Nick Drake (28 page)

Like many poor boys, he believed that having his photo taken imperilled his immortal soul, and it was only in 1986 that a picture emerged which could be authenticated as that of Robert Johnson. After all those years, if this wasn't an image of Johnson, then it
should have been. Staring at you from a photo from over half a century ago, the eyes are rigid and inflexible, but what compels you to keep staring is not his eyes; rather it is the fingers of his left hand, which grasp the neck of his guitar like the throat of an enemy.

Nick Drake, like so many young white boys growing up in the 1960s, is known to have loved the plaintive blues which came up off the Mississippi Delta, and he was particularly fond of Johnson's
King Of The Delta Blues Singers.
Friends speak of Nick's penchant for the blues during his lifetime, and it is more than coincidence that ‘Black Eyed Dog' was one of the last songs Nick ever recorded, and one of his best. It was a song which drew heavily on the blues tradition, and particularly that of the late, great Robert Johnson.

Johnson's blues are desolate and windswept, none more so than the chilling ‘Hellhound On My Trail'. Like the music of Nick Drake, you sift through the work of Robert Johnson looking for omens. In his case you don't have to look far. From his youthful pact with the Devil, chronicled in ‘Crossroads Blues', to the end-of-life fatalism of ‘Hellhound On My Trail', life and death are marked out clearly on the sparse recorded legacy of the man.

A friend who encountered him during the dark days, remembers Nick comparing himself to the doomed Johnson, and claiming that he too had a ‘hellhound on my trail'. ‘A little shiver ran down my back,' Ben Lacock told Mick Brown. Those echoes eventually become too loud to ignore: a sound of aching loneliness and solitary desolation. Sung by one man and his guitar to an empty wall.

Nick Drake's third and final album,
Pink Moon
, was recorded over two nights at Sound Techniques studios. With only a smattering of piano on the title track,
Pink Moon
too is the sound of one man and his guitar, pouring out his despair into a studio microphone.

Though unable to articulate his despair in any other way, Nick was clearly aware that there was something gnawing away at him. Unable to cope any longer on Haverstock Hill, unwilling to answer the door, reluctant to communicate on any level – with his parents, his record company or his dwindling audience – Nick finally left London and returned to his family home in Tanworth.

Anthea Joseph: ‘When Joe left there was no one really looking after Nick, but he had a family, you see. I mean, it wasn't as though he was an orphan of the storm really – he may have felt like one, I don't know. I mean, it wouldn't surprise me if he did. He wasn't mentally stable. You can't take – nobody can take – responsibility for that,
apart from immediate family, and he did have a family who loved him dearly.'

In the period between the release of
Bryter Layter
in November 1970, and
Pink Moon
in February 1972, the depression continued to corrode. Despite his distaste for the mechanics of promoting his records, Nick was upset at the poor response which had greeted the release of both
Five Leaves Left
and
Bryter Layter
, and the transparent lack of success ate away at him. He saw poor record sales as a personal failure, and could not accept that for any singer-songwriter at the beginning of their career, it all took time. You could not expect to make it overnight: building a career involved doing just that, from the foundations up. Before the video age, touring was what gradually brought your name to a wider audience, and with Nick's reluctance to perform, that most obvious avenue was cut off from him.

The reluctance to face the hard facts of commercial consideration became internalized, and where others might have taken advice or bided their time, he saw no future, only failure. ‘I've failed at everything I've tried to do,' he told his mother. A terrible admission from a young man barely into his twenties. Concerned at their son's unwillingness or inability to communicate, his parents consulted their local GP, who felt that Nick might benefit from seeking psychiatric help. During 1971 Rodney and Molly Drake took Nick to see a psychiatrist at St Thomas's Hospital in London. His mother later admitted that ‘it never really worked … what do psychiatrists really know? They are fumbling in darkness too.'

What did come out of those first sessions was a prescription for anti-depressant drugs. Nick was prescribed three types of drug, which he reluctantly began to take daily. Friends recall his embarrassment at taking the pills in their presence. It was a very English, a very middle-class response to a depressive illness: to be seen to be taking anti-depressants was an admission that there was something wrong; an admission of weakness.

