Nick Drake Read online

  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.’

  Chapter 3

  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 acous
tic 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.’

  Already aware that his young charge ‘was in love with music’, Dennis Silk realized that all the music teachers were longing for him to play in the orchestra: ‘Nick didn’t want to disappoint them, and of course he was pretty keen on all music, but he was obviously gripped by the new music … You’d find him in his study sometimes, strumming away at his guitar.’

  Jeremy Mason spent a lot of time with Nick at school and acknowledges that he was somewhat thoughtful, but he saw no sign of the isolation or crippling introspection which would kick in later: ‘I can remember a couple of occasions when we’d go off on long walks — all motivated, I’m sure, by smoking cigarettes — along a railway line, where we got fairly intense. He was totally and utterly … ordinary. There was no manifestation, except this deep interest in music and slightly off-beat music … Dylan, who we both adored, was obviously another link.’

  One of the strongest impressions Simon Crocker retains is of Nick’s unassuming nature: ‘I don’t ever remember Nick contributing to the school magazine or anything. The thing about Nick was that he never pushed himself forward. He wanted to be in the background. He didn’t want to be in the limelight. It wasn’t that he was lazy, he was very industrious. But I think if myself and others hadn’t hustled a band together, got the hall, got the equipment, made sure everyone got out of bed, it wouldn’t have worried him …’ Getting out of bed was a vital discipline because rock rehearsals, being rather frowned upon by the school authorities, were conducted very early in the morning in the Memorial Hall, in the hope that anyone who might object would still be in bed.

  It seems strange that Nick didn’t contribute to the school magazine, or indeed write anything much of his own at this stage, but perhaps this too can be put down to his natural diffidence. Dennis Silk remembers the odd poem, but nothing more substantial: ‘He loved his English. He wrote poems from time to time, but I never saw one published… In his first year of specialization as an historian and classicist, I taught him and occasionally they would write a piece of poetry … I wish I’d hung on to them.’

  Arthur Packard also sensed a deep modesty, but took it as an indication that Nick was ‘probably a lot more mature than the rest of us … Thinking back on him, that expression “still waters run deep” seems to describe Nick. He was funny, slightly zany, but underneath that you sensed deep thoughts.’

  Cloistered in school dormitories and studies at Marlborough, ears pressed to transistor radios, the boys were tantalized by the sounds crackling across the airwaves during the earth-shaking year of 1965. It was the year the establishment acknowledged The Beatles, when Prime Minister Harold Wilson, who modelled his style on the youthful vigour of the late President Kennedy, made The Beatles Members of the British Empire. It was also the year that the group began to really think about making an album, rather than a string of singles. Released in time for Christmas 1965, Rubber Soul marked the first step away from simple love songs, particularly now that John was contributing material like ‘Norwegian Wood’, ‘Nowhere Man’ and ‘In My Life’.

  Rock historians have earmarked 1967 as the moment when it all began to change, but I would submit 1965 as the year which laid the foundations for a durable rock ’n’ roll culture. This was when Dylan kicked the stool away and hung folk music by going electric on Bringing It All Back Home and Highway 61 Revisited. The Rolling Stones, The Who, Simon & Garfunkel, The Kinks, Manfred Mann, The Byrds, The Animals, The Small Faces and The Yardbirds were taking pop in a new and exciting direction. Phil Spector excelled himself with the Wagnerian ‘You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feeling’; Berry Gordy’s Tamla Motown label was producing a seamless sequence of hit records; and politics and pop were beginning to fuse together.

  Nick was seventeen, and clearly aware of the changes which were taking place, changes which were not just being felt in music, but in fashion and film too. London was leading the world. Jean Shrimpton shocked first Australia, then the world, by wearing the world’s first miniskirt, while David Bailey created the prototype of the classless cockney photographer. In the cinema, the old stars were being swept aside by the iconic Julie Christie, Tom Courtenay and Albert Finney; while the films themselves started to tackle issues like abortion, infidelity and homosexuality with a frankness which many found simply shocking.

  The soundtrack to all this freewheeling frenzy, the music which played as everyone capered like crazy, was pop – or rock ’n’ roll, R&B, jazz, folk-rock … Call it what you will, it was just too good to miss. And London was not that far from Marlborough for fit young men who didn’t need much sleep.

  Nick and David Wright soon became regular visitors to the clubs of swinging London: ‘The Flamingo was where we particularly used to go,’ David recalls. ‘We used to hitch there after lights out, on the old A4 out of Marlborough. We’d get to Wardour Street … see the British R&B mob, the people we were really keen on. We’d stay there till daybreak, then get the bus to the A4 and hitch back in time for breakfast. It was fairly intrepid stuff.

