Nick Drake Read online

Set amid the rolling Downs in the lush and still rural county of Wiltshire, Marlborough was another idyllic backwater. With a population of barely over 6000 in Nick’s day, the town was quiet and untroubled. But by the middle of the 1960s, and to the delight of its schoolboy inhabitants, a mere three hours away, down in London, things were beginning to get seriously swinging.

  At the school itself, Dennis Silk recalls, ‘We used to have a House Dance with a local girls’ school, the usual sort of cattle market, and I can remember one such occasion. It went like a dream. It was about 1964, when the House was still biddable, and we were still in charge. We had this dance, and ensured that no girls were hurt by being left on the side, and programmed dances, and every boy had to dance with every other girl at some stage of the evening. I can remember … lovely quiet music, “Sleepy Lagoon” and things like that, and my wife giving them dancing classes before.

  ‘A year later, the dispensation had changed, and against my better judgement, allowed electronic music. No one could speak to anyone at all, the records were so loud … The whole atmosphere of the House had changed, and we were no longer in control, we were swept away by this amazing new liberating thing.’

  The public-school ethos hardly lent itself to the dropped aitch rowdiness and two-fingered rebellion of rock ’n’ roll. Public-school rock ’n’ rollers are at best a footnote to any rock encyclopaedia: Genesis first convened in the hallowed halls of Charterhouse, the school which would later offer house room to World Party’s Karl Wallinger. Harrow played host to Island’s Chris Blackwell; Peter & Gordon and Shane MacGowan attended Westminster; Roxy Music’s Phil Manzanera and This Heat’s Charles Hayward studied at Dulwich College; Kula Shaker’s Crispian Mills was at Stowe. But in general there wasn’t much room for the hoity-toity in the hurly-burly of rock ’n’ roll.

  The Beatles had rewritten the rule book. Far from trying to hide their provincial origins, they revelled in them, and theirs were the first defiantly regional accents to be heard regularly on the upper-crust BBC airwaves. One of The Beatles’ oddest gigs was at Stowe. At the height of Beatlemania in 1963, following a request from a pupil, the Fabs played to a sedate, seated audience of public schoolboys. But The Beatles soon came to embody the new classlessness of the sixties: suddenly it didn’t matter where you were from – only what you did. Cockney photographers and pop stars became the new aristocrats.

  Jeremy Mason was Nick’s closest friend during his early days at Marlborough. The friendship was forged over cigarettes, and as the two teenagers puffed away on Disque Bleu in ‘smoking holes’ dotted around the college, the conversation invariably turned to the music they both liked: ‘At that time, Nick played the saxophone and the clarinet. The alto sax I think it was … Which meant that a lot of the music we liked early on was definitely sax-based: One of the records we liked was called Giant Steps by John Coltrane … But I remember going to listen to a John Coltrane record with Nick at Liverpool Street Station, which must have been on the way back to school. I think it was called Ascension, which was one complete barrage of sound, and we rather lost interest.’

  Michael Maclaran also remembered music always being a priority for Nick: ‘We spent hours in common rooms and studies listening to records (45s were 6/6d) and the Top 20 on Sunday afternoons.’

  With no television in the House in Nick’s time, and Film Society shows limited to a couple each term, pop music was all-important. Nick’s housemaster, Dennis Silk, couldn’t help but notice the intrusion of pop music in his house: ‘It was as much as your life was worth not to know what was in the Top 20. You lost face terribly.’

  Cigarettes behind the bike sheds and listening to pop records were crucial, but the public-school tradition of team sports was also an integral part of Nick’s life at Marlborough. David Wright recalls that once on the sports field, Nick was an enthusiastic participant: ‘One thing Nick was very good at was running, he was very quick. While I was playing cricket, which he wasn’t remotely interested in, he was on the athletics track. He was a very quick 100-yarder. And he used to play rugby, on the wing, because he was quick.’

