Nick Drake (31 page)

‘I think he was always slightly sensitive, not aloof, but distant from it. I've been in pubs with Nick, and he would laugh and joke and things, but he would then go after a while … Whereas most people would hang on for another hour, he would get up and go. From the minute I met him, he would get up and go, because you got the impression that he thought it was uncool to stay there getting pissed, or whatever. It had to do with cool, and image, a lot of it.

‘It's interesting, isn't it: Why wasn't he a well-integrated, well brought-up English public-schoolboy who went off to do the same as everybody else? But, you see, he was. He was, and it seemed to change once he got into the music business. And I think the music business is a great place if you've got some rough edges. I think the music business is a much easier place for working-class lads to be…1 think you've got to be quite tough and almost ruthless to be successful in the music business.

‘I think he got into this arena with a fine, chiselled talent. I mean his music is not… he was not getting up on-stage and playing loud
chords and boogying around or being sexy. He wasn't into rock ‘n' roll. He was sitting there, a kind of… timid figure, dressed in black, playing beautiful weird-tuning-type acoustic guitar stuff … He was never a rock ‘n' roller.'

For those who only knew Nick after he arrived in London to make a career as a musician, the decline was less striking, but nonetheless still shocking. Because of his chosen career, many assumed that Nick's problems could be put down to drugs. Only a 10/- cab ride away from Nick in London at this time, Linda Thompson remains convinced that his problems were not drug-related: ‘I never saw him do drugs. I saw him smoke dope, but I never saw him do anything else. I suppose he did. But then you know, looking back on him now, right from the start, there was something wrong.

‘If he did take a lot of drugs, he wasn't an overt drug user. Then as time wore on, he was taking drugs for his depression. It was hard to tell. Then he had his Howard Hughes phase, which was really scary, with the long fingernails and the dirty clothes and stuff. At the time I certainly felt, oh, that's disgusting – those long fingernails and the dirty clothes – instead of thinking it might be nice to try and help this person.'

‘I've known a lot of drug addicts … and I think he was ill. Clinical depression. If he'd been in a rehab, if he'd had lithium or something, maybe counselling, maybe something would have helped. But in those days, vegetarian food and shrinks were still very much fringe things. He must have found that hard, because he had to try and keep himself together on his own.'

At Cambridge, a mere three years before, Nick was fastidious about his nails because of his guitar-playing – Paul Wheeler laughed when he remembered that Nick would never do the washing-up because it might damage his nails. In London, by early 1972, Linda Thompson noticed that Nick's nails had grown so long that it was hard to imagine he would ever play the guitar again.

It was Nick's parents more than anyone who bore the brunt of their son's depression. When he was back at home in Tanworth, Rodney and Molly Drake were the only people he saw regularly, and it was they who watched his tragic decline in his last three years. Rodney: ‘God knows where the depression came from … The experts didn't seem to know much about it, because he did agree to go and see some very eminent people … and they didn't seem to know what was wrong with him. They gave him pills to take, one of which, of course, was the cause of his death, and they did seem to help him, these pills.'

Molly: ‘Hampstead was the beginning … He took this room, all alone, and he decided to cut off from all his friends, and that he was just going to concentrate on music. He had a tremendous number of friends and at one stage he was very gregarious almost, and then he suddenly said this is no good, and he went off to Hampstead, which was where he started to get so depressed, and that was when we really started to get so terribly worried about him.'

Rodney: ‘He was depressed about the world … I think he thought deeply about things, but he couldn't talk to us about it… He did feel that everything was going in the wrong direction … He always thought 1980 was going to be the time …'

His parents were sad, but not surprised that they could not communicate with their son. But even his contemporaries were unable to get through to him. Iain Dunn had lost touch with Nick after he left Cambridge early to record his debut album, but kept buying the records of the boy he remembered playing his songs in college rooms: ‘You could tell in the music as well, as soon as
Pink Moon
came out, you thought, this is … desperate. Most of the intelligence I got back was from Paul [Wheeler], who was still seeing him quite a lot, and was desperately, desperately worried.

