‘I think he might have had quite a wild time at Cambridge,’ says Dennis Silk, ‘the restrictions of Marlborough being removed, and him loose in town with his guitar, without his housemaster going round saying: “Drake, for God’s sake put that bloody instrument away.” ’
Nick went up to Fitzwilliam College to read English in October 1967. After the tightly communal, strictly timetabled life of boarding school, an institution like Cambridge University must indeed have been a liberation for Nick, and thousands of students like him. There was no one looking over your shoulder, no rotas and lists to tell you what to do or when to do it.
There is something timeless about the melted-candle beauty of Cambridge. The city which has been home to spies and scholars, musicians and mathematicians, choristers and clerics, seems to maintain its other-worldly charm in the face of progress. There is still the beatific charm of an afternoon spent lazing on the Backs, the green stretch which borders the River Cam as it slips, silver, past colleges in the clouds. Willows weep silently over the river banks, but even the boisterous cries of undergraduates cannot overwhelm the quietude of the Cam as it winds its way down to Grantchester.
Rupert Brooke – another golden boy whose life bears similarities to that of Nick Drake — was educated at Rugby and Cambridge. A socialist poet and radical, he died at the age of twenty-seven in 1915, before he could reach Gallipoli, but not before he had done much to brush away the dust and cant of the Victorian age. His best-known poem, ‘The Old Vicarage, Grantchester’, was published posthumously in 1914 And Other Poems, and in its poignant questions Brooke spoke for all the young men who sailed away to the mud of Flanders and the bloody beaches of Gallipoli:
Stands the Church clock at ten to three?
And is there honey still for tea?
Cambridge has been a university town since 1209, but for all its air of tranquil permanence, life bubbles away beneath the surface. In Market Square the market flourishes today as it has since the early thirteenth century. Among the fruit and veg and clothes are stalls selling joss-sticks, bootleg albums and shawls, much as they did in Nick’s day.
From all over the country they came in the sixties, as they had always come, and on arrival they put away childish things and settled down to become students and put the world to rights. For relaxation, there were college cinema clubs, or the Arts Cinema on the corner of Market Square. Here, through clouds of cigarette smoke, the imaginative leap was made from the cinema of childhood to the foothills of the avant-garde. Cambridge all-nighters blended the anarchy of the Marx Brothers with the solemnity of The Seventh Seal, while tired late-teenagers grappled with the symbolism which came thick and fast by the celluloid mile.
This was a time before videos, computers and compact discs; before cashcards, mobile phones and mixed colleges. But the conversations were liberating and ideas were cross-fertilizing. To the distaste of some and the delight of many, in the turbulent year after Nick Drake’s arrival in Cambridge abortion and homosexuality were finally legalized by Harold Wilson’s Labour government.
Key texts of the time were Joseph Heller’s Catch-22, Colin Wilson’s The Outsider and Tolkien’s The Lord Of The Rings. For additional cred, there were the grey-spined Penguin Modern Classics: Hermann Hesse’s Steppenwolf, Jack Kerouac’s On The Road, Franz Kafka’s The Castle, Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast trilogy. Poetry had to a large extent been supplanted by rock ’n’ roll, but no self-respecting ‘head’ left their digs without a well-thumbed copy of The Mersey Poets, and Yevtushenko (‘Do not tell lies to the young…’) was widely quoted.
This was the city to which Nick Drake came, the year The Beatles released Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. Richard Charkin, who had been with Nick during his month in Morocco earlier in the year, went up at the same time. He laughed when he remembered how they met again: ‘Come October ’67 I’m in my room at Trinity College, Cambridge, there’s a knock on the door and it’s Nick. The astonishing thing is that in a month of living together in Morocco, he had never said that he was going to Cambridge. That’s quite bizarre, but it was very symptomatic.’
Nick certainly seems to have enjoyed the Cambridge experience, at least some of the time, at least at the beginning … Simon Crocker, his old friend from Marlborough, visited Nick during his second term and found him in extremely good heart: ‘We both went up to university in the autumn of ’67. I went to Bristol, Nick went to Cambridge. In the second term there was an exchange between the Bristol revue group which I was in, and the Cambridge Footlights, and I remember Nick turned up after the show at Cambridge and said: “Right, let’s go” — he had this old motorbike, and we spent the night roaring around Cambridge — “Let’s have some fun.” He was in great spirits.’
The Cambridge University Footlights Club, which was founded in 1883 as a forum for university entertainers, came into its own during the 1950s. Peter Cook, the John Lennon of the Fringe quartet, arrived in 1957 and blitzed the town. Cook hitched up with Alan Bennett, Jonathan Miller and Dudley Moore, and went Beyond the Edinburgh Fringe in 1960. British comedy was never the same after their foray; in their way, the Fringe four had as much impact on British society as The Beatles. Following Cook, Cambridge Footlights became the comedy equivalent of the Cavern, spewing out a series of household names: John Bird, Eleanor Bron, David Frost, John Cleese, Michael Palin, Eric Idle, Terry Jones, Clive James, Graham Chapman … Interestingly, both Nick Drake and his friend Robert Kirby auditioned for the club during their time at Cambridge, but neither was accepted.
