Nick Drake (26 page)

Paul Simon had shaken off the cosy, easy-listening image of
Bridge Over Troubled Water
with his eclectic, eponymous 1972 solo debut. Leonard Cohen became enshrined in a generation's hearts as the emotional surgeon, using his songs as sensitively as a scalpel. Phil
Ochs, Tim Hardin, Van Morrison and Tim Buckley, Neil Young, Joni Mitchell – all were appealing to their own devoted audiences. By 1973 Bruce Springsteen, John Prine, David Blue, Loudon Wainwright III, Jackson Browne, Tom Waits, Kris Kristofferson, John Prine and David Ackles had all released their debut albums.

Undeniably part of the singer-songwriter's appeal was a fascination with the private made public. There was a definite confessional element to the best-selling albums of the period – everyone knew of James Taylor's roller-coaster emotional state and his heroin addiction; but success soon removed the American singer-songwriters from anything approaching reality. Leaving their teenage bedsits far behind, they were installed in luxury hotel rooms, perpetually on the road promoting hit albums.

Nick Drake's British contemporaries like John Martyn, Al Stewart, Richard Thompson, Cat Stevens, Sandy Denny and Ralph McTell were also out gigging to promote their new albums. If ever there was a time for Nick to break through, this was it.

Anthea Joseph: ‘I don't think Joe realized how paranoid Nick was about gigging. I don't think any of us did in fact. He knew Nick was difficult … Whatever the damage that Nick had done to himself at some point, I don't know, but something happened. By the time we met him … it was almost as though he was bricked up. There was a wall round him. I don't know whether Nick had some bad trips that turned him over or not, but it wouldn't surprise me. Certainly his drug habits were considerable. Not just smoking … I don't think he was a junkie, but I mean there was an awful lot of Mogadon around and things like that, you know. But he was never straight – you knew – you could always tell when someone was stoned. I don't know, but it may even have been prescribed by that time.

‘Nick didn't twitch – he was always very still. And isolated. That's what I mean about being bricked up, he could be in a room, and there'd be Fairport there, String Band, all sorts of people falling in and out of the building, and Nick would be still, completely on his own, surrounded by people … shrieking with laughter … sitting on the floor and saying: “Here, what do you think of this?”, and playing a verse of something. And Nick would be there – but he was always over there – he was not part of it.'

Around the time of
Bryter Layter
, Island Records recognized that Nick Drake was never going to reach the wide audience of Cat Stevens. Tim Clark, production manager at Island, recalls a meeting to discuss the second album's sleeve: ‘We met in Joe Boyd's office, in
Charlotte Street, Joe, Anthea, myself, Keith [Morris] and Nick. Nick sat there looking down, barely looking up. All his answers were monosyllabic – occasionally not even monosyllabic, sometimes just grunts. We were all trying to coax replies out of Nick. Ideas came up, were discussed, and Nick sat there, and we tried hard … “What do you think?” It was difficult to get him to do more than grunt to say yes.

‘There was absolutely no heaviness … Everybody was very sensitive to Nick … And Joe, who was a fairly quiet man himself … certainly never raised his voice or anything like that. We all thought Nick had potential … and that Nick was a very important artist. A lot of the time, decisions weren't terribly commercial, and that's why we staggered from one disaster to another. We did spend too much on sleeves, we did spend too much on advertising, and we did spend too much on the artists that we absolutely believed in ourselves. If we had stood back I suppose we would have recognized that actually to sell huge amounts of Nick Drake records, Nick
had
to get out and tour to promote those records.'

Nick's state of mind during 1970 and 1971 could best be described as delicate, though Gabrielle points out that at one point his problems seem to have stemmed from a physical source: ‘There wasn't a sea change in Nick. It was a gradual thing … I think the crux came around the time he produced
Bryter Layter
, and he was quite ill, he had kidney stones, which caused my parents terrific concern. He would disappear in London, and nobody would know where he was. That was the first time I came in touch with Island. We were trying to find out where Nick was.'