‘I think an awful lot of people got their brains severely fried at that time, because most people didn't really know what they were taking. All they really knew was that it felt good. I remember after leaving college and getting my first flat, sharing with some guys who worked on the
NME
… I mean I was the only person there who knew what time of day it was … People matured a lot later in those days, even by the time you went up to university, you didn't really know what was going on in life. So you were coming to terms with all that; huge changes going on in society; this vast ingestion of all kinds of illegal substances … I don't think Nick was alone in having his brains done in by this … cocktail. I think there were a lot of people who were just as badly affected; unfortunately for him it was far more severe in terms of where it went.'

On 3 September 1971 John Lennon and Yoko Ono left Britain for New York. Lennon was never to return. For the last two years, the couple's home had been at Tittenhurst Park, a Georgian house on a sprawling seventy-two-acre estate near Ascot. Lennon's personal assistants there were Nick's friend from Cambridge, Paul Wheeler, and his then wife, Diana.

Tittenhurst Park played a substantial role in Lennon's last years in
the UK. It was in the grounds there, on 22 August 1969, that the four Beatles gathered for what proved to be their final photo session. During early 1971 the Lennons had much of the ground floor gutted, and it was there, during the course of one week in July, in one enormous white room, that Lennon recorded his best-loved solo album,
Imagine.

After the Lennons moved out, Ringo bought the house, and when he in turn moved out in the late eighties, Tittenhurst became a recording studio. Set amid landscaped gardens, the house was everything you would expect of the sixties rock-star aristocracy. From the master bedroom, you looked out over lawns which descended like an enormous green staircase to the sweep of cedars for which the property was famous before the Lennons' occupancy. Next to the window were a pair of switches for turning on the garden lights; rather touchingly, one was labelled ‘John', the other ‘Yoko'.

The Lennons' departure was connected with the long-running custody battle for Yoko's daughter Kyoko, and there was every reason to believe that they would return to live in verdant Royal Berkshire. While Paul and Diana Wheeler were in residence, Tittenhurst – like Charles Foster Kane's Xanadu – was kept in a state of permanent readiness in case the whim of the master and mistress dictated a swift return. It was during this time of limbo that Nick visited Paul Wheeler there.

Another Cambridge visitor to Tittenhurst was Brian Wells, who was still studying to be a doctor: ‘We used to eat cannabis, I was getting this cannabis extract… and we'd put it into cookies and eat this stuff, and wander round the arboretum. There was all this Beatles memorabilia – the statues from the cover of
Sgt Pepper
, the Pepper uniforms and in John and Yoko's bedroom there was a wall of Rickenbacker guitars. I said: “Oh, there's John Lennon's Rickenbacker”, and some guy said come and see this – and there's a whole
wall
of them!'

Paul Wheeler remembers Nick being impressed by Lennon's work even before he visited the house: ‘I remember when he wrote “Cold Turkey” late in '69, Nick heard it and said what an amazing thing to do, to write about that … it's a really tough song. And I was quite surprised to hear Nick saying it was a really interesting thing to do, because I didn't associate Nick with that kind of pain.'

There is a striking incongruity in the image of Nick Drake stalking the corridors of Tittenhurst during 1971. From an early age Nick had been no stranger to home comforts, but surely even he would have
been impressed by the opulence on display. The long corridors gleamed with gold records. The interior was so white that a casual visitor might have imagined he had strayed into an asylum – even the grand piano was white. No noise intruded. Here was the tranquillity of Tanworth and the beguiling other-worldliness of Cambridge, but on a scale which mere mortals could barely comprehend.

With record sales that scarcely registered, a career that hardly merited the name, and a darkness which seemed set to fill his horizons, Nick Drake wandered around the empty mansion of a millionaire rock icon who would never return.

‘John and Yoko had gone,' Paul Wheeler recalls, ‘and Nick seemed to fit in with the “ghost house” image of Tittenhurst, the empty palace. It always stuck in my mind as an allegory of the times, this abandoned estate … They hadn't definitely gone for ever, which is why we were still there, they could have come back any day. When he came to see us in Ascot, there were people he met there who were fascinated by him, by his presence. “Who is this guy?” He had very, very strong presence. There is this idea that he was just this shimmering, ghost … No, no.'

