Beethoven with driving through snow on the way back to Toronto on Sunday afternoons, listening to the New York Philharmonic on the radio, and he always preferred the northern European composers—Orlando Gibbons’s austerely beautiful counterpoint, Bach’s immaculately crafted mathematics, Sibelius’s tone poems—to the more overtly emotional Mediterraneans.
He went on to make a number of radio documentaries about the Far North, which has an imaginative pull on Canadians similar to that of the West on Americans. The Idea of North (1967) was inspired by a 1,015-mile journey he took on the Muskeg Express from Winnipeg to Churchill in subarctic northern Manitoba. The program mixed and overlapped human speech in a way that he called “contrapuntal” and that was inspired by his solitary journeys north, during which he whiled away time at truck stops eavesdropping on conversations, learning to hear the lilting cadences of northerners’ speech as a kind of music.
This idea of the North as a place where you could escape other people was, as Gould well knew, a romantic fallacy: his interviewees, old hands who talked about life in the northern third of Canada, often said that the isolation and harshness of the environment meant that people stuck closer together and relied on each other more. Gould, who did not even like the cold very much, knew that you could just as easily live a hermit-like existence in a hotel suite with room service. But his romantic attitude toward the Far North embodied two notions he held dear: that solitude was a precondition for creativity and that the most worthwhile and enduring forms of communication occurred against the seeming handicap of physical distance.
Gould was not shy in the conspicuously uneasy way that, say, the silent John Ogdon was; his often exasperated friends and colleagues tended to see him more as neurotic, single-minded, or stubborn. But he did have that classic shy sense of feeling stymied by normal social codes and conventions and having to look—in his case, with magnificent ingenuity—for alternative ways of reaching people. And he had an extreme variety of that weird overconfidence that can afflict shy people, the sense that they are escaping the cant and evasions of social life in pursuit of some deep and pure connection with the rest of humanity.
Given Gould’s hatred of live performance and his faith in the creative potential of keeping your distance from others, it is fitting that his work should invite the most delayed and distant audience response of all. His recording of the Prelude and Fugue in C from the second book of Bach’s The Well-Tempered Clavier formed part of the “golden record,” that mix tape of natural earth sounds, greetings to aliens, and music that was affixed to the outside of Voyagers 1 and 2, the spacecraft launched into the nothingness of space in 1977. No extraterrestrial audience—even assuming that they ever work out, from the etched pictorial instructions, how to spin the record and put the stylus in the groove—is likely to hear Gould’s piano playing for at least another 185,000 years, when these spacecraft may at last enter the orbit of a star with a habitable earth.
At half-past four one morning in 1967 or 1968, in his bedroom in the family home in Tanworth-in-Arden in the English Midlands, another shy voice committed itself to tape. Unlike Gould’s nighttime recordings, this one was never meant to be preserved, still less sent into space; it seems to have been made for no one’s ears in particular. But the recording survives. The voice’s owner has just returned, drunk, from a party, and is speaking into the mic of a Ferrograph mono recorder. His family had been capturing each other’s voices since the early 1950s, when his father, an engineer, brought home one of the first reel-to-reels. “I think there’s something extraordinarily nice about seeing the dawn up before one goes to bed,” this voice is saying. “I shall probably stop talking here, because if I don’t I shall start soon relating the life histories of things, which will be frightfully tedious.”
Our voices are such markers of our identities, with signatures as distinctive as fingerprints, that anxiety will always find its way into our vocal cords. A voice is simply an exhaled breath, a series of vibrations of air produced by different parts of the body from the abdomen to the lips. A confident voice resonates with the breath of life itself. A screaming baby does not need to worry if its voice will carry; it is just a breathing body, making itself heard. But the shy and ill-at-ease generally fade into muttering monotone, whether they like it or not. Agatha Christie’s voice may have found a renewed assurance when she was alone with a tape recorder, but this Tanworth bedroom voice is classically shy: half-hearted and wavering, with a falling inflection on each phrase. It betrays those familiar bad habits, such as breathing shallowly and slouching so the voice’s journey up from the diaphragm is blocked, that the shy acquire when they are unsure if others want to hear what they have to say. It is the only surviving record of Nick Drake speaking.
The back cover photograph on his first album, Five Leaves Left, has Drake in focus, leaning against the brick wall of a south London factory, while a blurred man, late for the bus, runs past him. The image captures the general aura Drake gave off of being on the edges, looking in. The writer and musician Brian Cullman recalled going for a curry with a group of friends and not even noticing that Drake was there, the specter at the feast, until they paid the bill. Brian Wells, a Cambridge contemporary, said that Drake would often just get up while they were playing records and smoking pot in someone’s room, and leave. It gave him an air of mystery, as if he had an unknown parallel life, even though he was probably just going back to his room. Wells went on to be a psychiatrist and referred to Drake in professional terms as “defended”—someone who compartmentalized his life, policed his boundaries, and let others in only on his terms.30
It was when Drake moved to London to make records that his natural introversion congealed into something darker. Increased shyness is a known side effect of excessive pot-smoking; the initially disinhibiting influence of the drug can give way to anxiety and agoraphobia. The dreamy, listless haze induced by “Mary Jane” infuses many of Drake’s songs, as does the attendant sense of observing from the wings and being too timorous to join in. His producer Joe Boyd said that Drake answered the phone in this period with a muffled “Uh, hello?” as if he had never heard it ring before.31 He began wandering the streets of the city, ending up in friends’ houses, mutely accepting a mattress for the night and leaving the next morning without a good-bye.
