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.’
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.
Interpreted by Charles Trenet, Juliette Greco, Charles Aznavour, Jacques Brel and Edith Piaf, chanson is timeless and ineffably French. On moving to France, Petula Clark couldn’t believe the impact of seeing Piaf in concert. Familiar with light-hearted English music hall and variety songs, she was stunned by the gritty realism and the honest, coruscating nature of the songs Piaf sang. The haunting existential beauty of Juliette Greco carried the chanson tradition into a new era. Stalking the bustling streets of St-Germain-des-Prés in the late forties, rubbing shoulders with Sartre and Cocteau, the black-clad Greco epitomized a new type of teenager.
Chanson embodied world-weariness, the realization that life was not sweet, but a rather bitter cup of black coffee. It was this air of melancholy and mystery which found its way into the songs Nick Drake would soon begin writing. Songs which, at their best, sat somewhere between the traditions of folk, the blues and chanson.
Throughout his life, Nick loved France. The landscape, the language, the food, the wine all held a strong attraction for him. As well as being home to the wistful, enduring art of chanson and the smoky sensuality of Juliette Greco, St-Germain-des-Prés provided a haunt for Jean-Paul Sartre. There in the smoky fug of the Café de Flore, Sartre mapped out the defiantly lonely life of the existentialist: ‘Hell is other people.’
Sartre’s work was widely available in paperback by the time Nick left Marlborough and went up to Cambridge, and his doomed anti-heroes were familiar to the postwar generation, as was the work of another of Sartre’s contemporaries, Albert Camus. Camus, who died at the age of forty-seven in a car crash in 1960, was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, having become a landmark figure for a generation of disaffected young people with classic novels of alienation like The Outsider (L’Etranger). His The Myth Of Sisyphus was the last book Nick would read before his death.
The end of Nick Drake’s education at Marlborough came in July 1966. He had switched from History and Classics to study English rather late in the day, but it seemed to suit him much better. He continued to play a full and robust part in the life of the school, at the same time as pursuing his own extracurricular interests, and this was recognized when he was made Captain of his House. His final months at Marlborough were also marked by distinction on the athletics track, when he had the honour of competing in the Wiltshire Junior Athletics Championship. Nick’s housemaster wrote about him at the time: ‘a most talented athlete, who was never really deeply interested in breaking records which were well within his grasp. He is probably one of the best sprinters we have had at Marlborough since the war, and yet he would much more often than not be found reading when he should have been training.’
Throughout his years at Marlborough, Nick had enjoyed the pubs of the nearby town. The local beer, Wadworth’s from nearby Devizes, was a potent brew, and frequently Nick and Jeremy Mason, David Wright, Simon Crocker and Michael Maclaran would sneak off to the Bell in nearby Ramsbury, or pubs in Marlborough like the Cricketers or the Lamb, to drink beer, smoke cigarettes and put the world to rights. But none of Nick’s friends or acquaintances from school remembers any evidence of drugs during their time there. David Wright: ‘I don’t ever remember any dope at Marlborough, but interestingly enough, I was chatting to a friend who was there the year after Nick and I left, which would be 1967, and it was around then.’
In his final term Nick took A-level exams again. He had sat some the previous year, but the results had been disappointing. This time around he brought his tally of passes up to four – History, English, Latin Translation with Roman History, British Constitution – and managed to improve his grade in English to a B, making a university place likely. The Marlborough College Register lists ex-pupil N.R. Drake simply as ‘a guitarist, and composer of folk music for the guitar’.
In recommending Nick for a university place, Dennis Silk displayed an obvious fondness for him while suggesting that he had yet to achieve his full potential: ‘Nicholas Drake is a boy who has taken a long time to mature scholastically. His IQ, measured when he first came to the school, was high enough to make us hope for a much more dynamic approach than he showed for several years. One always felt there were possibilities here and yet he seemed incapable of producing it …
‘He is essentially a rather dreamy, artistic type of boy, very quiet, verging almost to the side of shyness. He loves English and this last year had a timetable especially prepared for him, by which he was able to spend a lot of time reading by himself. His whole written fluency developed enormously and people who had written him off were forced to eat their words …
‘He was someone who everybody liked enormously here, despite his reticence and the difficulty of getting to know him well … In conclusion I would say that he is a genuine late developer who is only now growing into his academic potential. For a long time we have despaired of him but now I genuinely feel that given a chance to read English at the university he would prove a great success and in more spheres than the purely academic one. He could give a lot to the community as well as getting a lot. He is a most delightful person to deal with.’
Nick’s final night at Marlborough was marked by a typical piece of teenage malpractice, and understandably Dennis Silk found him slightly less delightful that night: ‘I can remember having a flaming row with Nick on his last night in school, when he was up at three o’clock in the morning drinking and smoking — everything that boys do on their last night at school which housemasters are paid to try and stop.’
To celebrate the end of A levels, Nick, David Wright and Jeremy Mason had sloped off into town, where they got spectacularly drunk on beer and wine. ‘On the last night of term he got awfully pissed …’ David recalls. ‘And my abiding memory of Nick is with a bottle of sweet white wine, probably Graves, absolutely out of it, completely cold, by the Music Block.’
In an often-repeated quote, Nick is alleged to have described Marlborough as a place ‘where the sensitive experience a horrified dissociation from reality that can sometimes never fade away’. The words are those of Steve Burgess, in a May 1979 profile of Nick for Dark Star, in which he seeks to equate his experiences of ‘that evil British institution known as boarding school’ with those of Nick at Marlborough: ‘I know that Nick and I were of a piece …’ The truth is that Nick never expressed such an opinion — indeed all the contemporary evidence points to him having rather enjoyed his years at public school.