All the Madmen

by Clinton Heylin

  Mary Finnegan: [Angie] created this whole star myth. She used to say all the time, if you want to be a star you’ve got to live like a star . . . She was the worldly sophisticated one and he was just a small town boy. She put herself behind him a hundred per cent and so, gradually, they both became weirder and weirder.

  Bowie still wasn’t convinced he was psychologically robust enough to grasp the crown. It took the unholy alliance of Angie and Defries to make him believe. But when he did believe, the effect was really quite startling. Mick Ronson – sidekick, sounding board and band-leader to The Spiders from Mars – was one of those stunned by the change in him. When Defries, having put their arrangement into legalese, asked Bowie to sign his life away in a Faustian pact, the accompanying Ronson realized his friend ‘just wanted to get signed up and get on the move. He didn’t pinpoint things in contracts . . . He just wanted to be a star.’ It would prove an expensive oversight. Photographer-journalist Mick Rock, who had not known the pre-Ziggy Bowie but knew the inspirational Syd Barrett better than almost anyone in rock, subsequently portrayed the Bowie he met in March 1972 as someone who was ‘as ambitious as any person I’d ever come across up to that point in my life . . . He was projecting heavily, before it actually happened – that’s the fascinating part.’ Even if the shadow man remained ever on his tail.

  *

  Another singer-songwriter haunted by the shadow man was also returning to the studio just as Hunky Dory was rolling off the record presses. Nick Drake even had a name for ‘him’ – ‘Pink Moon’ (‘None of you stand so tall / Pink Moon gonna get you all’). But unlike Bowie, Drake lacked a plentiful supply of songs fit for purpose. He barely had a bushel of ballads, certainly not a full fruit tree. And what he did have, he seemed reluctant to share with any like-minded musos. According to Fruit Tree sleeve-writer Arthur Lubow – only the second writer (after Nick Kent) to research Drake’s life – ‘Nick would never perform any songs from Pink Moon for his friends.’

  Perhaps he didn’t consider (m)any of the new songs to be public pieces. Maybe they were too damn raw; they just needed to be gently rubbed until they shined in the dark. It was like he finally planned to make his own Astral Weeks. ’Cause it sure sounded like the man who made Pink Moon was in terrible pain, pain most of Nick Drake’s previous work had only suggested. And yes, there was a redemptive element in the blackness. One just had to listen hard enough to glean this message from what were increasingly slim pickings.

  By the end of 1971 something had happened to the songwriter that conspired with his copious cannabis consumption to stop him in his tracks. Whether because of the chronic depression that had enveloped him during the making of Bryter Layter, or an ongoing writer’s block that was itself probably a contributory cause to the self-same depression, new songs were fitful visitors these days. In fact, as Peter Hogan points out in his guide to Drake’s music: ‘No one is too sure where and when the [Pink Moon] songs were written. Robert Kirby recognized guitar phrases and fragments that Nick had been toying with back in his Cambridge days [while] . . . others have stated that many of the songs date back to 1969 or thereabouts.’

  Whenever and however they came, the songs that for so long had served as a refuge for his inner feelings, weren’t serving their master so well. This time the sum would need to exceed the parts. It is no coincidence that the only pair of songs on Pink Moon that run to more than a dozen lines – save for the two eight-line poems that make up ‘Which Will’ – are ‘Things Behind the Sun’ and ‘Parasite’, songs whose genesis predates Bryter Layter. Also from the same time (and place) was ‘Place to Be’, a three-verse lyric replete with the kind of natural imagery he once mined so meticulously. Here he directly addressed the muse he thought he knew so well, asking her to explain why he is ‘darker than the deepest sea . . . weaker than the palest blue.’

  Only with these three older joins would the new construct prove solid enough to stand tall. Even father Rodney was unsure when the other songs were penned, admitting in interview, ‘Where and how and when he wrote [Pink Moon] is difficult to say.’ The overseer of Drake’s estate, Cally von Callomon, knows better. He informed Amanda Petruisch, the most recent writer to tackle Pink Moon in monograph: ‘Nick was incapable of writing and recording whilst he was suffering from periods of depression. He was not depressed during the writing or recording of Pink Moon and was immensely proud of the album, as letters to his father testify. Some journalists and book writers have found this fact disappointing.’