  Cricket has became irrevocably associated with the English public school, but the ponderous process of a cricket match held little allure for Nick. He would sprint in track events or tear off alone on the wing of the house rugby team, and on occasion he could even be found on the hockey field; but, perhaps surprisingly, cricket never appealed to him.

  ‘In the summers we used to meet on the athletics track for training and for competitions against other schools,’ Michael Maclaran recalled. ‘No one liked to admit to having to train – it was assumed that natural talent would get you through. But Nick had good motivation and a competitive streak and achieved great success in sprinting, with his long stride, high knee action and powerful build.

  ‘Rugby was the main winter game, but I turned to hockey after some rugby injuries and often played with Nick for Marlborough Second XI. I think Nick played centre half, which was a key position, and he could hit the ball hard and well. He may well have been captain, because he had leadership qualities in a persuasive rather than dictatorial way, as well as talent.’

  Confounding the familiar image of Nick Drake as a withdrawn and virtually catatonic individual, Michael Maclaran’s recollection of his ‘good motivation’ and ‘competitive streak’ paints the very different picture of a vigorous, even ambitious teenager.

  Nick’s days at Marlborough were, by and large, happy ones. A bona fide rock ’n’ roll rebel may have rejected the rowdy rugby field and striving for victory on the athletics track, but although he was shy and fairly quiet, Nick’s instinctive sporting abilities enabled him to fit in quite happily. It was over short distances that Nick really excelled; not for him the sustained endurance of the marathon, rather the quick-burn glory of the sprint.

  Dennis Silk: ‘He was a very distinguished sprinter. He played on the wing, away from the hurly-burly. It meant very little to him that he was a super athlete. He could have done anything athletically. He was very well made, tall — very tall, as a teenager about six foot two – strong, very quick. When he caught the rugger ball, he could run round the opposition. Dreaming a bit, he sometimes dropped it … He played rugger, I suppose you would say, apologetically.

  ‘Nick was a very poor cricketer, a joke cricketer. He found cricket rather amusing, but it would be six or out. He played in gym shoes rather than cricket boots. He was quite a good hockey player, and of course, Marlborough was the outstanding hockey school, and he played in the school team, as he did in the rugger side. But his real forte was sprinting. He was rather a stately sprinter. Very upright, not leaning at forty-five degrees … upright, and like a ship in full sail.’

  As a member of C1 House, Nick was a member of the winning Senior team in the school’s summer 1965 relay race. He also set a school record for the 100-yard dash which remained unbeaten for some years. The school magazine noted that: ‘In the Open Team, N.R. Drake is developing into a very useful performer over 100 and 220 yards.’ The same account of athletics activities at Marlborough noted that M.A.P. Phillips, Captain of Athletics, had achieved a long jump in excess of twenty-two feet, before concluding: ‘N.R. Drake has been awarded his colours.’ Seven years later Nick’s exact contemporary, Captain Mark Phillips, would marry HRH Princess Anne.

  Photographs of Nick during his years at Marlborough show a chubby-faced teenager, smiling – shyly but photogenically – at the camera. Invariably he is part of a group: whether displaying a rugged pair of knees in the 1964 photo of ‘C1 Cock House Upper League Rugby Team’ or, the following year, celebrating victory in both the ‘House Shout’ (a unison singing contest) and the Junior and Senior Relay Races. The N.R. Drake that stares at you from these photographs is no different from the boys around him, except that his rugby kit is noticeably cleaner. He sports a Beatle cut, the fringe of his thick, straight hair almost reaching his eyebrows, but in deference to school regulations, the back and sides are well clear of his collar
.

  He looks chubbier here than in the later, more familiar photographs, and a half smile is evident on the head emerging from the striped rugby shirt. We are so used to the image of Nick as a haunted and doomed figure, stalking the pop landscape of the early 1970s, that there is real shock value in these school photos. The face is recognizably his; the strangeness comes from seeing Nick in company, relaxed, smiling – in the mainstream of life and apparently enjoying it. In the later pictures Nick was always alone.

