Nick Drake (10 page)

Julian Lloyd, whose photograph of Nick wrapped in a blanket appeared on 1994's
Way To Blue
compilation, knew Nick in London in 1967, and thirty years later talked about the period to Mick Brown in a
Daily Telegraph Magazine
piece. It was ‘a life centred on scoring black hash at eight quid an ounce, buying twenty Embassy and a packet of Rizla papers, then getting terribly stoned and laughing a lot, followed by a companionable silence'.

‘I think he might have had quite a wild time at Cambridge,' says Dennis Silk, ‘the restrictions of Marlborough being removed, and him loose in town with his guitar, without his housemaster going round saying: “Drake, for God's sake put that bloody instrument away.” '

Nick went up to Fitzwilliam College to read English in October 1967. After the tightly communal, strictly timetabled life of boarding school, an institution like Cambridge University must indeed have been a liberation for Nick, and thousands of students like him. There was no one looking over your shoulder, no rotas and lists to tell you what to do or when to do it.

There is something timeless about the melted-candle beauty of Cambridge. The city which has been home to spies and scholars, musicians and mathematicians, choristers and clerics, seems to maintain its other-worldly charm in the face of progress. There is still the beatific charm of an afternoon spent lazing on the Backs, the green stretch which borders the River Cam as it slips, silver, past colleges in the clouds. Willows weep silently over the river banks, but even the boisterous cries of undergraduates cannot overwhelm the quietude of the Cam as it winds its way down to Grantchester.

Rupert Brooke – another golden boy whose life bears similarities to that of Nick Drake — was educated at Rugby and Cambridge. A socialist poet and radical, he died at the age of twenty-seven in 1915, before he could reach Gallipoli, but not before he had done much to brush away the dust and cant of the Victorian age. His best-known poem, ‘The Old Vicarage, Grantchester', was published posthumously
in
1914 And Other Poems
, and in its poignant questions Brooke spoke for all the young men who sailed away to the mud of Flanders and the bloody beaches of Gallipoli:

Stands the Church clock at ten to three?

And is there honey still for tea?

Cambridge has been a university town since 1209, but for all its air of tranquil permanence, life bubbles away beneath the surface. In Market Square the market flourishes today as it has since the early thirteenth century. Among the fruit and veg and clothes are stalls selling joss-sticks, bootleg albums and shawls, much as they did in Nick's day.

From all over the country they came in the sixties, as they had always come, and on arrival they put away childish things and settled down to become students and put the world to rights. For relaxation, there were college cinema clubs, or the Arts Cinema on the corner of Market Square. Here, through clouds of cigarette smoke, the imaginative leap was made from the cinema of childhood to the foothills of the avant-garde. Cambridge all-nighters blended the anarchy of the Marx Brothers with the solemnity of
The Seventh Seal
, while tired late-teenagers grappled with the symbolism which came thick and fast by the celluloid mile.

This was a time before videos, computers and compact discs; before cashcards, mobile phones and mixed colleges. But the conversations were liberating and ideas were cross-fertilizing. To the distaste of some and the delight of many, in the turbulent year after Nick Drake's arrival in Cambridge abortion and homosexuality were finally legalized by Harold Wilson's Labour government.

Key texts of the time were Joseph Heller's
Catch-22
, Colin Wilson's
The Outsider
and Tolkien's
The Lord Of The Rings.
For additional cred, there were the grey-spined Penguin Modern Classics: Hermann Hesse's
Steppenwolf
, Jack Kerouac's
On The Road
, Franz Kafka's
The Castle
, Mervyn Peake's
Gormenghast
trilogy. Poetry had to a large extent been supplanted by rock 'n' roll, but no self-respecting ‘head' left their digs without a well-thumbed copy of
The Mersey Poets
, and Yevtushenko (‘Do not tell lies to the young…') was widely quoted.

This was the city to which Nick Drake came, the year The Beatles released
Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band.
Richard Charkin,
who had been with Nick during his month in Morocco earlier in the year, went up at the same time. He laughed when he remembered how they met again: ‘Come October '67 I'm in my room at Trinity College, Cambridge, there's a knock on the door and it's Nick. The astonishing thing is that in a month of living together in Morocco, he had never said that he was going to Cambridge. That's quite bizarre, but it was very symptomatic.'

