Nick Drake (39 page)

By the time of
Pink Moon
, Nick was visibly crumbling. Linda Thompson observed the decay during Nick's last months in London: ‘Towards the end of his life, there were signs that everyone should have seen. He completely stopped washing I mean, he shut down. We all tried to help a bit, but… I was very shocked the last time I saw him, he really did look very ill, he wasn't eating. I don't know if he was doing any drugs, he was apparently on medication. I think there's no way that Nick could have survived. Absolutely no way at all. He had no survival skills.'

Keith Morris hadn't seen Nick for a while, and was pleasantly surprised to receive a call asking him to take some publicity photos to help promote
Pink Moon.
He too was shocked by the dreadful decline: ‘I got a call saying would I do this session with Nick. I was really surprised because I hadn't seen him for months. They came round in a car to pick me up, then went to get Nick, and out to Hampstead Heath. It was the quickest session we ever did, barely an hour. We didn't talk about any ideas, I just snapped away.

‘I had seen him before when he'd been very introverted … But that day at Hampstead, he wouldn't even look at me, let alone do anything. It was just “stand there, stand there, look over there”. He just did it … My favourite photo of the session is him going down
the hill, his back to the camera, with the dog jumping up. I think there's a tragic simplicity to those pictures. Anyone could have taken them, I just happened to be the person … I still remember that I felt if I'd said something at the time, it might actually have stopped him … Normally I was quite chatty and sixties: lots of “Yeah, man” and “beautiful” …'

Gabrielle Drake points to one of the Keith Morris photos from that final Hampstead Heath session as her most abiding image of her late brother. ‘He used to do this thing of just sitting there, lost,' she told
Melody Maker's
Kris Kirk. ‘The most truthful photo I've ever seen of him is in the record booklet, where he is sitting on a park bench. Everyone, no matter how bad they are feeling, will try to pose when they are having their photograph taken, but here all Nick's desire to pose has gone – he's not even aware of the camera.'

Keith Morris: ‘I have to agree with Gabrielle. She liked the ones of Nick in Hampstead on the bench; she says they're the most honest pictures of Nick … I think that's right, he was just sitting around, looking … uncomfortably Nick.'

The sense of bleakness and isolation which Keith captured on those final photos on Hampstead Heath are coloured retrospectively by the knowledge that it would be Nick's last-ever photo session. Even so, Nick's obvious detachment and frailty have him looking like a character left marooned by Samuel Beckett. There is nothing coming from the eyes. The photographic evidence is conclusive: here is a person barely capable of comprehending what is going on around or inside him. Nick Drake seated on Hampstead Heath that day is the sight of a man shutting down.

The only lightness to come from that final session is provided by the dog who bounds up, as Nick walks, back to the camera, away from the lens and towards the pond. Annie Sullivan remembers that day: ‘Keith was brilliant with people. I think one of the keys of being a good Art Director is putting the right photographer with the right person, and not interfering … I had my dog Gus, a golden retriever with me. I'd brought him along because everybody liked Gus, and also dogs have a way of getting through sometimes, where people don't. Nick didn't talk to Gus, but he obviously liked him. And that's where that picture came from: Nick walking down the path, and Gus came rushing round the corner and looked up at Nick.'

Annie got a call from
Melody Maker:
‘They were asking, where's the ad? A space had been booked, and I had to make an instant decision because they were going to print “This space was booked by
Island Records”, which would have been disastrous. I thought, I've got to put something in, and I had half an hour to make up an ad. I was looking at the pictures, and I thought, this picture says more about Nick … there was no point in using a full-frontal picture of him, because you'd just have had this rather shy, sad-looking person. I thought that was a kind of enigmatic image.'

For many, that image of Nick Drake with his back to the camera, walking away from … everything, is the one which endures. It is the one featured in the
Melody Maker
advertisement of 26 February 1972, and the one which Jason Creed has featured on the back of every single issue of his fanzine,
Pink Moon.
But as Annie points out, the reality wasn't that romantic: ‘He wasn't fashionably down at heel, he was kind of sad. Such a shame, he was such a nice-looking boy. I never asked, but I suppose I presumed, at the time, it was drugs.'

