Nick Drake (13 page)

The now familiar picture of a reserved and image-conscious young man, preoccupied with his music, seems at odds with Nick's apparent enjoyment of playing for his friends, pints of beer at the Criterion and college parties. Nick enjoyed the conviviality of Cambridge. It was an easy place to get seduced by, and during his two years there Nick embraced university life. There were plenty of spontaneous drives out of town too, when friends like Robert Kirby and Paul Wheeler piled into Nick's Vauxhall Viva, with Nick heading for the Suffolk coast or local points of interest.

Robert Kirby confirmed this light-hearted, almost fun-loving, side to Nick: ‘He liked to go to parties. He came out to a party at my brother's in Hertfordshire, played the guitar there quite happily. He liked a drink, he talked … I can remember punting, swimming. Getting in the car and just looning off on the spur of the moment. Talking about anything at all. He had been a sportsman, a very good athlete. I can remember him trying to chuck me in the river, me trying to chuck him in the river. However, he did, from the very first time I met him, have this incredible presence. He was tall, very good-looking. He was imposing just when he came in the room. Without speaking, he would impose his presence on you unintentionally. All women liked him. I remember all my girlfriends fancied him.'

One of the theories frequently put forward to try to explain Nick's later depression and decline is that he was gay and unhappy about it. Nick was undoubtedly attractive to women, and Richard Charkin acknowledges that he didn't seem very responsive to this interest, but he doesn't believe that Nick was homosexual. Like so many others I have spoken to, he felt that over the course of all the time they spent together, he would have sensed such an instinct, even if repressed: ‘We used to go down to the Criterion … Girls used to really love him, and he never did a bloody thing, he never lifted a finger …
People have said he was gay, he was pretty, but I think, together for a month in Morocco, and two years at Cambridge …'

For all his conviviality, there was always a more serious side to Nick's nature; but as Robert Kirby explained, that wasn't unique to his friend. Cambridge did have that effect on people: ‘There certainly was a dark side to Nick, right from the start… I remember the first time I heard “Three Hours” – at Madingley, the American cemetery – we'd gone out there one night, and it was very scary, just to hear him play that there. I'm not saying that dark side was all based on drugs, or him reading
The Myth Of Sisyphus
… I think Nick did look into these things like Wittgenstein, Camus, structuralism … That sort of blank, negative, nihilist side of life … but he wasn't unique in that. Walking around Cambridge in those days, there were fifty people worse than Nick that you would pass on the pavement every hour…'

Studies did not worry Nick unduly at Cambridge, but apart from participating in the wide-ranging social scene, it was at Cambridge that he really began to hone his guitar style and songwriting. In the university's green pastures, between 1967 and 1969, Nick Drake slipped quietly from shy schoolboy to introspective young man with a clearly defined picture of his future.

Robert Kirby was at Caius on a music scholarship when he first met Nick Drake during their second term at Cambridge in early 1968. Kirby was already involved with The Gentle Power Of Song, a close-harmony singing group at the university, who had landed a recording deal with Polydor and released a couple of singles. In February of that year Nick had played a gig at London's Roundhouse, as a result of which Ashley Hutchings of Fairport Convention had alerted Joe Boyd to the singer-songwriter's abilities. Somehow Nick had learned of Robert Kirby's musical pedigree and, during the spring term of 1968, approached him about possibly arranging songs for the album which would become Nick's debut recording.

‘It was during the spring term, March or April 1968, that Nick first approached me,' Robert told me. ‘When I first met him, he was importing those psychedelic posters from LA, and he was selling those as a sideline … Nick came round to my room in Tree Court at Caius and said he'd got a recording deal and knew that I'd done an album for Polydor … He had his guitar with him and he played me “Day Is Done”, “Way To Blue”, “I Was Made To Love Magic” and “Time Of No Reply”. The version of that he played me was much faster than the one which was later released. We did an arrangement of that, which was one of the first four I did.'