Where would Drake have been without the electric microphone? When it first came along in the 1920s, it allowed singers to personalize their delivery and connect more closely with large audiences. Relieved of the need to project over the orchestra, they no longer had to sound like generic tenors or sopranos but could sing mezza voce and sound like themselves. Performers like Drake, who sang at the same volume as he spoke, even found that the microphone improved their tone and brought out harmonics unheard by the unaided ear. When the first multitrack tape machines arrived in the early 1960s, soft singers could have their voices turned up high on the mix so the instruments did not drown them out.
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bsp; At the Sound Techniques studios, just off King’s Road in Chelsea, where Drake recorded his albums, the brilliant engineer John Wood was pioneering multitrack recording and mic’ing up voices as if they were another instrument, creating a vocal line that was clear and alluring without sounding too amplified. After experimenting with several microphones for Drake, he chose a Neumann U67, which allowed him to sing very close to the mic without its creating popping sounds from the plosive blasts of air the mouth expels. Drake’s breathy, mumbling voice now sounded haunted and beautiful. At the top of his fairly narrow register it was soft and melodic, if slightly flat; lower down it was more of a purr, and on the lowest notes almost a growl.
Drake had first hitchhiked to France during the summer of 1965, while he was still at school, and he returned often over the next few years. In 1967 he spent four months at the University of Aix-en-Provence studying French and writing songs. Here he immersed himself in the chanson tradition, which began with the Provençal troubadours and their northern counterparts, the trouvères, and came to maturity in the informal setting of Parisian cafés and nightclubs. Declaiming the words matters more than the melody in the chanson, and when the electric microphone arrived, it became the perfect means for chansonniers to exploit the rhythms and inflections of the French language. Chansons typically have intimate vocals with a simple accompaniment, so every syllable is audible, and as the chansonnier Georges Moustaki put it, “There is no need to sing above the level of your heart.”32
Many of Drake’s songs are like English chansons, with lyric and melody working together to produce a string of vivid observations. They do not have a chorus and an eight-bar bridge like conventional songs, just a loose series of verses linked by a refrain. His voice drifts away from the guitar rhythm, each vocal line beginning just after the beat, so his phrasing seems hesitant but natural, as if he is fighting his shyness to get something said.
Although at first listen he sounds like a sensitive singer-songwriter baring his soul, Drake’s songs are actually quite cagey. They might well be scenes from his life, with hints of missed opportunities (“One of These Things First”), unfulfillment (“Day Is Done”), the inadequacy of words (“Time Has Told Me”), and urban loneliness (“The Chime of a City Clock”). But they mostly avoid the first person, addressing instead an indeterminate “you” or “they.” This is typical of the chanson, a form that allows singers to sing their hearts out while hiding behind different guises. Georges Brassens, a renowned chansonnier of the postwar years and someone Drake would certainly have listened to in Aix, sang bourgeois-baiting songs about sexual conquests, cuckoldry, and venereal disease with satirical vignettes of the police, judges, and priests. But he performed them quietly and rather nervously, sitting in a straight-backed chair with just his guitar, a pipe, and a glass of water to hand.
Françoise Hardy was another shy chansonnière with whom Drake felt an affinity and who also suffered from stage fright. In May 1968 she was halfway through a show at the Savoy when, as overawed by the place as Agatha Christie had been, she forgot the words to a new song. While a more confident performer might have brushed the incident off, Hardy retired from live performing later that year and had nightmares about it for the next forty years. In the summer of 1970, Joe Boyd arranged a meeting between Drake and Hardy in her apartment on the Île Saint-Louis in Paris, during which Drake stared into his tea and did not speak. Despite this unpromising start, Drake agreed to write songs for Hardy, and they had other monosyllabic meetings over the next few years. An urban legend says that he once stopped off in Paris, rang her doorbell, discovered she was out, and left without even leaving a message with her maid. Since the only authoritative source for this tale would be the timid doorbell-ringer himself, it probably never happened, but the story has stuck. It sounds just like something Nick Drake would have done.
Nowadays a snatch of video on YouTube of music made in his bedroom might have been all Drake needed to build a following. In his era the options for a shy performer were more limited, especially since Chris Blackwell of Island Records, Drake’s parent record company, was reluctant to advertise music directly via a separate marketing department. British radio played mostly chart music, so live shows were the only way for an artist like Drake to build an audience—which forced him to face down his stage fright.
