Nick Drake (41 page)

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Way To Blue
appeared with a testimonial from The The's Matt Johnson: ‘Nick Drake is one of a trio of singer/songwriters from the late 1960s/early 1970s (the other two being Syd Barrett & Tim Buckley) forever linked together in my mind for no other reason than that tragedy struck all three early in their lives.' When I asked Matt Johnson to expand his thoughts on Nick Drake, he told me: ‘He was one of those people who transcended fashion, who made music that spoke to your soul. There was a dignity which isn't there in a lot of contemporary music … Someone like the Velvet Underground, who only sold six thousand records when they were together, their stuff has lasted. Why did it last? Certain artists are still alive, Leonard Cohen, Neil Young, Van Morrison. Maybe Nick Drake, if he'd lived, there would have been a comparison with Van Morrison.
Bryter Layter
is very similar to
Astral Weeks …

‘For someone to create something of such beauty, even the instrumental pieces on
Bryter Layter
, even if he was that depressed, there was an energy to that music, which is not depressing. I find the music you hear on the commercial radio stations, that is what I call depressing. I find it sad that people think there is a glamour to an early death. It means that the media can do what they want to dead heroes, like Nick Drake and James Dean; they can reinvent them.'

Way To Blue
was compiled and designed with an eye to attracting potential young buyers – those who were drawn to Nick because of comparisons with Ian Curtis and Morrissey, or because Peter Buck and Matt Johnson dropped his name. It was a successful package, remaining on catalogue after sales settled down at around 35,000 in the UK. In America,
Way To Blue
was runner-up in the 1994
Rolling Stone
Music Awards for ‘Best Reissue'. Coming second behind Marvin Gaye was a position Nick Drake would not have minded.

In
NME
, Iestyn George drew comparison with Nirvana's Kurt Cobain, who died just a month before
Way To Blue
was released: ‘Nick Drake only released three albums before overdosing on
tranquillisers in 1974, at the age of 26. This may read like some grizzly blueprint for the decline of Kurt Cobain 20 years later, but the circumstances which led to Drake's death were very different. Every last detail of Kurt Cobain's sorry decline was charted in interviews, reviews and hearsay, whereas Drake's death went virtually unreported …'

In the year which saw the release of Oasis's debut album, George concluded his review:
‘Way To Blue
shows that we were robbed of a phenomenal talent. Completists might question the artistic value of re-releasing material which is already widely available, but that's little more than a minor quibble. If Nick Drake means nothing to you, go buy this album. It could be the best musical discovery you make this year.'

One Monday afternoon in Seattle, Peter Buck, guitarist with REM, The World's Biggest Rock Band, bounces baby daughter Zoe on his knee as he crackles down the transatlantic line. It was the week that REM officially became TWBRB, after faxing confirmation of an $80-million deal with which Warner Bros secured the band's services for five albums and on into the next millennium. But what drew Buck to the phone was not megabucks or REM hype, it was his fondness for the work of Nick Drake.

‘As a teenager growing up in Georgia, before punk came along, it was all those Allman Brothers, Lynyrd Skynyrd … Marshall-Tucker were huge. I saw Ten Years After play. It was all fine, but it wasn't what I wanted. Folk music to me, then, was all 100-year-old guys playing bluegrass music incredibly fast.

‘What got me into Nick Drake was Led Zeppelin. I got that fourth Zeppelin album, liked the girl singing, and a friend said she's in Fairport Convention, so I bought that record, liked that. It was a time when Duane Allman was God, and, you know, you're a kid and you want to be different … The first Nick Drake record, I remember, was
Five Leaves Left.
I got it in a bargain bin, I guess he was still alive. I wasn't drawn to it because of the … lonely adolescent thing. There was just something to me, as a teenager growing up in Georgia, incredibly sophisticated about it – the way the strings came in, that baroque sound, the guitar, that frail voice.