  The year after Nick went to Marlborough, I followed my father and uncle by attending Dulwich College. Trying to pull together the strands of Nick’s life, I found myself drawn back, rather reluctantly, to those public-school days. I was several years younger than Nick when I started, but lucky enough – and close enough – to be able to continue living at home. The similarities, though, were legion: the ritual formality of posed team photographs; the rigid etiquette of the school magazine; the dogged determination to preserve cherished traditions; the absolute refusal to concede that the world outside was changing.

  Over the years I had grown familiar with the tales told of Nick by fellow-musicians and record company types, but talking to his schoolfriends for the first time, it seemed to me that they had known a quite different Nick. Musicians always admire Nick; they are often in awe of him and frequently perplexed by how he did what he did and who he really was. But listening to Old Marlburians talking, what struck me time after time was the warmth and genuine affection they had felt for him long before he was famous, or doomed.

  Perhaps that old chestnut about the child being father to the man is more than usually valid when considering the life of someone who died so early. Nick survived only eight years after leaving Marlborough, and much of that time he was in the grip of an illness which all but blanked out his true self. Tempting though it is to blame the insensitivity of the archaic public-school system, or the trauma of being sent away from home at such an early age, for his eventual fate, all the evidence suggests that, for Nick, his schooldays really were the happiest days of his life.

  The Officer Training Corps met weekly to drill Marlborough’s young officers in the making. War Games were played, parades undertaken, and the habit of accepting and obeying orders was hammered into the teenagers as they marched around the parade-ground in musty uniforms. Simon Crocker was in the Corps band with Nick and remembers them both hating it: ‘We managed to get out by going on a conservation detail at an old building called the Mount House in Marlborough. There were four of us, and we had to repaint it every year. They were the funniest afternoons … I just remember us spending the whole time laughing …’

  Marlborough had suffered terribly during the First World War, losing more old boys than any public school except Eton. Between 1914 and 1918, 733 boys were lost, most barely out of their teens. Fresh-faced subalterns, straight from public schools like Marlborough, were hewn down in their thousands by German machine-guns during the Great War. The life of a Second Lieutenant on active service on the Western Front was estimated at a mere two weeks. Peter Parker’s The Old Lie quotes old Marlburian G.A.N. Lowndes reflecting that early in 1915: ‘It was uncanny to look across Chapel to the back row opposite and realise that within six months probably half the boys there would be dead.’

  The unflinching public-school code of honour fuelled the patriotic zeal which swept the nation during the summer of 1914. One of the first to enlist at the outbreak of the war was the poet and old Marlburian Siegfried Sassoon, though he would later come to question its inevitability. Sassoon’s education mirrored that of Nick Drake — Marlborough and Cambridge — and Nick’s housemaster, Dennis Silk, was a friend of Sassoon’s and an expert on his work.

  Another old Marlburian poet who died in the conflict was Charles Sorley. Barely twenty when he was killed in 1915, his only collection, Marlborough And Other Poems, was published posthumously. The old school was the only life the teenager knew when he enlisted in 1914, but soon he had discovered another, more brutal, existence:

  When you see millions of the mouthless dead,

  Across your dreams in pale battalions go …

  Sorley’s was a short life, and only the poems he left behind distinguish him from the countless others who foundered in the Flanders mud.

  Though as distant as the Hundred Years War to the generations who have grown up with McDonald’s and the Internet, the First World War cast a shadow over the twentieth century which was long and searing. Such was the scale of the slaughter that death reached in and touched every community. Visiting Nick’s birthplace, I paused by Tanworth’s War Memorial, to find inscribed nearly forty names of men from that one village and its surrounding fields who fell in the Great War. Think of the losses in that tiny Warwickshire village, and in all the other hamlets which linked up to form the nation in the early days of this century, and consider the waste.

  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 …’