Friend and musical colleague Robert Kirby, who had worked closely with Nick and Joe Boyd on the first two albums, felt that Boyd's decision to go to Los Angeles to work for Warner Brothers left a significant gap in Nick's life: ‘That is one important thing: the length of time that Boyd was in America. I think that Nick felt sadly out of touch … He also admired Joe very greatly, and I think when Joe was in America, it did leave a big hole.'

When Nick did not respond well to the anti-depressants, his father consulted Boyd, who agreed to try to help: ‘I spoke to Nick a few
times from LA. He was obviously having difficulties. His parents got on the phone to me once and said they really wanted him to seek help, and that he was afraid that everyone would look down on him if he went to a psychiatrist. He was reluctant, and they would appreciate it if I would speak to him because they said he respected me so much. So I spoke to him and said: “I don't want to tell you what's right or wrong, but you should never feel people are judging you. You have to deal with things from your own point of view, and if you need help you should get help.” The guy he went to, I think, was the guy who gave him the anti-depressants, and I think we know a lot more about anti-depressants now. Then, they were doling them out like candy, not aware of how dangerous they are.'

As someone who remained a close friend until the end of Nick's life, and has also trained as a psychiatrist, Brian Wells has memories of Nick at the time that are perhaps doubly revealing: ‘My view is I don't think Nick Drake had what I as a psychiatrist would view as a biological depressive illness. I think he became more and more uncomfortable around people, and withdrew because he felt safety in his own company. A bit isolated, not for any particular reason … I think he got himself in a rut. If you are presented with that as a psychiatrist, there's nothing else you can call it, other than depression. But I don't think he had a biological depressive illness of the type we would normally prescribe anti-depressant drugs for. I'm not criticizing his doctor, because I think when his parents brought him to this psychiatrist up in Warwickshire, they were worried [because] he was at home. He'd had all this lively sort of stuff, he'd been at Marlborough, he'd been at Cambridge, you know. What had happened to this guy?

‘Psychiatrists are trained to think in terms of diagnosis. What would explain this behaviour? Well, he's either got schizophrenic illness, which he didn't have: he wasn't listening to voices. The most obvious diagnosis to make with Nick was one of depression. I don't think it was. I mean, it was a depression, but it was more a sort of existential state that he'd got himself into, rather than it being the kind of depressive illness that medical students learn about when they're training to be psychiatrists. I would not have given him Tryptizol, which was an anti-depressant of that time … You hear stories that “it seemed to be making a difference”. But I don't think that was the kind of depression he had. I think he was a sensitive, rather precious guy who became increasingly withdrawn. And I think that was diagnosed as depression.'

For a time, though, it did seem to those around Nick that his mind was made marginally clearer by the anti-depressants, and Nick himself began to feel that a change of scene might help. Following Boyd's sale of his Witchseason roster before returning to America, Island Records boss Chris Blackwell had maintained a fondness for Nick and his music, ensuring that he continued to receive a weekly stipend. Now, concerned by Nick's visible deterioration, Blackwell allowed him the use of his villa, in Algeciras, near Gibraltar. Barely seven years before, Nick and David Wright, his friend from Marlborough, had planned to use the area as a springboard for their round-the-world trip.

On his return from Blackwell's villa, his mood perhaps slightly brightened by the Spanish sun, Nick began to think about recording again. In the absence of Joe Boyd, who was now installed in LA, he decided to make contact with one of his few remaining conduits to the music industry, John Wood. The mythic version is that Nick turned up out of the blue to record the third album in 1971, insisting that it be sparse and straightforward. ‘No frills' is Nick's most frequently quoted comment on
Pink Moon.
In fact, it seems that as early as 1970 Nick had determined that the new album would be much simpler. Back then, though, he was not to know just what torments lay ahead.

