Nick Drake (40 page)

Molly: ‘When I heard that they were going to make this compilation thing of all his albums, I said to Rodney I think it ought to be called
Fruit Tree
, because that to me is a terribly prophetic song. Several months later, Joe came and had lunch with us in London and was talking about this album, and he said I tell you the title I think it should be:
Fruit Tree.'

Reviews for
Fruit Tree
were not widespread; the weeklies were preoccupied with disco frenzy and albums such as Blondie's
Parallel Lines
, Supertramp's
Breakfast In America
and Rod Stewart's
Blondes Have More Fun.
The anticipation of Led Zeppelin's first UK shows in
two years was tangible, and there were new bands like The Police, Dire Straits, The Pretenders and U2 to contend with.

In his
NME
review of
Fruit Tree
, David Hepworth wrote: ‘This box set brings together the three albums that he recorded for Island with four tracks put down near the end when his vulnerability had got past the point of melancholy and had become a crippling disease … Most songwriters use their sadness but with Nick Drake it was the sadness that used him and even music as rare and honest as this is never worth such tragedy.'

Rodney Drake did notice a slight dip in the sales of Nick's records around 1981, following the release of
Fruit Tree
in 1979, but apart from that sales remained steady and the three Island albums remained on catalogue, available for the curious of each successive generation.

The next upsurge of interest came in 1985 courtesy of Dream Academy, a trio consisting of Nick Laird-Clowes, ethereal oboist Kate St John and multi-instrumentalist Gilbert Gabriel. Their fifteen minutes of fame began with a haunting single, ‘Life In A Northern Town', which was dedicated to the memory of Nick Drake. The single reached number fifteen on the UK charts in March 1985, and the following month Dream Academy were profiled in
Melody Maker
, where Nick Laird-Clowes explained about the dedication: ‘I just felt the song has a strong connection with Nick Drake in a way I can't even explain. I held him in such high esteem – and still do. Mike Read played our single on the radio and mentioned that it was dedicated to Nick and since then he's apparently been deluged with letters from people who said they were fans and could Mike please play some of his songs for them!'

Nick Laird-Clowes was obsessed by the minutiae and memorabilia of the sixties. On hearing that the Guild guitar which Nick holds on the cover of
Bryter Layter
had surfaced, he immediately purchased it. Another of Nick's guitars now belongs to Brian Wells, who was given it by Rodney after Nick's funeral: ‘I own Nick's Martin D28 … I don't think it ever appeared on an album, because I think a lot of
Pink Moon
was done with a gut string, I don't think it was done with a steel string … I think he bought the Martin after
Pink Moon
, because when he died it was quite new – perhaps he sold the Guild to buy it. It had a normal tuning, which was quite rare, as most of Nick's guitars were tuned to some funny tuning.'

Brian was also able to scotch another rumour concerning Nick's guitars: ‘I actually talked to Eric Clapton about Nick, and he had never heard of Nick … I know Eric quite well because we're on the
same charity things together, we're both in recovery from addictions, so Eric helps out by giving my charity some free concerts, and there was this rumour that his guitar-playing had been seriously influenced by Nick … There's a lot of this stuff: someone said Eric owned Nick's guitar, but Eric had never heard of Nick Drake.'

The success of Dream Academy's single in 1985 prompted Island into action, and within a matter of weeks they announced the first Nick Drake compilation. The title,
Heaven In A Wild Flower
, came from one of Nick's favourite poets, William Blake, and his 1802 poem ‘Auguries Of Innocence'. Trevor Dann was asked to compile the fourteen-track collection: ‘A guy called Nick Stewart who was working at Island in the mid-eighties mentioned Nick Drake, and I started waxing on, as I do, and then he just rang me up one day and said we're going to do a Nick Drake compilation CD, because there'd never been one – there was the box set
Fruit Tree
, but there had never been a single CD compilation – and would you like to compile it? I said I would be absolutely thrilled.

‘So I just went home and recorded the album off my own copies of the records and said this feels nice, like it has “Hazey Jane I” and “II” put together … Even though it was specifically going to be a CD, I remember compiling it so it would work as a vinyl album, so that the beginnings of each side, and the ends of each side, felt good. From memory, it's completely chronological, except that Joe insisted that they change one of the tracks. He put in “Northern Sky”, and they just plonked it in the middle; otherwise it's in perfectly chronological order.'

