Nick Drake (42 page)

Like it or not, premature death does bestow an extra degree of greatness. Life gets in the way of the myth. If Richard Thompson had died immediately after the release of
Henry The Human Fly
, would he have become Nick Drake? It is no reflection at all on the inherent quality of Nick's work to suggest that it was his premature death which guaranteed him his current cult status.

Late in 1996 Donovan played a showcase at Dingwalls in Camden Lock. He was magnificent. Opening the evening was singer-songwriter Beth Orton. Hailed as that week's next big thing, she was nervous and edgy. She wasn't captivating the crowd – she works better on record. As she tuned her guitar, she introduced one of her own songs, ‘Galaxy Of Emptiness'. Hello, I thought, here's someone who likes Nick Drake.

While he was in London, I took the opportunity to speak to Donovan about Nick Drake. He too was wary about the cult which
has labelled Nick as doomed: ‘Tim Buckley, Nick, Tim Hardin. You get these figures who didn't quite make it, and they're there, and they're influential. There are those who like those cult influences, who would have preferred Nick not to have made it. They prefer it that he was dark and doomed. And yet he was like me in many ways, he was very isolated, and I felt isolated as a child and as a songwriter, until I got the support.'

After Nick's death, Robert Kirby carried on working with Joe Boyd and John Wood, on albums for Julie Covington and Any Trouble. He kept busy arranging until 1975, when he joined The Strawbs, and toured America with them for two years. For someone who died in 1974, like the moon on the tides, Nick Drake still exerts a strong pull on fellow singer-songwriters. Kirby, though, is still very much alive and working: ‘Elvis Costello approached me to conduct the RPO at the Royal Albert Hall in January 1982 because of my work with Nick Drake. Jake Riviera's office contacted me and said that Elvis was really into the Nick Drake albums, and the arrangements, and wanted me to do the arrangements – they thought I was dead! For a long time, when Nick died, a lot of people thought I was dead.'

There is a roll-call of Nick Drake disciples that musters Kate Bush, REM, The The's Matt Johnson, Mark Eitzel, Beth Orton, Lucy Ray, The Cardigans, Belle & Sebastian (‘They sound like Nick Drake fronting the BMX Bandits,' said the
NME)
, Folk Implosion (‘Nick Drake goes Trip Hop' –
Mojo)
, Tom Verlaine, The Black Crowes, The Cure's Robert Smith, Nervous's Justin Travis and September 67. Stephen Duffy, who had flirted with Duran Duran and pop success as Stephen ‘Tin Tin' Duffy in the early 1980s, came back in 1987 with a new band, The Lilac Time, who took their name from a line in Nick's ‘River Man'.

Everything But The Girl were particularly keen on the legacy of Nick Drake. Selecting
Five Leaves Left
as one of his all-time favourite albums, Ben Watt told
Q
in 1994: ‘It's the art of understatement – English folk-rock understatement I suppose. I love them as mood pieces as much as anything else, and again the fact that they have influences that are not directly from rock ‘n' roll, and an unembarrassed ability to mix almost semi-classical string arrangements with acoustic basses and acoustic guitars. I also like what I've read about Nick Drake – that he was terribly frustrated that he wasn't more popular than he was. He genuinely believed that what he was doing was potentially intensely commercial, which I find quite
charming, because it so obviously isn't. But he really felt that he was saying something that was direct and would appeal to people in an open-hearted way. Rock ‘n' roll needs grander gestures, unfortunately.'

Without carbon-copying Nick, one way to pay homage is to cover one of his songs, but to date, incredibly few have been covered. It is not as if they are unwieldy word-orgies, like Dylan's ‘It's Alright Ma …' or wilfully arcane like Richard Thompson's ‘Don't Sit On My Jimmy Shands'. Nick's songs are open and accessible, melodic and rhythmically memorable. The lyrics are not challenging or abstruse. Yet, aside from the 1992 tribute album
Brittle Days
, Nick's catalogue remains largely unplundered.

