Nick Drake (24 page)

Bridget St John was playing the same circuit as Nick at roughly the same time, and she remembers Nick performing, and the sort of response he got from critics: ‘My memories of him playing are of a tall, lanky, long-legged young man — always seated cross-legged. I loved a lot of his music — especially from the
Bryter Layter
period: it was John and Beverley [Martyn] who introduced me to him. I remember we both opened for Fairport Convention in Croydon, and both of us felt good about our performances. Karl Dallas reviewed it and obviously hated both of us equally: “There's only one question in my mind after having heard the Fairport Convention's superlatively excellent performance at the Fairfield Halls last Friday: why the hell did the organisers make us sit through almost an hour of sheer tedium before the interval instead of letting the Fairports have the whole show to themselves?” '

The
Croydon Advertiser
was rather kinder. Reviewing the 10 October 1969 gig, the local paper's reviewer noted: ‘The first half of the evening's programme was devoted to another folk direction – that of the solo composer/guitarist/singer. Unfortunately, Bridget St John and Nick Drake were too similar in outlook, and thus each robbed the other of impact. Both sing sad, personal songs in rather deep, hushed voices, interspersed with the slightly amateur incoherencies one associates with this sort of performance. Both are pleasing enough artists, with above-average skills at the guitar and composition … Nick Drake, a Cambridge undergraduate, wore youthful cords, an open neck shirt and jacket, and a rather anxious expression …'

Nick is also rumoured to have played a short, unbilled set at an
open-air festival in Yorkshire, headlined by Free, who were Island labelmates. It could have happened: solitary guitarists who sung their own songs were cheap, didn't need much in the way of PA, and could be slotted in between showers. There are other rumoured appearances, but even some of the ones advertised in
Melody Maker
may not have materialized. What does emerge from eyewitness accounts is that the weight of opinion about Nick's live performances is at odds with that of his sister. Gabrielle remembers Nick electrifying the audience with his tremendous presence, and recalls that at one point he had wanted to become an actor, but she too recognized her brother's intense vulnerability: ‘He did very few performances. What put him off, I think, was that he did a working men's club somewhere, and they talked all through the performance. I always think if you're going to be a performing artist of any sort, you have to have an inside that's like a jelly, and an outside that's as tough as nails. And I think Nick's trouble was that he never had that tough outside. He was born with a skin too few …'

The solitary nature of Nick's craft probably added to his feelings of being adrift and isolated. Following his appearance at the Haworth folk club in Hull, Michael Chapman remembers his wife seeing Nick on the pavement outside, alone with his guitar, looking quite forlorn: ‘She went up and said how much she'd enjoyed the gig and he said he didn't have anywhere to stay; they hadn't booked him a room or anything, so we asked him back to stay for the night. He was very quiet, well-spoken, but as soon as he came in and saw my guitars lying around, we were off. He was quite easy to be with. Once we were in the house, and he was away from an audience, he was fine.

‘He was playing a Martin guitar, and I had a Gibson, which for guitarists are two totally different philosophies. As soon as we sat down we started jamming, improvising scraps of songs. We played all night, from midnight to 5a.m. I have to say that substances did play a part in the proceedings. He played some lovely stuff on the guitar, interesting, Brazilian-type tunings.'

Nick was hauled out regularly and put in front of audiences keen to witness Fairport Convention, Fotheringay, John and Beverley Martyn … Support acts are the timid Christians thrown to hungry lions in the auditorium, and even tiny club audiences could be pretty doctrinaire in those days. For anyone without the necessary chutzpah, folk clubs could be fairly unforgiving places.

Jerry Gilbert, a regular observer on the folk circuit, saw Nick play half a dozen times: ‘I always remember him seated on a stool. He
always seemed to be the token opening act, which was sad, as he was worth more than that. I don't ever remember a showcase for him. He was out there as a stooge to whet the crowd's appetite … There was always a huge amount of nervousness … let me qualify that: Nick's performances were always very accomplished. I don't recall huge amounts of shaky fingers and bum notes or anything at a Nick performance. I think once he got into the song, he lost himself in his own world — he could have been in Sound Techniques recording, he shut the audience out entirely, created this cocoon around himself… then he thought, oh God, there's got to be a link here, a bridge, between here and the next song. The actual performance of the songs I remember as being pretty OK.'

