Nick Drake (23 page)

An audience of around fifty had paid to sit in the room above the pub. Bruce remembers that he bought matching pink denim shirts in an attempt to make Folkomnibus look ‘less like schoolboys and more like professional artists'. These would also have contrasted markedly with Nick's customary dark outfits. Folkomnibus played a set consisting of Simon
&
Garfunkel, Spinners and Corries covers; some Irish jigs and reels; and their own ‘instrumental attempts at being teenage versions of the string-bending John Renbourn or Bert Jansch'.

‘Nick took to the floor, or should I say the low chair at the front of the audience,' Bruce recalls. ‘He sat, stooped, hunched over his guitar, an almost reverential silence in the place and this low, dark, almost drowsy voice — almost one of the audience, only he was facing the other way. His hair covered his face, and as far as I can remember, there were no in-between song comments – quite spooky in some way. The image of the figure – almost like on the cover of
Bryter Layter
– is very strong: dark, hunched shape, face hidden by hair, voice, audience intently listening.'

Before the gig, Nick was fascinated by Bruce's cheap Italian round-backed mandolin, and picked it up. Bruce remembers him ‘holding the delicate, pear-shaped body in his delicate hands, as if it were a new-found antiquity'. When Folkomnibus came offstage, Bruce even remembers Nick laughing good-naturedly and saying: ‘You've stolen my set.'

Another handful of confirmed gigs came when Nick opened for Fairport early in 1970, as the band endeavoured to recover from the departure of founder member Ashley Hutchings and cynosure Sandy Denny. Fairport's Dave Pegg remembered those dates: ‘He did about six gigs with Fairport. I remember we did the Bristol Colston Hall with Nick. He was very well received, the audience liked him. They loved it, he'd go on and play the songs, he didn't have any spiel. But the songs were strong enough to get people's attention, and in those days people were into listening to music anyway. He didn't have much stage presence … he was the opposite of somebody who gets up and tries to gee the audience up, but the fact that he was that way, people had time for him, because the music and his voice were so good, and they'd probably never heard much of it before. It was early days for him.

‘He was quite sociable. I remember we went for a curry round the corner from the Colston Hall, and he was very friendly … I never saw him lose it, I never saw him become that depressed that he'd walk off the stage.'

Fully qualified survivor Michael Chapman saw Nick perform at a folk club in Hull in 1969. Chapman, who was seven years older than Nick, had given up his job as an art and photography teacher in the mid-sixties, for the life of a travelling folkie. He made his debut with
Rainmaker
in 1968, but it was his 1969 set,
Fully Qualified Survivor
, which marked his card. Recorded for Harvest, EMI's ‘progressive' subsidiary, the album is remarkable for Chapman's inimitable, gritty ‘Postcards Of Scarborough'.

While ploughing around the British folk circuit in the late sixties, Chapman met Bridget St John, who had just made her debut album for John Peel's Dandelion label. ‘I'm pretty certain it was Bridget who turned me on to
Five Leaves Left
, and that was an album I loved,' Chapman told me. ‘I saw Nick was on at a folk club in Hull, so my wife and I went down. It must have been sometime in 1969, as I remember the album had just come out. It was at a pub called the Haworth. They were a real silver-tankard and finger-in-the-ear crowd. The folkies did not take to him. Nick came on and played his own songs, but they wanted songs with choruses. They completely missed the point. They just didn't get the gentleness, the subtlety. He played beautifully.

‘I don't know what the audience expected. I mean, they must have known that you weren't going to get sea-shanties and singalong songs at a Nick Drake gig! I remember he didn't say a word between the songs. I suppose they were all his own songs, I recognized some from the album. He didn't introduce any of them; he didn't say a word the entire evening. It was actually quite painful to watch. Nick should never have been there. It was obviously not in his nature to perform, especially to a crowd like that. But back then, if you played acoustic guitar on your own and played your own songs, folk clubs were the only places that you could play.'