In the light of the frequent allegations of record company indifference, it is interesting that Gabrielle feels strongly that Island could not have been more supportive of her brother: ‘Mum and Dad were in London, very worried, and I rang up Island because we thought that he was deeply depressed at that time because Island weren't supporting him, that he'd brought out a record, and they'd never give him dates and things like that… They said we'd do anything for Nick, give him publicity, but he won't do it. Chris Blackwell said if he doesn't want to do public performances, fine, we'll put him on a stipend of however much it was a week. And I suddenly realized that on the contrary, Island were prepared to do anything. And that that was not where the problem lay.

‘I read about Nick railing that he wasn't more famous, but in the end, you jolly well have to set about becoming famous. As a young artist of any sort, you have to push. I think he was very lucky – he was
also extraordinarily talented – but he found somewhere like Island who were prepared to support him, to nurture him, and not mind that he didn't do the publicity.'

Although his real success came with the re-release of ‘Streets Of London' in 1974, Ralph McTell was fiendishly busy throughout this period. By 1972 he had moved up from the folk-club circuit to the Royal Albert Hall, but he still kept a watchful eye on his contemporary singer-songwriters: ‘There was definitely this thread of guys who dressed reasonably smartly and sang in this particular style. And I would say Nick was definitely there. He would have hated Cousins and that folk circuit. It's a strange paradox: you really want to get your ideas across and record them. But playing in public, performing in front of an audience … the terror of actually going on.'

Even at Cambridge, friends had sensed that Nick's shy and soulful nature had an element of conscious image-building to it. As someone who had seen him close-up, had Ralph McTell ever felt that? ‘I always thought all of it was. I thought we were all affected in some way … Bert was the only one who wasn't mannered. He revealed himself in different ways. He was unable to talk in a fluent way, that's why he wrote songs … On reflection, perhaps Nick was the same. But I doubt it. Bert was not an articulate man. He's not someone who enjoys conversation. Whereas somebody who's been to Marlborough and then on to Cambridge … It's almost like slumming it somehow, they should be doing something else.

‘There was that element when people were being deep and dark, you thought at what point are they going to say fuck this, I've got to go and have a drink and have a bit of fun. Some of them just never did – Nick would be one of them. If Nick didn't have a job to do, you wouldn't see him round and about. You'd bump into other people at gigs, but Nick was very outside of that, on the edge.'

Brian Cullman, who had supported Nick at Cousins, was a fixture around the London folk scene at this time, and thanks to his friendship with John and Beverley Martyn he saw a lot of Nick: ‘I would often go round to John and Beverley's basement flat in Hampstead in the afternoon and listen to music and drink tea, get stoned and watch the sun set over the heath …

‘The third or fourth time I stopped by … Nick was there, hunched up in the corner of the room, smoking a joint. He had an odd way of sitting that made him seem smaller and frailer than he was (it was always a surprise, when he stood up, that he towered over John and nearly everyone else) … Nick asked to try out my guitar, and I
passed it over to him, curious to hear what his music sounded like, both because he seemed so self-contained and distant, but also because John treated him with such care and deference, as if, at any moment, he might fade away … Nick ambled over, took my guitar, then walked out of the room and closed the door. I could hear the faint sounds of fingerpicking, like the ocean, far away … Ten, maybe fifteen minutes later, the sound stopped, and he walked back in, nodding to himself. Nice, he said handing it back. Then he studied the front, as if he'd just noticed the design on the pickguard. “Gibson,” he said. And then he left.'

How much of that air of mystery Nick cultivated, and how much of his remoteness sprang from genuine shyness is hard to say. Certainly Cambridge friends and colleagues from Island thought they detected an element of contrived mystery; a sense that he was always conscious of the impression he was making; a feeling that Nick knew, by dressing almost entirely in black, saying little and smiling inscrutably, he was aiding and abetting the myth-making process.

Paul Wheeler: ‘This just comes to mind, someone talking about a Rolling Stones concert, you had Mick jumping about all over the stage, and then Keith just moved one step, and the whole place went wild. And I think there was an element of that with Nick. I'm not saying it was conscious, but I think he knew how to play the crowd … The one comment that Nick would add to the conversation you would really hear, because he said so little the rest of the time.'

