Nick Drake (7 page)

Already aware that his young charge ‘was in love with music', Dennis Silk realized that all the music teachers were longing for him to play in the orchestra: ‘Nick didn't want to disappoint them, and of course he was pretty keen on all music, but he was obviously gripped by the new music … You'd find him in his study sometimes, strumming away at his guitar.'

Jeremy Mason spent a lot of time with Nick at school and acknowledges that he was somewhat thoughtful, but he saw no sign of the isolation or crippling introspection which would kick in later: ‘I can remember a couple of occasions when we'd go off on long walks — all motivated, I'm sure, by smoking cigarettes — along a railway line, where we got fairly intense. He was totally and utterly … ordinary. There was no manifestation, except this deep interest in music and slightly off-beat music … Dylan, who we both adored, was obviously another link.'

One of the strongest impressions Simon Crocker retains is of Nick's unassuming nature: ‘I don't ever remember Nick contributing to the school magazine or anything. The thing about Nick was that he never pushed himself forward. He wanted to be in the background. He didn't want to be in the limelight. It wasn't that he was lazy, he was very industrious. But I think if myself and others hadn't hustled a band together, got the hall, got the equipment, made sure everyone got out of bed, it wouldn't have worried him …' Getting out of bed was a vital discipline because rock rehearsals, being rather frowned upon by the school authorities, were conducted very early in the morning in the Memorial Hall, in the hope that anyone who might object would still be in bed.

It seems strange that Nick didn't contribute to the school magazine, or indeed write anything much of his own at this stage, but
perhaps this too can be put down to his natural diffidence. Dennis Silk remembers the odd poem, but nothing more substantial: ‘He loved his English. He wrote poems from time to time, but I never saw one published… In his first year of specialization as an historian and classicist, I taught him and occasionally they would write a piece of poetry … I wish I'd hung on to them.'

Arthur Packard also sensed a deep modesty, but took it as an indication that Nick was ‘probably a lot more mature than the rest of us … Thinking back on him, that expression “still waters run deep” seems to describe Nick. He was funny, slightly zany, but underneath that you sensed deep thoughts.'

Cloistered in school dormitories and studies at Marlborough, ears pressed to transistor radios, the boys were tantalized by the sounds crackling across the airwaves during the earth-shaking year of 1965. It was the year the establishment acknowledged The Beatles, when Prime Minister Harold Wilson, who modelled his style on the youthful vigour of the late President Kennedy, made The Beatles Members of the British Empire. It was also the year that the group began to really think about making an album, rather than a string of singles. Released in time for Christmas 1965,
Rubber Soul
marked the first step away from simple love songs, particularly now that John was contributing material like ‘Norwegian Wood', ‘Nowhere Man' and ‘In My Life'.

Rock historians have earmarked 1967 as the moment when it all began to change, but I would submit 1965 as the year which laid the foundations for a durable rock 'n' roll culture. This was when Dylan kicked the stool away and hung folk music by going electric on
Bringing It All Back Home
and
Highway 61 Revisited.
The Rolling Stones, The Who, Simon & Garfunkel, The Kinks, Manfred Mann, The Byrds, The Animals, The Small Faces and The Yardbirds were taking pop in a new and exciting direction. Phil Spector excelled himself with the Wagnerian ‘You've Lost That Lovin' Feeling'; Berry Gordy's Tamla Motown label was producing a seamless sequence of hit records; and politics and pop were beginning to fuse together.

Nick was seventeen, and clearly aware of the changes which were taking place, changes which were not just being felt in music, but in fashion and film too. London was leading the world. Jean Shrimpton shocked first Australia, then the world, by wearing the world's first miniskirt, while David Bailey created the prototype of the classless cockney photographer. In the cinema, the old stars were being swept
aside by the iconic Julie Christie, Tom Courtenay and Albert Finney; while the films themselves started to tackle issues like abortion, infidelity and homosexuality with a frankness which many found simply shocking.

The soundtrack to all this freewheeling frenzy, the music which played as everyone capered like crazy, was pop – or rock 'n' roll, R&B, jazz, folk-rock … Call it what you will, it was just too good to miss. And London was not that far from Marlborough for fit young men who didn't need much sleep.

