Nick Drake (36 page)

Rodney Drake had been sufficiently worried about Nick to write to his friend and erstwhile family doctor before Nick's death, asking for advice. On the first day of the new year, barely five weeks after his son had died, Rodney Drake wrote another letter to my uncle, James Lusk, thanking him for his opinion and breaking the sad news of Nick's death.

Written in fountain pen on Far Leys headed paper, Rodney's letter is dated 1 January 1974, although he wrote it on New Year's Day 1975 a common enough mistake to make with your first letter of the year. The first part of the letter reads:

My dear Lusko,

Thank you so very much for your most interesting letter and for the time and trouble you took to give us such a helpful opinion about Nick.

I am very sorry to say that we have lost poor Nick. On the morning of November 25th Molly went in to his room to wake him as it was nearly midday and found him collapsed across his bed and the doctor when he came said he must have been dead for six hours or more.

The cause of death was given as an over dose of tryptizol which was one of the three things he was taking on prescription the other two being stelazine and disipal. You can imagine what a stark and numbing tragedy this has been for us both and of course a dreadful shock for Molly finding him. What made it even worse was that he had seemed so much better during the previous two months; he had
been staying with some very kind and understanding friends in Paris where he had seemed to be happy for the first time in three years and after he came back he had been talking about getting back to his music. He had seemed quite all right the night before when he went to bed fairly early but the next morning there were signs that he had had a bad night (as he sometimes did) because he had obviously been down to the kitchen some time and had some cornflakes. More often than not when this sort of thing happened Molly used to wake up and go down to talk to him but alas on this occasion neither of us woke. However we didn't think anything of it at first and left him to sleep late. It must have been done on impulse in the early hours of the morning and, as I said, he was lying right across the bed on top of the bedclothes.

There had been a time a year ago or more when we had feared that something of this sort might happen (when he was really badly depressed) and anyway we always kept sleeping pills and aspirins locked up. I'm afraid we had not realised that tryptizol was dangerous and we're not sure that Nick did either but he certainly did take a heavy dose according to the pathologist.

So now we're trying to come to terms with what's happened and of course it is some comfort to know that all the suffering we've watched Nick go through over the past three years is now over for him and perhaps it is really the best thing for
him.

We have had some remarkable tributes about his music from various quarters. There was a very long article in a magazine about three months ago and his name was mentioned in an article in a recent issue of the
Listener
and this three years after he has produced anything. He told me once that music was running through his head all the time and I think that recently the fact that he could no longer produce it was one of the main causes of his unhappiness.

I'm afraid I have written rather a lot to you on this sad subject but I was encouraged to do so by your very sympathetic response to my last letter and it is nice to unburden oneself to an old friend particularly when he happens to have been one's family doctor as well!

The letter continues for several pages, with news of Gabrielle and other family members as well as ‘the ex Burma brigade', and poignant details of Rodney and Molly's saddest Christmas, spent with friends ‘the first Christmas we have been away for many years'. Finally, after offering warm congratulations on the birth of a third Lusk grandson, it concludes:

‘Molly and I send our love to you both and thanks again so much for all you wrote about Nick.

‘Ever, Rodney'.

An inquest into Nick's death was held on 18 December 1974, after which H. Stephen Tibbits, Coroner for the Southern District of Warwickshire, recorded a verdict of suicide, with the cause of death given as ‘acute Amitriptyline poisoning self administered when suffering from a depressive illness'. Unable to obtain a certificate of his son's death until after the Coroner's inquest, it fell to Rodney to officially register, on Christmas Eve 1974, the death of ‘Nicholas Rodney Drake, Musician'.

The verdict of suicide was challenged by Nick Kent in his piece for the
NME
which appeared in February 1975; and has subsequently been vehemently disputed by many people. Gabrielle Drake, however, is less certain; talking to Kris Kirk in
Melody Maker
in 1987, she explained: ‘I personally prefer to think Nick committed suicide, in the sense that I'd rather he died because he wanted to end it than it to be the result of a tragic mistake. That would seem to me to be terrible: for it to be a plea for help that nobody hears.'