Nick certainly seems to have enjoyed the Cambridge experience, at least some of the time, at least at the beginning … Simon Crocker, his old friend from Marlborough, visited Nick during his second term and found him in extremely good heart: ‘We both went up to university in the autumn of '67. I went to Bristol, Nick went to Cambridge. In the second term there was an exchange between the Bristol revue group which I was in, and the Cambridge Footlights, and I remember Nick turned up after the show at Cambridge and said: “Right, let's go” — he had this old motorbike, and we spent the night roaring around Cambridge — “Let's have some fun.” He was in great spirits.'

The Cambridge University Footlights Club, which was founded in 1883 as a forum for university entertainers, came into its own during the 1950s. Peter Cook, the John Lennon of the Fringe quartet, arrived in 1957 and blitzed the town. Cook hitched up with Alan Bennett, Jonathan Miller and Dudley Moore, and went Beyond the Edinburgh Fringe in 1960. British comedy was never the same after their foray; in their way, the Fringe four had as much impact on British society as The Beatles. Following Cook, Cambridge Footlights became the comedy equivalent of the Cavern, spewing out a series of household names: John Bird, Eleanor Bron, David Frost, John Cleese, Michael Palin, Eric Idle, Terry Jones, Clive James, Graham Chapman … Interestingly, both Nick Drake and his friend Robert Kirby auditioned for the club during their time at Cambridge, but neither was accepted.

Trevor Dann, who compiled the 1985 Nick Drake retrospective
Heaven In A Wild Flower
and is now in overall control of popular music coverage on BBC TV and Radio, was, in 1971, a student at Fitzwilliam College. Dann, who had bought
Five Leaves Left
as a teenager, was delighted to find himself reading history at Nick Drake's old Cambridge college, but the college buildings were far from homely: ‘It's worth remembering that at the time Nick was there in the sixties, it was an even worse building than it is now. Only half
of it was built, the bit by Huntingdon Road, everything the other side of the monstrous café block wasn't there. And also, the A14 wasn't a motorway, so all the lorries coming to the port used to come up Victoria Road, hang a right past the college, and the windows used to rattle something horrible. Every term I came back from holiday, I used to have to put Plasticine round the windows to stop them shuddering.

‘I was just a lad who liked Nick Drake, who was at the same college. Then I met a bloke there called John Venning, who was a postgrad, and he had known Nick Drake. So I spent the odd evening in the college bar, trying to get him to reminisce. I suspect it was through him I found out that Nick had briefly had a college room. Somebody told me it was R24, so I managed to get myself into R24.'

Fitzwilliam College grew out of ‘an institution which became the home of non-collegiate students in Cambridge who could not afford membership of an established college'. Its first buildings were occupied in 1963, but the buildings the college now occupies, designed by Denys Lasdun, architect of London's National Theatre, were inaugurated in 1966. Cambridge City Council's official guide describes Fitzwilliam College codedly as ‘strikingly modern' and ‘a riot of sculptural invention'.

When you read that Nick Drake studied at Cambridge, images spring to mind of punts gliding on the Cam and gowns flowing as cyclists scuttle across Jesus Green. The reality was, and is, somewhat different. Architecturally, Fitzwilliam has more in common with the boxy modern hotels which proliferate on industrial parks close to major motorway exits than with the traditional Cambridge colleges which grace the heart of the city.

Fitzwilliam College sits a good mile out of Cambridge, on the Huntingdon Road, its red-brick buildings and plain rectangular window-panes jarringly at odds with the public image of the city. Despite beautifully kept gardens and well-appointed lawns, Fitzwilliam looks less like a Cambridge college than a 1960s day-care centre. Victoria Lloyd (née Ormsby-Gore) remembered visiting Nick at Fitzwilliam when she spoke to Mick Brown: ‘He was profoundly disappointed by it. He had this wonderful vision of going to Cambridge – the dreaming spires, the wonderful erudite people. We went up to visit and he was in this grim, redbrick building, sitting in this tiny motel-like bedroom. He was completely crushed. He just sat there saying “it's so awful”.'