  Actually, this ‘book writer’ finds our indentured man’s statement plain incredible. Not to say blatantly contradicted by the recipient of said ‘letters’, who had already stated: ‘He was beginning to get very withdrawn and depressed then. He was very down when he wrote Pink Moon.’ And if ever there’s a record that sounds like the product of someone who ‘was very down’, it is Pink Moon. Maybe the gentleman with the Germanic surname saw something Byronic in Drake; for he, too, left an estate that claimed ‘unpublished letters’ proved the man was a saint, and what a shame no one else was allowed to see the evidence.

  And why exactly would Drake be writing letters to his parents at this juncture? After all, he was spending most of his time at his parents’ home – part of what Joe Boyd has dubbed ‘the steady progress of retreat’ – even though it wasn’t where he really wanted to be. (He confessed to his mother Molly, ‘I don’t like it at home, but I can’t bear it anywhere else.’) ‘Place to Be,’ that product of another time and place, was at least partly about longing to go home. One of Drake’s former songwriter-muses, Robin Frederick, reckons the song ‘was written by someone who wants to tell us how lost he feels, how much he yearns to go home, to find a place to be. Before he has even finished the musical introduction, we are as lost as he is. He starts on the tonic (home), plays just those couple of chords that assure us we know where we are, then starts singing . . . in the middle of the progression . . . the middle of nowhere! Suddenly you have that sensation of floating, of falling . . .’

  Such a remembrance of that hopeful yesteryear had become a necessary prop to a painful present. But if Drake could still communicate ‘real’ feelings in a song like this, he barely conversed with his parents when back home, which makes the idea of gregarious letters about how well the songwriting was going, and how proud he was of the songs, doubly unlikely. Drake, who was now monosyllabic in person and whose lyrics had become so pared down he was almost writing haikus, by autumn 1971 had retired to some place where even his friends could not find him:

  Brian Wells: Nick just seemed to become isolated. You’d go see him and the conversation would become uncomfortable and I would have to leave. And then he wound up going back to his parents’ place, and I think he felt quite embarrassed about that, ashamed that he hadn’t been able to cope in London . . . And he did wind up in hospital a couple of times, and he was treated with anti-depressant drugs . . . [But] I see it more as an existential thing, that the world was becoming a rather futile place [to be]. He wasn’t like Peter Green or Syd Barrett, where the chemicals precipitated an underlying schizophrenic tendency. [But] I did get a sense of [chronic] low self-esteem – [Hence,] ‘I am a parasite who clings to your skirt.’

  The remaining eight songs (one an instrumental doodle) on a collection that times out at a mere twenty-eight minutes – which would be parsimonious for a mid-Sixties Beach Boys album, let alone a singer-songwriter statement of the early Seventies – were pared to the bone, lyrically, musically and spiritually. This is exactly what he had intended. Apparently every note from the two night-time Pink Moon sessions ended up in its well-spaced grooves, save for a forty-six-second snippet of the eighteenth-century French standard, ‘Plaisir D’Amour’ – which had been positioned to open side two on the original album master.

  The message of that traditional song was certainly one Drake related to as much as anything by Joan Baez, whose version of the song provided him with a template (along with ‘All My Trials’ (Will Soon Be Over)’, anot
her pertinent ‘cover’ he once liked to play). The refrain of ‘Plaisir D’Amour’ (in translation) goes, ‘The pleasure of love lasts only a moment / The pain of love lasts a lifetime.’ But Drake did not intend to voice the sentiment, merely alluding to it. In the end Drake decided even this little gesture might be misunderstood, and the song was cut; leaving Pink Moon as the era’s shortest album-length statement of consequence. As producer John Wood told Arthur Lubow: ‘He had no more material, and he thought that was part of the deal. And he was right. I wouldn’t want to hear any more before turning it over. If something’s that intense, it can’t really be measured in minutes.’