Five years after ‘My Boy Lollipop', Millie became one of only two acts to cover a song by Nick Drake during his lifetime, when ‘Mayfair' appeared on her
Time Will Tell
album in 1970. Nick's former labelmates Tir Na Nog included ‘Ride' on their 1973 Chrysalis debut,
Strong In The Sun;
and singer-songwriter Lucinda Williams recorded ‘Which Will'; but otherwise, covers of Nick Drake songs are rarer than rocking-horse droppings.

For years, Joe Boyd has cherished the idea of a Nick Drake tribute album, on which contemporary acts would cover their own favourite song of Nick's. The concept reached its high watermark in the early 1990s, when tributes appeared to Leonard Cohen (three times), Elton John, Jimi Hendrix and Richard Thompson (twice), among others. Among the names pencilled in for the Nick tribute were REM's Peter Buck and The Psychedelic Furs' Richard Butler together on ‘Pink Moon', John Cale and Britain's premier pedal-steel player, B.J. Cole (‘River Man'), All About Eve (‘Clothes Of Sand'), The Black Crowes (‘Black Eyed Dog') and Everything But The Girl (‘Northern Sky'). Plans have been in the air since at least 1990, but at the time of writing, the Nick Drake tribute remains unreleased.

The kudos which is wrapped around the late Nick Drake manifests itself in the oddest ways and the strangest places. The 1996 catalogue for Polygram/Island music, representing the publishing interests of some of the greatest songwriters of the rock ‘n' roll era (Elton John, Bob Marley, U2, Van Morrison), boasted a reproduction of Nick's original handwritten lyrics for ‘Fruit Tree'.

In
Record Collector's
poll of collectable artists, the second highest-climbing name in 1997 was Nick Drake, up 138 places to number eighty-seven. A sharp-eyed
Mojo
reader noted that the back sleeve of
Five Leaves Left
was just visible in a scene in the film
Grace Of My Heart.
But surely the most bizarre rumour recently to attach itself to Nick Drake was that one of his songs had been used as background music for a Nike ad screened on MTV; according to Nike's advertising agency, there is absolutely no truth in the rumour.

By the beginning of 1997
Heartbeat: Number One Love Songs Of The 60s
, which features ‘Fruit Tree' as its closing track, had sold over 300,000 copies, to become the eighth-best-selling compilation album of 1996. As well as providing a good selection of golden oldies from pop's most fondly remembered decade, the record obviously sold on the back of the enormously popular retro TV drama. Its success meant that in the space of just a few months roughly ten times more people heard Nick Drake than ever bought his records while he was alive.

Unquestionably, Nick Drake has been pigeon-holed; safely slotted into the template of tragic, doomed young poet, whose talent went unappreciated by record company and public at large, leading to depression, and ultimately, premature death. But that is all too pat, and it does the life and memory and work of Nick Drake a grave disservice.

So strong has the morbid myth become, and so delicate the body of work, I asked Peter Buck if he thought that Nick's death was in danger of suffocating the innate quality of the music: ‘I don't buy the posthumous appeal thing. The guitar player from Chicago died, and I don't remember legions of fans going out and buying the first four Chicago albums. The thing with Nick is I couldn't see him around now, or in the future, aged sixty-five, and doing the fourth farewell tour. I mean, hindsight is a great thing, isn't it? – all the symbols that are there on the records and in the lyrics.'

Dave Pegg, who watched Nick opening the show for Fairport early in 1970 and worked with him on
Bryter Layter
, said: ‘It's awfully sad what happened to Nick … he obviously did want to be successful, it's all that stuff, you don't know anything about people at the time. He was the last person I would have thought would have taken it that seriously …

‘Nick was a great talent, and it's great that people appreciate him. It's great that young people do; the only cred I get is that I played on a Nick Drake album. Which is quite good when you look like I do. If you were clever enough to analyse why people like something that much, I'd have retired thirty years ago. They are just great songs, and
they sound good. Without knowing anything about the personality behind the songs, if you heard
Bryter Layter
for the first time, and you didn't know who it was … I think most people would really like it. As a guitarist, he is so complete … He was really good. He could do stuff in one take. There was never a problem, and rhythmically he was incredibly sound.'