Strangely, though, when Simon Crocker visited he felt that, far
from hating the modernity of Fitzwilliam, Nick was frustrated by the hidebound nature of the whole institution: ‘I think for Nick Cambridge was a bit too … old-fashioned. I think he would have enjoyed one of the other universities better. I think he felt quite stifled. He didn't like the customs …'

Roger Brown, who went up to Fitzwilliam in October 1969, at the beginning of what should have been Nick's final year, wrote to me with his impressions of the place. Roger remembered Nick being spoken of fondly by contemporary musicians, including Fred Frith, who went on to join the band Henry Cow. More intriguingly, he wrote about the college as it was in Nick's time: ‘In theory, a college such as Fitzwilliam with an active social life and back-up such as individual tutors, ought to offer an ideal environment for the transition from home and school to independent life as an adult. In practice however, many students were too young and not self-reliant enough. Nick Drake was not the only Fitzwilliam student to have difficulty in adjusting … It was not unusual for people to crack-up and spend time at the local mental hospital (Fulbourn, as I recall) … At the time, Fitzwilliam did not admit women, so the atmosphere was rather monkish and not helped by the emphasis on engineering, science, chemistry, law, rowing, rugby etc …'

So this was Nick Drake's Cambridge college: a suburban dormitory building, efficient and municipal, with little in the way of camaraderie, comfort or college spirit. The undergraduate rooms were cubicles, practical but cramped and impersonal; the whole place an outpost, far removed from the life of the city and the heart of the university.

Paul Wheeler met Nick and fellow-student Robert Kirby when he went up to Caius College in 1968: ‘The way that Cambridge works is like a big club, and when I arrived at Caius, because I played music, they said: “Oh, you should meet this person”, and Robert said: “Oh, you must meet Nick” … Caius was in the centre of town, and it had more of a traditional image of Cambridge. So I think this link between Caius and Nick is quite interesting, because in some ways he was on the border of a Cambridge life – he was living outside the town, and Fitzwilliam is quite a way out – whereas coming into Caius, which he did quite a lot because of Robert and me and quite a group of us … so in some ways there was more of a link between Nick and Caius than there was between him and Fitzwilliam.

‘At Caius we had this dining club, which is very Cambridge, called The Loungers. And the only thing you had to do was “lounge by ye
gate for one hour every day and observe what straunge creatures God hath made!” Every week or two we had a Loungers' Breakfast … and Nick was the “odd fellow” in this group, they had one or two people from other colleges … and that was the way we used to officially meet.'

Unlike Marlborough, on which he left a real and lasting impression, Fitzwilliam College has precious few memories of Nick Drake. He never completed his degree, quitting twelve months ahead of Finals, to journey down to London and seek a career in music. His departure, like his two-year residence, went largely unnoticed. Two years after Nick left Fitzwilliam, Trevor Dann went up and found that not a trace remained: ‘The only person who knew about Nick Drake at Fitzwilliam was me, and I would tell people, and they'd go: “Who?” '

However, by 1994 the slow-burning flame of posthumous fame had begun to take hold. A notice appeared on the college notice board headed ‘Calling All Guitarists'. A second-year student, Ewan C. Kerr, was organizing a guitar concert ‘in recognition of the number of guitarists there are in college who never get around to playing in front of anyone'. The notice continued: ‘You may or may not be aware that Fitz was home to a singer-songwriter legend (well I think so!) of the 60s called Nick Drake. The concert will be in memory of him (he died on November 25th 1974 – just 20 years ago last Thursday).'

Like most students at Fitzwilliam, Nick spent his first year living in, with ‘bedders' to clean up his room and meals in hall on tap. But when he returned to Cambridge after the long vacation in autumn 1968, he moved into lodgings outside the college. It was during his second year, while he was living in rooms in Carlyle Road, that Paul Wheeler met him for the first time: ‘It's just slightly outside the main university territory, Carlyle Road, just by this little bridge which leads on to Jesus Green, so that every time Nick came into town he would cross over the river, and I've always considered that “River Man” had to do with this …'

Much of Nick's time at Cambridge was spent visiting friends in other colleges — Brian Wells at Selwyn, Robert Kirby and Paul Wheeler at Caius; and they in their turn would visit him. One friend remembers Nick's room as ‘very quiet and nice, books and records and dope', and Nick would often produce his guitar and play for them — songs which his friends would recognize on
Five Leaves Left
the following year.