Nick Drake

It's all about that song and that car ad. At least, that's what it was most recently. Some years people have just discovered Nick Drake by accident, and in his music found the loner, the alienated part of themselves, and had it calmed by his words and music. He was - in life as in music - the shy one who looked on, rather than participated.

Almost 28 years ago Nick Drake died. Possibly suicide, possibly an accidental overdose of prescribed antidepressants. In a short life, he released three albums that barely sold, and played no more than a handful of concerts. In death his legend and reputation have continued to grow, and in the light of his recent increased popularity, his albums - which have never been out of print - have been remastered, and a new disc of very early, previously unreleased material is on its way. Even after a biography of him has been published, and a number of articles (he's a recurring topic in MOJO), he remains the archetypal enigma wrapped inside a mystery. His music might have the power to seduce the troubled breast, but as to the man himself? He remains a paradox.

Born in Burma in 1948, Drake grew up in the heart of England, the small town of Tamworth-in-Arden. While his parents weren't rich, there was money to send him to a ‘public' (i.e. private boarding) school, the prestigious Marlborough College, named for an ancestor of Winston Churchill. From there it was almost a given that he'd go on to either Oxford or Cambridge, England's two most illustrious universities. And, indeed, he was accepted by Fitzwilliam College in Cambridge. Music and the arts had been part of his life. His mother played piano, sang, and composed songs. His sister was an actress. Nick himself played a number of wind instruments, then took up guitar, and early recordings, available on bootleg, show him definitely under the folk-blues influence, covering material by Dylan and British folkie Bert Jansch, as well some well-known blues tunes. He had begun to write, but it was in the more challenging atmosphere of Cambridge that his talent would truly develop.

Prior to university, he, along with some school friends from Marlborough, had spent part of the summer in France, at Aix-en-Provence, and it was there that Drake premiered early versions of the songs that would be on his first album. At Cambridge, he'd play his material for friends, but didn't play shows in the town; instead, he focused his energy on getting a gig in London.

"He writes of being of that world, but outside it, watching it, and yearning for more from it."

Those were few and far between, but at one he managed to snag, a charity show at the Roundhouse in Camden in late 1967, he appeared on the same bill as Fairport Convention, then an up-and-coming folk-rock band. Bassist Ashley Hutchings was struck by the solo performer, and introduced him to manager and producer Joe Boyd who was impressed by Drake's "harmonic originality, the sophistication of the lyrics, the uniqueness of the voice. You don't really analyze these things. You either get a gut feeling about it or you don't."

Boyd's reaction, on hearing a reel-to-reel tape Drake had recorded at home, was to sign him to his Witchseason Productions, which also handled Fairport and John Martyn, among others. The strong connection between Boyd and Chris Blackwell's Island Records meant that there was an automatic home for Drake's work. The songs were finished, and had been polished carefully by Drake by the time he entered Sound Techniques studio in London to record.

"He was very easy and stimulating to work with," remembered Boyd. "A lot of the ideas for his first album, Five Leaves Left, were his, some were mine. There was a good dialogue going on."

One thing that was emphasized was Drake's guitar work. His style was unusual, and he'd developed his own tunings and way of picking notes, so that often the melody would be carried in the bass strings, which might well be tuned higher than the strings above them.

"His guitar playing is the foundation of everything," explained Boyd. "The intricacy of his parts are combined with clarity and an incredible strength of playing. Normally it would be full of blurred or hammered-on notes, and that would be acceptable. The style forgives a lot of little errors. But with Nick every note rang true, and that's one of the things that made the records such a pleasure to produce. It's often difficult to fit other instruments around guitar and vocals, but his guitar gave it a wonderful spine, but not calling too much attention to itself. It made everything work very well."

The real trick was coming up with arrangements for the songs. And while people like Richard Thompson and John Cale contributed, the string parts proved to much harder. Drake had cut "I Was Made To Love Magic," with Richard Hewson arranging and conducting the orchestra. Hearing the replay, Boyd recalled, "we looked at each other and knew it didn't work. Nick suggested Robert [Kirby], and we thought what did we have to lose. I was skeptical, but I'd learned to respect Nick; he was hesitant to say things unless he really believed them, and he was such a good musician that I took notice. I drove to Cambridge to meet Robert, and the three of us sat around. Robert seemed bright and empathetic, and Nick hadn't told me until then that he'd been playing with Robert's string quartet in Cambridge. Or he might have, and I didn't absorb it. But it was part of Nick's shyness."

The mix if Drake and Kirby was magic - or to some it was. On its release in 1969, Five Leaves Left garnered some excellent reviews; others didn't know what to make of it, or simply didn't like it. Following the usual pattern, Drake began playing shows to support the record, a move that didn't work too well.

"I saw him support Fairport Convention at the Festival Hall in ‘69," said Boyd. "He was great, but he was quiet. He had a presence, and the audience was willing to respect that presence and that attitude. But in other places where they talked, it was a nightmare, because he had nothing to say."

And perhaps that's one of the keys to Drake. He was uncomfortable with people he didn't know. Around friends he could be sociable, but in front of an audience he had no shield of patter and small talk, simply his music. And a singer-songwriter, working only with an acoustic guitar, needed a thick skin to withstand the hubbub of restless audience voices. He had to be an entertainer, something Drake was manifestly not.

His album had come as a surprise to many who knew him at Cambridge. There'd been vague talk of a record contract, but Drake himself had said no more, not even about the recording process. The first most knew was when the record appeared in the stores. Having quickly realized that he wasn't cut out to be a performer, Drake saw his future as a songwriter and recording artist. He was still hopeful that Five Leaves Left would sell well, and he quit university to focus on his career, moving to London, where he could concentrate on writing his next album.