  Certainly, no careful listener leaves Pink Moon less than sated. ‘Intense’ could almost be a synonym for Pink Moon, as could ‘compacted’. Even Drake sensed it, choosing to give half the songs on the album single-word titles – ‘Road’, ‘Horn’, ‘Know’, ‘Parasite’, ‘Ride’24 – that reflected his own monosyllabic divided self. The opener and title track, which would be responsible for introducing Drake to a mass audience when used in a US Volkswagen TV ad in 2000, comprises just five lines. The beguiling ‘Road’ runs to four; as do ‘Harvest Breed’ and ‘Know’. In fact, ‘Know’ comprises just twenty words – but manages to say more about Drake’s then-state of mind than twenty-hundred words from anyone else, even Nick Kent, who called the song ‘a paean to schizophrenia’:

  Know that I love you

  Know that I don’t care

  You know that I see you

  You know I’m not there.

  In less than two-dozen syllables, Drake elucidated the paranoid panorama of his own condition. As he knew only too well, his problem was precisely that no one ever really got to ‘know’ him, not even his current (platonic) girlfriend Sophie Ryde. And Drake was now so internalized that he wasn’t even sure he could get the message through to her. In fact, Ryde tells a story about the day of the first Pink Moon session, when Nick called by at her flat and asked her if she would mind typing up the lyrics from his exercise book for the session; a slightly odd request given that he had extremely readable handwriting and the exercise book was his ‘fair copy’, anyway.

  When she came to one of the new songs, ‘Free Ride’, with its obvious lyrical play on her surname, she grew mildly miffed, feeling that this was a ‘none too subtle plea for her to be more understanding’. She even took the reference to ‘the pictures that you hang on your wall’ to be a sly dig at the post-Impressionist paintings that decorated her small flat. But such was the barrier separating him from her, and everyone else he held dear, that his only way to communicate with her was to show her these lyrics, like a repressed schoolboy passing notes in class.

  Significantly, each verse to ‘Free Ride’ asserts ‘I know you . . . I see through’, as if his songs gave him a one-way ticket to the outside world, which he could summon were he not so afraid he might not come back. But without external stimuli, the songs were drying up – hence, that preternatural feeling on Pink Moon that this is someone almost writing from memory, half-recalling how it used to be. The writer in him seems to know that this is probably his last shot. For all the references to the light of the sun on Pink Moon, it seems Drake set out to prove Pascal’s truism that ‘too much light darkens the mind’. The signs of imminent mental collapse could no longer be ignored. The portrait of Drake in Arthur Lubow’s 1978 retrospective piece for New Times said it all:

  Some nights Sophia [sic] would return from work and find him sitting in total darkness. After Bryter Layter he retreated to his parents’ home, but he would [still] make occasional forays into London . . . To Brian Wells he said, ‘I can’t cope. All the defences are gone. All the nerves are exposed.’ . . . He wasn’t able to write. ‘There’s music running through my head all the time,’ he told his father. Yet he couldn’t get it down.

  The album, for all its sense of skeletal unity, acts like a series of sketches for songs – hints of an unobtainable future now lying permanently in the past. Unlike Barrett’s second solo LP, though, one senses throughout that Drake is fully cognisant of the effect he is going for; that, end of his tether or not, this was a conscious artist reworking the core sensibility of ‘the blues’ in a way firmly consistent with his own uniquely English sensibility. There is a deliberation to everything here, which dates back to the immediate aftermath of Bryter Layter and ‘the idea of just doing something with John Wood, the engineer at Sound Techniques.’

  Even after Boyd removed himself from the process by splitting for California, Drake had retained his faith in Sound Techniques engineer John Wood, the studio technician he now made complicit in the decision to strip himself bare. Yet it was only at the sessions themselves that Wood realized just how internalized the introspective singer-songwriter had allowed himself to become. As he revealed on a Dutch 1979 radio retrospective:

  John Wood: Nick was determined to make a record that was very stark, that would have all the texture and cotton wool and . . . tinsel that had been on the other two pulled away. So it was only just him. And he would sit in the control room, and sorta blankly look at the wall and say, ‘Well, I really don’t want to hear anything else. I really think people should only just be aware of me and how I am.’