Trevor Dann, who compiled the 1985 Nick Drake retrospective Heaven In A Wild Flower and is now in overall control of popular music coverage on BBC TV and Radio, was, in 1971, a student at Fitzwilliam College. Dann, who had bought Five Leaves Left as a teenager, was delighted to find himself reading history at Nick Drake’s old Cambridge college, but the college buildings were far from homely: ‘It’s worth remembering that at the time Nick was there in the sixties, it was an even worse building than it is now. Only half of it was built, the bit by Huntingdon Road, everything the other side of the monstrous café block wasn’t there. And also, the A14 wasn’t a motorway, so all the lorries coming to the port used to come up Victoria Road, hang a right past the college, and the windows used to rattle something horrible. Every term I came back from holiday, I used to have to put Plasticine round the windows to stop them shuddering.
‘I was just a lad who liked Nick Drake, who was at the same college. Then I met a bloke there called John Venning, who was a postgrad, and he had known Nick Drake. So I spent the odd evening in the college bar, trying to get him to reminisce. I suspect it was through him I found out that Nick had briefly had a college room. Somebody told me it was R24, so I managed to get myself into R24.’
Fitzwilliam College grew out of ‘an institution which became the home of non-collegiate students in Cambridge who could not afford membership of an established college’. Its first buildings were occupied in 1963, but the buildings the college now occupies, designed by Denys Lasdun, architect of London’s National Theatre, were inaugurated in 1966. Cambridge City Council’s official guide describes Fitzwilliam College codedly as ‘strikingly modern’ and ‘a riot of sculptural invention’.
When you read that Nick Drake studied at Cambridge, images spring to mind of punts gliding on the Cam and gowns flowing as cyclists scuttle across Jesus Green. The reality was, and is, somewhat different. Architecturally, Fitzwilliam has more in common with the boxy modern hotels which proliferate on industrial parks close to major motorway exits than with the traditional Cambridge colleges which grace the heart of the city.
Fitzwilliam College sits a good mile out of Cambridge, on the Huntingdon Road, its red-brick buildings and plain rectangular window-panes jarringly at odds with the public image of the city. Despite beautifully kept gardens and well-appointed lawns, Fitzwilliam looks less like a Cambridge college than a 1960s day-care centre. Victoria Lloyd (née Ormsby-Gore) remembered visiting Nick at Fitzwilliam when she spoke to Mick Brown: ‘He was profoundly disappointed by it. He had this wonderful vision of going to Cambridge – the dreaming spires, the wonderful erudite people. We went up to visit and he was in this grim, redbrick building, sitting in this tiny motel-like bedroom. He was completely crushed. He just sat there saying “it’s so awful”.’
Strangely, though, when Simon Crocker visited he felt that, far from hating the modernity of Fitzwilliam, Nick was frustrated by the hidebound nature of the whole institution: ‘I think for Nick Cambridge was a bit too … old-fashioned. I think he would have enjoyed one of the other universities better. I think he felt quite stifled. He didn’t like the customs …’
Roger Brown, who went up to Fitzwilliam in October 1969, at the beginning of what should have been Nick’s final year, wrote to me with his impressions of the place. Roger remembered Nick being spoken of fondly by contemporary musicians, including Fred Frith, who went on to join the band Henry Cow. More intriguingly, he wrote about the college as it was in Nick’s time: ‘In theory, a college such as Fitzwilliam with an active social life and back-up such as individual tutors, ought to offer an ideal environment for the transition from home and school to independent life as an adult. In practice however, many students were too young and not self-reliant enough. Nick Drake was not the only Fitzwilliam student to have difficulty in adjusting … It was not unusual for people to crack-up and spend time at the local mental hospital (Fulbourn, as I recall) … At the time, Fitzwilliam did not admit women, so the atmosphere was rather monkish and not helped by the emphasis on engineering, science, chemistry, law, rowing, rugby etc …’
So this was Nick Drake’s Cambridge college: a suburban dormitory building, efficient and municipal, with little in the way of camaraderie, comfort or college spirit. The undergraduate rooms were cubicles, practical but cramped and impersonal; the whole place an outpost, far removed from the life of the city and the heart of the university.
Paul Wheeler met Nick and fellow-student Robert Kirby when he went up to Caius College in 1968: ‘The way that Cambridge works is like a big club, and when I arrived at Caius, because I played music, they said: “Oh, you should meet this person”, and Robert said: “Oh, you must meet Nick” … Caius was in the centre of town, and it had more of a traditional image of Cambridge. So I think this link between Caius and Nick is quite interesting, because in some ways he was on the border of a Cambridge life – he was living outside the town, and Fitzwilliam is quite a way out – whereas coming into Caius, which he did quite a lot because of Robert and me and quite a group of us … so in some ways there was more of a link between Nick and Caius than there was between him and Fitzwilliam.
‘At Caius we had this dining club, which is very Cambridge, called The Loungers. And the only thing you had to do was “lounge by ye gate for one hour every day and observe what straunge creatures God hath made!” Every week or two we had a Loungers’ Breakfast … and Nick was the “odd fellow” in this group, they had one or two people from other colleges … and that was the way we used to officially meet.’
Unlike Marlborough, on which he left a real and lasting impression, Fitzwilliam College has precious few memories of Nick Drake. He never completed his degree, quitting twelve months ahead of Finals, to journey down to London and seek a career in music. His departure, like his two-year residence, went largely unnoticed. Two years after Nick left Fitzwilliam, Trevor Dann went up and found that not a trace remained: ‘The only person who knew about Nick Drake at Fitzwilliam was me, and I would tell people, and they’d go: “Who?” ’
However, by 1994 the slow-burning flame of posthumous fame had begun to take hold. A notice appeared on the college notice board headed ‘Calling All Guitarists’. A second-year student, Ewan C. Kerr, was organizing a guitar concert ‘in recognition of the number of guitarists there are in college who never get around to playing in front of anyone’. The notice continued: ‘You may or may not be aware that Fitz was home to a singer-songwriter legend (well I think so!) of the 60s called Nick Drake. The concert will be in memory of him (he died on November 25th 1974 – just 20 years ago last Thursday).’
