Nick Drake (32 page)

In his essay which accompanied the posthumous
Fruit Tree
box set, Arthur Lubow wrote of Nick Drake's American launch: ‘When a compilation album was released in the US … the reception at the Troubador featured a cardboard cut out of Nick on stage as the record played. If he wouldn't tour, perhaps his reclusiveness could be commercial.'

The fifteen months which separated the release of Nick's second and third albums was the period of the most marked decline in his health and state of mind. Still living alone in Haverstock Hill, Nick was drawing further inward, curling up foetus-like in his own world, a world bordered by the four walls of his room.

Brian Wells: ‘He never said: “I'm utterly pissed off and I wish I'd sold more records”, you know – that wasn't cool. I think he was very aware of what was cool, and I think he found safety in actually appearing to be withdrawn. And I think he was quite uncomfortable around people. In Cambridge he wasn't one for sitting round and just shooting the shit. It would run out of steam, and then he would look nervous, and then say, right, I've got to go. And you knew that he wasn't going
to
anything. He just wanted to withdraw from the situation. That went on in Cambridge, and I think became more and more the norm for him. I think he would withdraw from situations, but still feel awkward having done so. And he'd go back to his room
on Haverstock Hill and stare at the wall for ages … A guy called Rick Charkin went to Morocco with Nick before Cambridge, and he once said to me that he went round to see Nick in Haverstock Hill, rang the bell and no one answered, so he went round the back and there was Nick in his room staring at the wall, just not answering the front door …'

A record as bleak and initially intimidating as
Pink Moon
was never going to get radio play, aside from the odd spin on John Peel's late-night Radio 1 show; and with Nick refusing to perform live, the chances of anyone even being aware of the existence of the third album grew more and more remote.

Linda Thompson: ‘I saw him around the time of
Pink Moon
, we were doing
Bright Lights
around that time. We were both in the same studio. Nick did those sessions very late at night, so he'd be going into the studio as we were coming out … I would grab him and tickle him, but he was … incommunicado.

‘Sound Techniques itself was fairly big … You walked in, and you went up a very windy staircase, and then there was a big studio, a big ground-floor studio, the control room was set up, so that you could look down into the studio. Then you went up some more windy steps to the kitchen. It was a lovely studio, in two parts, a front part and a back part; mostly they used to do vocals in the back part. Nick liked that studio. He was always very close to John Wood. John had a sixth sense about what you wanted for the record.'

Trevor Dann was still at Cambridge when Nick's final album was released, and remembers how uneasily its sombre mood sat with the times:
‘Pink Moon
I didn't care much for when it came out. I'd gone all Mahavishnu Orchestra, if I wanted to be cerebral, and Roxy Music if I wanted to dance, and
Pink Moon
was just so bleak. The other bloke of my acquaintance who was completely besotted by Nick Drake was another guy from my school, Dick Taylor, who was also at Cambridge, and we used to spend nights arguing which was his best record. Dick would always plump for
Pink Moon
, ‘cos it was the darkest, the most in touch with the psyche. Dick was a fairly boisterous, rather upper-class bloke, the same age as me, and when he was thirty-eight he shot himself. I hadn't seen him for ten or fifteen years, I had no idea what had been going on, but almost my first thought about it was – Nick Drake! That Dick had been so obsessed by that really dark stuff.'

To their credit, Island had not given up all hope. Garrell Redfearn was a young assistant to Muff Winwood in radio promotion, who
remembers being dispatched to Hampstead to try to interest their most retiring act into doing something, anything, to help awaken interest in his new album. The idea was to get Nick along to the BBC's Maida Vale studios – where he had gone in such high spirits barely two and a half years before – to record a session plugging
Pink Moon
on one of the nightly
Sounds Of The Seventies
programmes. One day during the early part of 1972 Garrell went along to Haverstock Hill. He was one of the last people from Island ever to see Nick Drake: ‘By broadcasting a session, you could get more than one track played from an album, maybe three or four in one broadcast. As he was known to be very difficult about performing at that stage, and I can't quite remember why, maybe because we were about the same age … I was asked to see if I could chat to him and persuade him to do a session. I think it was a request from one of the producers to try and get him on.

