Nick Drake Read online

  TO SUE, FOR IT ALL

  Contents

  Foreword

  Introduction

  Book I: Before

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Book II: During

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Book III: After

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Discography

  Plate Section

  Acknowledgements

  Foreword

  The idea of writing a book about Nick Drake is one which I resisted for many years, not least because I worried that it might be an unbearably depressing task. Eventually, though, all roads really did lead to Nick Drake, and having pondered the family connection – my uncle was the doctor who brought baby Nick into the world — I began to see a certain symmetry. Perhaps I could discover something about Nick’s life and not just dwell on the last few years leading up to his death.

  While I was researching my biography of Richard Thompson, Nick’s name was mentioned regularly, and I began to think that perhaps the moment had come. When I mentioned the idea to Joe Boyd, while interviewing him about Richard, Nick and Richard’s producer cast his eyes heavenwards, patiently explaining that I was not the first to come to him with this idea and that he was weary of cooperating on projects which never came to fruition. His response was simply: we’ll talk when you’ve got a publishing deal. But publishers are like policemen — there’s never one there when you need one – so it took time. One British publisher rejected the detailed proposal and chapter breakdown, explaining that they didn’t consider there was sufficient market for ‘a book on Nick Cave’.

  By the time I had found a publisher with sufficient faith and vision – a genuine debt of gratitude here to Penny Phillips of Bloomsbury – both Joe and Nick’s sister, Gabrielle Drake, had decided not to cooperate, which meant I was unable to quote from Nick’s lyrics. This did, of course, make my task a less straightforward one, but by that time I had gone too far to turn back.

  Slightly daunted, I went through the journalistic motions with little hope of much success. In the event, I was quite overwhelmed by the response: there seemed to be dozens of people who had known and remembered Nick Drake, simply waiting for someone to ask them about him. New undreamed of angles started to emerge, and a strange, unfamiliar picture of a very different Nick Drake began to develop. Far from being depressing, the project became exciting, even uplifting. The fondness of his schoolfriends for the young Nick was particularly contagious, and I began to feel I had a mission to give this young man his life back.

  Nick’s parents are now dead, but I very much wanted to use their words, not just for the background to his early family life, but because, more than anyone else, they were in a position to shed light on the last few years, when his illness had taken hold. I am therefore indebted to T.J. McGrath for allowing me to use tapes of interviews he conducted with Rodney and Molly Drake in 1985; these gave me the backbone of Nick’s story.

  Joe and Gabrielle have both been interviewed many times and, where necessary, I have drawn on, and acknowledged, these previously published sources; otherwise their quotes come from interviews I conducted with them in 1994 for a magazine piece which never appeared. All other quotes, unless otherwise noted in the text, are taken from the dozens of interviews which I conducted exclusively for this book.

  In the past, myth and rumour have attached themselves like barnacles to Nick Drake. Rock ’n’ roll is notoriously unreliable: session logs have disappeared, corporate take-overs have seen archives vanish, correspondence has been ditched, original press releases shredded. Misquotes and misinformation proliferate. For too long Nick has been the victim of myth-making. In the end, out of twenty-six years, twenty-three were spent by and large happily, either with his family, at school and university, or beginning his recording career. It was only towards the end that, in his mother Molly’s sadly chilling phrase, ‘the shadows closed in’.

  It would have been nice to have some of the story in Nick’s words. As it is, he lives on not only in his music, but in the fond memories of the many whose lives were touched by his, and through them, I hope in this book. This is a life of Nick Drake, in the words of those who knew him. And if that is not enough, there is always, and always will be, the music.

  Patrick Humphries

  London, September 1997

  Introduction

  All morning the crowds seeped from the city centre, a constant stream trickling down to the Lough. The sun was high in the clear blue sky which hung over Belfast that bright spring day. It was a time before television, when cinema was a sideshow novelty and only radio whispered in soft waves across the air. The borders of Europe had remained unchanged, secure in their dynastic stability for centuries; the twentieth century had yet to make its mark on the map.