Paul Du Noyer's respectful review in
NME
was typical of those accorded
Heaven In A Wild Flower
, and demonstrated the sort of reverence Nick was beginning to attract: ‘Rock has known a million morose young poets: bedsit brooders penning their pain, real or imagined, to angst-intensive refrains of frail pathos. What a bloody awful bunch. Yet, by the law of averages, they were bound to spawn at least one genuine genius. They did. His name was Nick Drake.'

A keen-eyed journalist on the
Birmingham Evening Mail
noted that
Heaven In A Wild Flower
was being released at the same time as Gabrielle Drake was making her debut in the popular long-running TV soap
Crossroads.
Under the headline ‘Record “no link to
Crossroads”
', the probing piece continued: ‘Island records' Rob Partridge denied any element of cash-in: “The Nick Drake album has been a project planned for some years, and its release now has nothing whatsoever to do with the TV series.” ' Partridge was further
quoted, incorrectly, as saying: ‘The group Dream Academy have a hit at the moment with “Life In A Northern Town” which was written by Nick years ago – and its success has sparked a lot of interest.'

The success of the Dream Academy single and the subsequent release of
Heaven In A Wild Flower
helped bring Nick Drake's name to a new decade, eleven years after his solitary death. Since
Fruit Tree
in 1979, there had been the real sense of a cult developing; it was a cult which, to everyone's surprise, would only grow during successive years.

Researching in the Island vaults during the summer of 1985 while he was compiling the Sandy Denny box set
Who Knows Where The Time Goes?
, Joe Boyd, in the company of fellow American Frank Kornelussen, found the original master tapes of all Nick's sessions. Master tapes are the first-generation reels, the tapes that roll in the studio, capturing what the artist is actually playing. They are the pristine originals. They are what all CD releases should be cut from. They are what the artist and the producer hear. They are the fly on the wall of the recording studio.

Island had deleted
Fruit Tree
in 1983, and Boyd had made an arrangement which allowed him to release the box set on his own Hannibal Records, though Island still retained the rights to release all three of Nick's individual albums. Having discovered enough previously unreleased material to constitute a ‘new' Nick Drake album, Boyd took the opportunity to revise
Fruit Tree.
The tapes unearthed at Island would form a fourth, and in all likelihood, final Nick Drake album,
Time Of No Reply.

Rodney, Molly and Gabrielle Drake were concerned that Nick's reputation should not be sullied by inferior recordings released under his name, and despite constant pressure from fans to release everything, the recorded legacy of Nick Drake remains pristine. What appeared on
Time Of
No
Reply
had been cleared by Boyd with the Drake family, and in 1986 it was put out as part of the amended
Fruit Tree
box set, with Nick's fourth album appearing as a bonus disc. The following year
Time Of No Reply
was released in its own right.

The fourteen-track album consisted of previously unreleased songs from the
Five Leaves Left
sessions: ‘Time Of No Reply', ‘Joey', ‘Clothes Of Sand', ‘Mayfair' and ‘I Was Made To Love Magic', complete with original arranger Richard Hewson's setting. There were also alternative takes of two songs Nick had included on his debut album, ‘Man In A Shed' and ‘The Thoughts Of Mary
Jane', with some subdued guitar from Richard Thompson. There were three songs which Nick had recorded at home in Tanworth: a solo version of ‘Fly', which had appeared beautifully arranged on his second album, as well as two otherwise unreleased titles: the blues cover ‘Been Smoking Too Long' and his own ‘Strange Meeting II'. The final four tracks were Nick's last-ever recordings from 1974, which had previously been available on the original
Fruit Tree
box, tacked on the end of
Pink Moon.