The folk scene in London was centred on Les Cousins, in the basement of 45 Greek Street. Cousins, as everybody called it, was run by Andy Matthews, a folk enthusiast whose parents ran the Dionysius Restaurant upstairs. The club, which was tiny, had begun life as The Skiffle Cellar during the DIY music boom of the mid-fifties. When Cousins first opened its doors in 1965, it charged ‘2/6 membership, entrance 5/- and 7/6'. Cousins was
the
folk venue in London during the sixties, the club to which every tyro folkie who could string together more than two Bob Dylan songs gravitated. It was where guitar wizard Davy Graham held court; where Paul Simon visited.

Ralph McTell had made his recording debut a couple of years before Nick and was a regular performer at Cousins at the height of the folk boom: ‘Very, very small. You were playing to the wall. There was room for three tiny rows of seats before the back wall. There was a dark corner, a tiny stage not big enough for a stripper. A microphone and a domestic amplifier and speaker … A little coffee bar, because it wasn't licensed, although there was occasionally a light ale in there!

‘The real strength was the all-nighters, because if you got in on a
Saturday night in Soho, you had shelter, people used to sleep there. Every boy with a guitar came in … We were all so driven to play, we were all so young. And, of course, just walking through Soho to go to work. When The Incredible String Band were on, the queues used to go round the block, and the working girls around Greek Street at that time were complaining that they weren't doing the business.'

An advertisement in
Melody Maker's
Folk Forum of 15 November 1969 has John James at Cousins, supported by ‘Nick Drake, a fine songwriter'. Steve Aparicio was a member of Cousins, and remembers Nick's performance that night: ‘Nick came on and sat hunched up on a stool on the tiny stage. He played only three or four numbers before leaving the stage in some distress, when he was looked after by John Martyn. John Martyn and Al Stewart both got up and did a few songs each.'

Michael Chapman: ‘Me and Al Stewart, Roy Harper, Ralph McTell, we were all out working the circuit. But that gig in Hull was the only time I ever saw Nick. Whenever we went down to London, we'd all drift along to Cousins to check out the opposition – nick a lick, maybe pinch a gag or a bit of patter, but I never saw Nick there. I assumed — or I think I'd heard — that he was still at school or university, because his name was never around.'

Folk singer Steve Tilston released his debut album,
An Acoustic Confusion
, in the summer of 1971, and in a couple of reviews found himself compared to Nick Drake. Steve remembers meeting Nick in Soho: ‘It was a Saturday night in 1971, and as I walked down Greek Street, on my way to Les Cousins, I noticed a group of about four people gathered on the street outside the club's entrance. One of these was Andy Matthews, who ran the club, and the only other one I recognized was Nick. He was dressed in a white shirt and black jacket, just like in most of his photographs, and stood out in those “tie-dyed” times. We were introduced and pretty soon we got into a conversation. He was very tall and I have this recollection of him having to stoop a little. He startled me by saying that he liked my album, and I remember saying something along the lines of that being good, given that I was supposed to sound like him.

‘My memory is of the conversation being relatively easy — given my own then-mastery of the pregnant pause. One question I remember asking him was concerning a small news snippet I'd seen in
Sounds
… I was convinced that I'd read a piece about Nick about to be doing some recording with one of the old black American blues legends — somebody like Mississippi Fred McDowell or Son House,
somebody of that stature – and I remember feeling really envious. I mentioned it and recall him laughing at the somewhat bizarre prospect. I remember liking him a lot; my recollection is of us getting along pretty well. I think we all then moved along to the Pillars of Hercules pub, and then the memory fades.'

Only one account survives of Nick Drake actually playing at Cousins. It was written by Brian Cullman, who supported Nick that night in 1970, and appeared in
Musician
magazine in 1979: ‘He sat on a small stool, hunched tight over a tiny Guild guitar, beginning songs and halfway through, forgetting where he was, and stumbling back to the start of that song, or beginning an entirely different song which he would then abandon mid-way through if he remembered the remainder of the first. He sang away from the microphone, mumbled, and whispered, all with a sense of precariousness and doom. It was like being at the bedside of a dying man who wants to tell you a secret, but who keeps changing his mind at the last minute.'

