‘It was very much the era of all those desolate souls playing at Cousins,’ Jerry Gilbert recalls. ‘In that sense, Nick would have fitted in perfectly – the Al Stewarts, Cat Stevens, Paul Simon, John Martyn – all singing into their soundboxes. I would have thought that would have been Nick’s natural ambience, his habitat.
‘Nick was only wheeled out to play the big shows, he never seemed to play the folk-club circuit at all. I think that is a really important point: he didn’t ever seem to gravitate around the folk clubs, which all the other Witchseason acts did, and the Island acts generally — Cat Stevens, John Martyn, Sandy Denny, The Incredible String Band. The whole Witchseason thing was linked to the folk club tradition. But not Nick Drake. He came out and did the concert-hall thing, the opening act, then vanished back into wherever he vanished back into.’
The performing career of Nick Drake was incredibly short. Once signed to Island, he only ever gave a couple of dozen concerts, which were, according to eyewitness accounts, largely desultory and inconclusive affairs. As with so many aspects of Nick’s life, specific dates and places are elusive. Nick’s friend John Martyn, for example, knew of only two gigs, and in 1986 he spoke to Musin’ Music about what he obviously believed was the most crucial gig in Nick’s career: ‘He never felt comfortable in front of an audience. It was embarrassing to go and see him, because he was obviously in such utter discomfort. He just didn’t like going on and playing. He primarily played for his own amusement … one of the things that contributed to his utter detestation of the whole thing was that he was once booked to play at a Coventry Apprentices Christmas Ball … in those days, “Purple Haze” was “in”, and there he was singing “Fruit Tree” and all those gentle, breezy little ballads, and I can just imagine them swigging back the Carlsberg Special and giving him an awful time. I know that gig lived in his mind, he’d talk about it quite regularly … I’d hate to be affected that badly by one social experience … dreadfully sensitive fellow, dreadfully sensitive.’
Nick’s long-time friend and arranger Robert Kirby has given a lot of thought to the problems facing Nick as a performer: ‘When he was performing, in the studio … it was his whole life, but even that was compartmentalized. I don’t think he ever had a problem performing well. So it wasn’t a question of nerves. And as I said, he practised.
‘I have always respected Joe and everything he’s done, but I don’t think Witchseason ever claimed to have agency networks set up, that kind of management. Fairport were self-promoting. Within their group, there was one of their friends who would get the gig and organize it, get the van. Nick didn’t have any of that support. I think Nick did get angry, and resented the fact that he wasn’t getting the help he should have. What I felt would have helped is if he had an agent. Marcus Bicknell at Rondo, through his relationship with me, got Nick gigs wherever he could. He was representing bands like The Climax Blues Band, Genesis, so wherever he could, he’d put Nick out.’
Popular myth has long held that Nick was so soured by his experience at the Christmas dance referred to by John Martyn, that it put him off live performance for ever, but Robert Kirby has different recollections: ‘It was the Nettlefold Nut & Bolt Apprentices’ Annual Dance. He and Marcus … knew it was going to be the pits, but it was a gig … I can remember they came back to Cranley Gardens after the gig, which was in Sheffield or Derby or somewhere up North … This one was a riot anyway, it wasn’t Nick particularly they were moaning about. It was just pints of lager thrown everywhere. He came back and was laughing and joking about it — and he’d got paid!
‘I don’t believe that was the occasion, but I can perfectly well accept that he went somewhere where he was expecting to be listened to, and wasn’t listened to, and might have felt that afterwards. I think there was one in London that did sour him. I think they were Hooray Henrys who he would have expected to have listened. And they weren’t in the slightest interested — “boo-ha”, “get off”, that sort of thing.’