His first big concert, supporting Fairport Convention at London’s Royal Festival Hall, came in September 1969, a few weeks after Five Leaves Left was released. This venue was about the worst place for a nervous performer to do his first major gig. Its auditorium is like a giant airplane hangar: three thousand seats sweep uninterrupted down to the front, with no separating pillars between performer and audience. If you are playing solo, it seems like a very long way from the wings to the center of the massive stage. The hall’s famous egg-in-a-box design, in which the curved auditorium floats on stilts above the foyers, was supposed to cut out external noise but in fact made it hard to hear at the back and the sides. Drake’s feathery voice barely carried. He had brought only one guitar, and because each song required bespoke retuning, he needed long gaps between songs to twiddle the machine heads, during which time he completely ignored the audience. His only admission of their presence came as he walked off and waved his guitar vaguely in their direction. According to David Sandison, Island Record’s press officer, he could have been a roadie doing a sound check.33
Smaller gigs in bars were worse, as Drake’s ethereal sound fought a losing battle against the clinking glasses and low conversational drone. He wasn’t bold enough to tell people to shush. The sound equipment in these venues was invariably poor, with just one mic for his voice and one for his much louder guitar, and no foldback monitoring to allow him to hear himself. The mic picked up the sound of his chair squeaking and his jacket buttons hitting the guitar, but his voice sounded dampened and distant, not helped by his habit of turning his head away from the mic as if he had changed his mind about being heard. Halfway through songs he would lose his nerve and start again.
The nadir arrived when he was booked for the Guest, Keen and Nettlefolds Nuts and Bolts Apprentices’ Annual Dance in Smethwick, Birmingham at the end of 1969. About fifteen people gathered in front of the stage as he began, but most of his audience were still cleaning up after the meal and stacking chairs to make way for the disco to follow. There is nothing lonelier-looking than a musician playing for a crowd that isn’t listening. Drake’s sister, Gabrielle, said later that he had “a skin too few” for a creative artist, because “you have to be able to bare your soul in your work while someone goes off and makes coffee in the middle of your performance.”34
Nor was he good at coping with attention. If someone praised his music, he would shrug and walk away. When Jerry Gilbert interviewed him for Sounds magazine, he stirred his tea and started occasional sentences that trailed off into silence. He barely mentioned to his sister that he was making his first album and then, one day in the summer of 1969, came into her bedroom, threw the record on her bed, and said, “There you are.”35 It was the classic, self-defeating act of the shy: investing in something that you hope will change people’s idea of you and then announcing it with a throwaway gesture that fails to convey how much it means to you. He recorded his last album, Pink Moon—which consisted of just his voice, guitar, and a single piano overdub—without telling anyone except John Wood, the studio engineer, and then handed in the master tapes at the Island Records reception desk in a plastic bag.
By then Drake was back home living with his parents. At some point late in each afternoon he would leave his bedroom without a word, get into his car, and drive fast into the night, a ritual that seemed to offer him self-obliterating relief. A few hours later, unable to face buying gas, which in those days meant talking to a gas-pump attendant, his tank would be empty, and from a telephone booth he would ring his father, who patiently drove for miles to siphon fuel into his car. On August 1, 1974, three months before Drake died of an overdose of antidepressants, his
father recorded in his diary a hopeful sign that his son might be turning a corner. After several failed attempts, Drake had managed to fill up at the Tanworth garage.36
In our self-service, automated world, we forget that until half a century ago, shy people had the unavoidable daily ordeal of talking to service staff: shop assistants, floorwalkers, doormen, gas-pump attendants. Just the thought of entering a shop made the historian Thomas Carlyle unhappy, and, according to Josiah Morse, “the idea of ordering a suit or buying gloves prostrated him.” Agatha Christie dreaded stepping off the sidewalk into a shop, since she worried that the salespeople would not understand her order. One of Elizabeth Taylor’s characters similarly rehearses giving the order to the shop assistant in her head and frets over “how to seem off-hand enough.”37
Such anxieties were diminished, or at least displaced, after the arrival of the supermarket, with its invitation to browse through aisles of produce, silent and incognito. Nowadays the shy can scan their own items at the checkouts or, better still, fill their virtual shopping baskets online and click to buy; sliding doors and lifts have made doormen and porters almost extinct; and the latched-nozzle gas pump with automatic cutoff has turned all gas stations into lonely atolls of self-service. Perhaps self-service was all that Drake needed, and Glenn Gould was right: we reveal our better selves to each other when the impersonal charity of the machine serves as both barrier and intercessor. Or perhaps, as psychotherapists say, this would simply have “enabled” and set up a “maintenance cycle” for Drake’s shyness, giving him permission to retreat ever more into himself.