Nick Drake (27 page)

One thing Nick never did, even when cultivating the company of minor East End villains, was to deny, or try to shake off, the marks of the social class into which he was born. He seems always to have accepted his background for what it was: an unalterable accident of birth. The other problem with trying to blame Nick's class or upbringing for his increasing sense of unease is explaining why the signs did not show themselves earlier. Certainly there are some people in Nick's life who only really knew him when he was troubled, but equally there are those who knew him when he was apparently happy and well-adjusted. The fact that there are so few who actually witnessed the change has much to do with Nick's talent for compartmentalizing his life.

Most of the time Linda Thompson knew Nick he was troubled, but even she has fleeting memories of a happy Nick: ‘He was a class act, Nick. The lanky aristo … I remember at the beginning when I used to see him, when he did smile, or he laughed, you just felt thrilled for weeks. It used to make me so happy when he smiled or laughed. He was an adorable person.'

Linda was well placed to observe Nick in and around London as he started to make his way as an Island artist. A singer herself, Linda was
engaged to Joe Boyd before marrying Richard Thompson in 1972: ‘I can't remember the very first time I met Nick, whether it was with Joe, or at this drug dealer Bob's house. We'd all go there to play cards, and people would sing. Nick would sing, Richard would sing, John Martyn. I really don't know if Nick was getting drugs off Bob – Richard and I certainly didn't; we must have been awfully stupid, because we didn't really know he was a drug dealer.'

Later Linda and Nick would embark on a somewhat half-hearted relationship: ‘The fact that he came to my flat once a week, lots of people, myself included, thought we were boyfriend and girlfriend … We would drink macrobiotic tea, and I'd put on records for him. And if he didn't like it, he wouldn't say anything, he'd just shake his head, and I'd have to rush over and take the record off.

‘He made monosyllabic seem quite chatty. And he was still fairly up then, he wasn't too bad at all. We'd sit on the bed … we'd have a bit of a cuddle. But it was always strangely detached … He never said very much. Then I'd see him the next week, same night, and then it just got a bit too much like hard work … Instead of thinking to myself, God, this isn't right, he's not well.'

Though Nick's sexuality has increasingly become a focus of attention in the years since his death, there is no real evidence that he was gay. Friends from Marlborough are agreed that he showed no homosexual tendencies and they feel sure that in the hothouse public-school atmosphere, it would have been apparent. David Wright: ‘I do remember that Nick wasn't of the “little boy” persuasion. At Marlborough in those days, before girls came along, the main topic of conversation wasn't weather, it was little boys. Though very little, if anything, actually happened … it was a classic girl-substitute during term time. Certainly I don't recall Nick being interested in that.'

Contemporaries from Cambridge even recall Nick's enthusiastic heterosexuality; one even remembers ‘getting laid at the same party'. But just as many are convinced that he was sexually ambivalent, unable or unwilling to commit himself to the demands of a sustained relationship, with anyone, of either sex. There is no real evidence of any sustained relationship in Nick's life. Linda Thompson remembers that he went out with one of her friends and that he played them off against each other. Schoolfriends remember a girlfriend in Aix in 1967, and Nick's friend from Marlborough, Jeremy Mason, met a girl in Beirut, shortly after Nick died, who spoke of being engaged to him.

Twenty years on, attempts to contact her for this book failed, and
Jeremy felt that without her permission it was unfair to reveal her name: ‘Nick was meant to have got engaged to her towards the end of his life. She was in Beirut while I was there with an exhibition, and she talked about Nick a lot, because she saw him for the last few months of his life. She was a very sensitive girl … I think she met Nick's parents. She knew all about the end. She was very good looking. We got quite close to her in Beirut, over this brief period of time … Her eyes used to fill with tears every time she mentioned his name.'

Unfortunately, this account cannot be confirmed, though its timing seems to lend it credence. Molly Drake had noticed that in the last few months of Nick's life, he seemed to have attained a degree of happiness, but until now it has been assumed that the reason for his contentment was his visit to Paris in the months immediately preceding his death. This possible romance would offer another reason for Nick's brief happiness just before the end.

