Nick Drake (34 page)

After Nick returned to Far Leys from the hospital, his parents remained terribly worried by his visible decline, although they dared hope that the prescribed anti-depressants would keep him on a more even keel. To an extent, the Tryptizol did appear to put some balance back into Nick's life, but the side-effects produced a torpor and absent-mindedness which must have been hard to bear.

Molly Drake remembered one evening when Nick, having expressed an interest in learning to play the violin, asked to borrow her car so that he could drive down to London and buy an instrument. The following morning Molly asked if he was still going to London to buy a violin, only to be met with a blank, uncomprehending stare. Nick had no recollection of the conversation. On another occasion Gabrielle was contacted by the police: Nick was marooned at a zebra crossing, unable, uncertain, and unwilling to cross the road. He had been standing there for an hour. In fact, she had already seen her brother in a similar state of detachment. She had not been frightened, and had spoken with some pride to Mick Brown about the time that Nick came to see her at the BBC canteen while she was rehearsing: ‘He was this stony presence, not saying a word, and very quickly everybody else just left the table. It was a positive negative presence. It was almost impressive in a peculiar way.'

The final eighteen months of Nick Drake's life are characterized by slow and steady decline. His inability to communicate, and his tendency to withdraw completely in on himself, were a daily drain on his parents. Rodney and Molly felt themselves trapped in a waking nightmare, forced to witness the deterioration of their only son. Molly: ‘I remember him striding up and down one morning saying: “I've failed in every single thing I've ever tried to do.” It was the most terrible heart-rending cry, and I said: “Oh Nick, you haven't, you know you haven't.” But it wasn't any good, and he had that feeling that he was a failure, and that he hadn't managed to achieve what he'd set out to do. And how much that was a contributory factor in his final depression and death I don't know. I really don't know. There are always so many questions unanswered, and of course it was a terrible time, because whatever you did, you always felt you were doing the wrong thing. You always had this awful feeling that you were somehow letting him down.'

Rodney: ‘He used to go for a long time without talking to anybody,
when he was very bad. He used to play a lot of music. He used to sit there, leaning back against that piano, with those two speakers on, and the record player on … Times when he was prepared to talk at all were few and far between, and when they happened, you had to be ready to try and help him as best you could.'

Molly: ‘He was very, very bad when he wanted to talk, you knew he was. Sometimes he'd say: “Are you busy?” And, of course, whatever I was doing, I wasn't busy, and just let him talk, because you so longed to be able to do something to try and help him.'

It had all happened so swiftly. Less than three years after quitting Cambridge delighted with his new recording contract and full of optimism about his new career, Nick was back home, sleeping in his boyhood bedroom. A gaunt and silent figure who haunted Far Leys and then disappeared unexpectedly, driving long into the night. Even that solitary pleasure was reliant on his parents' good graces. Nick would frequently break down, or simply run out of petrol, and then he would phone home, waking his father, and ask to be collected.

Time and again Nick would take off in the family car, or later his own, and as the flat blackness wrapped around him, he would drive, and drive and drive. Yet there was rarely any purpose to the journeys. He was quite likely to simply turn around and make his way home again. If he did arrive anywhere, and stayed, it would usually be a wordless visit, the silence which shrouded him unsettling his friends. Then, after an hour, or a week, he would return to the car, again without speaking, and head off into the night.

Nick's fondness for driving is mentioned repeatedly by those who knew him. Did he perhaps find peace in the mechanics of driving, or was it simply a means of escape? Apart from music – and his schoolboy athletics – driving was pretty much the only hobby or passion anyone seems to have noticed in Nick, and it remained a love all his life. From teenage odysseys through France to solitary late-night venturings trying to escape the darkness, Nick welcomed the freedom which driving brought. Perhaps it was the solitude he liked, or the speed, which effectively blocked out reality; or simply being in control of something in his life.

‘He was a very good driver, quite nippy,' Paul Wheeler recalls. ‘It was like sprinting in the car. He wasn't reckless … He had a little white car I remember, I can't remember the model, but it wasn't at all flashy. He did like driving, and was not at all hesitant. He would say: “Let's go somewhere”, like when we went out to the coast… When we were in Ascot, he wouldn't think twice about driving down from
Tanworth, and that must have been quite a long drive. I don't recall that he ever asked for more than the address, never asked how to get there, which is quite interesting. It goes against this “lost boy” image. He could find his way very well!'