  The year was 1911. King George V was still a month away from his Coronation and Queen Victoria had been dead for a decade. With her passing, Imperial Glory and absolute monarchy had also gone to the grave. Edward VII had succeeded his mother, and in marked contrast to the widow’s weeds and mournful demeanour which had dominated the past four decades of Victoria’s reign, his ten years on the throne were characterized by vivacity and bright colours.

  Edward’s funeral, in 1910, was to be the final occasion when all the crowned heads gathered. Men who held unquestioned power over the lives of untold millions in Russia, Austria-Hungary, Germany and France stood together, heads bowed, as the corpulent King was wheeled past. There had not been a land war in Europe since Great Britain had battled Russia in the Crimea over half a century earlier.

  The first years of the twentieth century had ushered in a new era: an exciting time of flying machines and moving pictures and confidence that man — for it was still a masculine world — could harness and control the forces of nature.

  In 1911 seven out of every ten tons of shipping which sailed through the Suez Canal were British. Gandhi was still practising law in South Africa; Stalin languished in a Tsarist prison; and Hitler was eking out a living as an artist in Vienna. For the majority of subjects of the British Empire, place-names such as the Somme, Auschwitz and Hiroshima were as yet unknown. It was the calm before the storm.

  In Belfast — home of the massive shipyards which build the ships which sail the seas which bind the Empire together — the White Star Line has commissioned shipbuilders Harland & Wolff to construct the largest ship in maritime history. But the vessel the crowds flock to see launched will never sail through the Suez Canal, will never leave the Atlantic. RMS Titanic will never know safe harbour.

  The ship which began life as an enormous metal skeleton, its massive bare bones welded together like something unimaginable and Jurassic, looms like a cathedral of steel over the city which witnessed its birth pangs. It will be a symbol of the pre-eminence of Empire, the pre-eminence of man. Following Blériot’s conquest of the air only two years before, this floating palace will banish any vestiges of uncertainty. The White Star Line boasts that the Titanic demonstrates ‘the pre-eminence of the Anglo-Saxon race in command of the seas …’ and pays ‘eloquent testimony to the progress of mankind and the conquest of mind over matter’.

  It will take just sixty-two seconds, on the morning of 31 May 1911, for the 46,328-ton, 852-foot-long steamship to crash down the slipway and out into Belfast Lough. But before she is read
y to undertake her maiden voyage there must follow nearly a year of fitting out and lengthy sea trials. At last, as she sails out of Southampton on 10 April 1912, she is deemed ‘unsinkable’. With a crew of 885 and 1316 passengers on board, she sets out across the Atlantic. Riding with her are all the hopes of the world.

  Cleaving through the chill Atlantic waters, Titanic is the visible conqueror of the last frontier, for her arrival in New York is set to herald a whole new era of unparalleled luxury travel and speedy communication between England and America.

  At 11.40p.m. on the night of 14 April 1912, eleven storeys above the ship’s deck, lookout Frederick Fleet calls down with the warning of an iceberg. Down below, first-class passengers have dined on oysters, consommé, salmon mousse, filet mignon, roast duck, roast squab, asparagus vinaigrette, Waldorf pudding and French ice-cream. The ladies have retired and the gentlemen are finishing their cigars and brandy in the lushly appointed smoking room on the promenade deck.

  Just before midnight four stewards sitting gossiping on Deck D notice the silver set out for breakfast rattle slightly, but the steady rhythm of the Titanic’s four mighty engines resumes, and she sails on. Below decks Mrs J. Stuart White, about to turn off her light, feels the ship appear to ‘roll over a thousand marbles’. Others hear what they later describe as a distant ripping sound, ‘like someone tearing a long, long strip of calico’.

  Those still out on deck see what looks like a ship closing in, its sails full open; but none of them doubts that it is too far north for sailing vessels to be abroad on the chill Arctic waters. As the majority of passengers sleep on, the iceberg which looms over a hundred feet above the Titanic’s deck yet seems set to pass by harmlessly on the starboard side, slices a 300-foot gash in the liner. Within four hours the world’s greatest liner has slipped beneath the surface of the ocean and into legend.