The concerts Nick Drake is definitely known to have played number no more than a few dozen. After the Roundhouse gig in February 1968, where Ashley Hutchings discovered him, the most significant date was on 24 September 1969, when Nick supported Fairport Convention at the Royal Festival Hall. Then, on 21 February 1970, he was back on the South Bank supporting John and Beverley Martyn at the smaller Queen Elizabeth Hall, and the same month he opened for Fairport Convention at half a dozen dates. The following month Nick was opening for Sandy Denny’s Fotheringay on a five-date UK tour – the other act on the bill was a duo undertaking their final dates together, The Humblebums, featuring Gerry Rafferty and Billy Connolly.
In an interview quoted in the fanzine Pink Moon, John Martyn remembers seeing Nick before the Fotheringay show at the Festival Hall: ‘It was a good place for him, but he was cripplingly nervous. I mean, he was distraught before the gig. It was rather embarrassing in fact to see him. He was distinctly uncomfortable on-stage. I mean, the music was fine, but he just didn’t like being there at all … I got the impression it was costing him too much to go on the stage. It was just like no amount of applause or anything else would ever have paid him back the mental effort and energy he had to expend.’
Nick’s Royal Festival Hall gig in September 1969 was probably the most prestigious he ever played. This was the much-loved Fairport Convention’s first concert since the crash six months earlier, which had taken the lives of the band’s drummer, Martin Lamble, and Richard Thompson’s girlfriend, Jeannie. It also marked the debut of Fairport’s new direction, as instigators of English folk-rock, which would characterize their seminal album Liege & Lief, released later that year. It was an important moment for all concerned.
Fairport were too nervous to be nervous about their opening act. Even without the extra anticipation which presaged this particular appearance, the Festival Hall was an intimidating room to play. Advertisements for Fairport’s keenly anticipated appearance (Tickets 25/-, 21/-, 17/-, 13/-, 10/- and 8/-) detailed the support acts simply as ‘& Friends’. There was no mention of Nick Drake.
Witchseason’s Anthea Joseph was backstage to witness first-hand Nick’s terror of live performance: ‘Nick was sick with fright, which I can understand … you can’t live on glucose and lemon juice for ever. We got him on stage, I think he did four numbers and then fled. That was it — four numbers and off. He was shaking all over. Some people can perform and some people can’t, and he was one of those … he didn’t enjoy the adulation. He couldn’t carry it at all.
‘The other gig was a club of some sort … He just hated performing. In a room, if you had him in your own sitting room, he’d sit in the corner and take up the guitar and play you something, and it was lovely, no problem – he did that for me a couple of times. But performing was totally different… I remember him sleeping on my floor in Islington, because he didn’t want to go home. He crashed there a couple of times, we’d sit up all night, but he still didn’t talk, and in those days the meaning of life was all. We’d sit there and I’d be rolling joints, and cups of tea, endless cups of tea … Next morning, he’d shamble forth and vanish into the morning.’
Eighteen months after first seeing Nick Drake at the Roundhouse, Fairport’s bassist Ashley Hutchings was in a such a state of nerves that he remembers little of that landmark Festival Hall appearance, let alone his ‘discovery’, the opening act: ‘It was our first gig since the crash, the first time we had played the Liege & Lief material. It was one of the most anticipated events of my life … Nick apparently opened, but it was such a big thing. It wasn’t just the resurgence of the band after the crash, it was the beginning, if you like, of folk-rock. So it was such a big event for us that we were all nervously pacing about backstage.’
More municipal than the larger, baroque Royal Albert Hall, the Festival Hall, which was opened in 1951 as part of the Festival of Britain, accommodates an audience of up to 3000, sitting in serried rows, sweeping down to the stage, which is open and exposed. Even from the auditorium, it seems like a mighty long walk from the wings, particularly when you are occupying the platform alone.
Unbeknown to their son, sitting proudly in the audience that September night were Nick’s parents. Molly: ‘Of course the very first big concert was with the Fairport Convention at the Festival Hall. We didn’t dare tell Nick that we were going. We crept along there, quite the eldest by about ninety years. Nick came on first, followed by John and Beverley Martyn, then Fairport Convention were the whole of the second half of the programme.’