Following James Dean's death in a car crash,
The Times
wrote of ‘a lonely young man, haunted by insecurity, longing for affection, yet thrusting it away from him, gifted yet suspecting his gifts, ambitious yet preferring to live like a tramp, in love, like T.E. Lawrence, with speed, and hugging a surly manner around him like a protecting cloak'. There are echoes of Nick Drake in that appraisal, as there are in the life of T.E. Lawrence. During his life as a gentleman ranker in the aftermath of his desert triumphs in the First World War, Lawrence of Arabia loved what he called the ‘voluntary danger' of driving fast along country roads. For Lawrence, there was a certainty in speed, a pleasure in the isolation of hurtling along, in control of his vehicle and lost in the momentum. In 1935 Lawrence was killed by that momentum, when his motorbike swerved to avoid two young cyclists, and he was hurled over the handlebars to his death.

Paul Wheeler: ‘That sense of just going off. Of feeling abandoned. He certainly did that more and more towards the end of his life. I know that his parents talked about him setting off from home, going somewhere, and ringing up and saying bring me back.'

Brian Wells was married and living in Eastbourne at the time, and became used to his old friend ringing and announcing he would be driving down from Tanworth: ‘Nick would come quite late at night, and he'd run out of petrol two miles up the road. He resented going to garages and putting petrol in the car … so I went off and helped him fill up the car with petrol. And we all went to bed, and by the time we got up in the morning, he'd gone. That sort of stuff happened a lot.'

Nick's ambivalent attitude to his friends extended also to the form of transport he relied on so much. Brian Wells explained that when he wasn't using his parents' car: ‘Nick drove clapped-out cars. The last one he had was quite pokey but he blew it up, he just ran out of oil. I'm sure he did it deliberately … Impulsive: “Fuck it, I'm just going to keep driving it. I'm not going to put any oil in it” – almost out of frustration, bloody-mindedness. And from time to time this would appear, this kind of frustratedness. It was almost an arrogance, because he would wait for twenty-four hours, sleep on somebody's floor, then ring up Rodney, and Rodney would bail him out. To some extent it was taking advantage of his parents.

‘It was slightly irritating … because we were all driving clapped-out
Mini vans and things, and there was Nick … just not taking any responsibility, knowing he was quite capable of doing so, and then when asked: “Why didn't you put any oil in?”, “Oh, I just couldn't get it together.” It was almost as though it was kind of rather cool: “Oh, I'm just so untogether, man, I just couldn't get it together to put any oil in.” That it was far too mundane a thing.'

Rodney: ‘He had his own car, and he'd then make a decision to go away somewhere, and he'd get into his car and drive off, sometimes he'd get about two or three miles, and come back. Sometimes you didn't know where he'd gone. He used to travel tremendous distances. It used to be a sort of therapy to him to be able to drive. He used to set off with the idea of going up to London to see some friends, sometimes he'd get to London. Sometimes, we heard subsequently, there was a girl he knew very well, and he'd just walk into her flat and sit there, and she knew and was accustomed to him. And he'd get up and walk out without saying anything and drive home again. Other times he'd drive out, and run out of petrol, and couldn't bring himself to go and get some more. And then he'd ring us up, and we'd set off, all over the country …'

Out of the blue, Nick would turn up on the doorsteps of friends. John and Beverley Martyn were used to seeing him in Hastings. He was a familiar visitor at the Suffolk home of John Wood, Sound Techniques' owner, and his wife Sheila, who had a special bond with Nick (‘she was his confidante' Robert Kirby told me). Talking to Patrick Kampert for the
Chicago Tribune
, Wood remembered: ‘He would suddenly turn up for a few days. Sometimes he wouldn't say anything. He was very self-contained. He could sit and say nothing for hours. It was unnerving.'

Friends like Brian Wells and his wife were never surprised when Nick just appeared, but it could be a terrible shock for those who were unaware of his harrowing decline. Richard Charkin, who had spent an incident-packed month in Morocco with Nick in early 1967, and remembered him fondly from his time at Cambridge, told me: ‘After Cambridge, I'd moved down to London, and we'd lost touch, but one day I bumped into him in the street in South Kensington. He was looking pretty bad, and it was the week before he died. I felt terribly guilty because I said I'd get in touch … But when he came to London he was less … friendly. In Cambridge, he used to come round and see me as often as I would go round and see him … in London that was not the case.'