‘I went along to the big, old run-down house on Haverstock Hill, the bottom end, near to Chalk Farm Tube … I don't think he said an absolute no, but we never did get him into the studio again. I remember the flat being extremely grotty: tatty, filthy bits of fabric covering the windows as curtains, keeping the light out. All dark inside … There was a big, heavy, old Victorian sideboard. It was on the ground floor, as far as I remember. It wasn't a bedsit, because he'd got up and out of bed to let me in, and the bed wasn't in the room that we sat in.

‘He sat in a chair with very long hair, head down, hair falling over his face so I couldn't even really see his face. A few mumbled responses. He wasn't being difficult or unpleasant, he really just had difficulty talking to anyone, just making that contact. I just explained the situation, how it would really help if we could get him to do a session because it would mean a lot more exposure for the album … He said something like “I don't think so at the moment, maybe in the future” type of thing.

‘It was almost down to nods and shakes of the head, grunts. I remember saying to him: “Do you
want
the album to sell?” … It seemed illogical to me that you take all this trouble to record your music and you don't make any effort to try and help it get exposure, for people to hear it. But I think he may have got to a stage where … if it was important, it wasn't important enough for him to overcome whatever the inhibitions were that stopped him performing and promoting it.'

Alone and isolated, Nick rarely left his hideaway. He would
venture out occasionally, but otherwise he waited, and let the world come to him. And waited. And waited. With no involvement on Nick's third album, and his own career as an arranger burgeoning, Robert Kirby had seen less of his friend since the release of
Bryter Layter.
But he was quite used to Nick just turning up, a silent visitor: ‘I think Nick regarded groups of people and places as bolt-holes. After I left Cambridge, I lived for a long time in Cranley Gardens in Muswell Hill. Nick lived on Haverstock Hill, and then towards the end – his very last place in London – was a very grim bedsit on Muswell Hill Road. It was only about 100 yards from where I lived. That was very grim …

‘He would arrive at all hours, quite unannounced, totally unexpected. He'd stay for one day. One week … And then he'd be gone. Then you'd find out he had gone to John Wood's house, out in Mildenhall in Suffolk. He'd stay there. Then you'd find he'd gone home. Then you'd find he was staying somewhere near Brian [Wells] … and I'm sure there were other totally independent groups of friends that we didn't know anything about at all. I think he did compartmentalize them a bit. Maybe by the time he got bored with one group he'd move on.'

Molly Drake attributed Nick's decline to the solitary years spent living in and around Hampstead: ‘He once said to me that everything started to go wrong from the Hampstead time on.'

‘His parents were wholly supportive the whole of the time,' Robert Kirby recalled. ‘I was never privy to the family at home, but the phone calls that I had from the dad were … “Have you seen Nick? Don't get him. Don't tell him I called, but is he all right?”

‘I think underneath it all, Nick did have a hankering that maybe he should have got a proper job … He did try to please his father. But I didn't believe that his father pressured him. I remember when his father got him this job working in computers in London, and Nick disappeared, his father phoned quite distraught. “Have you seen him? Ask him to get in touch. Can you try and help?”

‘I feel elements of guilt about not doing more … I was always very overawed by Nick. I always admired him, looked up to him, and so if he wasn't saying anything, I said to myself: “This is what a genius does.” The first thought wasn't, oh, he's ill …'

A particularly painful glimpse of Nick Drake's decline was provided by Nick Kent. Probably best known as the chronicler of excess during those sybaritic seventies, Kent never met Nick, never saw him perform, but was captivated by the three albums. ‘Requiem
For A Solitary Man', his
NME
piece about Nick, appeared in 1975 and some years later he got John Martyn to talk about their friendship: ‘I met Martyn, and he was very emotional about the whole thing – you know he wrote that song “Solid Air” – and I tried to get him to sit down and talk on the tape about it, but he was very close to tears whenever the subject was brought up. It was an incredibly emotional thing for him, and so what he did was he said: “I'm going to take you to some friends of Nick's. I'm going to take you to a place in London. I'm going to introduce you to some friends of Nick Drake's who knew him up to the end, and you can make up your own mind there.”