By the beginning of 1971 Joe Boyd was feeling the pressure. Witchseason was struggling, and he was labouring under a heavy burden: Richard Thompson and he had been at loggerheads over Fairport's last album,
Full House
, and when Richard announced he was quitting the group, Boyd's primary interest in Fairport went with him. He was having problems with Sandy Denny and her plans for the future; to his concern, The Incredible String Band were becoming increasingly immersed in Scientology; and Nick had already announced that his third album would be a solo effort, with little need for any of Boyd's production flourishes.

After selling Witchseason to Chris Blackwell at Island Records, Boyd left London to take a job with the music division of Warner Brothers films. By all accounts, one condition of the sale was that Nick Drake's records should never be deleted from the Island catalogue. It was a condition to which Blackwell, a long-time admirer of Nick's work, readily agreed.

Anthea Joseph: ‘Joe got this offer to go to the States, and that's when we all broke up – he told me at London Airport … We sat down on those awful plastic seats … and he said: “I've taken a job in Hollywood.” And that was it. And I said: “You've gotta do it – if you get an offer of that kind you've got to do it.” He said: “Are you sure?” and I said: “Well, of course, it's an experience you can't turn down – we'll all survive somehow.” And that was the end of Witchseason.'

Some who have suggested that Nick – whether wittingly or not – was
homosexual, have seen Nick's evident fondness for Joe Boyd as a manifestation of such feelings. Certainly Nick did admire Boyd, and not just for his proven ability at producing records. But if there was more than simple affection on Nick's part, it seems likely that it was not secret desire, but secret envy. For how could he not envy the consummate ease with which Boyd managed his life? With his high cheek-bones and face framed by long, fair hair, Boyd was strikingly good-looking. His cultivated Boston upbringing lent him self-assurance, and he was capable of communicating swiftly and with a personal commitment which made you feel you were the sole object of his concern. In short, Joe Boyd was everything Nick Drake was not. And when Boyd left London, it removed another strand from Nick's already unravelling life.

Nick's parents were both fond of Boyd and they appreciated how much he had contributed to their son's career, but they were worried by how much Nick missed him when he went back to America. Anthea Joseph also noticed Nick's dependence: ‘Nick relied enormously on Joe. He was emotionally tied to Joe, it was a mental thing, a brain thing. I mean, neither of them were homosexuals, by any stretch of the imagination. Joe rang a bell in Nick, I think, and vice versa. Joe really did care about him and tried to look after him as best he could.'

Linda Thompson, who knew both men, told me: ‘All those stories that Nick had a crush on Joe. I don't think Nick ever had a crush on anybody … Fantastically good-looking man, unbelievably good-looking. Tall and lanky. He was just gorgeous. Long, tapered fingers. A fabulous-looking bloke. But he was totally other-worldly, Nick. He really, really didn't seem like he belonged.' Linda, like so many others who knew him, seems to discount the theory of Nick being gay: ‘The time I knew him he was twenty to twenty-five. I think you would have seen him give a loving glance to some bloke, or being somehow involved. Somebody would have come out of the woodwork by now.'

So many people speak of Nick's unwillingness to communicate, that there is frequently a tangible sense of frustration when they remember him. A well-spoken young man, educated at public school and university, who wrote such beautiful songs, should have been able to articulate his feelings.

Brian Cullman remembered seeing Nick in London towards the end of 1970, and how he seemed to phase in and out of groups: ‘Over the next few months, I'd run into Nick at John and Beverley's or sometimes see him on the streets of Hampstead. He'd appear and
disappear from rooms, from restaurants (I had dinner with a group of musicians at an Indian restaurant once and only realized that Nick was there with us when he got up to go) always by himself, always quiet, deep in his own world.'

Throughout 1971 Nick grew more introspective. His friends and his family discerned the changes, but felt powerless to do anything. Linda Thompson: ‘It seemed almost like a kind of autism in a way. It just got progressively worse and worse … One didn't see the signs in those days, we just thought he was really cool… People would say, oh, you've got a relationship with Nick, that's unbelievable. He put his arm round you? That's practically frenzied lovemaking for Nick. At the time I was playing the field a lot, and I'm ashamed to say I don't much remember what went on. But I remember I used to get quite cross with him, because he didn't talk enough …

‘He did the odd gig … But it really wasn't very good. It was like watching somebody who was very ill in public … It wasn't enough. He didn't talk. It was OK on record, but for live gigs, you can't really cut off your audience that much. I was around Sound Techniques a lot and he was fairly, well, not animated, but he had fairly strong feelings in the studio. He knew what he wanted.'

