Nick Drake (33 page)

In ‘Black Eyed Dog' there is the real sense of the hellhound close at hand. The dog which was always one step behind Robert Johnson, Nick too had heard howling. Dangerous and other-worldly, the song is as chill and sparse as a midnight crossroads. He keens for home, but seems to know he is beyond the point of rescue. Behind him snaps the hellhound; ahead, the fearful unknown.

In ancient times a black dog was frequently a symbol of the Devil, and by the early eighteenth century the term was being used to describe depression. The image of death personified by a stalking hound has been popular in rock ‘n' roll since Robert Johnson recorded the chilling ‘Hellhound On My Trail', while ‘Black Dog Blues' was a familiar ragtime guitar tune from the early thirties. The term was also, most famously, Winston Churchill's euphemism for the depression which plagued him throughout his life.

Incongruous as it may seem, Churchill, hailed as one of the greatest Englishmen of the century – Nobel laureate, Prime Minister and Peer of the Realm – was prone to acute bouts of black depression, into which he plunged arbitrarily and from which he could find no escape. This darkness was such a familiar caller that Churchill named his bouts of depression ‘black dog'. According to biographer William Manchester, Churchill could not bring himself to stand on the platform's edge as a train hurtled by, or to glance downwards from a ship at sea, because ‘a second's action would end everything'.

I had always assumed that Nick's depression hadn't really taken hold until around the time of his bleak final album,
Pink Moon.
But talking to those who knew Nick during his early years in London, I found that the depression seems to have begun to afflict him quite early in his creative life. I was struck by how unhappy Nick had seemed, even around the time of
Bryter Layter
, widely perceived as his most ‘up' record.

The corrosive depression was apparently something which ate away at him during most of his adult life. But that is not to say that Nick was never happy. To the frustration of those who have constructed an elaborate cathedral of misery around him, he was plainly happy during his four years at Marlborough. Cambridge and France were also places that seemed to bring him pleasure. Even the early days in London, buoyed by the prospect of a career making music, while barely out of his teens … All were places and times which brought Nick contentment and happiness. There were friendships and fun and a family apparently devoted to his well-being. There were occasions aplenty which brought a smile to the face of the young Nick Drake.

From this distance, Nick does appear, in his sister Gabrielle's words, to have been born with ‘a skin too few', too sensitive for his own good, too acutely aware of his failings, too willing to find fault with himself. But these things alone are not enough to explain away the illness which drove him, literally, to despair.

‘It was a very sad world …' Rodney Drake said. ‘I think really he became – I don't know whether a “depressive” is the right word to use … He was certainly extremely depressed, in a way that the word “depressed” isn't sufficient to describe it really.'

Following his breakdown early in 1972, family and friends speak frequently of Nick's withdrawal during his final two years, of him being in a place where they could no longer reach him, of his isolation and inability to communicate. Their accounts of him simply sitting
for hours at a stretch, silent and staring, have all the hallmarks of clinical depression.

Visible scars and physical suffering are not necessarily easier to handle than mental anguish, but they are easier to grasp. Terence Rattigan wrote: ‘Do you know what “le vice anglais” – the English vice – really is? Not flagellation, not pederasty – whatever the French believe it to be. It's our refusal to admit our emotions. We think they demean us, I suppose.' Yet, strangely, Nick's parents do not seem to have been embarrassed by their son's illness. It would not have been surprising for people of their age and upbringing, in those days before mental imbalance was much discussed, to be lacking in understanding. But by all accounts, Molly and Rodney did their utmost to understand, sympathize and help with Nick's pain and suffering. His mother, particularly, agonized every step of the way with Nick during his last tragic years.

Depression is an illness to which adolescents are particularly prone. It strikes at the root of an existence which is already tremulous, a time when life is divided sharply into black and white; when shades of grey equate to old and lacking principle. It all goes back to Hamlet, the eternal adolescent, and the crucial question of that stage of life: whether to ‘be' or not. Such stark choices appeal to the adolescent in us all. Suicide is rather flippantly described as a permanent solution to a temporary problem, but at an age when emotions are at their most exposed, temporary isn't a state you recognize. Pragmatism comes only with experience: ‘this too will pass' is a discovery of middle age.