At Cambridge, by the nature of the place and student life, he'd been around people. In London, living in a tiny studio apartment, knowing very few people, he spent much of his time alone. His natural shyness kept him apart from the action, and though he adopted the look and styles of the time (the long hair, smoking pot), he remained very much on the sidelines, an observer at the party.

"I think he writes about being part of the social world of a privileged class, which was a glamorous world of beautiful girls and parties in country houses," suggested Boyd. "That world, at the time, was intersecting with the drug culture. Girls would talk about ‘Darling Nick,' but he wasn't cut out for competing in that sphere - he was too sweet and hesitant. So he writes of being of that world, but outside it, watching it, and yearning for more from it. So he'd retreat into the world of his music and smoking hashish. Then when he came to London, he slowly slipped away from that, became more involved in his music and more isolated."

Drake was extremely disappointed when Five Leaves Left failed to sell in any appreciable quantity. However discouraged and depressed he became - and depression had come and gone in his life for a while - he didn't give up, however, and returned with what was the most outgoing of his three albums, Bryter Layter. Much of that, according to Boyd, was because Drake let the producer have more say in the arrangements of the songs.

"He became a little less assertive, I suppose, during the course of his second record, although he dug his heels in on one thing, the three instrumentals, which I still think wasn't the right choice."

Where Drake's debut has put a great deal of emphasis on string settings for the songs, this was far more of a folk-rock album, and obviously geared toward that audience. While Drake wasn't lost inside the other arrangements - his soft, slightly husky vocals is still the focus of attention - Bryter Layter was an album with much less space and silence than its predecessor. However, those changes didn't help its sales figures. Once again, it bombed. That was enough to throw Drake into something of an emotional tailspin, which was exacerbated when Boyd, a constant supporter, moved back to the U.S. in 1971 to take a position with Warner Bros..

Drake retreated even more into himself, with the isolated, loner parts of his personality becoming far more dominant. That was reflected in the very sparse quality of his third and final record, Pink Moon, recorded with engineer John Wood. It's just Drake, his voice and his guitar - the entire disc only contains one overdub. An apocryphal story has Drake delivering the master to Island Records offices, where the receptionist had no idea who he was or what he'd brought.

"I've always felt that Nick would be discovered,"

"Thinking back on it, it's occurred to me that his emphatic, Spartan recording on Pink Moon could have been a reflection that Bryter Layter was too fancy or produced," speculated Boyd. Like his other two albums, it failed to sell. In many ways, that wasn't too surprising, since it was a record of quiet desperation, the sound of someone hanging on by his fingernails. In a time when others were exercising primal screams, Drake's was an almost silent cry of anguish. The lyrics were bleak, and where wisps of hope occurred, they were hazy and muted. It was a record for those white nights when sleep wouldn't come, and you needed a lonely, 3 a.m. soundtrack. Not something that was ever going to bring massive sales.

Drake's slide into depression continued unabated. By 1974 he'd returned to his parents' house, and had been prescribed antidepressants, which barely controlled his mental state. He did continue to write, however, and in February had undertaken a session to record four new songs, including the spare "Black Eyed Dog," utilizing a traditional symbol of death - an eerier presage of what would happen later that year. The songs were eventually released on Time of No Reply, which also collected some alternate versions of previously released material.

"We only spoke on the phone a couple of times, and he came to see me in London a few times before the last sessions, but not often," recalled Boyd. According to those who saw him in 1974, Drake was in bad shape, unkempt, unwashed, his fingernails grown long. Even his own parents had said that during much of the year they wouldn't have been too astonished if he'd committed suicide. But by November, there seemed to be an improvement.

So when he went to bed early on November 24, no one thought much of it. His career, to all intents and purposes, was over. Pink Moon had appeared in 1972, and since then the world had heard nothing of Nick Drake. Sometime before dawn on November 25, he took an overdose of the Tryptizol he'd been prescribed, and his heart stopped beating. An inquest was held, and a verdict of suicide recorded "when suffering from a depressive illness." And quite possibly it was, although Boyd said, "I think it's possible it was accidental, and I'd like to think it was."

In many ways, the end of Drake's short life, aged 26, is just the start of the story.

"The records started selling on a steadily increasing basis within a year of his death," noted Boyd. In 1979, Island issued the Fruit Tree set, which collected Drake's three LPs with the new Time of No Reply record (Time of No Reply only became available individually in 1987). The first Drake compilation appeared in 1985, and in 1994, Way to Blue introduced him to an entirely new audience. In Britain, many discovered his music for the first time in 1996 through the best-selling Heart: Number One Love Songs of the Sixties record, a spin off from the TV series Heartbeat. The album sold a quarter of a million copies. Perhaps the greatest exposure, though, came with the Volkswagen TV ad featuring "Pink Moon." Unlike so much music on television, its quietness grabbed the attention, the frail quality of the voice. And so Nick Drake found another audience, 25 years after his death.

"I've always felt that Nick would be discovered," said Boyd. "It wasn't like I was holding to some strange idea." And time has vindicated him. A couple of Drake bootlegs have surfaced over the years, but it's long been assumed that the well of material had run dry; we make do with what's available. But that might not be the case.

"I think there'll be a new album of material which pre-dates the first sessions," revealed Boyd. "A friend recorded him in the basement of a convent in Aix-en-Provence in the summer of ‘67, and the sound is reasonable. There are also some tapes of his mother, who wrote songs. A lot of the voicings she gave to chords on the piano indicate where Nick got his ideas."

And so the sound of Nick Drake continues to live. Not unlike Kurt Cobain, he was able to capture the pain of living and loving, and his records have helped make it more bearable for others. But neither of them, maybe, was made for this world.