Like most students at Fitzwilliam, Nick spent his first year living in, with ‘bedders’ to clean up his room and meals in hall on tap. But when he returned to Cambridge after the long vacation in autumn 1968, he moved into lodgings outside the college. It was during his second year, while he was living in rooms in Carlyle Road, that Paul Wheeler met him for the first time: ‘It’s just slightly outside the main university territory, Carlyle Road, just by this little bridge which leads on to Jesus Green, so that every time Nick came into town he would cross over the river, and I’ve always considered that “River Man” had to do with this …’
Much of Nick’s time at Cambridge was spent visiting friends in other colleges — Brian Wells at Selwyn, Robert Kirby and Paul Wheeler at Caius; and they in their turn would visit him. One friend remembers Nick’s room as ‘very quiet and nice, books and records and dope’, and Nick would often produce his guitar and play for them — songs which his friends would recognize on Five Leaves Left the following year.
Paul Wheeler: ‘I remember Nick playing “Time Has Told Me” at Cambridge. The first one that really struck me was “River Man” – that to me is the one that stands out. To be honest, I found a lot of his stuff a bit too … clean, too twee, whereas “River Man” had an extra dimension to it. I remember him playing those Jackson Frank songs, some standards of the time … but he’d certainly play something if he’d just written it. They weren’t performances — Nick would play something, I’d play something, somebody else would play something. But what was so noticeable about Nick was that he was so … perfect! Other people would start and stop, tune up. He would never do that …’
Nick’s mother, Molly, always regarded Brian Wells, who studied medicine at Selwyn College, as her son’s best friend at Cambridge. Brian was an exact contemporary of Nick’s at the university and provides a poignant picture of Nick during those two years. He remembers a college party where both he and Nick were struck by an outgoing girl who was dancing the night away. Nick was mesmerized, but Brian tired of the pursuit and returned to his rooms at Selwyn, only to be woken by Nick much, much later that night.
‘I didn’t get off with that girl,’ Nick woke Brian to tell him. A less than sympathetic Wells watched from his bed as Nick drunkenly ambled around his room, finally selecting a massive medical textbook from the bookshelves. From somewhere else, Nick found a candle, which he lit and ceremoniously placed on the flat surface of the book, before proceeding off down the staircase.
‘One of my fondest memories of Nick,’ recalled Brian Wells thirty years later, ‘was looking out of my window, and seeing him teetering off on his bicycle across the college, balancing that huge book on his handlebars. He was shielding the flame, and with the candle still flickering, he cycled off.’
‘Cambridge was a very radical place,’ Ian MacDonald recalls. ‘I remember when we arrived in ’68, meeting a friend who had been a year ahead of me at school, and when I arrived for my first term he recognized me and came up as the new intake were having their photograph taken, and he was laughing and said: “I thought we were weird when we arrived, but you lot look like the Mothers Of Invention.” ’
Ian went up to Cambridge in 1968 and met Nick Drake on various occasions: ‘I wouldn’t say I knew Nick at all, really. Though I was in the same places as him quite a few times … I actually spoke to him on only two or three occasions.’ He went on to become Deputy Editor of the New Musical Express during the 1970s, and in 1994 his acclaimed Beatles book, Revolution In The Head, was published.
In the wake of The Beatles, Harold Wilson and gritty Northern cinema, classlessness was venerated, but it was still largely the children of the middle classes who made the trip to Oxbridge. Once there, though, the accents which had been so carefully and expensively chiselled in public schools and comfortable drawing rooms were swiftly flattened into nouveau-working-class tones. Clive James, who also studied at Cambridge, recalled the inverted snobbery of that period: ‘There was a real pretension to inarticulacy, which I felt I couldn’t share. There were an awful lot of university students running around in the sixties pretending they’d never been educated, a grotesque sound coming out of their mouth.’
In the late sixties, the connection between a hash reverie, psychedelic art and rock music was self-evident. Paul McCartney’s admission in 1967 that he had taken acid sent shock waves across the nation; the Mick Jagger and Keith Richards bust that same year convinced everyone, particularly the readers of the News Of The World (then the world’s best-selling newspaper), that all these pop stars were drug addicts.
Nick Drake was evidently no stranger to drugs by the time he arrived in Cambridge. There are accounts of him smoking dope during 1966, and strong indications from friends that he had tried LSD during the early part of 1967. In that, he was certainly not unique. A wave of drug-taking swept through the teenagers of Britain’s middle classes during 1967. Most saw it as the beginning of a great odyssey, a trip to the centre of the psyche. Many made the journey, but some never came back.
Robert Kirby: ‘There was always the undercurrent of the people who had gone, or wanted to go, a bit further, the acid side of it, I suppose … I’m not trying to ascribe the whole thing to drugs, but what I’m saying is that even then there were the people who put their toe in the water but didn’t go the whole distance … You always got the impression that maybe Nick wanted more than just to put his toe in the water …’
The joy of long-playing records had much to do with the size and design of the twelve-inch sleeves, which were so convenient for rolling spliffs. Sleeves became iconic tokens: Sgt Pepper was the stained-glass window of 1967; Dylan’s John Wesley Harding the maze of 1968 – turn the sleeve upside down and The Beatles and Lee Harvey Oswald appeared in the tree above Dylan’s head. Tentative psychedelia was apparent on album sleeves by The Incredible String Band and Pink Floyd. The Small Faces’ Ogden’s Nut Gone Flake sleeve was as revolutionary as Sgt Pepper, but its circular sleeve made rolling up a nightmare.
