Nick Drake (30 page)

The music industry was biding its time, treading water, following the break-up of The Beatles and Simon
&
Garfunkel, Bob Dylan in hiding and The Stones in tax exile. No one was sure if Glam was a flash in the pan, or how much longevity you could expect from Savoy Brown or Jonathan Kelly. Wherever the bright lights were shining, though, Nick Drake was well out of sight, edging into the shadows.

In his
Time Out
review of
Fink Moon
, Al Clark was clearly aware of the problems surrounding Nick: ‘Sadly, and despite Island's efforts to rectify the situation, Nick Drake is likely to remain in the shadows, the private troubador of those who have been fortunate enough to catch an earful of his exquisite 3a.m. introversions.'

Even Nick's most loyal supporters in the press were hard pushed to be unequivocally enthusiastic about
Pink Moon.
In his review of the album for
Sounds
, Jerry Gilbert wrote: ‘Island appear to have forgotten about Nick Drake until he ambled into the offices one day and presented them with this album. No-one knew he'd recorded it except the engineer and it's a long way removed from the mighty sessions that Joe Boyd used to arrange for him. Nick Drake remains the great silent enigma of our time – the press handout says that no-one at Island even knows where he's living, and certainly he appears to have little interest in working in public again.

‘The album consists entirely of Nick's guitar, voice and piano and features all the usual characteristics without ever matching up to
Bryter Layter.
One has to accept that Nick's songs necessarily require further augmentation, for whilst his own accompaniments are good the songs are not sufficiently strong to stand up without any embroidery at all. “Things Behind The Sun” makes it, so does “Parasite” – but maybe it's time Mr Drake stopped acting so mysteriously and started getting something properly organised for himself.'

Within a couple of months of the release of
Pink Moon
, Nick had suffered a breakdown, and was hospitalized in the Warwickshire countryside. Like an ocean liner, slowly and inexorably, he was slipping the ropes which connected him to the shore. David Sandison's poignant press statement had only confirmed the rumours which were already percolating around the music industry. With so much else happening – the first post-Beatles hysteria accompanying Bowie and Bolan; the increasing interest in the progressive movement epitomized by ELP and Yes – the absence of the already shadowy Nick Drake wasn't exactly headline news.

In
Melody Maker
, Mark Plummer's review of Nick's last album was strikingly foreboding, given that Nick was still alive and only believed to be temporarily absent: ‘John Martyn told me about Nick Drake in ecstatic terms and so it seemed the natural thing to do, bag the album when it came in for review that is. It is hard to say whether John was right or not. His music is so personal and shyly presented both lyrically and in his confined guitar and piano playing that it neither does or doesn't come over. Drake is a fairly mysterious person, no-one appears to know where he lives, what he does – apart from writing songs – and there is not even a chance to see him on stage to get closer to his insides. The more you listen to Drake though, the more compelling his music becomes – but all the time it hides from you … It could be that Nick Drake does not exist at all.'

‘He was the most withdrawn person I've ever met,' John Martyn said of Nick. To Andy Robson he said: ‘We were never that close. Except, I was as close as anybody could be. He was an impossible man to get close to … In another age he would have been a hermit.' Martyn and his then wife Beverley, near neighbours to Nick in Hampstead, were among the very few who were ever really close to him. Martyn, three months younger than Nick, was always one step ahead of him during his early career, and was the first folk-related signing to Chris Blackwell's Island label.

His early albums –
London Conversation, The Tumbler –
were cut from the folkie cloth, but soon Martyn got the hump, and working with bassist Danny Thompson, switched direction: ‘I was actually very shy and retiring,' he told
Q
, ‘and ever so sweet and gentle until I was 20 then I just got the heave with Donovan and Cat Stevens and all that terribly nice rolling up joints, sitting on toadstools, watching the sunlight dapple through the dingly dell of life's rich pattern stuff … I'm not really that nice, and I very consciously turned away from all that.'