  ‘The two bands Nick and I saw and enjoyed more than any were Zoot Money & The Big Roll Band and Chris Farlowe & The Thunderbirds. But the best evening I ever had in the 1960s – Nick was there too — was the day that “Keep On Runnin’ ”, by The Spencer Davis Group, got to number one, in December ’65. They were playing on the same bill as The Moody Blues, when Denny Laine was with them … in the days when they were a great R&B band, and The Mark Leeman Five. That night at the Marquee was absolutely sensational: there was Steve Winwood singing “Keep On Runnin’ ”, and it was announced from the stage that it had just got to number one, and there we were, in the Marquee!’

  Jeremy Mason too has memories of illicit visits to London with Nick: ‘Once we hitchhiked to London for the Flamingo all-nighter, and we had to be back in time for Chapel. It was all a bit risky. Once we saw Chris Farlowe — you can see Nick liking the way he sang. Another time it was Georgie Fame. In those days they had three rows of seats in the front, and everything else happened at the back. We thought we were pretty grown-up.’

  Most of the clubs visited by the marauding Marlburians were in Soho, which in 1965 was like a slash of vermilion lipstick across the grey face of London. The pubs still closed at 11p.m., but Soho was rich in after-hours drinking clubs; and Soho was where the musicians gathered. Prostitutes also enlivened the streets, as David Wright recalls: ‘Soho was so much fun in those days: it had the first pizza restaurant I’d ever seen, just up from the Flamingo. I remember Nick and I getting accosted by a lady of the street — we were fifteen or sixteen – and bartering with her, then running off with very cold feet.’

  London exerted an equally strong pull during the school holidays, but without the need to rush back at dawn. David Wright remembers: ‘We spent one wonderful New Year’s Eve in London, getting absolutely legless in Trafalgar Square. My sister had a flat in Chalk Farm, and we pitched up there on New Year’s Eve, 1965.’

  Hitching down to London gave the seventeen-year-olds an opportunity to see in person acts they had enjoyed on record. Jeremy Mason vividly recalls finally getting to see Graham Bond: ‘It was at the Manor House Hotel, Friday evening, 29 October 1965. Nick and I went to that together, I don’t know how, because it was during term time, but we used to sneak off and go and listen to things. On this occasion we stayed at Gabrielle’s flat. She wasn’t there, and it was rather spooky – we were quite young. I’d never met her, and we were pretty pissed.

  I remember Ginger Baker doing a drum solo – on a song called “Camels & Elephants”, I think – and Nick was standing there watching, with a cigarette, and he was so impressed — I’ll never forget this – he poured a pint of beer all the way
down his front before he noticed.’

  During 1965 and 1966 David Wright and Nick became close friends, and even during the long holidays from Marlborough, they spent much of the time together. ‘I suppose we were drawn together by music, but also by the fact that we both came from the Midlands, so we saw each other in the holidays. He was in Tanworth and I was in Wolverhampton, so when we could both drive we saw quite a lot of each other.’

  As they got older the two were able to venture further afield, and in August 1965 they set off to hitchhike around Europe for three weeks: ‘Around France, Germany, Belgium and back again … [Nick] was barely seventeen. We got a train down to Dover, and set off with nothing but a thumb … We got down to Paris and then on to Avignon. The first night we slept in a cave, and then we just hitched and bumbled our way along the Côte d’Azur, having a great time. It was super, and I have visions of us sitting on the beach, and Nick got quite severe sea urchins. There was nothing particularly significant about that trip, but it was bloody good fun. We laughed all the way.’

  Another abiding memory of the trip is of Sonny & Cher’s protest song “I Got You Babe” playing everywhere they went: ‘The reason I remember I Got You Babe is that you didn’t hear much American pop music in France in those days – it was all accordions.’ More ambitious plans were made, for travelling around the world after they left school, but the world had other ideas: ‘We both had this wanderlust … and there was a plan to get a Land Rover, drive around the Mediterranean: down through Spain, Gibraltar, cross to Africa, right the way round. That was planned in 1965 … But by 1966, they’d shut the gates of Gibraltar, and by 1967 there was the Arab–Israeli war.’

  That first trip to France, hitching during the summer of 1965, was followed by others, and over the next couple of years many of Nick’s happiest times were spent in France. He was enchanted by that country and became familiar with a style of music which would subtly infuse his own work when he began recording. The chanson tradition imbues wistful, idealized love with a rueful charm, at the same time as recognizing despair. Chanson eludes definition — rather it is a feeling, a sense of melancholy which pervades the song like a wisp of Gauloise smoke.