Nick Drake (11 page)

Paul Wheeler: ‘I remember Nick playing “Time Has Told Me” at
Cambridge. The first one that really struck me was “River Man” – that to me is the one that stands out. To be honest, I found a lot of his stuff a bit too … clean, too twee, whereas “River Man” had an extra dimension to it. I remember him playing those Jackson Frank songs, some standards of the time … but he'd certainly play something if he'd just written it. They weren't performances — Nick would play something, I'd play something, somebody else would play something. But what was so noticeable about Nick was that he was so … perfect! Other people would start and stop, tune up. He would never do that …'

Nick's mother, Molly, always regarded Brian Wells, who studied medicine at Selwyn College, as her son's best friend at Cambridge. Brian was an exact contemporary of Nick's at the university and provides a poignant picture of Nick during those two years. He remembers a college party where both he and Nick were struck by an outgoing girl who was dancing the night away. Nick was mesmerized, but Brian tired of the pursuit and returned to his rooms at Selwyn, only to be woken by Nick much, much later that night.

‘I didn't get off with that girl,' Nick woke Brian to tell him. A less than sympathetic Wells watched from his bed as Nick drunkenly ambled around his room, finally selecting a massive medical textbook from the bookshelves. From somewhere else, Nick found a candle, which he lit and ceremoniously placed on the flat surface of the book, before proceeding off down the staircase.

‘One of my fondest memories of Nick,' recalled Brian Wells thirty years later, ‘was looking out of my window, and seeing him teetering off on his bicycle across the college, balancing that huge book on his handlebars. He was shielding the flame, and with the candle still flickering, he cycled off.'

‘Cambridge was a very radical place,' Ian MacDonald recalls. ‘I remember when we arrived in '68, meeting a friend who had been a year ahead of me at school, and when I arrived for my first term he recognized me and came up as the new intake were having their photograph taken, and he was laughing and said: “I thought we were weird when we arrived, but you lot look like the Mothers Of Invention.” '

Ian went up to Cambridge in 1968 and met Nick Drake on various occasions: ‘I wouldn't say I knew Nick at all, really. Though I was in the same places as him quite a few times … I actually spoke to him on only two or three occasions.' He went on to become Deputy Editor
of the
New Musical Express
during the 1970s, and in 1994 his acclaimed Beatles book,
Revolution In The Head
, was published.

In the wake of The Beatles, Harold Wilson and gritty Northern cinema, classlessness was venerated, but it was still largely the children of the middle classes who made the trip to Oxbridge. Once there, though, the accents which had been so carefully and expensively chiselled in public schools and comfortable drawing rooms were swiftly flattened into
nouveau
-working-class tones. Clive James, who also studied at Cambridge, recalled the inverted snobbery of that period: ‘There was a real pretension to inarticulacy, which I felt I couldn't share. There were an awful lot of university students running around in the sixties pretending they'd never been educated, a grotesque sound coming out of their mouth.'

In the late sixties, the connection between a hash reverie, psychedelic art and rock music was self-evident. Paul McCartney's admission in 1967 that he had taken acid sent shock waves across the nation; the Mick Jagger and Keith Richards bust that same year convinced everyone, particularly the readers of the
News Of The World
(then the world's best-selling newspaper), that all these pop stars were drug addicts.

Nick Drake was evidently no stranger to drugs by the time he arrived in Cambridge. There are accounts of him smoking dope during 1966, and strong indications from friends that he had tried LSD during the early part of 1967. In that, he was certainly not unique. A wave of drug-taking swept through the teenagers of Britain's middle classes during 1967. Most saw it as the beginning of a great odyssey, a trip to the centre of the psyche. Many made the journey, but some never came back.