Rodney: ‘He did very well, all by himself, sitting on a stool. He got a lot of applause, and he just got off his stool, waved his guitar to everybody and wandered off. And they couldn’t get him back again.’
Molly: ‘He was wearing his same old black trousers that he wore every day.’
Rodney: ‘I think he found it pretty difficult appearing in public, and it became more so. Of course Island always wanted him to go round doing these … “gigs”, is that the word? And he didn’t like that. He didn’t really enjoy performing … He became very withdrawn.’
Although the majority of those who witnessed Nick’s performances, or talked with him about them, have a vivid recollection of his extreme unease on stage, there are those who were more favourably struck by his stage presence. Joe Boyd and, particularly, Gabrielle Drake, remember being impressed by Nick’s Festival Hall performance.
‘Well, I read all these reports, about how Nick shambled on-stage at the Festival Hall,’ recalled Gabrielle. ‘I was there. I am a performer, I know something about it. It’s true he didn’t do the pre-chat. He came and sat on a stool and played. And he electrified the audience. What he did have was a tremendous presence. Sometimes that presence could be black and very negative when he was deeply depressed, but he was a charismatic figure, there were no two ways about that. There wasn’t a smattering of applause from a bewildered audience, this wasn’t true. They were enraptured.’
However, Island’s new press officer, David Sandison, was less than struck by his new charge in February 1970, when he first saw him performing, supporting John and Beverley Martyn at the Queen Elizabeth Hall: ‘The QEH gig, Nick was for everyone who hadn’t taken their seat or wanted to go and have a glass of wine to go and do it, because he wasn’t doing anything that was remotely grabbing your attention … He wasn’t projecting, there was nothing coming over the footlights. I know Gabrielle is really pissed off with me for the description which was quoted in the ad for Pink Moon, but that was how he was.’
The advertisement Sandison refers to was the official Island ad in the music press, announcing the release of Pink Moon. It took the form of a letter from David Sandison describing the impact Bryter Layter made on him, and how Nick’s third album had come into his possession. He also described seeing Nick perform at the QEH show: ‘He came on with his guitar, sat on a stool, looked at the floor and sang a series of muffled songs punctuated by mumbled thanks for the scattering of bewildered applause from the audience who didn’t seem to know who the hell he was, nor cared too much. At the end of his last song, his guitar still holding the final notes of the song, he got up and walked off; his shoulders hunched as if to protect him from actually having to meet people.’
Sandison still stands by his description of Nick’s performance: ‘That is how he was: he looked down all the time. Gabrielle’s memory is of a different gig, but that night there was a guy on-stage who … he actually looked mortified, frightened, ill at ease. In a room of about fifty or sixty people, it would have worked and it would have been very intimate, but he never came to grips with that aspect of playing to 2000 people, big rooms. He really had no experience of it, he was undoubtedly shy … it could have been someone doing a soundcheck, to be honest. He didn’t say anything, and at the end of the set he didn’t even say “goodnight” — he just walked off. Some people clapped, but not enough, and they didn’t clap for very long, the lights went up, and we all went off to the bar.’
The recollections of most of those who saw Nick Drake perform are in agreement: they highlight how ill at ease he appeared on stage and speak of his manifest discomfort when confronted with an audience. Following the publication in early 1997 of a feature I had written on Nick, dozens of readers took the time to write to me with their memories of seeing him in concert. Without exception, they confirmed just how uncomfortable a performer he appeared, alone on the concert platform.