‘He took me to this place in Ladbroke Grove, which was kind of a squat. It was not a particularly pleasant place to be in. And these people were mostly … they were all drug addicts … they weren't heroin addicts, but they had barbiturate problems. They were good people who'd had a bad time with drugs. They basically just told me this story: Nick would come round to their place a lot, and he would just sit there. He wasn't a drug addict. He wasn't a big druggie himself. But my understanding was that he had been involved to some degree with obviously smoking dope, and taking acid, not a lot … and these things had turned him. The whole thing had turned him.

‘And what I remember is that there was a woman there who seemed to know him very well, and she spoke very, very affectionately about him … It's awfully, awfully sad. The thing that she said to me … I just started crying when she said it, because she said he came round to this flat three days before he died, and he said to these people: “You remember me. You remember me how I was. Tell me how I was. I used to have a brain. I used to be somebody. What happened to me? What happened to me?”'

Muddled and muffled by the anti-depressants as he now was, his career non-existent, and with little hope left for the future, it is hard to imagine what it must have taken to make Nick Drake return to the recording studio. At a time when it seemed to everyone who saw him that he was quite, quite lost, from somewhere deep within himself he found the impulse to write and record again.

In 1994 Joe Boyd cast his mind back twenty years and told me about his memories of Nick's final recording session: ‘He came to see me when I was in London and he was in a terrible state. That's when he blurted out a kind of… a direct version of the lyrics of “Hanging On A Star”, which were basically his bitterness and his anger about not having enough money and not having sold enough records, and everybody says he's so great, but if he's so great, why is he broke and unrecognized? He couldn't understand it, he felt very aggrieved about it. I was astonished, because he'd never expressed any anger to me about anything …

‘I always had this objective overview of “Well, of course Nick doesn't sell records because he doesn't tour, because
Pink Moon
was so introspective.” It's very easy for me to have that objectivity, because I'm working with a lot of different artists. But for Nick it was devastating. It was his whole life. I guess I wasn't quick enough to see that as a problem to be dealt with, until he brought it up.

‘Then a few months later I spoke to John Wood, who said Nick had been in touch with him about recording some new songs, so I spoke to Nick and asked him if he wanted me to come along. John and I were
there for that last session, and Nick came in. It was chilling. It was really scary. He was so… He was in such bad shape he couldn't sing and play the guitar at the same time. We put down the guitar parts and overdubbed the voice. It was all one day: we started in the afternoon and finished about midnight – just for those four tracks.'

When these four final tracks appeared on
Time Of No Reply
, the session date was given as February 1974. However, contemporary evidence suggests that July is more probable, and this seems to fit in with the chronology of Nick's last year. One factor which may have encouraged him to pursue his thoughts of recording again was Connor McKnight's
Zig Zag
feature of June 1974. One of the few pieces on Nick to appear in his lifetime, it was a rare indication that anyone outside his immediate family even knew who he was, and as such it must have an impression on him.

Of the four songs Nick recorded in 1974, ‘Rider On The Wheel' is one of the most beguiling of his short career. Ironically, he sounds relaxed and in control, as a rolling folk melody is delicately picked on guitar. The slowly spinning essence of a dance is suggested by the lyrics, as round and round it goes. ‘Hanging On A Star' does indeed express the anger and frustration Boyd remembers Nick expressing: all the bitterness at the lack of recognition and poor record sales, the abject sense of failure that he felt so keenly in his final years. All this a bare five years after he had first begun recording. You can imagine a drum pattern underpinning ‘Voice From A Mountain', the final track of the four; Nick's singing voice sounds strained, whereas before on record he had always seemed in control. After this, there would to be no more.