For career purposes, the dozens of gigs, most of them supporting other people were not nearly enough – though for Nick personally they were obviously far too much. But to put it in some sort of perspective, Nick's Island labelmate and contemporary, Cat Stevens, racked up 145,000 miles of travel in one calendar year alone, touring to promote his albums. Venturing out from Little Hadham, Fairport Convention also clocked up the miles, hacking across the country during 1970. With little likelihood of picking up airplay for their albums, they recognized that their heartlands were the university campuses and regional clubs.

Dave Pegg: ‘We were in a band, and bands are like a different thing. If you're not in a group, you're always an outsider — you don't spend five hours in the van together. Bands develop their own sense of humour, it's difficult for an outsider to get in on stuff like that. I think Nick used to come in the van with us occasionally, but he did take things very seriously, whereas we were the opposite … They were very, very happy days, we just seemed to be working all the time. That year we were at the Angel, we must have done about 300 gigs.'

As a live performer, Nick Drake's career fizzled out barely two years after the release of his debut album. The ability to face an audience across the footlights was slowly and irrevocably lost. From then on, the only place for him to turn was in on himself. Back in Soho, Steve Tilston saw Nick for the last time. The elegant young pretender was gone now: ‘There was another brief meeting on the stairs going down to Les Cousins. He looked strange and unkempt, given that before he had appeared quite elegant and it was I who had felt like Wurzel Gummidge; and then, I suppose about a year or so later, the word was that Nick was not well.

‘He would still occasionally come down to Soho, but then it was
specifically to see Andy Matthews – he and his wife Di were very concerned and protective of Nick. The last time I saw him, I remember going into the Pillars of Hercules and spotting Andy deep in conversation with Nick; all I saw were [Nick's] hunched shoulders. I didn't join them, so my last memory is of Nick Drake's back. I didn't see his face again'.

In July 1970 Joe Boyd decided that the songs of his Witchseason acts – Fairport Convention, John Martyn, The Incredible String Band, Nick Drake – needed to be better known. He hired a studio and employed a couple of session singers: his then girlfriend, Linda Peters (later Thompson) and Elton John. Reg Dwight had become Elton John in 1968, and was already carving out quite a living, mostly as singer and pianist for those 14/11d ‘Can you tell the difference between these and the original sounds?' compilations.

Looking back, with the all the baggage of hindsight, it is hard to remember Nick Drake as anything but a frail, translucent, tragic presence. But there was a time back then when Nick was just another young singer-songwriter, ambitious as any of his contemporaries, and desperately keen to get his material across to as wide an audience as possible.

‘I wanted an album of Warlock Music songs,' explained Joe Boyd, Nick's mentor and producer. ‘We did Mike Heron's songs, a couple of Nick's songs, a John Martyn song … We pressed up 100 acetates, white labels. I never had any. Always the way!'

So ‘Elton Sings Nick' were the first covers of songs by Nick Drake? Joe Boyd considered: ‘The only cover I'm aware of during Nick's lifetime was by Millie. I think she heard it through Chris Blackwell. She covered “Mayfair” on an album, the one with her straddling a banana.'

Robert Kirby: ‘The Millie record came out in 1970. That was one of the first things I did when I left university, thrown in at the deep
end with a proper reggae band. That's the album with “Mayfair” on it. I produced and arranged it, and Nick was very pleased – it was a cover.'

The idea was to have something which could be sent out, for managers to play to music publishers, and on to their clients. It was a Tin Pan Alley tradition, and acetates of freshly written Lennon & McCartney compositions regularly turn up for sale at auction. Even the more established acts (Beatles, Bowie, Dylan) still demoed material, which was then pressed up on to acetates and passed around to interested parties. White-label acetates proved a godsend to bootleggers, and latterly, to the compilers of box sets and CD reissues.

The best-known acetate in rock ‘n' roll was Bob Dylan's
The Basement Tapes.
Culled from six months of loose-limbed jamming with The Band in the basement of their house, Big Pink, at Woodstock during Dylan's enforced lay-off during 1967, a twelve-track acetate was circulated to interested parties in the UK during early 1968. That acetate achieved notoriety when – as
The Great White Wonder
– it became rock's first bootleg during 1969.