The sleeves promised access to a closed world, and then there was the music those sleeves contained … Music was probably never more important than at that time, when pop was changing into rock and the single was being elbowed out by the LP. The liberating power of music was felt across the board, in folk, jazz, blues and rock ’n’ roll. Clive James told me: ‘I remember when “I Heard It Through The Grapevine” came out, and I spent the whole week listening to it in a pub in Cambridge on the jukebox.’
Iain Dunn, who was in his first year at Corpus Christi when, as a friend of Paul Wheeler’s, he met Nick early in 1968, also remembers how important the music was: ‘I saw an interview with Sting on the television recently, and he said something I thought was very true, which was that in those days everyone knew what number one was. These days nobody knows, because the whole thing is so fragmented. I think accessibility to material was much more difficult, so there was much more of a sense of belonging to a cult. So if you managed a trip up to London and got hold of a copy of, I don’t know, Mississippi John Hurt, this was like gold dust. People would come round and it would be an event to listen to it … I remember hiring the cellar in my college because I’d somehow or other managed to get hold of a first copy of Tommy, and actually playing it like a concert.’
Ian MacDonald: ‘Everyone took music much more seriously than we do these days. You’d gather together, sometimes people would be floating in and out of a particular room where people were smoking, they’d be playing records all day and people would come in and just sit, listening quite seriously all the way through The Beatles’ White Album, and then drift off.
‘A few years later, I remember – this was after I’d left Cambridge but was typical of the time – I met Mick Farren, who had just come fresh from an extraordinary twenty-four-hour bash at his flat in Notting Hill, where all the heads, Mick and Miles, had just decided that they were going to listen to everything that Dylan had released, including all the bootlegs, in chronological order, and nobody would leave until it was finished. I do remember when we all sat around reading aloud from The Lord Of The Rings. Incredibly embarrassing now, but there was that mad intensity.’
Sgt Pepper, ‘A Whiter Shade Of Pale’, ‘All You Need Is Love’, ‘San Francisco’: dreamy and benign reflections of 1967’s good vibrations. Iain Dunn remembers Cambridge reflecting the turbulence which was manifest throughout the world just a year later: ‘We’d had the Summer of Love, and 1968 was the year of Revolution … So from it all being peace and love and freedom, the agenda for the next academic year, if you like, was revolution. The Garden House Riot, as it came to be called, was part of that, a protest against the Greek Colonels who had come to power by force during 1967. I can’t remember who was in the hotel at the time, but it was something to do with protesting against the fascist junta … Coach-loads of people went up to the Grosvenor Square riot outside the American Embassy, protesting against Vietnam. So they were all highly political agendas. I think it was as much to do with being anti-Establishment as with being particularly committed to a cause. There were obviously those who were committed, but I think for most of us we were just happy to be rioting and rebelling.’
Throughout 1968 the world was rocked by dissent and chaos: in Vietnam, the Têt offensive severely shook American belief in a swift victory. Czechoslovakia briefly celebrated a liberating release from a stiflingly repressive government, before being crushed under the tracks of Russian tanks. Robert Kennedy was assassinated on the campaign trail. Martin Luther King was taken by a sniper’s bullet in Memphis. Enoch Powell’s ‘rivers of blood’ speech took racism on to the streets and into the headlines. In France, Japan, America, Britain, Poland, Spain, Italy and Mexico, students protested and rioted, shutting down university campuses and making their grievances spectacularly public.
Looking back on the period nearly thirty years after leaving Caius, Paul Wheeler was keen to put the period that he and Nick spent at Cambridge in the context of the times: ‘The way that I recall the difference between 1967 and 1968 — ’67 was the Summer of Love; ’68 was much more political. In a sense ’69 and ’70 was the end of all that, more cynical, more depressed times … When I knew Nick, it was still in the flush of the optimistic times … My memories of Nick from that time are very funny, very humorous. He wasn’t this grim, depressed … that came later. And also I would say that was the same for everybody, the turn of 1971/72 was a bad time for everybody. The depression was a sign of the times. Everybody felt down in ’73, ’74, because of the end of that era.’
The popular image of Nick Drake at Cambridge is of a tall, stooped figure, dressed in black, over-imbibing on hashish and French Symbolist poetry. All very romantic, and romanticized. Paul Wheeler, who knew Nick as well as anyone at Cambridge, took issue with me over my account of a drive the two of them undertook to the East Anglian coast, about sixty miles from Cambridge. An earlier account by Arthur Lubow had Paul and Nick sitting in moonlit silence, listening to waves crashing on the Suffolk beach. ‘There was something I wanted to say about Arthur Lubow,’ Paul told me, ‘something he got from me about going off to the coast … and I think in the article you wrote you have us coming back at dawn. It’s all getting a bit romantic. I don’t remember it as that. I do remember the occasion: I remember his driving off to the coast, and walking by the beach, but this idea of being an all-night thing I don’t remember.’
