Nick Drake (44 page)

‘The only written thing I have of Nick's is one exercise book (from Cambridge University) in which he put down the words to most of his songs. This is one of my most precious possessions and I could not part with it… Apart from this all I have are his letters from school – Marlborough College – every single one of which I have kept. But these are just schoolboy letters talking of football, hockey and cricket
matches, athletics, lessons or lectures etc – and nothing about music whatsoever, except an occasional reference to a classical lesson.'

At the beginning of their correspondence in 1986, when the Drakes sent Scott Appel the tape containing over four hours' worth of works in progress, which Nick had recorded but never released, his mother Molly noted poignantly that ‘Bird Flew By' was ‘one of Nick's earliest songs, played on his old original 20 dollar guitar. It has never appeared on any record – I love it and it reminds me of the very young – and still happy – Nick before the shadows closed in.'

As you trawl through the life, at the end and in the end, in Churchill's words, ‘the terrible ifs accumulate'. If Nick had sold more records while he was still alive, it might have tempered his depression … If the anti-depressants hadn't been dished out as freely as chocolates at Christmas … If Nick had been born with a thicker skin … In the end, though, Nick Drake was born, and died, the way he was. The sadness and introspection gave birth to the music. Had he been less contemplative, it is unlikely that he would have produced such inimitable music. And music was very important to Nick.

Was it the music industry which killed him? It is a popular scapegoat – an industry which is venal in its pursuit of profit. There have been sacrifices, but they are outnumbered by the survivors. For every Janis or Jimi, there have been hundreds who made it through: from Wee Willie Harris to Keith Richards, and back. Friends who knew him during the early stages of his life, right up to the time he began making a career of music, emphasized the normality of the Nick they knew, but somehow I think it is too easy to blame an industry for his very personal problems.

It is conceivable that drugs accentuated and made even more frail an already fragile personality. A precursor was Syd Barrett, the archetypal acid casualty. But with Syd too there is evidence that the drugs simply exacerbated problems that were already there. Drugs were certainly tacitly understood to be part and parcel of rock ‘n' roll life. Island Records' David Betteridge had plenty of experience dealing with fragile egos, dealing with ‘young human
beings working under very difficult social circumstances'. Island's Art Director, Annie Sullivan, remembers the last time she saw Nick, at the Hampstead Heath photo shoot for
Pink Moon
, and assumed his shabby condition was due to drugs. David Sandison, Nick's press officer at Island, told me: ‘I suspect he smoked a lot of dope – everybody did. But then if you are inclined to introspection, hash certainly is not inclined to make you come out of yourself.'

Simon Crocker had sunny memories of Nick at Marlborough. He also saw him six months before he died, and was shocked at his deterioration. By then, Crocker was in the music business himself, managing Pete Atkin, who had fashioned a career singing the lyrics of Clive James. As he had been around the music business and was aware of the drug question, I asked him if he assumed Nick's condition was drug-induced. ‘Yes, at the time I did …'he told me. ‘But I don't know how involved in drugs he got at that period. I don't know how far drugs contributed to his problems … Robert Kirby had seen it all gradually happen; for me it had been this huge jump. He was very shaky … I thought it seemed to be a kind of stoned … He probably wasn't. Looking back, he'd been taking anti-depressants, which have the same kind of effect, making you … confused.'

Nick is known to have smoked dope, suspected to have dropped acid and rumoured to have tried heroin. The only difference between Arthur Lubow's piece on Nick Drake for
New Times
in 1978 and his essay which accompanied the
Fruit Tree
box set in 1979, was the four lines excised for the latter (‘He told one friend he was “looking to score – the big one”. Heroin? “I've tried everything else,” he said. “There's nothing else left.” He never got any'). When the censored lines were spotted, it only fuelled the rumours that heroin was a contributory factor. It is easy to understand how such rumours sprung up: in those days people – particularly music-business people – who died of overdoses invariably had taken drugs supplied by a dealer rather than a doctor.