An American exchange student, who got involved in the English folk scene when he came to London in 1970, and fell in with John and Beverley Martyn, Brian Cullman has kindly expanded his impression of Nick Drake in performance at Cousins: ‘There was a large though not capacity crowd there, and, if memory serves, they were polite, if not overly enthusiastic about my set. If I was amateurish and awkward, Nick was even worse, though in a far more interesting and charismatic way. He made no eye contact with the audience and shrank into himself, looking smaller and more lost and fragile than usual. And he seemed to wander between songs, starting one, then discarding it in favour of another, the way someone might choose between melons at a fruit stand, picking one up after another, trying to figure out which was ripe. He forgot lyrics or, if uncomfortable with what they revealed, he sang away from the mic or simply mumbled. I've never seen a performer as deeply unhappy or uncomfortable on stage (and I've never seen an audience as rapt and spellbound … there was a genuine affection and admiration, almost a sense of devotion, and the crowd seemed to be willing him through the songs).

‘He played many of the songs from
Five Leaves Left
(“Time Has Told Me”, which came across almost as a country song; “Three Hours”; “Cello Song” – I think – “Thoughts Of Mary Jane”) as well as some songs that turned up on
Fink Moon
(“Things Behind The Sun”, maybe another) though the song that left the deepest impression was nothing more than a fragment. He sang the first few lines of
“Hazey Jane I”, over and over again, almost like a mantra, against soft and rolling chords. The effect was chilling, like eavesdropping on someone's prayers.'

A flyer for a Bedford College all-nighter on 8 May 1970 announced Nick Drake at the bottom of a bill which proceeded upwards via John Martyn, Spencer Davis, Jo-Ann Kelly, Group X, Black August, Raw Spirit, East Of Eden and Graham Bond. Five years after he had hitched from Marlborough to watch The Graham Bond Organisation, Nick was sharing a bill with Bond. In another five years, both men would be dead.

Nick appeared at Ewell on 24 January 1970, playing bottom of the bill to Genesis and bill-toppers Atomic Rooster. He shared a booking agency with Genesis, who were just starting on the windy, wuthering route to success. It was to promote their recent album
Trespass
, on the new Charisma label, that the band — then consisting of Peter Gabriel, Anthony Phillips, Mike Rutherford, Tony Banks and drummer John Mayhew – were out working the circuit. Phillips, the original Genesis guitarist, was kind enough to share his memories: ‘Maybe it was the same agent, but I seem to remember we shared bills at those big university gigs, where there'd be lots of different acts on different stages. There was no
simpatico
because we were all ex-public schoolboys … I remember Nick was
so
shy and retiring … It was probably a combination of things, that we were so wrapped up in ourselves, and there wasn't much time at gigs either … You used to arrive, get on with things, minimal soundchecks, play, then pack up and set off in the van. We had this ghastly old bread van, with no windows in the back. We never travelled with Nick. My abiding memory is that he was so shy, not the easiest guy to talk to.

‘He may have found the fact that he was this one person, and here was this phalanx of group, and roadies, he may have found that difficult. He performed, just him and his guitar. And it was a very crouched, husky performance. In techs, people didn't really listen. You have to stamp on people with volume, unless you're a name. The gigs we did with him – university gigs mainly — even we suffered in our quieter numbers, let alone Nick, doing his one-man thing in his soft, husky voice. It was concert-hall stuff, folk clubs, but not a tech gig, where the lads are there with pints … I don't know why he was put on those big, loud tech gigs. It was difficult enough for us.

‘When you're playing this quiet acoustic stuff to people who are shouting, it just kills the songs really. We used to start with a quiet acoustic set, and build up to a climax — but we got rid of that quite
quickly! … We started strong — kick 'em in the teeth, quieten them down, then you can go a little bit quiet. One of our most popular acoustic songs was a very sixties-sounding song called “Let Us Now Make Love” … Nick obviously liked that one very much, I remember him coming up to me when he heard that I wrote it and saying … “Dangerous!”

‘All the gigs I remember with Nick were these big, multi-act tech gigs. He might have got £50 for a gig, maybe a bit more, certainly more than us, because we had to split it. I don't remember Nick surrounded by anybody else. There was contact with Robert Kirby and Marcus [Bicknell], who were at some of the gigs. But I can't remember who got the gigs. I don't remember Nick with an entourage. I just remember this very sweet, but rather shy, tall man, who sang in this engaging husky voice, who you could never really hear properly!'