Nick Drake (16 page)

The story behind the title of Nick Drake's debut album is as well known to fans as the album itself: it was the caution found toward the
end of every packet of Rizla cigarette papers. A reminder that there weren't many opportunities left. ‘All smokers will recognise the meaning of the title,' began
Melody Maker's
single-paragraph review, which went on to call Drake's debut ‘interesting'. Robert Kirby is sure that Nick intended the reference as ‘an in-joke' – by the time of its release, everyone who knew, knew just what Rizla papers were being wrapped around. In the short life and work of Nick Drake, omens and portents abound; and the title
Five Leaves Left
took on even greater significance, when, just five years after its release, he was dead.

In 1996 Alex Skorecki was kind enough to send me a copy of a short story written around the turn of the century by the American writer O. Henry which he thought of interest. ‘The Last Leaf' concerns a young painter, dying of pneumonia in her Greenwich Village garret. The doctor senses she has already given up on life: ‘She has one chance in – let us say, ten … and that chance is for her to want to live.' But what keeps her attention, and keeps her alive, is the ivy growing in the yard outside:

‘They're falling faster now. Three days ago there were almost a hundred. It made my head ache to count them. But now it's easy. There goes another one. There are only five left now.'

‘Five what, dear? …'

‘Leaves. On the ivy vine. When the last one falls I must go too.'

Given that Nick was reading English at Cambridge while recording his first album, it is quite possible that he had read the O. Henry story. In which case he would have known that Henry's story had a hopeful ending – the artist's life saved by the love of her friend and an old man's sacrifice.

Whether it wears myriad influences on its sleeve (the first efforts of Bob Dylan and The Rolling Stones); distils a stage act on disc (as with The Beatles and Paul Simon); explodes with the never-get-a-second-chance frenzy (Bruce Springsteen); or opts for ‘Let's put all the singles on' calculation (The Sex Pistols and Oasis), a debut album is always a statement of intent.

Five Leaves Left
is an astonishingly mature and assured debut. From the cover in, it speaks volumes of its author: the elegant, enigmatic figure, shot three-quarters on, looking out of a window, half smiling at some half-forgotten joke. A wistful, autumnal mood is evoked by songs such as ‘Day Is Done', ‘Time Has Told Me' and ‘Cello Song'. The titles suggesting isolation and painful self-awareness, like the songs from a room which Leonard Cohen was so visibly
and tortuously producing. The world of Nick Drake, on the evidence of this album, was a vacuum, where the only way was to blue.

From its Rizla-inspired title to a song like ‘The Thoughts Of Mary Jane' (‘Mary Jane' being a euphemism for marijuana), the record was a dope-smoker's delight. The sense of world-weariness, the shifting, loose atmosphere which pervades the record, is redolent of the late sixties. Much of the atmosphere comes from the husky timbre of Nick's singing, the sound of his voice, as if he had just inhaled and was slowly letting the smoke out.

Much of the record's appeal came from Nick's voice, but also from the dexterity of his playing, which manages to be noticeable without ever appearing intrusive. The album does have flaws, particularly the inconsequential ‘Man In A Shed'; and perhaps the arrangements are a tad lush. But play
Five Leaves Left
back to back with any other record from the same year and you are struck at once by the quality and timelessness of Nick Drake's debut.

Lyrically, the songs on
Five Leaves Left
are largely unremarkable. Nick tended to use lyrics as part of the pattern, an integral mix with his guitar, voice and arrangement. The words of ‘Fruit Tree' are eerily prescient: a song which recognizes the frailty of fame, and that the only real fame is posthumous. Otherwise, the lyrics, taken in isolation, would not have seemed out of place in Marlborough's school magazine. Lost love, a sky-bound princess, unrealized love, inability to communicate, unrequited love — all revealed a tendency to idealize, because little of what Nick wrote at that time came from experience of the world outside himself.

On ‘Day Is Done' there is an image of a tennis court which could have come from Antonioni's contemporaneous exposition,
Blow-Up.
The image of a rose without a thorn, which appears in ‘Time Has Told Me', was made popular by Leonard McNally's eighteenth-century poem ‘The Lass Of Richmond Hill'. The language on
Five Leaves Left
is ornate, self-conscious even, as you might expect from someone who was still nominally studying for an English degree.