Rumours of Nick's use of heroin persisted long after his death and the ‘heroin chic' of the nineties saw them gain even more ground. In fact, the only occasion when Brian Wells remembers Nick showing any interest in heroin, owes more to Cheech
&
Chong than
Trainspotting:
‘I remember Nick coming round to a flat where I lived [in 1973]… with my wife saying: “Look, I really want to try smack.” So I said: “Are you sure?” because neither of us had ever done any … He said: “Yeah, I really think … I want to try it”, and it was all slightly hesitant. It wasn't: “I'm
really
determined to try it.”

‘So I said, well, do you want to give this guy a call? I knew someone who was doing smack, and he said: “Yeah, OK.” We'd maybe had a joint … and it was quite late, but he'd suddenly introduced the subject: “I want to try smack.” It wasn't: “There's nothing else left for me, I want to do it.” It's just: “I've been thinking about it, and I
think
I want to try the big one.”

‘I was a bit wary of this, because I was smoking dope and getting drunk, but not into taking heroin. And I phoned this guy who'd got a flat in Soho, and they picked the phone up and I was looking at Nick and said: “There's nothing to worry about”, and this guy said: “What do you mean, there's nothing to worry about?” I was saying to Nick: “Just relax, man.” And this guy, whose number I'd got, was getting really freaked out at the end of the phone … Nick started laughing and I just put the phone down. We fell about laughing.

‘I said I didn't ask him for any gear, he just freaked out at the other end of the phone, God knows what he's stuffing himself with … So I called back and said: “Look, I called a minute ago …”, and the guy says: “Who the fuck are you?” I said: “Look, I'm sorry, I didn't know what to say to you. I just wondered if you'd got any smack.” He said: “Don't ever ring this number again. Never, never, never ring this number again!” and he slammed the phone down. And so that was that… As far as I know, Nick never took heroin. He wasn't really a big drug user.'

Perhaps if he had become an engineer like his father, or a surgeon like his grandfather, Nick's life would have been less troubled. Maybe a less privileged upbringing would have toughened him, made him a degree more street-wise, a little less sensitive. Or was there simply something there in Nick all along? So that whichever path he took, a sense of failure and of worthlessness would have dogged him to the end of his days? There might have been more days, but would they have been better or brighter days? Or maybe he was just a poor, sad, lost boy, brought down by illness, who didn't find a cure in time.

It is fascinating, but fruitless to speculate. We will never know. Even those closest to him could never know. It seems likely that not even Nick knew. But Nick's death cannot be elevated to any heroic stature. We have to accept that an overdose of prescribed medicine was the method of his tragically premature death; and by investing false heroism in his death we only undermine the very substantial achievements of his life.

Any valour and heroism in Nick's all-too-short life came in the
courage of his living. It can be seen in his proud but foolhardy determination to try to beat his illness on his own, and in the will to go back and record even after he had apparently given up hope and retreated to Tanworth. It came in the day-to-day battles with despair, the acceptance of a life unfulfilled and empty, and the continued, weary living of that life.

In the tireless quest for an answer, an explanation, Nick's lyrics have been dissected as systematically and painstakingly as a corpse on a mortuary slab. With the easy wisdom of hindsight, you can sift through Nick's work and find eerie premonitions and chill forebodings by the bucketload. But this is treacherous territory: analyse the lyrics of any introspective young songwriter, and you are unlikely to divine plump, pragmatic, middle-aged contentment; and yet, for most, that was the more likely fate. John Martyn pointed out the dangers in conversation with Andy Robson: ‘Nick was neither generous nor outgoing. I sound like I'm having a pop at him now, don't I?… But I'm just trying to deflate the myth. I hate that myth-making. You could listen to my music and say I was a fucking lunatic, or a really romantic soul. Yet neither of those are true. And maybe it was the same for Nick.'

Stuart Maconie's
Q
review of
Way To Blue
also tried to disabuse the myth-makers: ‘Eulogies about Nick Drake often make romantic noises about his being “not of this world” and the like while ignoring the fact that he was mentally ill. To treat him as some super cultural sage rather than a gifted, sick, unhappy young man is both to cheapen his tragedy and undervalue his music.'