Was the idea to get the likes of Tom Jones or Engelbert Humperdinck interested in covering one of Boyd's protégés' songs? That sort of crossover was not unfeasible; there had been precedents. The first person to record a Paul Simon composition was Val Doonican; the first commercially available cover of a U2 song was by Barbara Dickson; and the first person to cover a Beatles song had been Kenny Lynch – and John Lennon was only too grateful.

Of the 100 acetates that Boyd had pressed up, six are known definitely still to exist and only two have appeared on the open market, the most recent changing hands for £925. The enduring appeal of the Warlock Demo is not so much due to the handful of Nick Drake cover versions, but rather the identity of the singer who, though relatively unknown at the time of recording during 1970, later became Elton John. Elton's days as a session singer used to barely merit a footnote, but the release in 1994 of
Reg Dwight's Piano Goes Pop
imaginatively collected together the best of Elton's anonymous vocal sessions, revealing the unmistakable sound of the man who would be king flexing his vocal cords.

Hindsight lends a curious perspective to the Warlock session: here is a man whose best-known records would fill the radio waves for the next quarter of a century – and, at one point during the 1970s, accounted for an astonishing 2 per cent of all records sold worldwide
– singing the songs of Nick Drake. Elton was in great demand as a session singer for his interpretative ability, which is what makes his handling of ‘When Day Is Done', ‘Saturday Sun', ‘Way To Blue' and ‘Time Has Told Me' so striking.

Elton John was ‘unavailable for comment' when I tried to reach him for his memories of the session, but he has been quoted as being impressed by the ‘beautiful, haunting quality' of Nick's songs. It is believed that when, in 1993, he sold off his collection of some 25,000 vinyl albums (with all proceeds going to AIDS charities), he kept only two back for himself: one was the
White Album
, which Elton had got signed by all four Beatles, and the other was his own copy of the 1970 Warlock Music sessions.

Following his work on Nick's first two albums, Robert Kirby found himself producing and arranging a number of records during the early 1970s. Grateful for the start given to him by both Joe Boyd and Nick, he did his best to return the favour. Besides managing to place ‘Mayfair' on the Millie album which he arranged, Kirby also remembers managing to get Nick some much-needed session work: ‘Everybody was a singer-songwriter. I did very well at that time … There was a guy called Mick Audsley on Sonet, a bluegrass player. I produced two of his albums, and Nick did session guitar on them. He's not credited, but I got him some sessions playing rhythm guitar on those. The first album was
Deep The Dark And Devilled Waters.
He then brought out a single on Sonet called “The Commissioner He Come”, and I know Nick played an extra acoustic guitar on that. The second session for Mick Audsley was 1972, in Sound Techniques. I produced “Sugar Me” for Lynsey De Paul, the only thing I've ever earned a reasonable sum of money on, but Ralph McTell played rhythm guitar on that!

‘Arranging in those days was heaven. Everybody wanted strings! “Eleanor Rigby” and “Yesterday” were very English styles of string arrangement… I love American stuff, American orchestrations, like “Bridge Over Troubled Water” … but this country was different. Very little in America got string quartets, they always got the full Hollywood treatment… They always approached it differently … lush. The UK has always been more prepared to accept a chamber sound. I put that down to what George Martin did …

‘The other session I got Nick was for Longman, the educational publishers. I was singing, pretending to be a swagman, Nick played guitar, and a childhood friend called Rocking John played banjo … I was going out with a girl who was an editor at Longman, and it was
recorded, I think, at their offices in Harlow. It was done within a year of us leaving Cambridge, so 1970/71.'

Interplay
, The Longman teaching anthology record, is an intriguing and previously unsuspected addition to the known recorded works of Nick Drake. Nick plays on three songs: ‘Full Fathom Five' and ‘I Wish I Was A Single Girl Again', both sung by Vivien Fowler; and the traditional Australian pioneer song ‘With My Swag All On My Shoulder', sung by Robert Kirby. The accompanying teachers' notes for ‘Full Fathom Five' reads: ‘This dirge, which has so many different musical settings, is here sung in folk style … Pupils could also suggest “modern” settings of traditional songs or tunes: the Top Twenty usually has at least one example'. Released in 1972, this Longman double album is probably the rarest of all Nick Drake's recordings. So rare that even Robert Kirby does not own a copy.