Keith Morris was one of the few people close to Nick who had watched the arc of his short professional career, and for him that last meeting was memorable: ‘I remember him in two ways: one was the first time I met him – incredible personality – and the other is the last – a grey day, a grey mac … Certain sessions you remember for their colour. I remember that one because I don't remember a single colour. Everything about it was grey. I don't remember green, I remember grey.'

If you want to mark the beginning of the cult which has sprung up around Nick Drake, 9 March 1979 is as good a date as any. On that day Island Records released the box set
Fruit Tree.

Island fought shy of marketing Nick in the first few years after he died. Enquiries to the label were met with the response that all Nick's records remained on catalogue, to be purchased by interested parties. Island's then press officer, Richard Williams, had even gone so far as to write to the
NME
, following Nick Kent's feature on Nick Drake which appeared in February 1975, to make it plain that they planned no further releases: ‘… we have no intention of repackaging Nick's recordings, either now or at any time in the foreseeable future. His three albums have never been deleted and they will remain available for those who wish to discover and enjoy them.

‘Furthermore, Nick himself expressed dissatisfaction with the four songs he recorded late last year, consequently John Wood has destroyed the 16-track master tapes – with our full approval.'

As Sean Connery so wisely said: never say never again.

Before working for Island, Rob Partridge had been at
Melody Maker
and the trade paper
Music Week.
On his arrival in London in 1969, one of the first artists he saw performing was Nick Drake: ‘The first thing I did when I got to Island as a press officer was suggest that perhaps we could put together a retrospective on Nick Drake – the studio albums plus whatever else was there – which eventually became
Fruit Tree.
I wasn't necessarily expecting massive vaults with millions of tunes, live recordings or whatever, but there was very little …'

The original press release announcing the Nick Drake box set came during 1978, headed ‘Nick Drake The Complete Collected Works', and talked of a November release: ‘If he won any battles in his short life, Nick Drake mastered the challenge of authenticity. He was of one piece. His songs, like his clothes, were melancholy to the point of morbidity. Yet somehow he escaped self indulgence. Elton John, who as a young studio musician cut a demo tape of Drake's songs, recalls their “beautiful haunting quality” … “listening to music so beautiful, you are shamed by the ugliness of the world” commented the prestigious American magazine
New Times.

‘Nick's three albums – plus four previously unreleased tracks, “Voice From The Mountain”, “Rider On The Wheel”, “Black-Eyed Dog”
[sic]
and “Hanging On A Star” – have now been compiled in a three-album box-set, called The Complete Collected Works (Island NDSP 100), released on November 10. The box-set, which will retail for £9.50, comes complete with an eight page booklet. Nick Kent of the
New Musical Express
has been commissioned to write the text for the booklet, which also includes Nick Drake's lyrics plus photographs and illustrations. The box-set also features three pencil drawings of Nick Drake.'

Nick Kent's sleeve notes were never used for
Fruit Tree.
Since arriving at the
NME
in 1972, he had been itching to write about Nick Drake, but the only opportunity he got was a posthumous appreciation: ‘I was always waiting for a chance … Then he went back in ‘74 and recorded some songs with Joe Boyd, and we were just waiting for something to tie it all together so we could write about him.

‘ “Black Eyed Dog”, it's all about mental illness, isn't it? It's about being there, and seeing your whole psyche overwhelmed by something that you can't control, and is sending you straight to a catatonic hell. You can't do anything about it and the very few moments of any kind of lucidity you write a song which expresses how you're feeling … It's like Syd Barrett's “Dark Globe”, where it's obvious the guy knows what's happening.

‘Even in the songs on
Bryter Layter
, this guy just doesn't seem to be able to relate to anybody. There's not even a flesh-and-blood woman that he is sexually or emotionally tied to. These are just images or dreams that he has of other people. I did write an 8000-word piece for
Fruit Tree …
It's not that much different from the piece I wrote for
NME.
The conclusion I came to was that he was this confused guy who was … a little confused and too sensitive for his time.'