‘I guess I knew Joe Boyd's name from the Fairport Convention records, Richard Thompson albums, saw he produced the Nick
album, so thought that must be OK. We worked with him on
Reconstruction Of The Fables
because we wanted to use horns and strings for the first time, and liked the way he had achieved that, particularly on Nick's records. At the time we came to work with Joe I was familiar with the myth, I had the
Fruit Tree
box set and had read the essay by then, and there had been articles in
Crawdaddy.

‘To my mind, there is a line you can draw between
Bryter Layter, Sketches Of Spain
and
Astral Weeks.
I didn't identify with the pained adolescent aspect, I was a teenager then, I didn't recognize it. It was the … quality of an album like
Five Leaves Left.
What's interesting about the guitar-playing is that he's playing blues, but in a folk kind of way. We tried to do that on
Automatic For The People
, blues signatures, but disguised them.'

Clive Gregson is another musician who was aware of Nick's work while he was still alive. Like many others, Clive first heard him on the Island
Bumpers
compilation, but it is Nick's final album to which Clive is drawn back, again and again:
‘Pink Moon
is my all-time favourite record. I think it's just timeless music. If you listen to music from the early seventies – from any period actually – the fashionable, pop-orientated records usually only live best within that period.

‘I think the thing about
Pink Moon
, it still sounds great, just a voice and a guitar – apart from a tiny bit of piano on one track – I love the songs, I love the way it sounded. I thought it was incredibly well recorded: the closeness of everything. I'd never heard an acoustic guitar sound that good on any record. I think with Nick's records, and
Pink Moon
particularly, you are always trying to figure out how they did it. And with that record, I can't begin to imagine how they did it – any of it. I've talked to John [Wood] about it, and he just says: “Well, we stuck a microphone there, and that was it.” And you think, no, it can't possibly be that simple.'

Peter Buck and Clive Gregson are fairly unusual in that they discovered Nick's music while he was still alive; many, many more have come to it only posthumously. A trawl through the cuttings on the short life and career of Nick Drake would show that 99 per cent are posthumous, features full of retrospective wisdom and knowing hindsight. In 1993 a panel of experts at
The Times
chose the Top 100 rock albums of all time, and
Five Leaves Left
made a surprise appearance at number sixty, beating Michael Jackson's
Thriller
, Wings'
Band On The Run
, Pink Floyd's
The Wall
and The Eagles'
Hotel California.

In a feature for the
Scotsman
in 1995, Brian Pendreigh charted
Nick's posthumous appeal: ‘Literature and painting have thrown up numerous examples of people whose work was recognised only after their death: few of Emily Dickinson's poems were published in her lifetime and Vincent Van Gogh only ever sold one painting. But Nick Drake is probably the first rock singer to be discovered after his death. Death certainly boosted the careers of Jim Morrison, Jimi Hendrix and others, but they were already major stars. They were too wild to get through life. Drake was the opposite: Drake was too delicate.'

Pendreigh also asked Joe Boyd how Nick could have developed had he lived. Boyd replied: ‘His fatalistic view of his life and career was very much part and parcel of his view of the world, which is not to say he was always fated or doomed to a short life. But it's very hard to say “Right, let's assume Nick was a healthy, optimistic … person” … I don't think Nick was hanging on as tightly as others of us do.'

Inevitably, you have to ask just what it is about Nick's music which sees it endure, so long after his death. I was curious what Boyd, who worked so closely with him, felt were the reasons his music has persisted for so long, in an industry renowned for its appreciation of the ephemeral: ‘He wasn't observing other people, he was mostly observing
himself
, which is what makes his songs so interesting, his acute observations of his own predicament, which are full of humour and irony. I think it is partly in the structure of the songs; partly in the intelligence of the lyrics – because I think the two go together, the thing already fits together well, just with the guitar and the voice, and it's just so well constructed that the more things you add, the better it gets. I find the more I listen to the records, the more … startled I am by the incredible high quality of Nick's guitar work.'

