Nick Drake (6 page)

Siegfried Sassoon's near contemporary, the poet and soldier Wilfred Owen, targeted the public-school lies which he believed had led thousands of the brightest and the best to their deaths on the battlefields of France:

My friend, you would not tell with such high zest

To children ardent for some desperate glory,

The old lie: dulce et decorum est

Pro patria mori.

Born in Shropshire, and killed at the age of twenty-five, just seven days before the Armistice of 11 November 1918, Owen is celebrated now as one of the key poets of the early twentieth century. The association with ‘doomed youth' inevitably draws comparisons with Nick Drake, especially as Owen's work was likewise only really appreciated posthumously. Indeed, in a 1992 assessment of Nick for
Record Collector
, Chas Keep noted that Nick's original song, ‘Strange Meeting II' took its title from Owen's poem ‘Strange Meeting'.

While at Marlborough, Nick divided his spare time between the athletics field and his growing interest in music. At this stage his musical tastes were very catholic, as Jeremy Mason pointed out: ‘He very much liked The Graham Bond Organisation. He loved “St James Infirmary” – there was a very good sax line in it… But the record he really liked, and we played it absolutely into the ground, was
The Sounds Of '65
by The Graham Bond Organisation. This was
the
record, followed by Zoot Money & The Big Roll Band.'

Perhaps less surprisingly, Jeremy remembers Nick loving Odetta: ‘ “Auction Block” was his favourite. I knew none of these people, but another record we adored was Miles Davis's
Kind Of Blue.
Charlie Parker we liked. John Hammond we both liked: the one with him sitting on a motorbike. We thought he was pretty cool. We also
bought a Segovia record together. Jimmy Smith was a great favourite of his. “Green Onions” by Booker T. & The M.G.'s he liked. We rather fancied Astrud Gilberto too, as I recall.'

Besides the popular Top 20 favourites which came courtesy of the pirate stations Radio Caroline and Radio London, Jeremy Mason explained how Nick began to develop an interest in the burgeoning folk, blues and R&B scenes: ‘What people don't understand nowadays is that there seemed to be room to accommodate almost everything. At that time I had a passion for Jim Reeves at the same time as Bob Dylan – can you imagine? Old Jim was frowned upon at the time, but I had fourteen LPs of his! Nick was particularly keen on that Dylan album with the line “She wears an Egyptian ring …”, Nick loved that –
Bringing It All Back Home.'

Nick's growing interest in listening to records was accompanied by the desire to play music for himself. This interest soon grew into an obsession, and the ability to play an instrument — any instrument – was swift and instinctive. As well as the guitar, during his time at Marlborough Nick learnt the clarinet and alto saxophone. David Wright only remembers Nick playing the guitar towards the end of their schooldays: ‘I presume he must have started music lessons on the piano, got bored, and taken up the clarinet when he was fourteen or fifteen. The clarinet was his instrument … Then, deciding, I imagine, that the clarinet wasn't very hip – it was all a bit Acker Bilk and “Stranger On The Shore” — he took up the sax.'

As well as the mainly classical pieces Nick played during his clarinet lessons, there were occasional forays into jazz; in particular, friends recall his fondness for Stan Getz's ‘Desafinado'. Dennis Silk remembers that whenever jazz musicians came to play at the school, Nick was always there. However, an account in
The Marlburian
during the Lent term of 1966 was rather less relaxed about modern trends in music than Nick's erstwhile housemaster.

‘Every week of every term, Marlborough's 6 resident and 13 visiting music teachers instruct 115 pianists, 16 organists, 3 singers, 13 students of harmony, 26 violinists, 3 violists, 13 cellists, 5 double-bass players, 18 flautists, 10 oboists, 4 bassoonists, 30 clarinettists, 8 horn-players, 15 trumpeters, 7 trombonists, 6 tuba players, 4 saxophonists, 3 euphonium players and 30 guitarists (330 in all). These numbers have changed surprisingly little over the years and the only interesting (or ominous?) change in recent years is that there are some thirty fewer pianists and thirty more guitarists, some of whom are tempted to attach amplifiers and speakers to their
“machines” in order to convey their message without ambiguity to those who are hard of hearing.'

