Nick Drake (22 page)

‘Well, I read all these reports, about how Nick shambled on-stage at the Festival Hall,' recalled Gabrielle. ‘I was there. I am a performer, I know something about it. It's true he didn't do the pre-chat. He came and sat on a stool and played. And he
electrified
the audience. What he did have was a tremendous presence. Sometimes that presence could be black and very negative when he was deeply depressed, but he was a charismatic figure, there were no two ways about that. There wasn't a smattering of applause from a bewildered audience, this wasn't true. They were enraptured.'

However, Island's new press officer, David Sandison, was less than struck by his new charge in February 1970, when he first saw him performing, supporting John and Beverley Martyn at the Queen Elizabeth Hall: ‘The QEH gig, Nick was for everyone who hadn't taken their seat or wanted to go and have a glass of wine to go and do it, because he wasn't doing anything that was remotely grabbing your attention … He wasn't projecting, there was nothing coming over the footlights. I know Gabrielle is really pissed off with me for the description which was quoted in the ad for
Pink Moon
, but that was how he was.'

The advertisement Sandison refers to was the official Island ad in the music press, announcing the release of
Pink Moon
. It took the form of a letter from David Sandison describing the impact
Bryter Layter
made on him, and how Nick's third album had come into his possession. He also described seeing Nick perform at the QEH show: ‘He came on with his guitar, sat on a stool, looked at the floor and sang a series of muffled songs punctuated by mumbled thanks for the scattering of bewildered applause from the audience who didn't seem to know who the hell he was, nor cared too much. At the end of his last song, his guitar still holding the final notes of the song, he got up and walked off; his shoulders hunched as if to protect him from actually having to meet people.'

Sandison still stands by his description of Nick's performance:
‘That is how he was: he looked down all the time. Gabrielle's memory is of a different gig, but that night there was a guy on-stage who … he actually looked mortified, frightened, ill at ease. In a room of about fifty or sixty people, it would have worked and it would have been very intimate, but he never came to grips with that aspect of playing to 2000 people, big rooms. He really had no experience of it, he was undoubtedly shy … it could have been someone doing a soundcheck, to be honest. He didn't say anything, and at the end of the set he didn't even say “goodnight” — he just walked off. Some people clapped, but not enough, and they didn't clap for very long, the lights went up, and we all went off to the bar.'

The recollections of most of those who saw Nick Drake perform are in agreement: they highlight how ill at ease he appeared on stage and speak of his manifest discomfort when confronted with an audience. Following the publication in early 1997 of a feature I had written on Nick, dozens of readers took the time to write to me with their memories of seeing him in concert. Without exception, they confirmed just how uncomfortable a performer he appeared, alone on the concert platform.

Paul Donnelly saw Nick at the Liverpool Philharmonic Hall in very early 1970, supporting Fairport: ‘He came on and said nothing audible to the audience, either before or between songs, and when he'd finished he just got up and walked off. True to all other reports about him. I remember “Cello Song” and “Three Hours”, mainly because they were two of my favourites …'

‘I was a teenager and had just bought
Five Leaves Left
and fallen in love with the songs,' wrote Mick Stannard, who remembered seeing Nick at a folk club – almost certainly Cousins. ‘Suddenly, there he was on a stool a couple of yards away. I think he started with “Time Has Told Me”. It was great, me being a guitarist, looking at his fingers playing those lovely chords. Later, he was in the middle of “River Man”, sitting hunched up, head bowed, not looking up at the audience, when suddenly his capo sprung off the neck of his guitar and fell to the ground. There were a few giggles from some people, but mostly we didn't really know how to react… He didn't look up or say a word or … make light of it with a laugh, but simply bent down and picked up the capo, reattached it to his guitar and carried on from where he had left off. He was aloof and awkward. After his three songs he scuttled off round a corner and out of sight.'