Besides working closely alongside Boyd at Witchseason, Anthea Joseph knew Dylan, Paul Simon, Richard Thompson, Sandy Denny and Nick Drake. ‘I don't think Nick had the chance to develop …' she reflected. ‘But there was something about him which was special … The early death and unrealized potential, I believe, are absolutely factors. No question. And the fact that he was romantic, he looked romantic. You look at those sleeves … It's Byronesque, isn't it? Or Shelleyesque, actually …

‘But this is Joe, I suppose. Joe's vision. The way he produced those records, the sleeves, and so on. They're extraordinarily romantic. But you do wonder, had things been slightly different, because there's undoubtedly a wonderful talent, given growing up, growing older, kicking the shit, what he would have developed into?'

Trevor Dann went on to produce the BBC coverage of Live Aid, and head Radio 1, but his enthusiasm for the music of Nick Drake remains undimmed: ‘What is it about his records that makes them last? The first record is a gloriously complete album, it's one of those records that doesn't have a weak track, it's very consistent; very coherent, and contiguous in its mood. It's one of the great mood records; it doesn't try and have variety. This is not: here's a mixed portfolio of my talents. It's: this is what it is. And many of the great albums are like that …
Astral Weeks
being another example where it's really one thing all the way through.
Five Leaves Left
is one of those records where if you're in that mood, you put it on, and it stays there in that mood.

‘I guess the other thing is, most introspective raincoat student music is pretty twee, and you grow out of it. But there is something about the spare lyrical quality that means even when you've grown up, it doesn't feel embarrassing. You have to remember back to the kind of lyrics that people were writing back in that era. They were, for the most part, hogwash … It was a particularly bad phase: hey, I've taken some drugs, and now I'm going to write a fairy tale. Here was a man who didn't do that. To my mind, he wrote about how he felt, and they're completely direct and personal.'

As a student, Iain Dunn was lucky enough to hear Nick Drake sit down and play the songs he had just completed: ‘That sense of alienation in his music is something that speaks very strongly to people in that age group, between your late teens and your late twenties … And I think Nick was very, very accurate in replaying what he was going through, and synthesizing it into his songs … which was art in its own right, but also spoke to people. I think that by its nature, it's very direct, it's very personal, and I think it can still speak to people at quite a profound level, because you can say quite complex things through that sort of structure, which you can't necessarily say when it's production-based.'

While Jerry Gilbert has long been associated with Nick Drake because of his
Sounds
interview, he was also in a position to appreciate the developing talents of Richard Thompson, Sandy Denny, Al Stewart, Cat Stevens and John Martyn: ‘I remember talking to Joe … just before Nick died when I was trying to get a story together … I know he'd laid down four tracks, and that Joe had definitely said to me how upbeat he was, and how he really felt this was almost like a renaissance for Nick, and how enthusiastic he felt about these four tracks. So in that sense I was shocked … It was
like somebody who was terribly ill, and then suddenly started to get better, and then the next day they're dead, and it's like: so what happened then?

‘I suppose Nick's reputation is built on a flimsy body of work. I don't remember Nick being anything other than someone who was sucked along in what ultimately became a really good movement of contemporary English folk performance. A really accomplished player, but almost – and it's an awful thing to say – a bit-part player.'

Nick's close friend John Martyn found the myth-making wore him down, and talking to Rob O'Dempsey he admitted: ‘It gets a bit morbid at times, especially in America. It's awful, you get these dreadful people with spaced eyes going: “Hey, wanna talk about Nick?” … The first couple of times you feel sorry for them, but after four or five of them you go: “Not another nutter. He's dead, you fool. Dead! Dead! You're alive. Rejoice! Rejoice!” '

Danny Thompson also tires of the obsessives: ‘I've had Italians who drive me mad. “Oh, you work with Nick Drake, tell me …” and they're always tortured souls. I look at the faces of, yet again, tortured people. I say: “Look, he wanted to top himself, and he topped himself. That's it!” Very irreverent, and they look at me in absolute horror as if I've just shot the Pope. I'm fed up with all this precious … There are still people alive who need writing about. I said to Joe, all these albums with, bless their hearts, Sandy, Nick … I said: “Joe, I'm still alive, how about giving me a deal?” People like Davy Graham, great talents, who are overlooked.'