Written in the year that The Beatles released
Revolver
, The Rolling Stones
Aftermath
, and Bob Dylan
Blonde On Blonde
, the report adds: ‘We are forced to the conclusion that boys are disinclined to listen to all but the most trivial music'. For ‘trivial', read ‘pop'. Within two years Nick Drake would himself be entering a recording studio for the first time.

Meanwhile he continued happily at Marlborough, remaining on good terms with the staff and the institution. Dennis Silk was aware that Nick kept in close contact with his parents too: ‘He was obviously the centre of a very loving family. I don't know what they made of the pop music … but they must have worried. Father was very conventional, a delightful businessman, who adored his son. And the son adored him … They worshipped the ground Nick walked on, without spoiling him, and Nick adored them. So it wasn't a sort of rebellious youth giving hell to his parents …'

There were some rebellions, of course, but they were small, one might even say traditional. The days at Marlborough were familiarly mundane, and like most of his fellow-pupils, Nick leavened the dismal round of lessons and sports with sporadic interruptions for illicit pleasures. The most popular of these, back in the innocent mid-sixties, were cigarettes, puffed in quiet corners, and trips to the tearoom known as the Polly. David Wright recalls that, for the strong of heart, there was also the occasional jaunt to a town pub: ‘Nick liked his ale. After lunch a bunch of half a dozen of us would go off to this pub in Marlborough, the Lamb, which had a sympathetic landlord, where you could go into the back bar, and scarper if someone came in the front.'

Jeremy Mason too has fond memories of Marlborough watering-holes: ‘Almost every day after lunch, Nick and I used to go to a splendid place down the High Street, which had a bay window, so we could see if anyone was coming. And we'd sit there for our afternoon fag, smoking our Disque Bleu cigarettes. Saturday evenings we'd go drinking at a pub that's no longer there, called the Cricketers. The Buffalos had a room there — they were a bit like the Freemasons — and had this room, done up like a courtroom. It really was the most extraordinary place to begin your drinking career.'

The four and a half years Nick Drake spent at Marlborough were remarkable only for their ordinariness, and for their similarity to the schooldays of previous generations of British upper-middle-class
males. The changes which were shaking the walls of cities outside, had as yet, left Marlborough largely untouched. But by 1965 the foundations were beginning to shake, largely due to the beat of Vox amplifiers and Rickenbacker guitars.

‘We weren't rebels, that would give us too much credit,' admitted Arthur Packard, a Housemate of Nick's from C1. ‘But we were interested in smoking cigarettes, John Player's – not marijuana — and nipping out for a drink, just a pint, at one of the local pubs. I suppose it was our attempt at a quiet revolution, not like the US campuses. We were slightly iconoclastic listening to Rolling Stones records, trying to grow one's hair slightly over the collar, sporting Chelsea boots, stuff like that.'

In January 1962, when Nick first entered Marlborough, The Beatles were a buzzing beat group, popular only in Hamburg nightclubs and Liverpool cellars; The Rolling Stones were still lolling around in their legendarily squalid flat in London's Edith Grove; and Bob Dylan was a chubby-faced kid who had barely begun writing his own songs. By the time he left the school in July 1966, the world had turned upside down: The Beatles were finishing their days as a touring band; The Stones had copyrighted snotty rebelliousness; and Dylan was reinvented as an electric Messiah.

It was a turbulent world where traditional values were being overthrown and institutions were foundering, but long on into the sixties the public schools remained little changed. Old Etonian Prime Minister Harold Macmillan watched his government brought down in the aftermath of the Profumo Affair in 1964; but the militant Schools' Action Union, the corrosive undermining of Lindsay Anderson's film
If
, the challenging of the established order by angry students — all this would wait until 1968, the year of revolution, by which time Nick Drake was long gone.

His contemporaries at Marlborough paint an achingly normal picture of the schoolboy Nick. Shy certainly, retiring even; but the monosyllabic, almost catatonic figure of those final years, hunched on a Hampstead bench, strikes no chord with those who shared their formative teenage years with the boy from C1 house who had a penchant for French cigarettes, sprinting and Bob Dylan.

‘You didn't think about the future then,' Simon Crocker recalls. ‘You hardly thought about your bloody exams … You presumed you were going to go: school, university … and then there'd be something.'