The combination of Nick's looks, body of work and premature death conspires against all rational objections, to reinforce the romantic myth of the doomed and tragic poet, who in dying young achieved the acclaim which was denied him in life. The very Englishness of his work places Nick in a line which stretches from Byron and Shelley through to Wilfred Owen and Rupert Brooke. These are not easy temptations to avoid.

But no life worth the name is ever that simple, and even the brief life of Nick Drake abounds with contradictions: the boy who seemed to personify the corrosive effects of loneliness, though he never really left his parents' home; who found communication such an effort, but reached out so fluently, to so many, through his work. The artist who valued integrity above all, yet grew increasingly bitter at his own lack of commercial success. To cast Nick in the role of doomed poet, first you must reconcile that image with his avowed prowess at athletics.
To paint Nick as a perpetual outsider, you must explain away his conviviality at Marlborough. To blame the record industry for Nick's failure, you must consider whether Nick's own unwillingness to gig was not a major factor in his lack of recognition.

Try as you might, it is hard to reconcile the athletic schoolboy in the C1 House rugby XV with the gaunt and haunted figure pictured on Hampstead Heath only a handful of years later. But always the dark side is taken for the
real
Nick Drake. The truth of a whole life is sought solely in those last few years, dominated by depression, when Nick himself had all but forgotten who he really was. His death has become his defining moment, like a prism which distorts the way in which we look at the whole short life. And yet his overdose, whether accidental or deliberate, was probably no more than the impulse of one lonely, confused, pre-dawn moment.

If Nick Drake was doomed during his lifetime, how much worse that he should now be doomed again in death; his life defined not by what he was, nor even by what he achieved, but simply by the nature of the illness that cursed him.

Nick Drake remains a luminous presence – the very stuff of legend. But as is so often the case, the myth clashes with the life. Nick's sad, solitary death, after a prolonged bout of depression, sealed his reputation as prophet of the disaffected, the outsider's outsider. But the truth is equally that of a shy boy, popular and successful at his public school, who ran races and set records, passed exams and bunked off down to London to listen to music. He wrote songs and tried them out on friends, and he practised and practised and practised on the guitar. Such base reality humankind cannot bear.

In researching and writing this life of Nick Drake, I found myself cutting across borders and boundaries: of the English public-school system, and the freewheeling London underground scene; of a close-knit family in rural England, and a gifted golden boy who came adrift. Of an artist who never achieved commercial success in his lifetime, but won the pyrrhic prize of posthumous fame. Of gregarious survivors and a reclusive casualty, and the difficulty of telling them apart. All the strands converged in the short, bitter-sweet life of Nick Drake.

At times, though, the myth has threatened to drown out the melodies. So insubstantial are the facts of Nick's life that his audience have imposed their own flaws and fantasies on to a virtually blank canvas. The cult of Nick Drake is, to paraphrase Oscar Wilde, Narcissus glimpsing his own reflection, unable to tear
himself away from the beauty he finds in the mirror. For some, the real beauty lies in the emptiness.

There are no easy answers. Perhaps in the end facts can only diminish the myth, but ultimately the life is more important. For whatever the truth about Nick Drake's death, it remains a tragedy – just as his legacy of extraordinary songs remains a triumph, and a joyful one at that.

For all that has been written, said and sung about Nick Drake, what made him so special is to be found in the three records he wrote and recorded between 1968 and 1972. Island Records supplied the current catalogue numbers and original release dates of these albums:

FIVE LEAVES LEFT

ILPS 9105, 1 September 1969 (CD: IMCD 8, March 1987) ‘Time Has Told Me', ‘River Man', ‘Three Hours', ‘Way To Blue', ‘Day Is Done', ‘Cello Song', ‘The Thoughts Of Mary Jane', ‘Man In A Shed', ‘Fruit Tree', ‘Saturday Sun'.

BRYTER LAYTER

ILPS 9134, 1 November 1970 (CD: IMCD 71, May 1987) ‘Introduction', ‘Hazey Jane II, ‘At The Chime Of A City Clock', ‘One Of These Things First', ‘Hazey Jane I', ‘Bryter Layter', ‘Fly', ‘Poor Boy', ‘Northern Sky', ‘Sunday'.