Robert Kirby: ‘There was always the undercurrent of the people who had gone, or wanted to go, a bit further, the acid side of it, I suppose … I'm not trying to ascribe the whole thing to drugs, but what I'm saying is that even then there were the people who put their toe in the water but didn't go the whole distance … You always got the impression that maybe Nick wanted more than just to put his toe in the water …'

The joy of long-playing records had much to do with the size and design of the twelve-inch sleeves, which were so convenient for rolling spliffs. Sleeves became iconic tokens:
Sgt Pepper
was the stained-glass window of 1967; Dylan's
John Wesley Harding
the maze of 1968 – turn the sleeve upside down and The Beatles and Lee Harvey Oswald appeared in the tree above Dylan's head. Tentative psychedelia was
apparent on album sleeves by The Incredible String Band and Pink Floyd. The Small Faces'
Ogden's Nut Gone Flake
sleeve was as revolutionary as
Sgt Pepper
, but its circular sleeve made rolling up a nightmare.

The sleeves promised access to a closed world, and then there was the music those sleeves contained … Music was probably never more important than at that time, when pop was changing into rock and the single was being elbowed out by the LP. The liberating power of music was felt across the board, in folk, jazz, blues and rock 'n' roll. Clive James told me: ‘I remember when “I Heard It Through The Grapevine” came out, and I spent the whole week listening to it in a pub in Cambridge on the jukebox.'

Iain Dunn, who was in his first year at Corpus Christi when, as a friend of Paul Wheeler's, he met Nick early in 1968, also remembers how important the music was: ‘I saw an interview with Sting on the television recently, and he said something I thought was very true, which was that in those days everyone knew what number one was. These days nobody knows, because the whole thing is so fragmented. I think accessibility to material was much more difficult, so there was much more of a sense of belonging to a cult. So if you managed a trip up to London and got hold of a copy of, I don't know, Mississippi John Hurt, this was like gold dust. People would come round and it would be an event to listen to it … I remember hiring the cellar in my college because I'd somehow or other managed to get hold of a first copy of
Tommy
, and actually playing it like a concert.'

Ian MacDonald: ‘Everyone took music much more seriously than we do these days. You'd gather together, sometimes people would be floating in and out of a particular room where people were smoking, they'd be playing records all day and people would come in and just sit, listening quite seriously all the way through The Beatles'
White Album
, and then drift off.

‘A few years later, I remember – this was after I'd left Cambridge but was typical of the time – I met Mick Farren, who had just come fresh from an extraordinary twenty-four-hour bash at his flat in Notting Hill, where all the heads, Mick and Miles, had just decided that they were going to listen to everything that Dylan had released, including all the bootlegs, in chronological order, and nobody would leave until it was finished. I do remember when we all sat around reading aloud from
The Lord Of The Rings.
Incredibly embarrassing now, but there was that mad intensity.'

Sgt Pepper
, ‘A Whiter Shade Of Pale', ‘All You Need Is Love', ‘San
Francisco': dreamy and benign reflections of 1967's good vibrations. Iain Dunn remembers Cambridge reflecting the turbulence which was manifest throughout the world just a year later: ‘We'd had the Summer of Love, and 1968 was the year of Revolution … So from it all being peace and love and freedom, the agenda for the next academic year, if you like, was revolution. The Garden House Riot, as it came to be called, was part of that, a protest against the Greek Colonels who had come to power by force during 1967. I can't remember who was in the hotel at the time, but it was something to do with protesting against the fascist junta … Coach-loads of people went up to the Grosvenor Square riot outside the American Embassy, protesting against Vietnam. So they were all highly political agendas. I think it was as much to do with being anti-Establishment as with being particularly committed to a cause. There were obviously those who were committed, but I think for most of us we were just happy to be rioting and rebelling.'

Throughout 1968 the world was rocked by dissent and chaos: in Vietnam, the Têt offensive severely shook American belief in a swift victory. Czechoslovakia briefly celebrated a liberating release from a stiflingly repressive government, before being crushed under the tracks of Russian tanks. Robert Kennedy was assassinated on the campaign trail. Martin Luther King was taken by a sniper's bullet in Memphis. Enoch Powell's ‘rivers of blood' speech took racism on to the streets and into the headlines. In France, Japan, America, Britain, Poland, Spain, Italy and Mexico, students protested and rioted, shutting down university campuses and making their grievances spectacularly public.