Today at least the symptoms are better recognized, the treatments more sensitive, less draconian. But when Nick Drake began suffering from the depression which would eventually kill him, there were few places where sensitive, introspective youngsters could gain help and sympathy. The majority of GPs were of an age to be unfamiliar, and in some cases, unsympathetic, to any problem which was not manifestly physical.

Tim Lott, who documented his obsession with suicide in
The Scent Of Dried Roses
, explained in an interview: ‘The only way to preserve the person I was, was to die. Suicide is a way of avoiding change and Auden says we would rather be ruined than change. The act of will it required would be proof that I was still real; it would be an act of heroism, like going over the top at the Somme.' Lott's image drew me back to Nick. The Somme, where so many of his predecessors at Marlborough had perished; where the flower of a generation had
withered on the barbed wire; where there was no elegant, eloquent choice, but rather courage to be found in the inflexible face of duty. Back to duty. Back to letting nothing show. Back to class.

The only available recording of Nick Drake speaking comes on the various bootlegs which came out of the Tanworth bedroom recordings during 1967–68. The first surprise is that after years with only the records and a few photographs to beguile us, Nick Drake suddenly is given voice. The voice is as you would expect, but perhaps rather more so: polite, hesitant, clear-cut, well-enunciated, unassuming, upper-middle-class. Like many of his class and background and time, Nick has a tendency to sound like a not very confident member of the Royal Family (‘one has one's reservations when one has quite enjoyed oneself …').

As he speaks into the tape recorder in his bedroom at Far Leys, after returning from a neighbour's party, Nick is clearly drunk. The surprise is, again, that there are no surprises, no insights. For all the world, Nick Drake sounds like any one of a thousand well-educated, softly spoken public-schoolboys. Coming home pissed, he imparts sozzled wisdom into the microphone. Whizzing around in the background is an intrusive pop record which sounds like it is spilling over from Radio 2 (the effect is rather like hearing
King Lear
cutting into the fade of ‘I Am The Walrus').

The subject of his discourse is driving, late at night: ‘I must have drunk rather a lot, or although it seemed so, at the time I felt myself quite sober, but when I leapt into the car to drive home, after my merry abandon, I found the task extremely difficult. And it was extremely fortunate that, um, there was nothing else on the road because looking back at it, I seem to remember I had a mental brainstorm, and I didn't realize at the time, and I think I drove the whole way home on the right-hand side of the road, which is something, of course, which comes from driving in France too much, which is what I've been doing recently, as you probably know, driving in France, you know. And in moments of stress, such as this journey home, one forgets so easily, the lies, the truth and the pain, and so I'm wavering from the point.'

The lies, the truth and the pain – profound philosophizing, signs, intimations of mortality? Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar. And this is just the sound of a squiffy teenager, playing around, waiting for his life to begin.

Talking to Len Brown in the
NME
about Nick's final four songs,
Joe Boyd pointed out: ‘He's someone whose story really is in the songs. He could talk through his songs but he had a very great difficulty in talking to people. The songs in a way became less about other people and more about himself as time went on.'

His songs were the only way Nick knew to tell his story, and the final four are the most eloquent of all.

From then on, the tale would be told in other people's voices.

Robert Kirby was shocked at the swift decline: ‘I remember him saying after
Pink Moon
that he'd got material for a new album. So maybe he was planning on something else … But I've always thought that things accelerated from that point. Up until then, there had always been something there that drove him on, and then it disappeared, and you can actually attribute the decline to the treatment. I do think he was writing. He might have been digging himself deeper into a hole with “Black Eyed Dog” and not coming out with other types of stuff.