The romanticization of Nick Drake has grown steadily in the years since his death, and appears unstoppable. Posthumously, Nick has been cast as a victim: of record company indifference, of a hostile society, of his own demons … But among those who knew him at Marlborough, Cambridge and while he was on Island Records, there is a feeling that he was not quite as disingenuous as he seemed; some suspect that even while still an apparently aimless student at Cambridge, he had an eye on future plans. Cambridge contemporary Iain Dunn certainly thinks he detected some deliberate image-making, despite the obvious shyness: ‘He was very nice. Incredibly nice. But quite … I think “detached” is probably the word. Not remote … I wasn’t quite sure if this was a conscious image that he was developing, or whether it was just the way he was. And I think in the end, I came to the conclusion that it was a bit of both. I think he quite liked the idea of there being an air of mystique about himself. But I think he was also genuinely, incredibly shy, and found himself to be quite remote from other people.’
Despite his closeness to Nick, Brian Wells also discerned a certain reserve, and an image-consciousness which is rarely acknowledged: ‘My theory, and it is only a theory, my own impressions, I think he was always, not aloof … slightly detached from everybody, and I think most people felt this. I don’t think Robert Kirby, or Paul Wheeler would ever think, Hi, Nick!, give him a hug … Nick was very conscious of his image … He was occasionally quite abrupt with people. You just got the feeling he was being rather dismissive of you.
‘I think it was because he was feeling threatened by the closeness of a relationship. I’m a very open, huggy kind of person. I sometimes felt he thought I was a bit of a twit. It wasn’t just my not being a musician, I wasn’t kind of … cool. He was very aware of his cool. Actually, if you look at his photos, he was quite contrived in his appearance. He was always clean-shaven, with his long hair and his black jacket … He was very self-conscious and I think he was very sensitive. I also think he was quite precious …’
Ian MacDonald remembers Nick making a strong impression during those early days at Cambridge, not just as a result of his growing confidence on the guitar, but because of his height and physical presence: ‘He was very slight physically, tall, slightly thin. He used to wear a loose, grey suit as I remember him. He looked … fragile, like something could happen to him. Yet he was observing at the same time; a very, very fine balance. An almost … translucent person.
‘Byronic is going too far. Nick was too diffident to be Byron, he wasn’t a wild man … He was someone rather fragile, but with a certain inner strength. But a lot of paradox: he was the kind of guy that women would want to mother. The impressiveness came through a kind of quiet power in those songs. Personally, he was quite a diffident person, he would mumble and there was that very faint half smile as he drew back from things.’
Nick’s awareness of the way he looked and how he appeared to others also struck Iain Dunn: ‘My most vivid memory of him around Cambridge was of this very tall, loping character with shoulder-length hair. But always very smart. I think he was very conscious of the way he looked. How he appeared to other people was all part of that … slight image-building thing that was going on. The velvet jacket, the Cuban-heel boots …’
The physical frailty, the lack of robustness which has become part of the myth of Nick in recent years, does not appear to have taken hold in Cambridge; the ‘very well made, tall, strong’ athlete of the Marlborough years was not yet erased. ‘He never struck me as being unhealthy,’ said Paul Wheeler. ‘He always held himself very well, always looked healthy, so there was that – a word you always hear about Nick – elegance …’
Iain Dunn characterizes Cambridge in the late sixties as: ‘Quite a lot of sex and drugs and rock ’n’ roll. I don’t remember doing a lot of work. Certainly if you were reading English, the idea of actually going to a seminar was thought to be quite bizarre. Not many people did. Not many people got up before midday.
‘Nick was reading English, and I remember a friend of his was doing some big essay … a comparison between a seventeenth-century love lyric and the lyrics of Smokey Robinson. That was a fairly typical thing of the time. There were an awful lot of people reading English in those days who were asking the question: how come all literature stops with T.S. Eliot? You were desperately trying to incorporate into your English essay some kind of relationship with what was going on in the rest of your life, which was how exciting the new Beatles album was. And of course, as far as the Establishment was concerned, this was total anathema. Very few dons then had any conception of, or understanding, that this might be the way things were going.’
Before rock ’n’ roll pulled on its pompous and ponderous seventies wardrobe, millions around the world were united by the sounds which came out of transistor radios and spinning black vinyl albums as the sixties wound down. Nick Drake was now fashioning his own material, but he remained immersed in the wonderful music which others were producing during 1967 and 1968. He loved the material of the new singer-songwriters like Tim Buckley, Leonard Cohen, Tim Hardin and Randy Newman, who were just beginning to make their mark. Ian MacDonald considered that, of all the people he met in Cambridge, ‘Nick always seemed to be somebody who was passing through, right on the edge of things … only relating to people who spoke the same language, the same musical language.’
Other albums which found favour with Nick during 1968 included Love’s Forever Changes, Van Morrison’s Astral Weeks and, more surprisingly, the work of Fifth Dimension. To many who favoured more challenging bands like Traffic, Pink Floyd, Led Zeppelin, Santana and Cream, the chart-friendly, close-harmony group were anathema, but Nick recognized the high production values of the first three albums. He also admired two writers championed by the group: Jim Webb, who wrote their biggest hit, ‘Up, Up & Away’, and Laura Nyro, herself barely out of her teens. Nick was impressed enough by Fifth Dimension to recommend them to Robert Kirby: ‘He told me to get the Fifth Dimension album Magic Garden, because of the use of rock and orchestra — same as Pet Sounds. He was the one who turned me on to the first Randy Newman album and Tim Buckley’s Goodbye And Hello …’
Paul Wheeler: ‘When I was at Caius there was a particular friend of ours who had an amazing record collection, from Bach to Motown. We spent a lot of time round there: he’d put on some Bach Suite, followed by jazz, Gregorian chants. And then put on Smokey Robinson, Indian music … That blending together was very much a sign of the times, and I guess things like “Cello Song” reflect that…’ One song he remembers Nick being particularly fond of was ‘Song For Our Ancestors’, from the second Steve Miller Band album, Sailor. An atmospheric piece, it begins with the sound of foghorns baying out, as a sepulchral organ plays beneath. As the guitars and drums brush in, it develops into an impressionistic wash, similar to those Pink Floyd were attempting at the time. An odd choice for someone whose perceived taste was for the precision-cut lyrics of literate singer-songwriters.