  Despite Drake’s quiet insistence that he didn’t ‘want to hear anything else’, Wood thought he might at some point say, ‘I want you to get hold of Robert Kirby.’ And so it was that the producer turned around at the end of the second evening and said, ‘Well, what do you think? What do you want me to put on?’ And the singer said, ‘I don’t want anything on.’ ‘Absolutely nothing?’ ‘No, that’s all I want.’ Less was now officially more. Robert Kirby, for one, thinks that his friend was both afraid he no longer had the mental energy to sculpt the songs and consumed with the very real fear that its impact would be diluted by any embellishment. From here on, the nerve ends would be there for everyone to hear:

  Robert Kirby: Each of the songs on [Pink Moon] contains a wealth of material that earlier he would have spent time developing. I do not mean by [necessarily] adding other instruments, but just himself. I think he [now] felt that he could trust nobody to help him, or just couldn’t be arsed . . . I sometimes feel guilty listening to it . . . because he is just too exposed. It’s almost like attending a public execution.

  Any embellishment would also have required a degree of communication now beyond Drake. The one confirmed visitor to the sessions, Linda Thompson, remembers someone who ‘was in a dreadful state, totally incommunicado. I’m surprised he didn’t throw me out. He didn’t [even] talk to John Wood.’ He didn’t talk to his record label much, either. Even when the album was completed – to, one must presume, his satisfaction – the only time he showed his face at Island was to give them the master tapes. The rest was now in the hands of the gods of commerce. David Sandison, still lending his brand of Islandic evangelism to the vestiges of the Witchseason roster, wrote about that visit in a piece that appeared in certain English music papers the following February:

  The last time I saw Nick was a week or so ago. He came in, smiling that weird smile of his and handed over his new album. He’d just gone into the studios and recorded it without telling a soul except the engineer. And we haven’t seen him since . . . Nobody at Island is really sure where Nick lives these days. We’re pretty sure he left his flat in Hampstead quite a while ago . . . The chances of Nick actually playing in public are more than remote. So why, when there are people prepared to do anything for a recording contract . . . are we releasing this new Nick Drake album, and the next (if he wants to do one)? Because we believe that Nick Drake is a great talent [even though] his first two albums haven’t sold a shit.

  Sandison’s refreshingly heartfelt appeal appeared in the papers not because there was a resurgence of interest, or because he had been commissioned to write about the shy, retiring songwriter. Island had actually paid for the page Sandison used to express his feelings, in the form of an ad, it being the only way they could think of to promote Pink Moon w
hen its auteur wouldn’t do interviews, radio shows or gigs.

  He wouldn’t even pose for a set of publicity photos (as his sister would say of the photo of him sitting on the park bench that bedecks the inner sleeve, ‘All Nick’s desire to pose has gone – he’s not even aware of the camera’). Photographer Keith Morris, who had already worked with Drake on the past two albums, was shocked when he saw the man who turned up for this December 1971 photo-shoot: ‘By the time the last album came out, he was seriously withdrawn. It was actually quite . . . a dramatic departure from the Nick that we knew . . . You’ll meet people that will tell you he was depressed at other times, but nothing was quite like that final session . . . It was like doing a still life.’

  Although Sandison expressed the prophetic hope that ‘maybe one day someone in authority will stop to listen to [Drake] properly . . . and maybe a lot more people will get to hear Nick Drake’s incredible songs’, his gambit yielded no immediate dividend. For now, Pink Moon didn’t sell shit. Even the songwriter’s few supporters in the music media were starting to feel the reclusive aura was becoming annoying. Jerry Gilbert, in his Sounds review, thought it was ‘time Mr Drake stopped acting so mysteriously and started getting something properly organized for himself’; while Melody Maker journo Mark Plummer’s intuitive response was that ‘the more you listen to Drake . . . the more compelling his music becomes – but all the time it hides from you’.

  Plummer had been steered in the album’s direction by one of Drake’s few musical contemporaries to believe he was one of a kind: John Martyn. Martyn, though, was in full agreement with Gilbert that Drake needed to snap out of it, stop ‘acting so mysterious’ and start meeting his fans halfway. In fact, it would appear that Martyn and Drake had a furious row on this very subject shortly after the Pink Moon album was completed. The way mutual friends heard it, Drake ‘said that Martyn’s music was becoming insincere in an attempt to be more commercial. When Martyn replied that he wanted his records to be heard, not to drop off an abyss as Nick’s had, Nick was furious . . . He called Martyn “devious” and drove away’ [in the night].’