Like many others, Dave Crewe first became aware of Nick from the
Bumpers
sampler which included ‘Hazey Jane'. He saw Nick open
for Fotheringay at Leicester's De Montfort Hall in March 1970: ‘I do remember the songs “Time Has Told Me” and “Way To Blue”. Each song being warmly greeted and with growing appreciation by the audience. About halfway through the set… midway through a song, he broke a string on his guitar. Embarrassingly, he carried on until he finished the song and immediately and rather nervously began to replace the string, making a few barely audible quips as he did so. After what seemed ages, but was probably only a couple of minutes, he completed his task and received rapturous applause for his efforts. Unperturbed, he continued and finished the set to a standing ovation with cries for more, but he left the stage and never returned.'

Schoolfriends from Marlborough who recalled the self-assured and talented performer of only a few years before were baffled by accounts of Nick's increasing terror of live performance. Simon Crocker: ‘When I read stuff about Nick in performance and mumbling, all I can do is look back and remember that Nick was a natural performer. He was bloody good: he was the band leader, he projected well. He was a confident performer. And I heard about this particular performance at the Queen Elizabeth Hall from people who'd been there who said he mumbled. And I remember saying at the time: “That doesn't sound like Nick at all, he must have been ill.” It just didn't connect.'

Perhaps it was after Nick signed to Island, with the realization that he would have to confront audiences by himself, that the chill set in. All alone on-stage, just him and his guitar, with no back line of bass and drums, no horn section, no one else to share the vocals or harmonize with. Certainly at Cambridge, Nick had seemed to enjoy playing for friends and even, on occasion, performing in front of an audience. He was never outgoing on stage, but by all accounts had a certain still, calm confidence, and even enjoyed performing. But something had changed.

By 1970 the fear was there for everyone to see—it was almost tangible. In performance and alone, he seemed so exposed that audiences found it painful to watch. For Nick, it was a waking nightmare.

Nick Drake was never comfortable with the label of folk singer, but the mere fact that he wrote his own songs and accompanied himself on guitar, typecast him as a folkie. For guitar-picking hopefuls like him, the folk clubs which had sprung up in such abundance were the obvious live venues, and following the release of
Five Leaves Left
, it was on to the folk-club circuit that Nick was dispatched.

Folk gave you a freedom, but it also gave you nowhere to hide. Folk clubs were ideologically sterile, with none of the ‘showbusiness' trappings. The atmosphere in folk clubs during the 1960s owed more to Bertolt Brecht than
Sunday Night At The London Palladium
. A stage was anathema – why should the performer be elevated? These were fiercely competitive venues at which to cut your teeth as a performer. You had to have stamina for the lengthy journeys from town to town, and you had to have guts to get up before an audience who frequently owned every album from which you had filched your repertoire.

The British folk revival had its own figureheads. Like many fledgeling folkies, Nick was fascinated by the richness of John Renbourn's playing, and his ability to draw on all manner of influences, from courtly madrigals to the blues. An even bigger impact on Nick as a teenager was made by Bert Jansch. On the tape he recorded at home at Tanworth during his first university vacation, Nick included two songs, ‘Courting Blues' and ‘Strolling Down The Highway', which Jansch had recorded on his 1965 debut album. Jansch's striking gypsy good looks and apparently effortless fluency on the guitar, made a mark on all those who heard his records or saw him play in the folk clubs of the mid-sixties. Neil Young cited Jansch as being as much an influence on his guitar-playing as Jimi Hendrix.

Pete Frame, legendary draughtsman of rock family-trees, jacked in his job as a surveyor with the Prudential Insurance Company to run a folk club in Luton, where Jansch performed. ‘Bert Jansch was like the fountainhead of it all, to my mind. Nobody had ever seen anything like it. His songs – the structure of them, the feel of them, the melodies, the words … There was no precedent, you couldn't tell what his influences were. Just amazing stuff… he played guitar like no one else had ever heard it before.'

In the days before videos, before the national press was interested in pop music, before monthlies like
Q, Mojo
and
Record Collector
, the chosen route for young singer-songwriters was to start in the folk clubs, graduate to tour support for a fellow Island act and finally headline in their own right.