It was not all darkness, even during those last months. Brian Wells recalls, during a day spent with Nick in his bedroom at Far Leys, picking up a guitar and starting to play. Recognizing the riff, Nick took up his saxophone, and for a while the two jammed away on Henry Mancini's familiar, throbbing ‘Peter Gunn' theme.

‘I think he was a sensitive guy,' Brian says. ‘After he'd been in the psychiatric hospital… I was talking about
Bryter Layter
, and getting him to play it, and talking about tracks on it, because he would show me tunings. This is when he had gone back to Tanworth … and I would go up there just to hang out and have a laugh. And then we'd play tracks off
Pink Moon
, and I remember saying, God, if I'd made that record and it hadn't sold, I'd have been very pissed off. And he said: “Well, now you know what's going on with me.” He actually said that. Which was rare for him, because normally he was very unforthcoming.'

For Nick's mother, the only hope came when he felt able to communicate, and tried to share his feelings. Towards the end of 1974 Molly took it as a hopeful sign when Nick asked to borrow her Linguaphone records, to brush up his conversational French. She was even more delighted when Nick felt confident enough to plan a visit to Paris.

For years rumours have persisted that the one relationship Nick had enjoyed during his life was with the
chanteuse
Françoise Hardy. Speaking about Nick for the first time, Françoise denied the stories: ‘I was more attracted by Nick as an artist than as a man; even though he was that explosive mixture, which usually seduces me totally, of purity, innocence, beauty – as much exterior as interior – and of a fascination for death. Maybe my subconscious self understood that Nick's instinct for death was too strong, both for himself, and in regard to me and what I could have done to combat it.'

Like most British teenagers, Nick would have become aware of Françoise Hardy when her song, ‘All Over The World' became a British hit in March 1965. The twenty-one-year-old Hardy personified all that was alluring and enticing and Gallic. Wistful and with her long, willow hair framing her face, Françoise captivated Beatles, Stones and Bob Dylan (who name-checked her on the sleeve of his fourth album) with her undeniably French appeal.

Robert Kirby: ‘He was exactly the same age as me, and I was madly in love with Françoise Hardy … She was beautiful, and I'm sure that's where it started. Nick hadn't got a voice, but he used his voice perfectly on his own stuff. Françoise Hardy also hadn't got a voice.
The French also come from a culture where they declaim the words, rather than have to have much of a melody. It's the lyrics that carry the song. French
chanson
culture has always been totally different to German, English, American, Italian in that it's the words that matter. They don't write strong melodies.

‘It is the concept, the atmosphere of the whole. It is not based on a catchy tune. The French would latch on to “La Vie En Rose”, it doesn't really matter what the tune is … you use music to deliver a lyric. I think that attracted Nick as well, because in fact his vocal melodies aren't that strong: if somebody asked you to sing a Nick Drake song, it's very hard to do. I think that made him think perhaps Françoise Hardy could do his stuff well: to deliver, to declaim atmospherically, a lyric.'

Françoise Hardy's first hit, ‘Tous Les Garçons Et Les Filles', came in 1962, when she was only eighteen. By 1968 she was moving away from the image of the bruised and vulnerable
chanteuse
, recording songs by Serge Gainsbourg and Leonard Cohen. Joe Boyd: ‘I went with Nick to visit Françoise Hardy, who was interested in recording some of his songs. We went and had tea with Françoise. That began because there was a guy called Tony Cox, who was a producer who worked at Sound Techniques, and he played Nick's songs to her, because the album was her attempt to break the English market. She loved them, thought they were wonderful. He put me in touch with her, and I arranged to go visit her with Nick, and we went to Paris together. It was while we were making
Bryter Layter
, I think, May or June of 1970. We climbed to her beautiful flat, at the top of one of those old buildings on the Ile St Louis. We had tea. Nick said not a word the entire time. There was an agreement he would send her more songs; we might have sent her a tape of the rough mixes of
Bryter Layter
, so there was a follow-up, but nothing ever happened.'