Nick Drake (12 page)

The physical frailty, the lack of robustness which has become part of the myth of Nick in recent years, does not appear to have taken hold in Cambridge; the ‘very well made, tall, strong' athlete of the Marlborough years was not yet erased. ‘He never struck me as being unhealthy,' said Paul Wheeler. ‘He always held himself very well, always looked healthy, so there was that – a word you always hear about Nick – elegance …'

Iain Dunn characterizes Cambridge in the late sixties as: ‘Quite a lot of sex and drugs and rock 'n' roll. I don't remember doing a lot of work. Certainly if you were reading English, the idea of actually going to a seminar was thought to be quite bizarre. Not many people did. Not many people got up before midday.

‘Nick was reading English, and I remember a friend of his was
doing some big essay … a comparison between a seventeenth-century love lyric and the lyrics of Smokey Robinson. That was a fairly typical thing of the time. There were an awful lot of people reading English in those days who were asking the question: how come all literature stops with T.S. Eliot? You were desperately trying to incorporate into your English essay some kind of relationship with what was going on in the rest of your life, which was how exciting the new Beatles album was. And of course, as far as the Establishment was concerned, this was total anathema. Very few dons then had any conception of, or understanding, that this might be the way things were going.'

Before rock 'n' roll pulled on its pompous and ponderous seventies wardrobe, millions around the world were united by the sounds which came out of transistor radios and spinning black vinyl albums as the sixties wound down. Nick Drake was now fashioning his own material, but he remained immersed in the wonderful music which others were producing during 1967 and 1968. He loved the material of the new singer-songwriters like Tim Buckley, Leonard Cohen, Tim Hardin and Randy Newman, who were just beginning to make their mark. Ian MacDonald considered that, of all the people he met in Cambridge, ‘Nick always seemed to be somebody who was passing through, right on the edge of things … only relating to people who spoke the same language, the same musical language.'

Other albums which found favour with Nick during 1968 included Love's
Forever Changes
, Van Morrison's
Astral Weeks
and, more surprisingly, the work of Fifth Dimension. To many who favoured more challenging bands like Traffic, Pink Floyd, Led Zeppelin, Santana and Cream, the chart-friendly, close-harmony group were anathema, but Nick recognized the high production values of the first three albums. He also admired two writers championed by the group: Jim Webb, who wrote their biggest hit, ‘Up, Up & Away', and Laura Nyro, herself barely out of her teens. Nick was impressed enough by Fifth Dimension to recommend them to Robert Kirby: ‘He told me to get the Fifth Dimension album
Magic Garden
, because of the use of rock and orchestra — same as
Pet Sounds.
He was the one who turned me on to the first Randy Newman album and Tim Buckley's
Goodbye And Hello …'

Paul Wheeler: ‘When I was at Caius there was a particular friend of ours who had an amazing record collection, from Bach to Motown. We spent a lot of time round there: he'd put on some Bach Suite, followed by jazz, Gregorian chants. And then put on Smokey
Robinson, Indian music … That blending together was very much a sign of the times, and I guess things like “Cello Song” reflect that…' One song he remembers Nick being particularly fond of was ‘Song For Our Ancestors', from the second Steve Miller Band album,
Sailor.
An atmospheric piece, it begins with the sound of foghorns baying out, as a sepulchral organ plays beneath. As the guitars and drums brush in, it develops into an impressionistic wash, similar to those Pink Floyd were attempting at the time. An odd choice for someone whose perceived taste was for the precision-cut lyrics of literate singer-songwriters.

During their first term in Cambridge, Brian Wells met Nick in a pub called the Criterion: ‘I went there because people who smoke dope went to the Criterion … I'd just come back from America, I'd been living there for a year, and I'd got a load of records — stuff like Sam & Dave which had been in the Soul Charts in America – that Nick hadn't heard. I'd got a few West Coast-type things, but I wasn't really into the West Coast stuff like Iron Butterfly …

‘Nick was a very tall, very good-looking guy, who looked just like the guy on the cover of your book … We clicked, partly because we both smoked dope, and partly because I'd got this record collection. I was interested in music, and it became very clear early on that he was a guitar player who was in a league that was totally different to the one I was in … I'd come back to England, where there were these people who had been influenced by John Renbourn and Davy Graham … and Paul Wheeler was one of them, actually. Nick and Paul were both very good guitarists who were playing acoustic guitars with all sorts of bluesy, finger-picking styles … I was really quite awestruck by them both, actually.