  The shock of the disaster, as well as its swiftness and the scale of losses, lent the sinking of the Titanic mythic significance. She had been heralded as unsinkable – the ship which would link the proud achievements of Empire with the opportunities offered by the new world; but now all such hopes had been dashed. In accordance with Board of Trade regulations, the Titanic carried twenty lifeboats to accommodate 1178 persons. On her maiden voyage she had carried over two thousand passengers and crew.

  In all, the loss of the Titanic claimed 1500 lives. Barely two years later the First World War had gutted Europe, and households in Belfast and London had become accustomed to reading over breakfast of casualties on a similar scale, losses sustained in a matter of hours on the Western Front.

  It is hard to imagine how the sinking of the Titanic could have been any more portentous. The pride of the British merchant fleet, lost on its maiden voyage, sinking in the icy isolation of the Arctic night, beneath a still, moon-filled sky. It was as if a five-star hotel had been plucked from Mayfair, all its lights blazing, and up-ended, foyer first, into the freezing ocean. But by all accounts there was no panic as she began to descend. Passengers roused to gather on the boat decks only began to appreciate the enormity of the situation as the Arctic frost bit into their sleepy fug.

  The band did play on, but memories vary as to what was played. The precious few lifeboats were lowered to the accompaniment of ragtime music; as they pulled away from the sinking ship ‘Nearer My God To Thee’ floated across the silent night; and as the boat deck finally sank from sight, survivors heard the Episcopalian hymn ‘Autumn’.

  On that frosty spring night, high up on the northern extremities of the map, an era slowly and symbolically passed away. The massive ship, nearly twice the height of the Great Pyramid, had taken years to emerge into life but only hours to slip beneath the North Atlantic. The electric lights were soon extinguished as the waters flooded over them, and the pitiful complement of lifeboats, lit only by moonlight, were left bobbing, uncertain and alone, on the vast, silent, empty ocean.

  During 1995 the Royal Naval College at Greenwich hosted an exhibition about Dr Robert Ballard’s expedition which had discovered the wreck of the Titanic in 1985. Among the artefacts which had haemorrhaged from the ship there were surprisingly few monogrammed ‘Titanic’. Tableware and cutlery – expected to serve for any of the company’s vessels – were stamped simply with the more prosaic ‘White Star’. But the knowledge that these items had been salvaged from the seabed, having lain four miles below the waves, undisturbed for more than eighty years, set off a shiver from across the decades.

  The Titanic’s bell had survived and been found, the one which Frederick Fleet had rung from his crow’s-nest on that doomed night. And there it was, safe now in its glass case, brought up from the depths, shined and secure for all eternity. Even at the end of a century grown old and weary with larger and more inconceivable tragedies, the impact of the Titanic’s loss still resonates.

  There remains something quaintly romantic and chillingly symbolic about the loss of the Titanic. No disaster was ever better equipped to sail into myth than that ship’s demise, and it haunts us still. I think of it again each time I think of my late uncle, James Wallace Lusk. My mother’s older brother, Uncle Jim was a doctor, and when she was very ill he sat and wrote a memoir of their lives together. Jim and Hester grew up, along with their brother Ian and sisters Peggy and Madeline, the children of John Brown Lusk, a minister of the Glasear Presbyterian Church for forty years when he died in 1939.

  Among the memoir’s closely typed pages are photographs of the faces my mother and uncle had known as children. They are unmistakably from another time, faces with more in common with the distant, dusty world of the young Queen, Victoria, and of Tennyson, than the era of Edward VII and Rupert Brooke into which my mother and uncle were born. I remember my Aunt Madeline talking, before she too was taken, of an abiding memory she shared with her brother Jim; and sure enough, there it was in his memoir:

  ‘The Titanic had been launched from Harland & Wolff’s yard in Belfast… Aunt Isabel was housekeeper to Lord Pirrie, the chairman of the firm, and got us tickets for the launch and I saw the great Titanic slide into Belfast Lough dragging huge piles of enormous chains to slow her entry into the water. I also remember seeing Lady Pirrie clad in long silken robes and an enormous feather boa, cleaving her way through the crowds like one of her husband’s liners.’