That change was marked by 1973's
Solid Air
, which Colin Escott in his booklet to accompany 1994's double compilation
Sweet Little Mysteries
described as ‘John's masterpiece'. Escott went on to explain that ‘The texture of the title song was dictated by Danny Thompson's bass, mixed way up. Inasmuch as the lyrics offered themselves up for interpretation, they were for, or about, John's Island labelmate, Nick Drake. Nick lived near John for a while, and
died mysteriously, if not altogether unexpectedly, the following year.'

Martyn's song was a cautionary note to Nick. Knowing him now to be unreachable, perhaps he hoped Nick would respond to a message written in a form he understood. Talking to
Zig Zag
, while Nick was still alive, Martyn said: ‘Solid Air was done for a friend of mine and it was done right with very clear motives and I'm very pleased with it, for varying reasons.'

In 1986 Martyn told biographer Brendan Quayle: ‘Nick was a beautiful man, but walking on solid air, helpless in this dirty business, an innocent abroad. He was killed, like [Paul] Kossoff, by the indecent, parasitic opportunism that pervades the music business.'

When I approached Martyn about being interviewed for this book, he rang to say that he felt he had said enough about Nick Drake over the years and was reluctant to run the risk of turning his memories into anecdotes.

Chas Keep, who is currently working with Martyn on his authorized biography, wrote to me in June 1997 with a memory of Martyn's response to Chas's profile of Nick in
Record Collector
: ‘I think the thing that sticks in my mind the most is the image of John reading my article on the day it was published in 1992. Driving back to his house, he sat in the passenger seat reading, with tears in his eyes, the silence only broken by his occasional muttered “Poor Nicky, poor Nicky …” Poor John, he does so blame himself for being unable to prevent Nick from withdrawing from the world.'

Following their move from Hampstead, John and Beverley Martyn relocated to the sleepy South Coast town of Hastings, where Nick became an irregular visitor. Fond as the Martyns were of Nick, it seems that by the time he visited them during 1972, he was in a place that they could never hope to reach.

David Sandison: ‘John Martyn told me a story about when Nick was staying with them, and they were all sitting round watching telly … and Nick got up and left the room, and he thought he'd gone to have a pee, or make a cup of tea, but then he suddenly realized that an hour had passed, and Nick hadn't come back. He was slightly concerned – he didn't suspect he was going to kill himself or anything – but just wondered where the hell he was. And Nick was sitting in a foetal crouch outside the door, and it kind of freaked John, because he said that it was almost like he was listening to see if we were talking about him. There was a hint of paranoia. There was also that kind of … vague insult that we were his friends, but he didn't want to be with us.'

Rodney Drake wrote that Nick was ‘very close' to John and Beverley Martyn during 1971-72, and that he was living near them in Hampstead around the time he was recording
Bryter Layter.
He had fond memories of Martyn, and recalled him visiting the Drake family home in Tanworth when Nick was at his most withdrawn: ‘They knew each other very well, and when Nick was up here, and was pretty bad, we got John Martyn to come up. We'd never met him, and he came up here, and he was a very charming person.'

Molly Drake recalled: ‘Nick, having said he could come, then went into the most awful torment of worry, because … Nick always went on about his two worlds, and he thought John Martyn's one world, and you're another world, and it simply won't work. But in actual fact, it worked like anything, we absolutely loved John Martyn, we got on dreadfully well …'

Rodney: ‘He kept us both entertained, and Nick was very amused, and the next morning, Nick wanted him to go …'

Molly: ‘Nick was very bad, and John Martyn is a tremendously vivacious, ebullient character, and at that stage, it was more than Nick could take. It was all right for one evening, and the next morning he couldn't take any more of it.'

Interviewed on Radio 1 in 1985, Martyn remembered Nick: ‘He came and lived with me in various locations, and was just distinctly unhappy in all of them. I think he distrusted the world. He thought it had not quite lived up to his expectations.'