‘I had worked on a radio station in the States, so I was into American pop music rather than the underground; the hippie movement was wasted on me, I thought it was a load of old cobblers. But it did introduce me to people who smoked dope, which was what Nick and I had in common … I remember smoking dope and playing him things like Cannonball Adderley's “Mercy, Mercy”, Sam
&
Dave, Aretha, “Never Loved A Man The Way I Loved You” … He was turning me on to things like Van Morrison's
Astral Weeks
and Donovan … He appreciated things like
The Notorious Byrd Brothers.'

Besides listening voraciously, Nick was quietly, determinedly, working at his own songwriting, and trying the results out on friends, as Ian MacDonald discovered: ‘I remember Nick playing
“River Man” and “Time Has Told Me” … on several occasions in various Cambridge college rooms … a very quiet, humble, kind man, who seemed to be viewing everything from a faintly puzzled, faintly amused distance. At the time, he was about to record
Five Leaves Left
, and we were all knocked out by the songs.'

Nick's Cambridge friends all share clear and fond memories of informal sessions when he played his own songs, and some remember occasions, often with Paul Wheeler on guitar, which were just jams, usually based around blues figures, with no discernible endings or beginnings. But although happy to get out his guitar and play for friends, Nick played precious few real concerts. Neither Iain Dunn nor Ian MacDonald recalls ever seeing Nick perform formally while at Cambridge, and Brian Wells agrees: ‘I don't remember Nick doing gigs in Cambridge – only in our rooms. I would occasionally jam with him. I would struggle on, but he didn't think much of me as a musician, quite rightly. I think he and Paul Wheeler would do a fair bit together.

‘In terms of gigging, that didn't really happen until after
Five Leaves Left.
We were aware that he had these mysterious friends, one of whom was Joe Boyd, and there was all this sort of stuff about “Well, I'm thinking of making a record …” I think some of us didn't quite believe it. It was a different life. He'd be in Cambridge, he'd smoke dope, he wouldn't do any work really, and we'd meet up and listen to music. Then he would go off to London, where he seemed to have a different life …'

Nick was listening to pretty much what everyone else of his age was hearing at the time, and when it came to guitarists his turntable tutors were as you would expect – Bert Jansch, John Renbourn, Davy Graham, John Martyn … Little of the electric flamboyance of Eric Clapton or Jimmy Page impinged upon his playing. Robert Kirby has clear memories of Nick playing in his rooms at Caius: ‘He'd often come round and sit, not play his own stuff, but improvise blues. I mean, I love Jansch, Renbourn, Davy Graham … in the sixties we had the best of the world's acoustic guitarists … He was better than them at the blues. He could either do it in a complex sixties or seventies rock style, or he could make it sound like the original black Americans had done it before the war. He had studied it a lot, he really had. He used to talk about some quite esoteric forties and fifties players.'

Iain Dunn didn't foresee Nick's success, but sensed that he was working at honing his talent: ‘I think in those days he did what
everyone did, which was play Bert Jansch at sixteen rpm, work out what he was doing, and do it for themselves … He would turn up and say: “I've got a new song” and you'd go: “Oh, what is it?” And he'd play “Man In A Shed” or something … He was obviously a very able guitarist… I do remember he had the most gorgeous voice, just fantastic. It was so … sensitive, a slightly husky quality.'

May Balls — which actually take place during the first week of June – are an Oxbridge tradition in which live music plays an important part. In 1964 The Rolling Stones had to interrupt their debut American tour to fly back and play an Oxford May Ball. The incongruity is still striking, but it really did happen: on 10 June 1969 Nick Drake hunched over his guitar and sent out his wistful and idiosyncratic songs to a braying, swaying, May Ball crowd.