During their first term in Cambridge, Brian Wells met Nick in a pub called the Criterion: ‘I went there because people who smoke dope went to the Criterion … I’d just come back from America, I’d been living there for a year, and I’d got a load of records — stuff like Sam & Dave which had been in the Soul Charts in America – that Nick hadn’t heard. I’d got a few West Coast-type things, but I wasn’t really into the West Coast stuff like Iron Butterfly …
‘Nick was a very tall, very good-looking guy, who looked just like the guy on the cover of your book … We clicked, partly because we both smoked dope, and partly because I’d got this record collection. I was interested in music, and it became very clear early on that he was a guitar player who was in a league that was totally different to the one I was in … I’d come back to England, where there were these people who had been influenced by John Renbourn and Davy Graham … and Paul Wheeler was one of them, actually. Nick and Paul were both very good guitarists who were playing acoustic guitars with all sorts of bluesy, finger-picking styles … I was really quite awestruck by them both, actually.
‘I had worked on a radio station in the States, so I was into American pop music rather than the underground; the hippie movement was wasted on me, I thought it was a load of old cobblers. But it did introduce me to people who smoked dope, which was what Nick and I had in common … I remember smoking dope and playing him things like Cannonball Adderley’s “Mercy, Mercy”, Sam & Dave, Aretha, “Never Loved A Man The Way I Loved You” … He was turning me on to things like Van Morrison’s Astral Weeks and Donovan … He appreciated things like The Notorious Byrd Brothers.’
Besides listening voraciously, Nick was quietly, determinedly, working at his own songwriting, and trying the results out on friends, as Ian MacDonald discovered: ‘I remember Nick playing “River Man” and “Time Has Told Me” … on several occasions in various Cambridge college rooms … a very quiet, humble, kind man, who seemed to be viewing everything from a faintly puzzled, faintly amused distance. At the time, he was about to record Five Leaves Left, and we were all knocked out by the songs.’
Nick’s Cambridge friends all share clear and fond memories of informal sessions when he played his own songs, and some remember occasions, often with Paul Wheeler on guitar, which were just jams, usually based around blues figures, with no discernible endings or beginnings. But although happy to get out his guitar and play for friends, Nick played precious few real concerts. Neither Iain Dunn nor Ian MacDonald recalls ever seeing Nick perform formally while at Cambridge, and Brian Wells agrees: ‘I don’t remember Nick doing gigs in Cambridge – only in our rooms. I would occasionally jam with him. I would struggle on, but he didn’t think much of me as a musician, quite rightly. I think he and Paul Wheeler would do a fair bit together.
‘In terms of gigging, that didn’t really happen until after Five Leaves Left. We were aware that he had these mysterious friends, one of whom was Joe Boyd, and there was all this sort of stuff about “Well, I’m thinking of making a record …” I think some of us didn’t quite believe it. It was a different life. He’d be in Cambridge, he’d smoke dope, he wouldn’t do any work really, and we’d meet up and listen to music. Then he would go off to London, where he seemed to have a different life …’
Nick was listening to pretty much what everyone else of his age was hearing at the time, and when it came to guitarists his turntable tutors were as you would expect – Bert Jansch, John Renbourn, Davy Graham, John Martyn … Little of the electric flamboyance of Eric Clapton or Jimmy Page impinged upon his playing. Robert Kirby has clear memories of Nick playing in his rooms at Caius: ‘He’d often come round and sit, not play his own stuff, but improvise blues. I mean, I love Jansch, Renbourn, Davy Graham … in the sixties we had the best of the world’s acoustic guitarists … He was better than them at the blues. He could either do it in a complex sixties or seventies rock style, or he could make it sound like the original black Americans had done it before the war. He had studied it a lot, he really had. He used to talk about some quite esoteric forties and fifties players.’
Iain Dunn didn’t foresee Nick’s success, but sensed that he was working at honing his talent: ‘I think in those days he did what everyone did, which was play Bert Jansch at sixteen rpm, work out what he was doing, and do it for themselves … He would turn up and say: “I’ve got a new song” and you’d go: “Oh, what is it?” And he’d play “Man In A Shed” or something … He was obviously a very able guitarist… I do remember he had the most gorgeous voice, just fantastic. It was so … sensitive, a slightly husky quality.’
May Balls — which actually take place during the first week of June – are an Oxbridge tradition in which live music plays an important part. In 1964 The Rolling Stones had to interrupt their debut American tour to fly back and play an Oxford May Ball. The incongruity is still striking, but it really did happen: on 10 June 1969 Nick Drake hunched over his guitar and sent out his wistful and idiosyncratic songs to a braying, swaying, May Ball crowd.
John Mayall and the Liverpool Scene headlined the Caius May Ball that year, together with Tuesday’s Children, White Unicorn, Paul Wheeler (‘whose lyrical and humorous songs and guitar-playing have been entertaining London and Cambridge audiences for several years’), Fab Cab and The North-West London Contemporary Jazz Five. As well as arranging for, and appearing with, Nick Drake, Robert Kirby was also singing with The Gentle Power Of Song that June night. There was also a Cambridge jazz group by the name of Horn. Intriguingly, barely three years later, ‘Horn’ would appear as the title of an instrumental piece on Nick’s final album, Pink Moon.