Nick and David Wright soon became regular visitors to the clubs of swinging London: ‘The Flamingo was where we particularly used to go,' David recalls. ‘We used to hitch there after lights out, on the old A4 out of Marlborough. We'd get to Wardour Street … see the British R&B mob, the people we were really keen on. We'd stay there till daybreak, then get the bus to the A4 and hitch back in time for breakfast. It was fairly intrepid stuff.

‘The two bands Nick and I saw and enjoyed more than any were Zoot Money & The Big Roll Band and Chris Farlowe & The Thunderbirds. But the best evening I ever had in the 1960s – Nick was there too — was the day that “Keep On Runnin' ”, by The Spencer Davis Group, got to number one, in December '65. They were playing on the same bill as The Moody Blues, when Denny Laine was with them … in the days when they were a great R&B band, and The Mark Leeman Five. That night at the Marquee was absolutely sensational: there was Steve Winwood singing “Keep On Runnin' ”, and it was announced from the stage that it had just got to number one, and there we were, in the Marquee!'

Jeremy Mason too has memories of illicit visits to London with Nick: ‘Once we hitchhiked to London for the Flamingo all-nighter, and we had to be back in time for Chapel. It was all a bit risky. Once we saw Chris Farlowe — you can see Nick liking the way he sang. Another time it was Georgie Fame. In those days they had three rows of seats in the front, and everything else happened at the back. We thought we were pretty grown-up.'

Most of the clubs visited by the marauding Marlburians were in Soho, which in 1965 was like a slash of vermilion lipstick across the grey face of London. The pubs still closed at 11p.m., but Soho was rich in after-hours drinking clubs; and Soho was where the musicians gathered. Prostitutes also enlivened the streets, as David Wright recalls: ‘Soho was so much fun in those days: it had the first pizza restaurant I'd ever seen, just up from the Flamingo. I remember Nick
and I getting accosted by a lady of the street — we were fifteen or sixteen – and bartering with her, then running off with very cold feet.'

London exerted an equally strong pull during the school holidays, but without the need to rush back at dawn. David Wright remembers: ‘We spent one wonderful New Year's Eve in London, getting absolutely legless in Trafalgar Square. My sister had a flat in Chalk Farm, and we pitched up there on New Year's Eve, 1965.'

Hitching down to London gave the seventeen-year-olds an opportunity to see in person acts they had enjoyed on record. Jeremy Mason vividly recalls finally getting to see Graham Bond: ‘It was at the Manor House Hotel, Friday evening, 29 October 1965. Nick and I went to that together, I don't know how, because it was during term time, but we used to sneak off and go and listen to things. On this occasion we stayed at Gabrielle's flat. She wasn't there, and it was rather spooky – we were quite young. I'd never met her, and we were pretty pissed.

I remember Ginger Baker doing a drum solo – on a song called “Camels & Elephants”, I think – and Nick was standing there watching, with a cigarette, and he was so impressed — I'll never forget this – he poured a pint of beer all the way down his front before he noticed.'

During 1965 and 1966 David Wright and Nick became close friends, and even during the long holidays from Marlborough, they spent much of the time together. ‘I suppose we were drawn together by music, but also by the fact that we both came from the Midlands, so we saw each other in the holidays. He was in Tanworth and I was in Wolverhampton, so when we could both drive we saw quite a lot of each other.'

As they got older the two were able to venture further afield, and in August 1965 they set off to hitchhike around Europe for three weeks: ‘Around France, Germany, Belgium and back again … [Nick] was barely seventeen. We got a train down to Dover, and set off with nothing but a thumb … We got down to Paris and then on to Avignon. The first night we slept in a cave, and then we just hitched and bumbled our way along the Côte d'Azur, having a great time. It was super, and I have visions of us sitting on the beach, and Nick got quite severe sea urchins. There was nothing particularly significant about that trip, but it was bloody good fun. We laughed all the way.'

Another abiding memory of the trip is of Sonny & Cher's protest song “I Got You Babe” playing everywhere they went: ‘The reason I remember I Got You Babe is that you didn't hear much American pop music in France in those days – it was all accordions.' More ambitious
plans were made, for travelling around the world after they left school, but the world had other ideas: ‘We both had this wanderlust … and there was a plan to get a Land Rover, drive around the Mediterranean: down through Spain, Gibraltar, cross to Africa, right the way round. That was planned in 1965 … But by 1966, they'd shut the gates of Gibraltar, and by 1967 there was the Arab–Israeli war.'