John Martyn was quoted in
Dark Star
as saying of Nick: ‘He was quite conscious of the image portrayed in his songs. He was not a manic depressive who picked up a guitar; he was a singer-songwriter in every sense.'

From the moment he first heard the demo tape, Joe Boyd worked as closely with Nick as anyone. Joe was the person who put Nick on the map, the man who encouraged and nurtured his talent, and as such was well placed to observe him at close quarters, but even with Joe, he does not seem to have moved beyond a close working relationship: ‘I got along very well with Nick, but a lot of the dialogue was not outside of specific, concrete stuff to do with production. There was a lot of one-way traffic. He struck me as a very shy and – dare one say it – even repressed upper-middle-class English person … He didn't stutter, but he had a little hesitation at the beginning of his sentences.

‘He certainly liked being around people who were a lot more
relaxed and outgoing than he. In particular, there was a semi-retired, East End minor villain that I had befriended, where we used to go round and play Liar Dice, smoke dope, drink tea, and Nick loved going there. Because this guy geed him up all the time, cuffed him on the shoulder. “C'mon Nick, what's up? Spit it out, boy” … He loved playing Liar Dice and the congeniality of that situation, but he remained very quiet. He could be very funny and very witty when he did speak, but I never found him the life and soul of the party; he was a very reserved guy.'

Perhaps at some level Nick felt that if he spent enough time with ebullient, larger-than-life characters, he might acquire some of their vigour and robustness. Danny Thompson was another who Nick seemed keen to get close to. Older by ten years than most of the singer-songwriters he was to work with, Danny had begun playing in the skiffle era after National Service. By the time Pentangle formed in 1967, he was nearly thirty, and had worked with everyone from Cliff Richard to Rod Stewart. While working on
Five Leaves Left
, Danny sensed that Nick was keen to forge a friendship: ‘He wanted to get close. I know that. Either he liked the way that I was or for whatever reasons. I don't want to come over as some important bloke in his life, but he really did want to know.

‘He said could he come out to the house – I lived out in Suffolk, in a manor house, with loads of acres – so I said yes. I thought it would be a good opportunity for him to come out, go down to my local pub … but it wasn't his sort of thing. He didn't open up at all – the whys and wherefores of life, the tragedies of being … no, none of that.'

Danny felt that by getting Nick away from London, he might be able to get to know him better and help him come out of himself. But even the Suffolk countryside could not break through the cocoon into which Nick had withdrawn: ‘He was very shy, very quiet. I had the feeling his mum and dad wanted him to get a proper job, finish off at university, and had pretty much laid a path for him to follow. I have no proof of this at all, but I just felt he was under pressure. I know he used to smoke a lot, which I wasn't aware of at the time, and that in itself is an indication, trying to get lost in it. Me, I used to like a few pints and know what was going on – each to his own. He could never be a close mate of mine, because I wasn't into dope. I wasn't into being a lost soul. I wasn't into all that deep and meaningful stuff, and I never have been.

‘I felt it all a bit tragic really. Because I'd been in the Army and all that … and come from a background of real blokes, and I thought
all he needs is a bloody good bacon and chip buttie and a good kick up the arse and a couple of good shags and he'll be all right. And I just thought, well, I'll have a go.'

Try as he might, Danny Thompson was frustrated by his inability to get through to Nick, and also by the effect it was having on himself: ‘For people who didn't know him, it's very hard to describe how … draining it is on you. When you see someone, and you can't really work out what the matter is … In the end, you sort of lose patience and say get on with it, because it takes up so much of your own time. You've got your own problems; particularly then: I was about thirty-something.'

Joe Boyd feels that Nick's natural reserve and inability to make connections was heightened by an awareness of the social class into which he was born: ‘For Nick, someone lacking in confidence, it is very difficult to be part of that public-school group, people who are bred, trained; people who behave as though they are the most confident people on the face of the planet. So to be the one who was a bit shy, hesitant, in that context, I would imagine could be very difficult… All those songs about longing for contact and longing for relationships, and yet at the same time, a very clear awareness of how difficult it is for him.'