It is only when Nick's voice carries the words to meet his masterly music, and the Boyd/Wood alchemy comes into play, that the magic is made – sublimely well on songs such as ‘River Man', ‘Cello Song' and ‘Three Hours'. The rolling guitar which ushers in ‘Cello Song' is fluid and quite distinctive, Clare Lowther's bowed cello and Rocki Dzidzornu's congas lend an exotic colouring; but always, the glue that binds the song is Nick's playing: the rolling, relentless guitar which never rests.

‘River Man' is enriched by Harry Robinson's lavish string arrangement, which kicks in just as Nick reaches the first refrain. ‘River Man' is the song Nick's Cambridge contemporaries recall him performing most often in various college rooms, and knowing that adds to the song's identification with the city. When Nick sings about shows which last all night during summertime, you can picture May Balls during the early summer days after exams have finished, played out along the silver spine of the River Cam which flows through the city.

‘Three Hours', one of the album's most beguiling tracks, is the only song we know to be directly inspired by someone Nick knew. Jeremy Mason, Nick's old friend from Marlborough, accompanied him on that pivotal trip to Aix in 1967, but hadn't seen him for some time after that: ‘I bumped into a chap called Robert Kirby, at the George in Bishop's Stortford. We were talking about Nick, and he said: “Oh, so you're Jeremy Mason … Nick wrote a song about you on this LP we've just been doing; it's called “Three Hours” '. This would have been 1969.

‘When I asked Nick whether this tune was about me, he said yes. I said: “Well, what does it mean?” He said: “Well, if you don't know it doesn't matter … it's the way I perceived your situation at that time.” And believe me, I've listened to it a thousand times … Three hours from sundown, Jeremy flies …'

Despite the mention of London in the second verse, ‘Three Hours' has echoes of Aix, a city dating back to Roman times, and nearby, cave paintings reaching back even further. Joe Boyd assumed that the title alluded to the time it took Nick to travel to London from Cambridge, but since we now know that the song was about Jeremy Mason, it seems possible that it refers to the time it took to get from Marlborough to London.

Five Leaves Left
is an impressive debut; there is real audacity on ‘Way To Blue' and ‘Fruit Tree', where Nick sings simply against an orchestral backing, the rock 'n' roll reliability of bass, drums and guitar removed. What mars the album is an apparent straining for diversity, obscurity and eclecticism, as on the unsuccessful jazz meanderings of ‘Saturday Sun' and the juvenile narrative of ‘Man In A Shed' — a facile rewrite of The Beatles' ‘Fixing A Hole'. As with the films of James Dean, because Nick left such a small body of work, too much is often vested in those few precious discs.
Five Leaves Left
was indeed a remarkable debut, but its real significance at the time was as a signpost to what could be, rather than what was.

Robert Kirby came down from Cambridge soon after Nick, with his life clearly mapped out. Proud as he was of his work on
Five Leaves Left
, he had seen it simply as a diversion, a distraction from his intended path: ‘The first album got a lot of critical acclaim, a lot of acclaim from musicians, peer group, which was almost worse … I had decided that I'd be quite happy teaching music at a public school – doing the choir, a bit of Gilbert and Sullivan. But when I got the cheque for doing Nick's stuff …

‘Joe got me some work, then I did
Zero She Flies
for Al Stewart. When I saw what the offers were I thought, there's a career here as arranger. It all came in very quickly … I worked with Ralph McTell on his first two albums, Tim Hart and Maddy Prior, Keith Christmas, Shelagh McDonald, Andy Roberts … Dave Cousins' solo album
Two Weeks Last Summer.
It seemed a positive thing to do, to get on with a career as an orchestrator.

‘I certainly think a factor in his leaving Cambridge, was that Nick had been told by people he admired that there was an obvious career carved out for him. To promote the first album, to be available …'

The first the world at large knew of Nick Drake came with the release of
Five Leaves Left
in September 1969. Nick's debut was squeezed in between ILPS 9104, Free's second album,
Free
, and ILPS 9106, the Joe Boyd-produced, Dr Strangely Strange album
Kip Of The Serenes.