Rob Partridge: ‘Nick Kent was originally commissioned to write the booklet which he duly delivered; it was an extraordinary piece of
journalism – if you've read his piece in
NME
on Nick, which questioned the verdict of suicide – but was felt to be inappropriate for a box set which celebrated the life and work of Nick Drake. I think we felt it would have been distressing to the family. It was completely legitimate to ask those questions in a magazine piece, but possibly not appropriate to appear in a box set.

‘At that time an American journalist called Arthur Lubow was in town – there were always two or three journalists in the press office over from America every year in search of Nick Drake. I'd introduced Lubow to Molly and Rodney, and also to Gabrielle, and at the last minute, commissioned him to write the essay.'

What became
Fruit Tree
was one of the first-ever box sets devoted to the work of a single artist, in an attempt to put that artist's work into some sort of perspective, as well as allowing the release of previously unheard material.

There had been records in boxes before – George Harrison's
All Things Must Pass
and
The Concert For Bangla Desh
– but
Fruit Tree
was the first to try to gain an overview of a life and work, and could be seen as a template for what followed. Box sets are now seen as setting the seal on an act's integrity. Since
Fruit Tree
, Dylan, Clapton and The Who are just some who have seen their work remade and remodelled. But few artists have had a box set built on such a small body of work as Nick Drake.

The main attraction of the original box set was the four previously unheard songs from Nick's final session, which were tacked on to the end of
Pink Moon.
The original sequence was restored on the revised and reissued four-LP
Fruit Tree
released by Hannibal in 1986, which incorporated the posthumous
Time Of
No
Reply
album.

The musical temperature had undergone severe changes in the seven years between
Pink Moon
and the release of the
Fruit Tree
box. Acts like Led Zeppelin, David Bowie and Bruce Springsteen, promising newcomers when Nick was still alive, now straddled the decade as its most visible icons.

The cosy camaraderie of mid-seventies pub-rock was just making an impact as Nick died, and from the remnants of pub rock came the Rottweiler impetus of Punk. Nothing could be further from the introspective, contemplative, balanced wistfulness of Nick Drake than the howling, cataclysmic, seething
Zeitgeist
of Johnny Rotten. A howl of discontent, Punk shaped the seventies and brought rock ‘n' roll back to its roots.

In the incendiary wake of the Sex Pistols came The Clash, The Jam, Elvis Costello and all that America liked to christen ‘New Wave'. Punk rewrote the musical rule book. It was a revisionist movement all by itself. The only music that the punks had any time for apart from their own three-chord manifestos was reggae. ‘No more Elvis, Beatles or Rolling Stones in 1977' sang The Clash. Of Nick Drake, there was no mention from Punk lips, but his contemporary singer-songwriters had not weathered the storm any better. John Martyn continued to plough an idiosyncratic and increasingly solitary furrow; Cat Stevens converted to Islam, as did Richard Thompson, effectively removing himself for three years during the late seventies.

The fact that Television's Tom Verlaine could name-check Nick in
Fruit Tree's
essay was not without interest at the time. Many of the Punk bands sprang from nowhere, fully formed, with no preconceptions of, nor appreciation for, rock history before Punk's year zero, so to see Tom Verlaine listed alongside Elton John and David Geffen as an admirer of Nick Drake was significant.

With the release of
Fruit Tree
came the realization that interest in the music of Nick Drake was just not going to go away. The set was put together in conjunction with the Drake family, by Joe Boyd and Island press officer Rob Partridge: ‘In Nick's lifetime, there were probably more review copies around than there were actual sales. They were released at a time when Island had big hitters like Cat Stevens. Nick Drake was not a big hitter.

‘I never met Rodney or Molly, although we had a great telephone relationship over the years. Whenever there was a journalist who wanted to interview them, I'd check it out, and they'd always be enormously accommodating. Nick's room was left exactly the way it was, which I guess is one way for them to deal with it.'