Clive Gregson: ‘It's kind of hard to imagine what he would have carried on doing … It was totally unfashionable then. It is, in many ways, totally unfashionable now. The fact that so many people come to it, is to do with the timeless quality. It's just basically very, very good music, very good songwriting. There's also the air of mystery surrounding his life and his death. There's so little that's really known about Nick …

‘The cult is certainly associated with the premature death. The fact that there will be no more records. It's a very finite thing you can look at and say, well, there's basically three records, a compilation of out-takes … But I do think that Nick was a great artist as well. There is something about
Pink Moon.
I don't understand it. There's something intriguing, it's fascinating. I can always find something new in it even after listening to it all these years. Nothing feels out of place. To do something so personal, so sparse and simple, for me, I can't think of any other record that captures that sound.'

Hidden in the hinterland of Shepherd's Bush, Nomis Studios is a big rehearsal and recording complex where, early in January 1997,1 went to talk to Paul Weller about Nick Drake. Weller struck many as an unlikely convert to the cause: there appeared to be little to connect the fiery leader of The Jam and epicene co-host of The Style Council with the quietly introspective music of Nick Drake. But since the relaunch of Weller's career as a solo act in the early 1990s, his own music had taken on a more reflective edge, and Weller is always careful to cite sources. While contemporaries in The Clash and Sex Pistols had railed against what had gone before, in pugnaciously punk fashion, Weller has always shown an appreciation of pop, R&B and soul history. He was turned on to Nick by hearing ‘River Man', and when he began name-checking Nick as an influence in interviews, Weller's fans also began taking an interest in the music of the singer-songwriter who had died before they were born.

Preparing for his fourth solo album, Weller sat alongside cappuccino compadre and Oasis biographer Paolo Hewitt, and talked about Nick Drake: ‘For me it's quite simple: it's the melodic side that attracted me. I only heard his stuff three years ago maybe, that was
the first I ever heard of him. The first thing I heard was “River Man”, which I think is just fantastic. The melody is so brilliant. So that's what hooked me … Intimate, the voice, the guitar, the melody … As a guitarist, I like the open tunings, which is probably a standard folk-music tuning, but I don't know that stuff, so he was my introduction to that style. I'm not a “disciple” of Nick Drake. I just heard his records and liked them, liked that very distinctive thing he was doing.

‘The fact he died young, that always adds to the myth, plus the fact he only ever made three albums, and they're all really good albums. He didn't get to make the fourth or fifth shitty one … “At The Chime Of A City Clock”,
Bryter Layter
, is brilliant. The instrumental stuff on that, mixes it up a bit. “Hazey Jane”, “Northern Sky”, they're just great melodies, moody and menacing. Great songs, that's why they're timeless, that's why he lasts. There is an Englishness, pastoral … There's a classical style in his music as well, which is very English.

‘With Nick, it was that one particular song, “River Man”, that did it for me. The arrangement, the strings, that alone. I like great melodies, songs. It's really hard to come up with an original melody, to come up with something that you haven't heard before. He's got at least half a dozen that are real classics, as soon as you hear them, so distinctive. I don't pay an awful lot of attention to his lyrics, because they're so samey, but on top of the melodies, they take you somewhere else: they transcend a lot of that sadness.'

Weller was intrigued when I mentioned Nick's virtual invisibility. With the prospect of recording a new album, resultant promo videos, the endless cycle of interviews and concerts to promote the album … With the next two years of his life effectively bound up, he seemed envious of the way things were back then. ‘So he only ever made three albums, a dozen gigs, never played America and one interview? That's the way to do it!'

After Nick's death in 1974, Rodney and Molly Drake were touched by the continuing interest shown in their son's music, and were always welcoming to fans and admirers. Far Leys was open house to those who travelled to see the house where Nick grew up and died. Nick's music was what drew them there, and his parents were clearly delighted by anyone who was touched by it. Only too aware of how neglected Nick felt during his lifetime, their joy in the lasting, even escalating, interest in his music was heartfelt.

Molly: ‘We always appreciated music, even if we didn't understand
the technicalities – the extraordinary ability on the guitar – neither of us played the guitar, so we didn't understand. People come from far and wide and say: “How did Nick tune his guitar?” and of course we have to say we don't know.'

Rodney: ‘It's not surprising that we didn't really appreciate his music, we were of a different generation, and even his own generation didn't appreciate it at the time. I think he was ahead of his time, wasn't he?'