The May Ball programme included the following profile: ‘Nick Drake’s forthcoming LP, already hailed in the press as the record of the year, was produced by Joe Boyd (producer of The Incredible String Band and Fairport Convention). Robert Kirby arranged some of the tracks on the album and his orchestra will be accompanying Nick tonight.’
Robert remembers his performance with Nick at the Caius May Ball: ‘I wore evening dress, and the girls were at the ball anyway, and they wore black, ankle-length dresses with white feather boas. They were playing as a double quartet, an octet. There was a string-bass player as well — his name was Colin Fleetcroft, and I’ve never seen him since, but I’m sure he had an old tape recorder set up and recorded it. I certainly scored for flutes. Nick was singing, and we also interspersed it with the slow movement of Leopold Mozart’s Trumpet Concerto and the Albinoni Adagio & Fugue.
‘It was in the Library. Nick did the four orchestrated songs, he did a couple of songs without the strings, and after every third song we stuck in these classical bits. Everyone talks about the sixties and flower power, but the May Ball was very much what it would have been like before the war. I think socially the big changes came in the seventies … when the educational establishment changed. In the sixties, the drug culture was there, but by and large, you still conformed, even if you didn’t think you were at the time.’
When flautist and saxophonist Iain Cameron arrived in Cambridge the year after Nick, he soon became involved in the city’s thriving undergraduate musical scene: ‘I would go round to Paul Wheeler’s room in New Court, and we’d blow. One afternoon I go round there, this would be April or May 1969, and … Nick is there playing songs – I definitely remember “River Man” – and just remember thinking what a dream of a song that was. How utterly stunning as a piece of music, partly because of the concentric guitar part in 5/4, the harmonies, very evocative, slightly mournful words. He also looked very impressive, like he looked on the records. A very beautiful person by any standards. Slightly reticent, slightly cool, insubstantial spirit …’
Cameron was co-opted into playing at the May Ball in the ‘Kirby-led ensemble’, and remembers the occasion in some detail: ‘Nick was on about eleven o’clock … He was quite featured, he had his own space, a medium-sized room in Caius College devoted to Nick. It was reasonably well attended, an audience of thirty to fifty … It was quite ambitious, because of the Kirby arrangements … Nick was seated, playing guitar, there was a little woodwind section over to one side of the stage … a few strings, but I can’t remember if there were girls … “Mayfair”, “Time Of No Reply” I remember, stuff from Five Leaves Left. Now I would worry about whether we had a good PA, but I don’t remember what the sound was like that night.’
Nick Drake performing while surrounded by girls in feather boas is an appealing and enduring image, and there is no doubt that it did happen. There is, however, a difference of recollection as to where and when. The striking tableau is generally attributed to the 1969 Caius May Ball, but others suggest that the boas in question appeared at another confirmed performance, which Nick gave at Cambridge’s Pitt Club, in Jesus Lane.
Brian Wells remembers both performances but refuses to be drawn about feather boas: ‘He did play at a May Ball; he also played at my ex-wife’s twenty-first birthday party in the Pitt Club, with an orchestra, and I was at both of those gigs, because I did the sound PA. At the May Ball he was using the amplifier and speakers that we were using for our disco, and he came in … while I was in the middle of playing “Mony Mony” or something by Tommy James & The Shondells … saying: “You will make sure we’ve got the PA … ?” And I’m saying: “Hang on, hang on, let me just cue up this other record.” And he was a bit concerned that I was a bit abrupt, and his comment was: “Oh, I can tell I’ve walked into a really busy situation …”
‘The Pitt Club with the orchestra was a bit scratchy … Robert Kirby had a string quartet with him as well… They definitely played “Time Of No Reply” – I was always surprised that wasn’t on Five Leaves Left, because it was something he played quite a lot. He played most of the Five Leaves Left stuff.’
The now familiar picture of a reserved and image-conscious young man, preoccupied with his music, seems at odds with Nick’s apparent enjoyment of playing for his friends, pints of beer at the Criterion and college parties. Nick enjoyed the conviviality of Cambridge. It was an easy place to get seduced by, and during his two years there Nick embraced university life. There were plenty of spontaneous drives out of town too, when friends like Robert Kirby and Paul Wheeler piled into Nick’s Vauxhall Viva, with Nick heading for the Suffolk coast or local points of interest.
Robert Kirby confirmed this light-hearted, almost fun-loving, side to Nick: ‘He liked to go to parties. He came out to a party at my brother’s in Hertfordshire, played the guitar there quite happily. He liked a drink, he talked … I can remember punting, swimming. Getting in the car and just looning off on the spur of the moment. Talking about anything at all. He had been a sportsman, a very good athlete. I can remember him trying to chuck me in the river, me trying to chuck him in the river. However, he did, from the very first time I met him, have this incredible presence. He was tall, very good-looking. He was imposing just when he came in the room. Without speaking, he would impose his presence on you unintentionally. All women liked him. I remember all my girlfriends fancied him.’