Looking back on the period nearly thirty years after leaving Caius, Paul Wheeler was keen to put the period that he and Nick spent at Cambridge in the context of the times: ‘The way that I recall the difference between 1967 and 1968 — '67 was the Summer of Love; '68 was much more political. In a sense '69 and '70 was the end of all that, more cynical, more depressed times … When I knew Nick, it was still in the flush of the optimistic times … My memories of Nick from that time are very funny, very humorous. He wasn't this grim, depressed … that came later. And also I would say that was the same for everybody, the turn of 1971/72 was a bad time for everybody. The depression was a sign of the times. Everybody felt down in '73, '74, because of the end of that era.'

The popular image of Nick Drake at Cambridge is of a tall, stooped figure, dressed in black, over-imbibing on hashish and
French Symbolist poetry. All very romantic, and romanticized. Paul Wheeler, who knew Nick as well as anyone at Cambridge, took issue with me over my account of a drive the two of them undertook to the East Anglian coast, about sixty miles from Cambridge. An earlier account by Arthur Lubow had Paul and Nick sitting in moonlit silence, listening to waves crashing on the Suffolk beach. ‘There was something I wanted to say about Arthur Lubow,' Paul told me, ‘something he got from me about going off to the coast … and I think in the article you wrote you have us coming back at dawn. It's all getting a bit romantic. I don't remember it as that. I do remember the occasion: I remember his driving off to the coast, and walking by the beach, but this idea of being an all-night thing I don't remember.'

The romanticization of Nick Drake has grown steadily in the years since his death, and appears unstoppable. Posthumously, Nick has been cast as a victim: of record company indifference, of a hostile society, of his own demons … But among those who knew him at Marlborough, Cambridge and while he was on Island Records, there is a feeling that he was not quite as disingenuous as he seemed; some suspect that even while still an apparently aimless student at Cambridge, he had an eye on future plans. Cambridge contemporary Iain Dunn certainly thinks he detected some deliberate image-making, despite the obvious shyness: ‘He was very nice. Incredibly nice. But quite … I think “detached” is probably the word. Not remote … I wasn't quite sure if this was a conscious image that he was developing, or whether it was just the way he was. And I think in the end, I came to the conclusion that it was a bit of both. I think he quite liked the idea of there being an air of mystique about himself. But I think he was also genuinely, incredibly shy, and found himself to be quite remote from other people.'

Despite his closeness to Nick, Brian Wells also discerned a certain reserve, and an image-consciousness which is rarely acknowledged: ‘My theory, and it is only a theory, my own impressions, I think he was always, not aloof … slightly detached from everybody, and I think most people felt this. I don't think Robert Kirby, or Paul Wheeler would ever think, Hi, Nick!, give him a hug … Nick was very conscious of his image … He was occasionally quite abrupt with people. You just got the feeling he was being rather dismissive of you.

‘I think it was because he was feeling threatened by the closeness of a relationship. I'm a very open, huggy kind of person. I sometimes felt he thought I was a bit of a twit. It wasn't just my not being a
musician, I wasn't kind of … cool. He was very aware of his cool. Actually, if you look at his photos, he was quite contrived in his appearance. He was always clean-shaven, with his long hair and his black jacket … He was very self-conscious and I think he was very sensitive. I also think he was quite precious …'

Ian MacDonald remembers Nick making a strong impression during those early days at Cambridge, not just as a result of his growing confidence on the guitar, but because of his height and physical presence: ‘He was very slight physically, tall, slightly thin. He used to wear a loose, grey suit as I remember him. He looked … fragile, like something could happen to him. Yet he was observing at the same time; a very, very fine balance. An almost … translucent person.

‘Byronic is going too far. Nick was too diffident to be Byron, he wasn't a wild man … He was someone rather fragile, but with a certain inner strength. But a lot of paradox: he was the kind of guy that women would want to mother. The impressiveness came through a kind of quiet power in those songs. Personally, he was quite a diffident person, he would mumble and there was that very faint half smile as he drew back from things.'

Nick's awareness of the way he looked and how he appeared to others also struck Iain Dunn: ‘My most vivid memory of him around Cambridge was of this very tall, loping character with shoulder-length hair. But always very smart. I think he was very conscious of the way he looked. How he appeared to other people was all part of that … slight image-building thing that was going on. The velvet jacket, the Cuban-heel boots …'