No one will ever know what sad, solitary thoughts preoccupied Nick during his final hours on earth, or what misery and corrosive unhappiness he took with him to the grave. Even the facts of the matter remain stubbornly elusive; the number of Tryptizol he took that night has been variously estimated as anything from three to thirty tablets, neither figure apparently based on any hard evidence – though the tone of Rodney's letter would suggest that a fairly large dose was taken. Curiously, Coroners' reports are not a matter of public record, and the relevant document may not even have been kept this long.

It is easy to get caught up in attempting to understand what went through Nick's mind that night, trying to guess whether it was a bleary, befuddled accident; a rash impulse with little thought for the consequences or the future; or a deliberate, calculated decision to gain control over something which he perceived as spinning, slowly and pointlessly, out of control. The absence of a suicide note only poses more questions. But Nick's Cambridge contemporary Brian Wells, now a consultant psychiatrist specializing in substance misuse and addictive illnesses, makes a very powerful case for focusing purely on the intent, when trying to decide whether the overdose was deliberately suicidal: ‘Personally, I don't think he had the kind of depressive
illness that should have been treated with anti-depressants; and secondly, I don't think Nick would have … you don't commit suicide … I think this was an impulsive episode, one night, frustrated, probably didn't sleep very well, took a few, took a few more, thought, fuck it, took a few more.

‘Tryptizol is an anti-depressant, but it's a sedative as well, and I think he was taking it to help him sleep … If he wanted to kill himself … I don't think he would have done it at home. I think he would have buggered off somewhere. I think if he had wanted to kill himself, he would have driven somewhere and put a hose into his car. Or he would have rung me up and said: “What could I take?” He wouldn't have taken an overdose of Tryptizol, which he had no way of knowing was potentially fatal, at home, one night. This wasn't a premeditated suicide, this was an impulsive guy, can't get to sleep …

‘I can see it: “Oh, who gives a bugger if I don't wake up?” kind of thing. You're a bit stoned, a bit what the hell. That's not somebody with suicidal intent. And a coroner should only diagnose suicide in somebody who's had suicidal
intent
… I intend to kill myself: that's suicide. Somebody who accidentally takes an overdose of pills, that's not suicide. You diagnose murder and suicide by the degree of intent, and I really dispute that there was intent there.'

I spoke to journalist Nick Kent, who was one of the first to dispute the suicide verdict but was also intrigued by the drug connection in Nick Drake's life. In the seventies Kent was as much of a star as the people he was writing about. No stranger to the dual addictions of rock ‘n' roll and drugs, to get close to the fire Kent zonked out with Keith Richards and Jimmy Page. He danced with the Devil, with a short spoon. For all his dark stuff, Kent had a conduit to the lost and the wasted, the withdrawn and the mislaid. Like Syd Barrett and Brian Wilson. And Nick Drake. ‘I've taken Tryptizol,' he said. ‘I've taken them once, and they are horrible, horrible drugs, almost overdosed on them, a doctor gave them to me when I was trying to get off heroin once, and I took two and they almost turned me into a zombie for about seventy-two hours, just two of these things. They were supposed to calm you out… but they turned you into a brain-dead zombie. Just taking one or two could do that to you …'

That Nick Drake died so young is a terrible tragedy; not just because of who he was, but because of what he might have become. The potential of all those years left unlived. But what made the waste even more unbearable for those left behind was the shaft of hope
which came immediately before his death, a brief, shining moment of buoyancy which had hinted at a return of the old Nick. In the end, of course, only Nick really knew what happened that night, and that knowledge died with him.

The death of Nick Drake made little impact on the world outside Tanworth-in-Arden. Friends from Marlborough and Cambridge had scattered, and many were not aware for months that he had died. But few were truly surprised when they heard; most had chill memories of the last time they had seen him, transformed from the shy, smiling friend to a hunched, withdrawn spectre with whom they could no longer communicate.