Even at the time of its release, Nick had felt that his second album erred towards the more lavish production favoured by Joe Boyd, rather than the simplicity he himself favoured. In an interview with
Musin' Music
, Boyd remembered: ‘Nick came to see me before we'd even released
Bryter Layter
, as soon as we'd finished the record, before the cover was done or anything, he said to me “The next record is just going to be me and guitar …” I think he may have found
Bryter Layter
a little full, or elaborate … I know he liked it, but he did feel, “OK, we've done this, now we're going to do something completely different …” Nick wasn't somebody you really argued with, but again he could do that with John Wood, he didn't need me to do a record with just him and guitar.'

Robert Kirby did not learn until later that there would be no place for his sumptuous arrangements on the new album: ‘I remember after
Bryter Layter
hoping there would be things for me to do, and I remember him saying: “No, it's only going to be myself and guitar.” I don't think this was immediately after
Bryter Layter;
it was more shortly before
Pink Moon.'

As far back as Cambridge in 1968, Kirby remembers Nick
performing guitar pieces and fragments, which he recognized four years later on the final album. One he particularly recalled was the guitar phrase which appeared as ‘Things Behind The Sun'.

‘I think at the time
Bryter Layter
was out, most people said it wasn't up to
Five Leaves Left
… I think the decline began with the response to
Bryter Layter.
The decline had set in prior to
Pink Moon.
Nick … took less care of himself. In the early days he always looked immaculate. Towards the end, he looked ill. He looked haggard, unkempt … I don't think he was eating, which didn't help.

‘Between
Bryter Layter
and
Pink Moon
, he would come round, stay for a week, and not say anything. Nothing. I knew him. My friends knew him … He might get the guitar out and play. If we were in the front room, enjoying listening to sounds, he'd come and sit down and enjoy listening. If we went to the pub or restaurant, he might come with us. But he would quite often not say anything.'

The period bordered by
Bryter Layter
and
Pink Moon
marked the almost imperceptible decline of Nick Drake. The outside world showed no real interest in that decline – merely curiosity. But those who knew him well, especially his family, found the change hard to bear. Gabrielle Drake: ‘The public image of Nick really stems from the years of his depressive illness because a lot of that coincided with his record-making. And of course one's later memories are clouded by this – he was very depressed. But that wasn't the essence of Nick as I knew him as a child …'

Formerly dapper and strapping and perhaps just a tad too aware of his own image, Nick now had so many real problems that simply making it from day to day was difficult. There was no longer space for worrying about a public image. Each and every day was a struggle, a period to be endured, to get through with gritted teeth. Nowhere was the grinding determination more evident than in the enormous personal struggle it took to record the songs which became
Pink Moon.

Remembering Nick in happier times, John Martyn told Andy Robson: ‘He was extraordinarily lovable. And the most lovable thing about him was that he was so shy.' But the sweet shyness had long gone, and now Nick seemed to have gone too. He was so totally withdrawn that he seemed to be teetering on the edge of something horrible, which he could barely discern and was fearful of truly comprehending. But some impulse – to work, to communicate, or to save himself – drove him to record. And determination, though never a part of the romantic myth, was always very much part of Nick
the human being. Tremors of uncertainty, jarring discord, nagging awareness, fretful concerns, must have filled Nick's head, for together they create the mood which saturates
Pink Moon.

If
Five Leaves Left –
released a scant three years before Nick made this final album – is melancholy, but with the comforting glow of a November bonfire for comfort,
Pink Moon
is Manderley without lights, burned and razed, a hollow shell where once had dwelt happiness. Talking to Connor McKnight for his
Zig Zag
appreciation, John Wood recalled the sparse sessions which led to
Pink Moon:
‘He arrived at midnight and we started. It was done very quickly. After we had finished, I asked him what I should keep, and he said all of it, which was a complete contrast to his former stance. He came in for another evening and that was it. It took hardly any time to mix it, since it was only his voice and guitar, with one overdub only. Nick was adamant about what he wanted. He wanted it to be spare and stark, and he wanted it to be spontaneously recorded.'