Paul Donnelly saw Nick at the Liverpool Philharmonic Hall in very early 1970, supporting Fairport: ‘He came on and said nothing audible to the audience, either before or between songs, and when he’d finished he just got up and walked off. True to all other reports about him. I remember “Cello Song” and “Three Hours”, mainly because they were two of my favourites …’
‘I was a teenager and had just bought Five Leaves Left and fallen in love with the songs,’ wrote Mick Stannard, who remembered seeing Nick at a folk club – almost certainly Cousins. ‘Suddenly, there he was on a stool a couple of yards away. I think he started with “Time Has Told Me”. It was great, me being a guitarist, looking at his fingers playing those lovely chords. Later, he was in the middle of “River Man”, sitting hunched up, head bowed, not looking up at the audience, when suddenly his capo sprung off the neck of his guitar and fell to the ground. There were a few giggles from some people, but mostly we didn’t really know how to react… He didn’t look up or say a word or … make light of it with a laugh, but simply bent down and picked up the capo, reattached it to his guitar and carried on from where he had left off. He was aloof and awkward. After his three songs he scuttled off round a corner and out of sight.’
Like many others, Dave Crewe first became aware of Nick from the Bumpers sampler which included ‘Hazey Jane’. He saw Nick open for Fotheringay at Leicester’s De Montfort Hall in March 1970: ‘I do remember the songs “Time Has Told Me” and “Way To Blue”. Each song being warmly greeted and with growing appreciation by the audience. About halfway through the set… midway through a song, he broke a string on his guitar. Embarrassingly, he carried on until he finished the song and immediately and rather nervously began to replace the string, making a few barely audible quips as he did so. After what seemed ages, but was probably only a couple of minutes, he completed his task and received rapturous applause for his efforts. Unperturbed, he continued and finished the set to a standing ovation with cries for more, but he left the stage and never returned.’
Schoolfriends from Marlborough who recalled the self-assured and talented performer of only a few years before were baffled by accounts of Nick’s increasing terror of live performance. Simon Crocker: ‘When I read stuff about Nick in performance and mumbling, all I can do is look back and remember that Nick was a natural performer. He was bloody good: he was the band leader, he projected well. He was a confident performer. And I heard about this particular performance at the Queen Elizabeth Hall from people who’d been there who said he mumbled. And I remember saying at the time: “That doesn’t sound like Nick at all, he must have been ill.” It just didn’t connect.’
Perhaps it was after Nick signed to Island, with the realization that he would have to confront audiences by himself, that the chill set in. All alone on-stage, just him and his guitar, with no back line of bass and drums, no horn section, no one else to share the vocals or harmonize with. Certainly at Cambridge, Nick had seemed to enjoy playing for friends and even, on occasion, performing in front of an audience. He was never outgoing on stage, but by all accounts had a certain still, calm confidence, and even enjoyed performing. But something had changed.
By 1970 the fear was there for everyone to see—it was almost tangible. In performance and alone, he seemed so exposed that audiences found it painful to watch. For Nick, it was a waking nightmare.
Nick Drake was never comfortable with the label of folk singer, but the mere fact that he wrote his own songs and accompanied himself on guitar, typecast him as a folkie. For guitar-picking hopefuls like him, the folk clubs which had sprung up in such abundance were the obvious live venues, and following the release of Five Leaves Left, it was on to the folk-club circuit that Nick was dispatched.
Folk gave you a freedom, but it also gave you nowhere to hide. Folk clubs were ideologically sterile, with none of the ‘showbusiness’ trappings. The atmosphere in folk clubs during the 1960s owed more to Bertolt Brecht than Sunday Night At The London Palladium. A stage was anathema – why should the performer be elevated? These were fiercely competitive venues at which to cut your teeth as a performer. You had to have stamina for the lengthy journeys from town to town, and you had to have guts to get up before an audience who frequently owned every album from which you had filched your repertoire.