Nick's old colleague from Marlborough's C1 House, Arthur Packard, told me: ‘My memories of Nick were very happy, but when I learned his life ended in tragedy I won't say I fell off my chair in surprise. Nick was always … you felt there was a very reflective, pensive mode to his psyche. While he joined in the fun and the laughter, he was always a little apart from the crowd.'

Paul Wheeler: ‘I don't remember the last time I saw Nick, because you don't think, this is the last time I'm going to see Nick … But 1974, when Nick died, was, I thought, a crashing point for loads of people. That was like the end of the dream. I have a personal thing, that my son was born on the day that Nick died. He was called Benjamin Nicholas Wheeler, after Nick …'

Iain Cameron, who, like Paul Wheeler, had known Nick at Cambridge, also recalled the anticlimactic air of the 1970s: ‘I get
Pink Moon
, and he dies, and I try to make sense of that to myself. And what I see at that time is … like everyone's having trouble, a lot of people who were at Cambridge at the time … It was more like a cultural trajectory, so you have the optimism, the floweriness of the late sixties, and then people are trying to make it work, and can't really get it to hang together. It all got very grimy in the mid-seventies. We were a gilded, protected generation. Just look at Cambridge: you've got this wonderful built environment, loads of intelligent and articulate people all wafting around. No wonder people managed to write quite well in that environment.'

David Wright, who had taught Nick his first chords on the guitar at Marlborough, and with whom Nick had planned to journey round the world, recalled the last time he had seen Nick: ‘That time at the Roundhouse, he was stoned, he wasn't quite with us. I remember thinking at the time, the image which has never actually left me … I
remember not being terribly surprised when my father told me that he had died. I remember thinking, oh Christ, the music business has got him …'

Linda Thompson was another who was not surprised when the news of Nick's death was broken to her: ‘The last time I saw him he was looking really awful. Those incredibly long fingernails. He couldn't possibly play the guitar, which was maybe why he did it. He couldn't have played at all. He was filthy, like a hobo really. I wasn't surprised when Nick died … He looked at death's door for a long, long time. I don't know how you can live through life not speaking to anybody. It was really a downward spiral… It was very sad, there was obviously this extraordinary talent, but also this inability to deal with life.'

The industry which had offered Nick Drake something resembling a career was even less surprised. High-profile rock ‘n' roll casualties were no longer unexpected; by 1974, Brian Jones, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Jim Morrison, Duane Allman, Gene Vincent and Gram Parsons had already gone.

Ralph McTell: ‘I wasn't at all surprised when I heard he died. Not at all. The illness, the going deeper and deeper into himself, only having his back photographed for his albums. I had a family by then, two kids, and when I heard I just thought, you poor sod. I hadn't seen him, but I knew he'd got more and more dependent on mind-controlling stuff … and more or less vanished.'

Zig Zag's
Pete Frame remembers: ‘At that time you kind of got used to rock stars dying, in a sense it was part of the trip. It used to happen with alarming regularity.' In January 1975
Zig Zag
carried a heartfelt piece by David Sandison, Nick's press officer at Island, entitled ‘Nick Drake: The Final Retreat', which began: ‘The amount of coverage Nick Drake's death had in the weekly musical comics just about sums it all up really. Jerry Gilbert did a beautiful piece for
Sounds
and they cut it down to half a dozen paragraphs. No-one else mentioned his departure with much more than a cursory nod of acknowledgement.

‘OK, so the guy did no more than a dozen gigs before more than 150 people, and they'd raised no ripple you'd notice. He released three albums in four years, and together they probably didn't sell enough to cover the cost of one. What the hell do you want? front page in
The Times? …

‘But. The biggest three-letter word in the dictionary, that. But Nick Drake was a lovely cat. But he wrote songs that'd tear your soul out if
you relaxed for a second. But in a world full of bullshit, hype, glittery horrors with the talents of dead oxen and the integrity of starving rats, Nick Drake was a man of sincerity, an artist of tremendous calibre and one of the few entitled to be called unique. But what the hell do they care?'