One of the theories frequently put forward to try to explain Nick’s later depression and decline is that he was gay and unhappy about it. Nick was undoubtedly attractive to women, and Richard Charkin acknowledges that he didn’t seem very responsive to this interest, but he doesn’t believe that Nick was homosexual. Like so many others I have spoken to, he felt that over the course of all the time they spent together, he would have sensed such an instinct, even if repressed: ‘We used to go down to the Criterion … Girls used to really love him, and he never did a bloody thing, he never lifted a finger … People have said he was gay, he was pretty, but I think, together for a month in Morocco, and two years at Cambridge …’
For all his conviviality, there was always a more serious side to Nick’s nature; but as Robert Kirby explained, that wasn’t unique to his friend. Cambridge did have that effect on people: ‘There certainly was a dark side to Nick, right from the start… I remember the first time I heard “Three Hours” – at Madingley, the American cemetery – we’d gone out there one night, and it was very scary, just to hear him play that there. I’m not saying that dark side was all based on drugs, or him reading The Myth Of Sisyphus … I think Nick did look into these things like Wittgenstein, Camus, structuralism … That sort of blank, negative, nihilist side of life … but he wasn’t unique in that. Walking around Cambridge in those days, there were fifty people worse than Nick that you would pass on the pavement every hour…’
Studies did not worry Nick unduly at Cambridge, but apart from participating in the wide-ranging social scene, it was at Cambridge that he really began to hone his guitar style and songwriting. In the university’s green pastures, between 1967 and 1969, Nick Drake slipped quietly from shy schoolboy to introspective young man with a clearly defined picture of his future.
Robert Kirby was at Caius on a music scholarship when he first met Nick Drake during their second term at Cambridge in early 1968. Kirby was already involved with The Gentle Power Of Song, a close-harmony singing group at the university, who had landed a recording deal with Polydor and released a couple of singles. In February of that year Nick had played a gig at London’s Roundhouse, as a result of which Ashley Hutchings of Fairport Convention had alerted Joe Boyd to the singer-songwriter’s abilities. Somehow Nick had learned of Robert Kirby’s musical pedigree and, during the spring term of 1968, approached him about possibly arranging songs for the album which would become Nick’s debut recording.
‘It was during the spring term, March or April 1968, that Nick first approached me,’ Robert told me. ‘When I first met him, he was importing those psychedelic posters from LA, and he was selling those as a sideline … Nick came round to my room in Tree Court at Caius and said he’d got a recording deal and knew that I’d done an album for Polydor … He had his guitar with him and he played me “Day Is Done”, “Way To Blue”, “I Was Made To Love Magic” and “Time Of No Reply”. The version of that he played me was much faster than the one which was later released. We did an arrangement of that, which was one of the first four I did.’
By the end of his first year at Cambridge Nick Drake already had his sights set on a career as an Island Records recording artist. During his second year he worked hard polishing his own songs and his skills as a guitarist. In the light of this chronology those intimate sessions trying out new material in studies and bedsits around Cambridge begin to take on the air of workshop performances or warm-up gigs. It has become part of the myth that Nick stumbled into the music business unwittingly, that the ‘success’ thrust upon him by others damaged him irreparably, but the evidence contradicts this view. Nick worked hard at his music, and cared too deeply about it to let it go to waste.
Brian Wells first met Nick in October 1967: ‘He probably hadn’t met Joe Boyd by that time, so it’s interesting, because he had all this network going on in London, and one got the sense that he had some sort of deal going … I think different folk were in different compartments. A bunch of people at the funeral met up for the first time, and were all from different walks of life … Occasionally he and I would get together in London during holiday time. It was actually a bit awkward … I felt slightly out of my depth in London. He clearly had all these slightly special people, like the Ormsby-Gores, and names like Eric Clapton got mentioned, and I felt slightly star-struck, hanging around with this guy whose guitar-playing I loved, who by then had started to record.’
Nick’s parents, though always supportive of his music, were troubled when he announced that he wouldn’t be returning to Cambridge for his final year. Molly’s voice is sad and slightly baffled in the recorded interview: ‘I don’t know if his only ambition was to be a musician. He read English at Cambridge, he was very interested in literature, he felt all the time that he was torn between the two things, and finally he gave up. He left Cambridge before taking his degree, which to us seemed a terrible thing; he had passed the first part of his degree, and he was within nine months of the finals. We all said this is the most terrible thing to do, as any parent would, and Rodney said to him at least if you get your degree you’ll have a safety net, and Nick said: “The last thing in life I want is a safety net!” ’
‘He was confident about the music,’ Rodney Drake said. ‘He made his first album while he was still at Cambridge. He was quite convinced that was what he wanted to do. I have said before that I don’t think we realized how good his music was – but he did. That first record, Five Leaves Left, was acclaimed by the critics, but it never sold in quantities. We thought it was a great mistake that he left Cambridge, but I don’t think now, looking back, that it was. It might have been better if he’d left earlier, because he had this music in him.’
Molly added: ‘I think he felt, having brought out Five Leaves Left, that if he went slogging on at Cambridge for another nine months, he would just miss the peak. Miss his chance. Miss his foothold in the world.’
The sessions for Five Leaves Left began at Sound Techniques studios in London, in July 1968, and continued intermittently for the best part of a year. Nick was barely twenty-one years old, but with the completion of the album his future was decided. In the summer of 1969 he left Fitzwilliam College. For Nick, a contract with Island Records was justification enough for quitting Cambridge. But the real vindication of his decision to manage without a safety net lay pressed in the vinyl of his first album, Five Leaves Left, which Island Records released on 1 September 1969.
As he left Cambridge behind him, Nick’s only qualifications were those he carried with him from Marlborough. Intriguingly, in his university recommendation of October 1966, Nick’s housemaster, Dennis Silk, had written presciently of his pupil: ‘He himself loves music and plays several wind instruments and would, I think, secretly like to be good enough to make his living in music.’