That first trip to France, hitching during the summer of 1965, was followed by others, and over the next couple of years many of Nick's happiest times were spent in France. He was enchanted by that country and became familiar with a style of music which would subtly infuse his own work when he began recording. The
chanson
tradition imbues wistful, idealized love with a rueful charm, at the same time as recognizing despair.
Chanson
eludes definition — rather it is a feeling, a sense of melancholy which pervades the song like a wisp of Gauloise smoke.

Interpreted by Charles Trenet, Juliette Greco, Charles Aznavour, Jacques Brel and Edith Piaf,
chanson
is timeless and ineffably French. On moving to France, Petula Clark couldn't believe the impact of seeing Piaf in concert. Familiar with light-hearted English music hall and variety songs, she was stunned by the gritty realism and the honest, coruscating nature of the songs Piaf sang. The haunting existential beauty of Juliette Greco carried the
chanson
tradition into a new era. Stalking the bustling streets of St-Germain-des-Prés in the late forties, rubbing shoulders with Sartre and Cocteau, the black-clad Greco epitomized a new type of teenager.

Chanson
embodied world-weariness, the realization that life was not sweet, but a rather bitter cup of black coffee. It was this air of melancholy and mystery which found its way into the songs Nick Drake would soon begin writing. Songs which, at their best, sat somewhere between the traditions of folk, the blues and
chanson.

Throughout his life, Nick loved France. The landscape, the language, the food, the wine all held a strong attraction for him. As well as being home to the wistful, enduring art of
chanson
and the smoky sensuality of Juliette Greco, St-Germain-des-Prés provided a haunt for Jean-Paul Sartre. There in the smoky fug of the Café de Flore, Sartre mapped out the defiantly lonely life of the existentialist: ‘Hell is other people.'

Sartre's work was widely available in paperback by the time Nick left Marlborough and went up to Cambridge, and his doomed anti-heroes were familiar to the postwar generation, as was the work of
another of Sartre's contemporaries, Albert Camus. Camus, who died at the age of forty-seven in a car crash in 1960, was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, having become a landmark figure for a generation of disaffected young people with classic novels of alienation like
The Outsider (L'Etranger).
His
The Myth Of Sisyphus
was the last book Nick would read before his death.

The end of Nick Drake's education at Marlborough came in July 1966. He had switched from History and Classics to study English rather late in the day, but it seemed to suit him much better. He continued to play a full and robust part in the life of the school, at the same time as pursuing his own extracurricular interests, and this was recognized when he was made Captain of his House. His final months at Marlborough were also marked by distinction on the athletics track, when he had the honour of competing in the Wiltshire Junior Athletics Championship. Nick's housemaster wrote about him at the time: ‘a most talented athlete, who was never really deeply interested in breaking records which were well within his grasp. He is probably one of the best sprinters we have had at Marlborough since the war, and yet he would much more often than not be found reading when he should have been training.'

Throughout his years at Marlborough, Nick had enjoyed the pubs of the nearby town. The local beer, Wadworth's from nearby Devizes, was a potent brew, and frequently Nick and Jeremy Mason, David Wright, Simon Crocker and Michael Maclaran would sneak off to the Bell in nearby Ramsbury, or pubs in Marlborough like the Cricketers or the Lamb, to drink beer, smoke cigarettes and put the world to rights. But none of Nick's friends or acquaintances from school remembers any evidence of drugs during their time there. David Wright: ‘I don't ever remember any dope at Marlborough, but interestingly enough, I was chatting to a friend who was there the year after Nick and I left, which would be 1967, and it was around then.'

In his final term Nick took A-level exams again. He had sat some the previous year, but the results had been disappointing. This time around he brought his tally of passes up to four – History, English, Latin Translation with Roman History, British Constitution – and managed to improve his grade in English to a B, making a university place likely. The Marlborough College Register lists ex-pupil N.R. Drake simply as ‘a guitarist, and composer of folk music for the guitar'.