‘He upped sticks, and moved back to Tanworth. I only ever visited him there around the time of
Bryter Layter.
I did rather sadly lose touch at the end. I still saw him, probably each time he was in London, but not for any length of time. He wasn't talking. Sometimes he would actually stand in the corner, facing out on the room, but looking down. With hindsight, you think if only I'd said: “Come on, lad. Pull yourself together, let's go down the pub.” At the time though, I thought, he's writing his next album, he's writing a brilliant song. It sounds so naive now …'

Like a thief in the night, Nick Drake just quietly disappeared. Anthea Joseph remembered her last meeting with the ‘very beautiful young man' she had first encountered in the Witchseason offices in 1968: ‘The last time I saw him was at Island, must have been '72 … It was a very hot August day … I got inside and there was this body sitting in a chair with a newspaper virtually glued to his face. And I thought, I know that mackintosh. Went up to him and slowly, he heard my voice, and he lowered the newspaper. “Hello Anth.” I said: “Hello Nick, are you waiting?” He went: “Mm”, and the newspaper went straight back up again and I thought, what's he doing here? Brenda Ralfini told me he just comes in, and he used to do that at Witchseason as well: for no particular reason, he would just come in and sit.

‘And that was the last time I saw him. You couldn't even give him a hug, you know. He was totally non-tactile. Now most people don't
have any trouble really saying: “It's lovely to see you.” But with Nick you couldn't – again, the brick wall. And thinking about it, he probably did feel bereft when Joe went to America because Joe was an anchor – an anchor of sort of sanity, a man of infinite patience.

‘You could see the difference. I mean … the difference between when he first came into Witchseason … and the young man I saw at Island. The deterioration was quite something. But he was still beautiful, he was incredibly thin, the skin was translucent.'

Simon Crocker, who had been in a number of Marlborough bands with Nick, was stunned when Nick turned up at his London home one day in 1974: ‘In either April or May I got this phone call out of the blue. And it was Nick. He sounded very incoherent. But he said: “I'd like to meet.” So I said: “Great! Fantastic!” But he sounded a bit shaky. Anyway he came round to meet me in Chelsea … I'm amazed he even found his way there. He turned up, and he was completely incoherent. It was the most awful thing, because I wanted to take him and look after him. He sat there, completely shaking … He couldn't put a sentence together.

‘I really tried to say, Nick, is there anything I can do? It was just awful, awful, lonely … The last memory I had of him was of a completely different person. I didn't realize till later how bad things were. I said, look, if there's anything I can do. I'm involved in the music business, maybe we can do something together. And he said: “Oh yeah, that'd be great.” And he went. And I never saw him again.'

The withdrawal of Nick Drake did not lead to the frenzied speculation in the rock press which attended Bob Dylan's absence during 1967, or John Lennon's house-husbandry between 1975 and 1980. Nick did not vanish so much as fade away. For the last years of his life he took refuge in the family home in the quiet Warwickshire village where he had lived as a toddler.

From the time he left London in early 1972 until his death in late 1974, Nick's most prolonged absence from Far Leys was during the breakdown he suffered shortly after returning home, when he spent five weeks in a nearby psychiatric hospital. Brian Wells visited him there and recalls: ‘I know that he had at least one admission, I think it was just the one. I visited him in the hospital, and gave him this book about Bob Dylan by Anthony Scaduto … It was in Warwickshire, near his parents, because I went to his parents' place first, and they hadn't wanted to tell me he was in hospital, because Nick had asked them not to tell anyone. I rang Nick, and he said: “I'm not in a nut house, this isn't a nut house.” I said: “No, OK. Can I come and see you?” He said: “Well, all right.” I said: “I want to give you something, I've got this book I want to give you.” When I got there, it was a regular psychiatric ward, and a regular Victorian loony bin, and he was fine. He'd been unforthcoming for some time before, and when I got there, it was more of the same really. I didn't talk to any of the staff or anything like that. I was just there as a supportive friend. I went
back and talked to Molly and Rodney, I think I stayed the night with them, and then came back to London.'