Marlborough, like every other school in the sixties, was seething with spotty rock 'n' roll bands. The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, The Animals, The Searchers, The Yardbirds had kicked the door open, and in their wake came Marlborough's answer: Sex, Love
&
Society, Les Blues en Noir, The Four Squares – and, featuring Nick Drake on saxophone, clarinet and piano, The Perfumed Gardeners! Simon Crocker was a fellow Perfumed Gardener: ‘The members that I can remember were Mike Maclaran, who played bass; me on drums and harmonica; Randal Keynes, who was the grandson of Maynard Keynes the economist – I think he played guitar and sax. He was the guy who introduced us all to Bob Dylan. A guy called Mike … on trombone. Nick played clarinet, saxophone and piano.'

The various Marlborough pop ensembles were always on the lookout for opportunities to perform, whether to assembled pupils and staff after a film show, in the gym, or as part of end-of-term celebrations. David Wright remembers playing bass on one such occasion, in a five-piece band featuring Nick on saxophone: ‘We played in the Memorial Hall – Muddy Waters' “Hoochie Coochie Man” and “Little Red Rooster”, Howlin' Wolf's “Smokestack Lightning”. I do remember us doing “Gonna Send You Back To Walker”, which was an old Animals B-side, any twelve-bar blues you can name. Our pedigree was The Yardbirds, The Stones.'

Simon Crocker also recalls playing Marlborough gigs with Nick: ‘The thing was that Nick was absolutely the musical director. There was a bunch of us together, but Nick was the musical centre. He
played very good piano, very good sax and clarinet. Guitar was not the big instrument then … We all agreed on numbers, but Nick arranged them. Nick didn't want to sing … but the truth was, he was the only one of us who could sing in tune. So he was kind of forced into that leader-of-the-band role.

‘Basically we took Pye International singles, Yardbirds albums, Manfred Mann, Cliff Bennett & The Rebel Rousers, and copied all that… The line-up did fluctuate, but the largest version of the band we had was about eight people – saxes, trombone – and we did the most amazing version of “St James Infirmary”. That is the one tune I remember us blowing the walls out, and everyone was amazed, because normally at school there were four people playing popular little tunes, and suddenly we had an eight-piece playing a really gutsy “St James Infirmary”.'

Jeremy Mason tells of a concert Nick played in the school hall during their last term: ‘He had a cold, I remember, and he suddenly put down the saxophone and went over to the piano, and on his own played a thing called “Parchman Farm”, and it was an absolute
tour de force.'
Written by Mose Allison, the song was inspired by the Mississippi State Prison, where Elvis Presley's father, Vernon, had spent nine months in the late 1930s for forging a cheque. Nick was probably familiar with the 1966 recording made by Eric Clapton while he was still with John Mayall, but there were also covers by Georgie Fame, The Nashville Teens and Bukka White.

Beyond Marlborough's walls the new pop royalty was making its mark, while within, competition for places in the various school groups became fierce. Simon Crocker secured a gig with one group ‘because I was one of only two kids at school who played the drums'. As with any group, though, from The Rolling Stones to Oasis, internal dynamics were as important as the music, and not all the Marlborough bands were fashioned in complete harmony. Simon remembers one such power-play: ‘Chris De Burgh, or Chris Davison as he was known at school, was a year behind us, and the thing I remember about him is that he was small and he had a big guitar. He was very keen, always wanting to join in, and rather cruelly we never let him because Nick felt that … he was a bit too poppy, that he wasn't quite right for the image of the band. I'm not surprised he's done well – he was very good – but I remember him as being quite pushy, and Nick wasn't pushy at all and he didn't like pushy people.'

Jeremy Mason too was aware of De Burgh ‘always being turned away from all the school groups because he was too short'; but he has
a final school memory ‘of Nick Drake and Chris De Burgh on the same stage together, singing the old boys' song'.

Adept as Nick was on clarinet, saxophone and piano, he soon realized that if you were going anywhere in 1965 you had to get there on guitar. While still at Marlborough he splashed out £13 on an acoustic guitar, and with the help of David Wright, patiently added another instrument to his musical CV. ‘He decided he was going to learn the guitar …' David recalls. ‘I remember sitting down and teaching Nick C, A minor, F and G7th on the guitar … A few days later he was better at it than I was. He was a proper musician. He played by ear, and he was good.'