John Mayall and the Liverpool Scene headlined the Caius May Ball that year, together with Tuesday's Children, White Unicorn, Paul Wheeler (‘whose lyrical and humorous songs and guitar-playing have been entertaining London and Cambridge audiences for several years'), Fab Cab and The North-West London Contemporary Jazz Five. As well as arranging for, and appearing with, Nick Drake, Robert Kirby was also singing with The Gentle Power Of Song that June night. There was also a Cambridge jazz group by the name of Horn. Intriguingly, barely three years later, ‘Horn' would appear as the title of an instrumental piece on Nick's final album,
Pink Moon.

The May Ball programme included the following profile: ‘Nick Drake's forthcoming LP, already hailed in the press as the record of the year, was produced by Joe Boyd (producer of The Incredible String Band and Fairport Convention). Robert Kirby arranged some of the tracks on the album and his orchestra will be accompanying Nick tonight.'

Robert remembers his performance with Nick at the Caius May Ball: ‘I wore evening dress, and the girls were at the ball anyway, and they wore black, ankle-length dresses with white feather boas. They were playing as a double quartet, an octet. There was a string-bass player as well — his name was Colin Fleetcroft, and I've never seen him since, but I'm sure he had an old tape recorder set up and recorded it. I certainly scored for flutes. Nick was singing, and we also interspersed it with the slow movement of Leopold Mozart's Trumpet Concerto and the Albinoni Adagio & Fugue.

‘It was in the Library. Nick did the four orchestrated songs, he did a couple of songs without the strings, and after every third song we
stuck in these classical bits. Everyone talks about the sixties and flower power, but the May Ball was very much what it would have been like before the war. I think socially the big changes came in the seventies … when the educational establishment changed. In the sixties, the drug culture was there, but by and large, you still conformed, even if you didn't think you were at the time.'

When flautist and saxophonist Iain Cameron arrived in Cambridge the year after Nick, he soon became involved in the city's thriving undergraduate musical scene: ‘I would go round to Paul Wheeler's room in New Court, and we'd blow. One afternoon I go round there, this would be April or May 1969, and … Nick is there playing songs – I definitely remember “River Man” – and just remember thinking what a dream of a song that was. How utterly stunning as a piece of music, partly because of the concentric guitar part in 5/4, the harmonies, very evocative, slightly mournful words. He also looked very impressive, like he looked on the records. A very beautiful person by any standards. Slightly reticent, slightly cool, insubstantial spirit …'

Cameron was co-opted into playing at the May Ball in the ‘Kirby-led ensemble', and remembers the occasion in some detail: ‘Nick was on about eleven o'clock … He was quite featured, he had his own space, a medium-sized room in Caius College devoted to Nick. It was reasonably well attended, an audience of thirty to fifty … It was quite ambitious, because of the Kirby arrangements … Nick was seated, playing guitar, there was a little woodwind section over to one side of the stage … a few strings, but I can't remember if there were girls … “Mayfair”, “Time Of No Reply” I remember, stuff from
Five Leaves Left.
Now I would worry about whether we had a good PA, but I don't remember what the sound was like that night.'

Nick Drake performing while surrounded by girls in feather boas is an appealing and enduring image, and there is no doubt that it did happen. There is, however, a difference of recollection as to where and when. The striking tableau is generally attributed to the 1969 Caius May Ball, but others suggest that the boas in question appeared at another confirmed performance, which Nick gave at Cambridge's Pitt Club, in Jesus Lane.

Brian Wells remembers both performances but refuses to be drawn about feather boas: ‘He did play at a May Ball; he also played at my ex-wife's twenty-first birthday party in the Pitt Club, with an orchestra, and I was at both of those gigs, because I did the sound PA. At the May Ball he was using the amplifier and speakers that we were using for our
disco, and he came in … while I was in the middle of playing “Mony Mony” or something by Tommy James & The Shondells … saying: “You will make sure we've got the PA … ?” And I'm saying: “Hang on, hang on, let me just cue up this other record.” And he was a bit concerned that I was a bit abrupt, and his comment was: “Oh, I can tell I've walked into a really busy situation …”

‘The Pitt Club with the orchestra was a bit scratchy … Robert Kirby had a string quartet with him as well… They definitely played “Time Of No Reply” – I was always surprised that wasn't on
Five Leaves Left
, because it was something he played quite a lot. He played most of the
Five Leaves Left
stuff.'