Fashionable as it has become to seek out conspiracy theories to explain Nick Drake's lack of success during his lifetime, at a distance of twenty-five years you gain a perspective lacking at the time. By 1972, Island Records were enjoying their most successful year ever. Island had been very much an album-based label in the late sixties, but they had made the transition and were now making substantial inroads into the pop charts, selling singles to teenagers.

Some may feel uncomfortable remembering just how popular Cat Stevens was at his peak. Now, as Yusuf Islam, he is best known for condoning the fatwa passed on British author Salman Rushdie in 1989; but during the early 1970s he released a series of compelling and enormously popular albums which came to epitomize the sweeping appeal of the introspective singer-songwriter.

David Betteridge remembers Island being bullish about their chances in the American market at the beginning of the 1970s: ‘In the States, Traffic went out on United Artists; Free and Cat Stevens went out on A&M, we were placing act by act, which is why Nick finished up on Warners.'

Asylum Records founder David Geffen was known to be a fan of Nick's work, and was keen to ensure Nick's product was available for the American market. Geffen knew a thing or two about promising
singer-songwriters, having graduated from the post room of the William Morris Agency to manage Laura Nyro, Joni Mitchell, Jackson Browne and Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young. With Asylum, Geffen had championed Tom Waits, David Blue and Judee Sill. He thought Nick's records were ‘fabulous … I thought Nick Drake should have been a star, and that I could help him.'

Only a compilation of the first two albums – imaginatively titled
Nick Drake
– was released in America during Nick's lifetime. The cover was the ‘running man' shot from the back sleeve of
Five Leaves Left
and the album garnered a glowing review from Stephen Holden in
Rolling Stone
of 27 April 1972: ‘British singer-songwriter Nick Drake's American debut album is a beautiful and decadent record. A triumph of eclecticism, it successfully brings together varied elements of the evolution of urban folk rock music during the past five years. An incredibly slick sound that is highly dependent on production values (credit Joe Boyd) to achieve its effects, its dreamlike quality calls up the very best of early Sixties' jazz-pop ballad. It combines this with the contemporary introspection of British folk rock to evoke a hypnotic spell of opiated languor …'

Holden went on to draw the inevitable Cat Stevens and
Astral Weeks
comparisons, picked out Nick's ‘softly seductive' singing and his ‘densely textured guitar' and suggested a ‘head cocktail … in a pool of sweet liqueur after a couple of downs and a few tokes'. Asking if this could be ‘the Muzak of 1984', Holden goes on to find similarities with the work of Donovan and Astrud Gilberto, before concluding: ‘Drake's greatest weakness – one he shares with all too many of today's male lyric troubadors, especially those from England – is the lack of verbal force in his song lyrics, which by and large could be characterized as art nouveau. In the case of Drake, this is less serious a liability than it is for the artists who are more up front vocally. The beauty of Drake's voice is its own justification. May it become familiar to us all.'

Unfortunately, Nick's resistance to gigging even wrecked his chances of making it across the Atlantic, for as David Betteridge pointed out: ‘Generally speaking, you've got to break it in your own territory before you can break an act overseas … and touring was the way to do that.'

So if Nick hadn't been so shy and hadn't so obviously hated live performance, the plan would have been to release his records in America, tied in with a prestige showcase gig around the time of release, at the Troubador in LA, or New York's Bottom Line, and
then to land him some prestige support slot with, say, Carole King or James Taylor, where he could reach an audience sympathetic to his sort of music? ‘Yes, precisely. That's exactly the way it worked. But not with Nick.'

Peter Buck thought back to being a teenager growing up in Athens, Georgia, and remembered just how little Nick was appreciated in America then: ‘I don't think Nick's albums came out here in the States while he was alive, and if they did nobody reviewed them, but then journalists, particularly music journalists, are great ones for rewriting history. Everyone says: “Oh yeah,
Exile On Main Street
is THE Stones album”, but you go back to the original reviews of 1972, and they're all “Well, Side Two doesn't rock”, “It's kind of a muddy sound” … Go look for a review of the first Velvet Underground album, everyone thought they were these circus freaks from New York. At best they were irrelevant, at worst, a total con job, junkies, Andy Warhol's puppets. If today's journalists went back to 1968 and said: “We're from the future, we're going to tell you the names of the important artists – James Brown and The Velvet Underground” – they would all drop fucking dead.'