By the end of his first year at Cambridge Nick Drake already had his sights set on a career as an Island Records recording artist. During his second year he worked hard polishing his own songs and his skills as a guitarist. In the light of this chronology those intimate sessions trying out new material in studies and bedsits around Cambridge begin to take on the air of workshop performances or warm-up gigs. It has become part of the myth that Nick stumbled into the music business unwittingly, that the ‘success' thrust upon him by others damaged him irreparably, but the evidence contradicts this view. Nick worked hard at his music, and cared too deeply about it to let it go to waste.

Brian Wells first met Nick in October 1967: ‘He probably hadn't met Joe Boyd by that time, so it's interesting, because he had all this network going on in London, and one got the sense that he had some sort of deal going … I think different folk were in different compartments. A bunch of people at the funeral met up for the first time, and were all from different walks of life … Occasionally he and I would get together in London during holiday time. It was actually a bit awkward … I felt slightly out of my depth in London. He clearly had all these slightly special people, like the Ormsby-Gores, and names like Eric Clapton got mentioned, and I felt slightly star-struck, hanging around with this guy whose guitar-playing I loved, who by then had started to record.'

Nick's parents, though always supportive of his music, were troubled when he announced that he wouldn't be returning to Cambridge for his final year. Molly's voice is sad and slightly baffled in the recorded interview: ‘I don't know if his only ambition was to be a musician. He read English at Cambridge, he was very interested in literature, he felt all the time that he was torn between the two things, and finally he gave up. He left Cambridge before taking his degree, which to us seemed a terrible thing; he had passed the first part of his degree, and he was within nine months of the finals. We all said this is the most terrible thing to do, as any parent would, and Rodney said to him at least if you get your degree you'll have a safety net, and Nick said: “The last thing in life I want is a safety net!” '

‘He was confident about the music,' Rodney Drake said. ‘He made his first album while he was still at Cambridge. He was quite convinced that was what he wanted to do. I have said before that I don't think we realized how good his music was – but he did. That first record,
Five Leaves Left
, was acclaimed by the critics, but it never
sold in quantities. We thought it was a great mistake that he left Cambridge, but I don't think now, looking back, that it was. It might have been better if he'd left earlier, because he had this music in him.'

Molly added: ‘I think he felt, having brought out
Five Leaves Left
, that if he went slogging on at Cambridge for another nine months, he would just miss the peak. Miss his chance. Miss his foothold in the world.'

The sessions for
Five Leaves Left
began at Sound Techniques studios in London, in July 1968, and continued intermittently for the best part of a year. Nick was barely twenty-one years old, but with the completion of the album his future was decided. In the summer of 1969 he left Fitzwilliam College. For Nick, a contract with Island Records was justification enough for quitting Cambridge. But the real vindication of his decision to manage without a safety net lay pressed in the vinyl of his first album,
Five Leaves Left
, which Island Records released on 1 September 1969.

As he left Cambridge behind him, Nick's only qualifications were those he carried with him from Marlborough. Intriguingly, in his university recommendation of October 1966, Nick's housemaster, Dennis Silk, had written presciently of his pupil: ‘He himself loves music and plays several wind instruments and would, I think, secretly like to be good enough to make his living in music.'

‘I saw Nick at the Roundhouse,' Ashley Hutchings recalls. ‘He was on a bill, a charity gig, with a friend, and I was playing with Fairport. I was in the audience wandering around before going on, and my eyes went to the stage … The thing that struck me first of all was his demeanour and his charisma. I didn't take the songs in. He sang well, he played well enough, the songs were interesting. But it was Nick the person; Nick the figure on-stage which really registered. That is what made a really strong impression on me.'

Just three years older than Nick Drake, bass player Ashley Hutchings had founded Fairport Convention in 1967. He would guide the band through their classic years, effectively inventing English folk-rock with Fairport's seminal 1969
Liege & Lief
album, but soon afterwards he left. He went on to pursue his own vision of indigenous English folk music, played on electric instruments, with Steeleye Span and The Albion Band, with whom he still performs.