The British folk revival had its own figureheads. Like many fledgeling folkies, Nick was fascinated by the richness of John Renbourn’s playing, and his ability to draw on all manner of influences, from courtly madrigals to the blues. An even bigger impact on Nick as a teenager was made by Bert Jansch. On the tape he recorded at home at Tanworth during his first university vacation, Nick included two songs, ‘Courting Blues’ and ‘Strolling Down The Highway’, which Jansch had recorded on his 1965 debut album. Jansch’s striking gypsy good looks and apparently effortless fluency on the guitar, made a mark on all those who heard his records or saw him play in the folk clubs of the mid-sixties. Neil Young cited Jansch as being as much an influence on his guitar-playing as Jimi Hendrix.
Pete Frame, legendary draughtsman of rock family-trees, jacked in his job as a surveyor with the Prudential Insurance Company to run a folk club in Luton, where Jansch performed. ‘Bert Jansch was like the fountainhead of it all, to my mind. Nobody had ever seen anything like it. His songs – the structure of them, the feel of them, the melodies, the words … There was no precedent, you couldn’t tell what his influences were. Just amazing stuff… he played guitar like no one else had ever heard it before.’
In the days before videos, before the national press was interested in pop music, before monthlies like Q, Mojo and Record Collector, the chosen route for young singer-songwriters was to start in the folk clubs, graduate to tour support for a fellow Island act and finally headline in their own right.
Ralph McTell remembers diligently treading this path: ‘I just went wherever I was sent … I was probably doing 200 dates a year, all over the country, for eight, ten quid a night, driving myself… I’d be going up to Sheffield for about a tenner a night… I can’t speak for Nick, because he didn’t do that many gigs, but people like John Martyn, myself, The Humblebums, were not quite folk and not quite pop. And we worked all the time … Because it was a youth thing, and the folk clubs were Dylan and all that, it naturally spilled off the universities, which is what really elevated the thing into equal status with what a lot of the pop singers were doing. We could get as big a crowd.’
Nick’s wariness of live performance can only have been compounded by the isolation of working the folk circuit. In a band, you had company, but as a solo singer-songwriter you were out there on your own – frequently rolling up at a gig alone, with no minder or record company support. However, there was an unseen record company machine waiting to spring into action, and curiously what triggered it were those tiny, apparently insignificant folk-club gigs. Martin Satterthwaite was on the sharp edge, as a member of one of Island’s first Field Promotion Teams: ‘It meant visiting the local record stores, making sure they had product, telling them which artists were coming to town. We made sure there were window displays, and visited local radio, which then, of course, was only the BBC”
In those days touring was what you did to interest people in buying your work — a write-off against record sales. There were no tour publicists, masseuses or manicurists; no limos, tour riders or merchandising. Just look at the back sleeve of Pink Floyd’s Ummagumma, from 1969: two roadies, surrounded by a phalanx of the Floyd’s state-of-the-art live equipment, all capable of being squeezed into the back of a transit van, were pictured to amaze fans with the band’s high-tech sophistication.
Martin Satterthwaite: ‘We’d have boards at the venues advertising the latest product. This was long before merchandising, of course. The only T-shirts that Island would manufacture then, in the early seventies, were for us to give away to DJs, record dealers – there was nothing for sale to the public. It was long before tour publicists or anything, so if a band was playing, you’d liaise with local media, try and arrange an interview backstage.’
Nick’s reluctance to gig is widely believed to have sprung from a single unsettling experience which soured him for future live performances. Robert Kirby’s memories of seeing Nick immediately afterwards have cast doubt on the apprentices’ Christmas party most often held to blame, but Joe Boyd believes he knows when the watershed came: ‘Then, the next thing you know, he’s playing a student centre at Warwickshire, and everybody’s drinking at the back, people are talking. He was very upset, couldn’t handle it. He came limping home, he said I can’t go on with the tour. So we cancelled the other dates.’