Joe Boyd had settled in Los Angeles, and after years of scraping by with his Witchseason acts was finally on a regular salary from Warner Brothers. But in London, in the early 1970s, with Boyd gone, Nick felt even more isolated. Nick's decision to record
Pink Moon
without the lavish Boyd production which had been such a feature of
Bryter Layter
meant that Boyd could leave for America with a clear conscience, though in later years he admits to wondering if Nick did in fact feel abandoned:
‘Bryter Layter
took a very long time. It was very off and on, doing little bits here and there, over the course of a year. And so by the time it was released, I was on my way to Los Angeles, so when it actually came out and didn't sell, I wasn't around as a manager … I guess I feel badly that I couldn't totally follow through on it.

‘I think he did feel abandoned. You can look back and see how … I didn't think of myself as being that important to the people you were dealing with. You were young, you think things go on and you do this
and you do that. I was a little frustrated, because a lot of the groups, and Nick, wanted to do things that I didn't feel necessarily involved me that much. Nick had already announced that he wanted to do his next record stark, so I said, well, you can do that with John, you don't need me for that.

‘Nick loved
Five Leaves Left.
I don't know what he thought of
Bryter Layter.
Whether he thought that his music was being a bit overwhelmed, by the arrangements, by the visiting artists, by John Cale, by Pat Arnold and Doris Troy … I just don't know. But definitely by the end, when we finished
Bryter Layter
, he said: “The next record's going to be different. It's going to be very simple.” This was before I left, before
Bryter Layter
came out and didn't sell, before any of that. And that was one of the things which added to my feeling of well, why not take this job with Warner Brothers.'

Simon Crocker had lost touch with Nick since the release of
Five Leaves Left
, but assumed that, signed to the prestigious Island Records, with his third album just out, things couldn't be better for his old schoolfriend: ‘Then I met Robert Kirby … and we had a long chat about Nick and he told me everything, and I was absolutely flabbergasted. One of the things was, Joe Boyd going to America really caught Nick on the hop. Basically he depended very heavily on Joe … and he was kind of lost after he went. I don't think you can point the finger at Joe: he did what was right for him at the time … I don't think there's any blame to be placed. He can't be responsible, but in a way the impression I got was that Nick didn't really grasp what was happening until it was too late. He didn't realize the gap that was going to be there.

‘What amazed me looking back was that Nick never had a manager. Nick needed people to get his act together. Nick was just not someone who was going to do that by himself … Anyone who knew him would realize that he needed someone to really help him, to structure his life … I'm sure if he had had the right manager with a bit of money, and he could have had other musicians playing with him, he could have performed very, very well indeed. Is it because Nick said: “No, I don't want it?” I don't know that.'

Another friend from Marlborough and Aix was Jeremy Mason. He was equally shocked when he saw Nick for the first time in two years: ‘He had changed completely. This would be early 1971. We couldn't get anything out of him at all. He didn't like the pub. He said it was a class of people he was not interested in any more – it was a pub for the Chelsea set, what you'd call yuppies today.

‘We did go back to his flat. He actually only loosened up when we got back to the flat. Whether he had just moved in, or whether this was it, but it had nothing in it except the boxes in which his stereo had come. You sat on the bed, and had coffee off the boxes.

‘I remember introducing him as my great buddy from school; and realizing that I had nothing further in common with him came as a bit of a shock … He had certainly gone a very different path by then … He had turned, from the time I knew him, from a relatively laid-back chap, with whom I had no trouble communicating …

‘I must emphasize that when we were at school and went to see Graham Bond, and we went to the Flamingo, and we came down to France, played the guitar … he was pretty normal. It was Aix that started it. He became more and more … “obsessed” is the wrong word. More and more interested in the music. It went from a schoolboy thing, to something he did more and more.'

Brian Wells had been close to Nick at Cambridge, and kept in touch when they both moved down to London. Knowing how abrasive the music industry could be, Wells knew how it could impact on such a sensitive individual as Nick, but he also remembered him as withdrawn and reclusive, even during their university days together: ‘It's difficult for somebody to say he wasn't depressed – any psychiatrist quite reasonably would have said this is a depression. But I think it was more to do with … you know how Howard Hughes just withdrew? I think it was more like that.