Ralph McTell remembers diligently treading this path: ‘I just went wherever I was sent … I was probably doing 200 dates a year, all over the country, for eight, ten quid a night, driving myself… I'd be going up to Sheffield for about a tenner a night… I can't speak for Nick, because he didn't do that many gigs, but people like John
Martyn, myself, The Humblebums, were not quite folk and not quite pop. And we worked
all
the time … Because it was a youth thing, and the folk clubs were Dylan and all that, it naturally spilled off the universities, which is what really elevated the thing into equal status with what a lot of the pop singers were doing. We could get as big a crowd.'

Nick's wariness of live performance can only have been compounded by the isolation of working the folk circuit. In a band, you had company, but as a solo singer-songwriter you were out there on your own – frequently rolling up at a gig alone, with no minder or record company support. However, there was an unseen record company machine waiting to spring into action, and curiously what triggered it were those tiny, apparently insignificant folk-club gigs. Martin Satterthwaite was on the sharp edge, as a member of one of Island's first Field Promotion Teams: ‘It meant visiting the local record stores, making sure they had product, telling them which artists were coming to town. We made sure there were window displays, and visited local radio, which then, of course, was only the BBC”

In those days touring was what you did to interest people in buying your work — a write-off against record sales. There were no tour publicists, masseuses or manicurists; no limos, tour riders or merchandising. Just look at the back sleeve of Pink Floyd's
Ummagumma
, from 1969: two roadies, surrounded by a phalanx of the Floyd's state-of-the-art live equipment, all capable of being squeezed into the back of a transit van, were pictured to amaze fans with the band's high-tech sophistication.

Martin Satterthwaite: ‘We'd have boards at the venues advertising the latest product. This was long before merchandising, of course. The only T-shirts that Island would manufacture then, in the early seventies, were for us to give away to DJs, record dealers – there was nothing for sale to the public. It was long before tour publicists or anything, so if a band was playing, you'd liaise with local media, try and arrange an interview backstage.'

Nick's reluctance to gig is widely believed to have sprung from a single unsettling experience which soured him for future live performances. Robert Kirby's memories of seeing Nick immediately afterwards have cast doubt on the apprentices' Christmas party most often held to blame, but Joe Boyd believes he knows when the watershed came: ‘Then, the next thing you know, he's playing a student centre at Warwickshire, and everybody's drinking at the back, people are
talking. He was very upset, couldn't handle it. He came limping home, he said I can't go on with the tour. So we cancelled the other dates.'

Nick's reluctance to go out and perform effectively cut off the prime avenue of exposure for any new act, a fact which did not escape his record label. David Sandison explains: ‘There was interest from a few people while Nick was alive, but it was limited. It was “Yeah, that's nice, but so what?” … And that's understandable. There wasn't any profile. There wasn't anything to grab on to. There wasn't even explaining the songs in interviews. There wasn't any gigging, so that you could make that live connection. And there wasn't radio play. There weren't any slots for the promotional people to get for people like Nick, apart from John Peel, and his time was limited. There weren't local radio stations. There wasn't any commercial radio. There was Radio Luxembourg, but they certainly weren't going to play Nick Drake.'

Even when Nick did get out and gig, it was never a comfortable experience. Ralph McTell remembers Nick opening for him at Ewell Technical College, Surrey, on 25 June 1970: ‘That's the only conversation I remember having with him, in the dressing room beforehand. I am a dreadfully nervous performer, still, and I'm always clucking around before a show. But to allay my nerves, I would cluck around other people and say: “Are you all right?” Nick was monosyllabic. At that particular gig, he was very shy. He did the first set, and something awful must have happened. He was doing his song “Fruit Tree”, and walked off halfway through it. Just left the stage.'

Bruce Fursman was still at school when his group, Folkomnibus, supported Nick at a gig in Middlesex. The Upper Room Folk Club was held at the Goodwill To All pub, a red-brick thirties roadhouse on the corner of Harrow View and Headstone Lane. This gig, on 4 October 1969, could well have been Nick's first-ever folk-club date, and certainly marked his first listing in
Melody Maker's
Folk Forum.