Ashley struggles to define exactly what struck him about that first performance: ‘It was a unique impact … because in no other case did I then go away and recommend an artist to a manager. I mean, instantly I went away to Joe and related that I'd seen Nick, been very impressed with him … To such an extent that I can't remember anything about who played with him. I have been asked over and over who was with him — was it a guitarist, a bassist? But it was Nick I focused on. I went up to him after he came offstage and said how much I had enjoyed it, and did he have any plans? He
said no, he was casting around. I said, well, I'm with Fairport Convention, we're signed to Joe Boyd, and may I mention you to him? Or words to that effect. I recall him writing something down, a contact address or something … I definitely got a contact off him that night, otherwise he would just have vanished off into the underground of 1968.'

In later years, when Nick's reluctance to perform to promote his records became legendary, it seemed ironic – almost incredible – that it was his stage presence which first alerted Ashley to his potential. Looking back nearly thirty years to that gig, Ashley tries to explain precisely what impressed him so forcefully about Nick's performance: ‘I remember this very good-looking boy, who held himself very well on-stage, and I just thought, here's someone who's really got something. It contrasted so nicely with what was going on at the time – there was a lot of extravagance at that time. And he stood very still, and he performed very simply.'

David Wright, Nick's schoolfriend from Marlborough, was also at the Roundhouse in 1968, but his memories of that crucial gig are rather different: ‘Somebody said: “Nick's playing at the Roundhouse, why don't we go?” … I have a vague recollection that as Nick came out, he was out of his head, capable of playing the guitar, but pretty smashed. He said what a big night it was because he was being watched by record company people, but it was obvious we weren't getting through, it was all “Oh hi, man …” Country Joe & The Fish were definitely on, who were sensational.'

The precise date of the Roundhouse appearance which sparked Ashley's interest is elusive and likely to remain so. Over the years, it has even been suggested that Ashley's memory is at fault, and that he first saw Nick perform at Cambridge. Robert Kirby, who was more involved in Nick's early Cambridge performances than anyone, thinks Cambridge a less likely venue: ‘I don't know about the Roundhouse gig, but I don't know where Ashley would have seen Nick perform at Cambridge … And Nick was down in London a lot. I would tend to go with what Ashley said.'

Journalist Pete Frame has a dim memory of seeing Country Joe wandering through the crowd at the Roundhouse, incongruously dressed in a sports jacket. But the Roundhouse was a focal point of the London underground scene, and gigs were held there frequently. Along with The Doors and Jefferson Airplane, Country Joe
&
The Fish were among the leading West Coast outfits, and one of the first to make the trip to Europe. The band's UK debut at the North
London venue in February 1968 seems on balance the likeliest occasion for Ashley's discovery of Nick Drake.

On Ashley's recommendation, Nick supplied a tape of four of his own songs to Fairport's manager, a man whose name would come to be inextricably linked with that of Nick Drake. Joe Boyd was only twenty-six, but had already carved himself a considerable niche in British rock music by the time he first heard the name of Nick Drake. For his part, Nick was already familiar with Boyd's name as producer of albums by Fairport and The Incredible String Band.

Born in Boston, USA, in 1942, Boyd was a fresh-faced music veteran. A former room-mate of Tom Rush and teenage friend of Geoff Muldaur (and later producer of Muldaur's ex-wife Maria's ‘Midnight At The Oasis'), Boyd first came to London in 1964, tour-managing The Muddy Waters Blues & Gospel revue. He was production manager at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival, best remembered for providing the platform for Bob Dylan's controversial first electric performance. Dylan's pick-up band that July evening were plucked from The Paul Butterfield Blues Band, whom Boyd had encountered earlier in Chicago. Impressed with Butterfield's musicians, Boyd recommended them to George Wein at Elektra Records. Wein was suitably grateful and ‘as kind of a reward' let Boyd run Elektra's London office. Boyd arrived in London in November 1965 and within weeks London began to swing to the boom of the beat groups, and gentlemen's hair began to edge over their ears. It was a time to be young.