Nick’s reluctance to go out and perform effectively cut off the prime avenue of exposure for any new act, a fact which did not escape his record label. David Sandison explains: ‘There was interest from a few people while Nick was alive, but it was limited. It was “Yeah, that’s nice, but so what?” … And that’s understandable. There wasn’t any profile. There wasn’t anything to grab on to. There wasn’t even explaining the songs in interviews. There wasn’t any gigging, so that you could make that live connection. And there wasn’t radio play. There weren’t any slots for the promotional people to get for people like Nick, apart from John Peel, and his time was limited. There weren’t local radio stations. There wasn’t any commercial radio. There was Radio Luxembourg, but they certainly weren’t going to play Nick Drake.’
Even when Nick did get out and gig, it was never a comfortable experience. Ralph McTell remembers Nick opening for him at Ewell Technical College, Surrey, on 25 June 1970: ‘That’s the only conversation I remember having with him, in the dressing room beforehand. I am a dreadfully nervous performer, still, and I’m always clucking around before a show. But to allay my nerves, I would cluck around other people and say: “Are you all right?” Nick was monosyllabic. At that particular gig, he was very shy. He did the first set, and something awful must have happened. He was doing his song “Fruit Tree”, and walked off halfway through it. Just left the stage.’
Bruce Fursman was still at school when his group, Folkomnibus, supported Nick at a gig in Middlesex. The Upper Room Folk Club was held at the Goodwill To All pub, a red-brick thirties roadhouse on the corner of Harrow View and Headstone Lane. This gig, on 4 October 1969, could well have been Nick’s first-ever folk-club date, and certainly marked his first listing in Melody Maker’s Folk Forum.
An audience of around fifty had paid to sit in the room above the pub. Bruce remembers that he bought matching pink denim shirts in an attempt to make Folkomnibus look ‘less like schoolboys and more like professional artists’. These would also have contrasted markedly with Nick’s customary dark outfits. Folkomnibus played a set consisting of Simon & Garfunkel, Spinners and Corries covers; some Irish jigs and reels; and their own ‘instrumental attempts at being teenage versions of the string-bending John Renbourn or Bert Jansch’.
‘Nick took to the floor, or should I say the low chair at the front of the audience,’ Bruce recalls. ‘He sat, stooped, hunched over his guitar, an almost reverential silence in the place and this low, dark, almost drowsy voice — almost one of the audience, only he was facing the other way. His hair covered his face, and as far as I can remember, there were no in-between song comments – quite spooky in some way. The image of the figure – almost like on the cover of Bryter Layter – is very strong: dark, hunched shape, face hidden by hair, voice, audience intently listening.’
Before the gig, Nick was fascinated by Bruce’s cheap Italian round-backed mandolin, and picked it up. Bruce remembers him ‘holding the delicate, pear-shaped body in his delicate hands, as if it were a new-found antiquity’. When Folkomnibus came offstage, Bruce even remembers Nick laughing good-naturedly and saying: ‘You’ve stolen my set.’
Another handful of confirmed gigs came when Nick opened for Fairport early in 1970, as the band endeavoured to recover from the departure of founder member Ashley Hutchings and cynosure Sandy Denny. Fairport’s Dave Pegg remembered those dates: ‘He did about six gigs with Fairport. I remember we did the Bristol Colston Hall with Nick. He was very well received, the audience liked him. They loved it, he’d go on and play the songs, he didn’t have any spiel. But the songs were strong enough to get people’s attention, and in those days people were into listening to music anyway. He didn’t have much stage presence … he was the opposite of somebody who gets up and tries to gee the audience up, but the fact that he was that way, people had time for him, because the music and his voice were so good, and they’d probably never heard much of it before. It was early days for him.
‘He was quite sociable. I remember we went for a curry round the corner from the Colston Hall, and he was very friendly … I never saw him lose it, I never saw him become that depressed that he’d walk off the stage.’
Fully qualified survivor Michael Chapman saw Nick perform at a folk club in Hull in 1969. Chapman, who was seven years older than Nick, had given up his job as an art and photography teacher in the mid-sixties, for the life of a travelling folkie. He made his debut with Rainmaker in 1968, but it was his 1969 set, Fully Qualified Survivor, which marked his card. Recorded for Harvest, EMI’s ‘progressive’ subsidiary, the album is remarkable for Chapman’s inimitable, gritty ‘Postcards Of Scarborough’.