With so much known about so little, it was disconcerting, twelve years after his death, to hear Nick Drake singing again. The little fumble in his singing of ‘Mayfair' which is laughed off; hearing ‘Fly' performed solo as Nick committed it to a home tape recorder, with a recording contract still a distant dream. There is Richard Thompson's tentative electric guitar on a song only familiar from Robert Kirby's lavish string arrangement. And best of all were the new songs, ‘Time Of No Reply' and ‘Strange Meeting II' particularly, which were quintessential Nick Drake: reflective with a pervading air of melancholy, wistful and oh-so frail. What elevates the songs is that enduring hallmark of Nick's talent, his undeniable flair for melody. The melodies here flow off the disc and seep into your subconscious. ‘Time Of No Reply' was one of the songs Nick recorded for his Radio 1 session in August 1969, and had been a regular fixture of his infrequent live appearances. The delay in its official appearance is therefore baffling; one can only assume that Nick was unhappy with some aspect of his performance.

‘I Was Made To Love Magic' does not benefit from its polite alternative arrangement, and lyrically, with the attention drawn to the author's tragic solitude in the first verse, it acquires an air of self-pity which is uncharacteristic and unrewarding. Similarly, ‘Clothes Of Sand' adds little lustre to the legend of Nick Drake. The home recording ‘Mayfair' is widely believed to have been inspired by Molly Drake, an homage to her fondness for the sophisticated Mayfair drawing-room songs of Noël Coward and Ivor Novello. Both Rodney and Molly Drake were delighted with
Time Of No Reply
, singling out ‘Clothes Of Sand' and ‘I Was Made To Love Magic' as their favourite tracks.

Time Of No Reply
was intended as the final Nick Drake album, but following the appearance of a 1994 bootleg of Nick's Tanworth home recordings, Joe Boyd was asked by reader Paul Hough in
Mojo
if there were any unreleased Nick Drake songs still to be released: ‘Tricky question,' replied Boyd diplomatically, and went on: ‘Nick
was his own severest editor. The only unreleased songs he tried recording are the ones we put on
Time Of No Reply …
We put these out because they were all songs that Nick decided at some point that he wanted people to hear. But he never considered any of those very early songs … Everything releasable has been released. The family is very upset about the bootleg. It's important to everybody involved that what comes out under Nick's name is up to the same standard as the released material.'

Boyd feels strongly that anything substandard released in the name of Nick Drake does his memory a disservice, but I still asked him the question every fan of Nick's wants to ask: is there anything left in the vaults? ‘Not in the recorded vaults at Island, no. Gabrielle has some home tapes, which we're going to listen to at some point… I'm not interested in the fans who want takes one to a hundred of everything. To me, what you release is what will enhance and expand Nick's reputation, his legacy. That doesn't mean it all has to be perfect. But it has to be
good.
To me, the tracks on
Time Of No Reply
are worth having: there's nothing on there that Nick would be ashamed of. I'm sure he would have hated the idea of it, but it doesn't make people think any less of Nick listening to that album. There are some naive things on it; I cringe when I hear the string arrangement on “I Was Made To Love Magic”. But it's historically interesting, and it's still a beautiful song … The last four songs are essential to understanding Nick.'

In his rooms at Cambridge and at Sound Techniques in London, Robert Kirby sat and watched Nick Drake create his music over a period of nearly five years. Was he aware of anything Nick had recorded that had never been released? ‘All I've got of Nick is this tape of him sitting and playing the guitar for about thirty minutes – the one with the “Things Behind The Sun” lick on it, but I can't find it. It was an old reel-to-reel, and the last time I played it, about fifteen years ago, it was almost ruined then. Sound Techniques closed down, if they've got the eight-tracks, they've just got the eight-tracks of all the albums. Where are all the out-takes? … If someone could find out what happened to all the reels that were upstairs at Sound Techniques, there might well be some out-takes there.'

In the decade which had elapsed since the first compilation,
Heaven In A Wild Flower
, the overwhelming interest in Nick's life and work continued unabated. Joe Boyd had always been unhappy about the sound quality on the vinyl pressing of
Heaven In A Wild Flower
, and
upset that Island had not improved it for the subsequent CD pressing. With the material from
Time Of No Reply
included there were now more than forty songs to play with. It was an irresistible opportunity, and in 1994 Boyd compiled a new collection,
Way To Blue
, as ‘An Introduction To Nick Drake'. Inevitably, though, there was duplication:
Way To Blue
contained ten of
Heaven In A Wild Flower's
tracks.