  So there he was, my Uncle Jim, on the day the Titanic inched into the water. Half a lifetime later, and far from Belfast Lough, Uncle Jim was to touch on my life again. For James Wallace Lusk was the doctor who delivered Nick Drake into the world …

  The only conversation I can remember having with Uncle Jim about music concerned his high opinion of Val Doonican’s talents as a singer. Music – rock ‘n’ roll music – wasn’t something that you talked to your uncle about. And though his music is soft and gentle, acoustic and folk-oriented, Nick Drake is rock ’n’ roll. That is something my uncle might have had a problem with. His was a life formed by a childhood in rural Ireland during the adolescent years of this century, far removed from the neon chaos of London and the music industry.

  On returning from Burma after the war, Uncle Jim became a GP in Weymouth in Dorset, and spent much of his spare time fashioning a book – A Fresh Look At The Brontës And Their Ancestors In Ireland. Brontë biographer Phyllis Bentley described the fiction of the sisters as ‘a Yorkshire tune played on an Irish harp’. But it was a book by Dr William Wright, The Brontës In Ireland, published in 1893, which first revealed the extent to which the Irish ancestry of the novelists played a role in the creation of their fiction.

  Delving further into the Brontë background in Northern Ireland, Uncle Jim unearthed strange patterns of behaviour in the Brontë family over three generations. These discoveries, and his comments as the doctor who knew Nick Drake as a small boy, may perhaps have some bearing on Nick’s short, sad life: ‘The causes of mental disturbances are usually multiple,’ wrote my uncle, ‘and in addition, the patient reacts to his own disturbance in his own way. One also may think of the patient s
uffering from society, and society may suffer from the patient.’

  Journeys into the mind are now commonplace, but at the time Uncle Jim began his medical studies Freud had yet to enter the mainstream. His world, and that of Nick’s father, Rodney Drake, sprang from a sense of tradition and moral certainty: a belief in the right of Empire and the duty of the British to serve that Empire. For men born as the twentieth century turned, there was little doubt and few questions.

  In a letter written a few years before he died, my uncle asked me if I knew the work of a singer called Nicholas Drake; remembering the conversation about Val Doonican, I was relieved that I didn’t. But he wrote again about this singer when a record called Fruit Tree was released, and it was then that the connection was made. A connection between a man born into the strict sepia world of an Edwardian manse and a lost child of more uncertain times.

  Thanks to my uncle, James Wallace Lusk, there is a long unbroken link from the launching of the Titanic to the life of Nick Drake – a life begun in a Burmese hospital and ended in a quiet Warwickshire village.

  The gravestone lies beneath an oak tree, just off the path which leads from the church to a gate into the open fields surrounding the village of Tanworth-in-Arden. The churchyard overlooks a curl of hill, the clipped fields sweeping into woods beyond. The horizon is topped by trees, and then dips down towards Danzey Green and Pig Trot Lane. The canvas-coloured headstone is weathered and worn, the inscription faded and, after little more than twenty years, surprisingly hard to read. But edging close and squinting, you can discern the epitaph: ‘Nick Drake, 1948-1974. Remembered with love.’

  The passing years have seen Nick joined by his father Rodney (1908-1988) and his mother Molly (1915-1993). To the casual visitor, the Drakes’ grave is simply another family plot, bordered by those of the Winwood family, of Mary Kathleen Whitehouse, the Tibbies family and Edward Rogers. There is something strangely comforting and consoling about a stroll around an ancient English country churchyard in the sunshine. There is some of Philip Larkin’s ‘awkward reverence’, but there is also history in every square foot of turf.