Initial printings of the album sleeve switched around the running order – in those days there were two sides to an album — and Side One closed with ‘Way To Blue' and ‘Day Is Done', but the order was transposed on the sleeve. Also on that first run of albums, the lyrics of ‘Three Hours' are inexplicably printed as ‘Sundown'. A mint-condition, pink-label copy of the album from 1969 would now be worth £30.

Island Records' inaugural press release which introduced Nick Drake to the world, ran in part:

‘NICK DRAKE is tall and lean. He lives “somewhere in Cambridge”, somewhere close to the University (where he is reading English) because he hates wasting time travelling, does not have a telephone — more for reasons of finance than any anti-social feelings and tends to disappear for three or four days at a time, when he is “writing”, but above all … he makes music!

‘As a child, NICK took classical piano lessons and later progressed to guitar and a love of the blues. But by his early teens was involving himself in writing music and lyrics. He developed a real talent for composing beautiful melodies and writing fine lyrics which coupled with his raw and often plaintive voice caught the attention of Tyger Hutchings of Fairport Convention one evening when they were on the same bill.

‘At his recommendation Fairport's Manager and Producer Joe Boyd went to see NICK … and so started the chain of events which led to the production of FIVE LEAVES LEFT – ILPS 9105 – a unique album, fresh and original, the first of many LPs … from NICK DRAKE.'

Vivien Holgate's piece was pretty standard press fodder for the time – trying to whip up a bit of interest in an act that nobody knew about, or wanted to. Not when there was a chance to see Led Zeppelin at Surrey University for 7/6d on the door, or listen to new albums from The Band, Pink Floyd or Bob Dylan. The only ace in the hole was that air of tantalizing mystery.

Nick's introduction to the media was calculated to make him appear more mysterious and abstract than the shy, but certain twenty-year-old he actually was. The vagueness about his location ('somewhere in Cambridge') and that eschewal of material possessions ('he does not have a telephone'), the concentration on his purity of intention, valuing music above all else, all helped to flesh out the picture of a singer-songwriter eager for recognition.

Highlighting Nick's ‘love of the blues' was a sign of the times. At the time, white-boy blues was all the rage: Cream had split in 1968, but John Mayall was still providing a finishing school for the next wave of Guitar Gods – Mick Taylor had replaced Brian Jones in The Stones; Peter Green's Fleetwood Mac were making headway, while Eric Clapton had gone on to join Stevie Winwood in the much hyped, short-lived supergroup Blind Faith. All offered highly visible platforms for extended workouts on the guitar. It was the era of the Guitar Hero, and blues was the currency.

Of all the blues giants, none towered taller over the landscape of the 1960s than the late Robert Johnson. It may seem disingenuous to suggest a connection between the haunted bluesman of the Mississippi Delta, who sold his soul to the Devil at a midnight crossroads in return for playing the guitar like no one else, and died poisoned by a lover's jealous husband, and the public-school-educated, well-spoken scion of an upper-middle-class English family. But as time went on, the lives of the two men, superficially so different, appeared to be haunted by the same demons.

Nick Drake's fondness for the blues is well documented and like many middle-class white kids of his time, he was fascinated by the lives of the poor black bluesmen. That fondness may well have shaped the title of the fourth track on
Five Leaves Left
— ‘Way To
Blue'. After Nick's death, his friend Robert Kirby said that one of his regrets was that he would never now get to hear Nick play the blues again.

The first time you hear it, there is something enticing about Nick's voice – frail and wistful, it cannot help but call you in. There is a cobweb fragility, but it is the voice of a friend, a friend you haven't seen for a long while, and who you're not sure you'll be seeing again.

There is an intimacy to Nick's singing which makes it the perfect voice for headphone communication. Not these modern, flimsy cotton-bud earpieces which make you go Walkman crazy on the Underground, but good, old-fashioned headphones — big, bulky cans which wrap around your ears, insulating you from the world and making you look like a Second World War bomber pilot. While the music coils around your head in the otherwise silent dark.

Paul Wheeler remembers Nick being intrigued by headphones when they first became fashionable: ‘He was fascinated by the idea that he could sit in the car with headphones on … Maybe he foresaw the kind of insular world, a Walkman world …'