His family recalled with fondness a streak of determination which would reveal itself in certain circumstances, and which he had shown occasionally since childhood, but except in the recording studio, that too seemed to be fading away. Far away from it all in Tanworth, Rodney and Molly Drake were increasingly concerned at their son's withdrawal. ‘Then, of course, came
Pink Moon,'
recalled Rodney. ‘Where and how and when he wrote that is difficult to say. He was beginning to get very withdrawn and depressed then. He was very down when he wrote
Pink Moon.
But some people say it was his best thing …'

‘Pink Moon
does remind me of Robert Johnson,' says Peter Buck, ‘and the fact that they recorded him in a hotel room, facing the wall, too shy to look at the people recording him; and I understand that's pretty much how they recorded Nick for
Pink Moon.
There is that loneliness. Close up, intimate. Scary.'

Buck, REM's guitarist and the band's musical archivist, is only one of a new generation of musicians who are coming to appreciate Nick Drake. He also made that fascinating connection between Nick and the late Robert Johnson. Although he only ever recorded twenty-nine songs, at five sessions between November 1936 and June 1937, such was the passion and intensity of that music that Johnson's position as the King of the Blues remains unassailable.

King Of The Delta Blues Singers
, a sixteen-track album released in 1961, was the record which marked out the parameters of the British blues boom which followed: Eric Clapton, The Rolling Stones and Led Zeppelin were just some of the white boys who hailed Robert Johnson's influence as seminal.

To the sheer quality of Johnson's music, you must add a palpable sense of mystery, for his short life and hard times were shrouded in an impenetrable mist of myth. Columbia Records' A&R chief, John Hammond, was intrigued by the blues he heard on Johnson's recordings and went looking for the man in 1938 so that he could highlight him at his Carnegie Hall ‘Spirituals & Swing' concert showcase. But by the time Hammond's interest had been piqued, Johnson was already dead.

Johnson only ever made it to twenty-six, the same age as Nick Drake. But otherwise, their lives could hardly have been more different: Johnson was born in poverty, black and illegitimate – some say it's a miracle he lasted as long as he did in the lynch-happy, Jim Crow American South of the thirties. As Peter Buck pointed out: ‘Blues is the music of the outsider, and you can't get to be much more of an outsider in our country than a poor, black guy in rural America in the 1930s, which is where Robert Johnson came from.'

In view of the enigma that was his life, it is little surprise that the circumstances of Johnson's death were also mysterious; though it now seems certain that he was murdered by the jealous lover of a woman who was showing too much interest in the bluesman. Before his death in August 1938, Johnson transferred some of the visions which haunted him in life on to shellac. Vocalion's Don Law was the man who tracked down the bluesman and lured him into a makeshift recording studio.

Johnson's first recording session took place at the Gunter Hotel in San Antonio, Texas, in November 1936. Johnson was young and nervous, and he mistrusted the motives of any white man who seemed interested in him. Law eventually persuaded him to record, but the singer was so nervous that he asked if the recording engineers could be located in the room next door. Finally, Johnson was coerced into singing, but not before he had turned his back to the engineers. He recorded facing the wall, lost in a world of his own, unobserved, wrapped in the isolation shared only with his music.

Although Johnson's music was available in the Deep South during his lifetime, it was only posthumously that it became widely available and appreciated. Aficionados appreciated the high, lonesome quality of his keening singing and the strength of his guitar-playing, which came in part from his astonishingly long fingers. Throughout his life, and in the sixty years since his death, mystery has attached itself to Robert Johnson like wool to Velcro. The most enduring question is how he learned to play the guitar in that eerie, other-worldly way of his. They say that when he came out of Hazlehurst, Mississippi, he couldn't play guitar worth a whit. Then the boy vanished. The next time Johnson appeared, folks said he must have sold his soul to the Devil to play guitar like that.