While ploughing around the British folk circuit in the late sixties, Chapman met Bridget St John, who had just made her debut album for John Peel’s Dandelion label. ‘I’m pretty certain it was Bridget who turned me on to Five Leaves Left, and that was an album I loved,’ Chapman told me. ‘I saw Nick was on at a folk club in Hull, so my wife and I went down. It must have been sometime in 1969, as I remember the album had just come out. It was at a pub called the Haworth. They were a real silver-tankard and finger-in-the-ear crowd. The folkies did not take to him. Nick came on and played his own songs, but they wanted songs with choruses. They completely missed the point. They just didn’t get the gentleness, the subtlety. He played beautifully.
‘I don’t know what the audience expected. I mean, they must have known that you weren’t going to get sea-shanties and singalong songs at a Nick Drake gig! I remember he didn’t say a word between the songs. I suppose they were all his own songs, I recognized some from the album. He didn’t introduce any of them; he didn’t say a word the entire evening. It was actually quite painful to watch. Nick should never have been there. It was obviously not in his nature to perform, especially to a crowd like that. But back then, if you played acoustic guitar on your own and played your own songs, folk clubs were the only places that you could play.’
The folk scene in London was centred on Les Cousins, in the basement of 45 Greek Street. Cousins, as everybody called it, was run by Andy Matthews, a folk enthusiast whose parents ran the Dionysius Restaurant upstairs. The club, which was tiny, had begun life as The Skiffle Cellar during the DIY music boom of the mid-fifties. When Cousins first opened its doors in 1965, it charged ‘2/6 membership, entrance 5/- and 7/6’. Cousins was the folk venue in London during the sixties, the club to which every tyro folkie who could string together more than two Bob Dylan songs gravitated. It was where guitar wizard Davy Graham held court; where Paul Simon visited.
Ralph McTell had made his recording debut a couple of years before Nick and was a regular performer at Cousins at the height of the folk boom: ‘Very, very small. You were playing to the wall. There was room for three tiny rows of seats before the back wall. There was a dark corner, a tiny stage not big enough for a stripper. A microphone and a domestic amplifier and speaker … A little coffee bar, because it wasn’t licensed, although there was occasionally a light ale in there!
‘The real strength was the all-nighters, because if you got in on a Saturday night in Soho, you had shelter, people used to sleep there. Every boy with a guitar came in … We were all so driven to play, we were all so young. And, of course, just walking through Soho to go to work. When The Incredible String Band were on, the queues used to go round the block, and the working girls around Greek Street at that time were complaining that they weren’t doing the business.’
An advertisement in Melody Maker’s Folk Forum of 15 November 1969 has John James at Cousins, supported by ‘Nick Drake, a fine songwriter’. Steve Aparicio was a member of Cousins, and remembers Nick’s performance that night: ‘Nick came on and sat hunched up on a stool on the tiny stage. He played only three or four numbers before leaving the stage in some distress, when he was looked after by John Martyn. John Martyn and Al Stewart both got up and did a few songs each.’
Michael Chapman: ‘Me and Al Stewart, Roy Harper, Ralph McTell, we were all out working the circuit. But that gig in Hull was the only time I ever saw Nick. Whenever we went down to London, we’d all drift along to Cousins to check out the opposition – nick a lick, maybe pinch a gag or a bit of patter, but I never saw Nick there. I assumed — or I think I’d heard — that he was still at school or university, because his name was never around.’
Folk singer Steve Tilston released his debut album, An Acoustic Confusion, in the summer of 1971, and in a couple of reviews found himself compared to Nick Drake. Steve remembers meeting Nick in Soho: ‘It was a Saturday night in 1971, and as I walked down Greek Street, on my way to Les Cousins, I noticed a group of about four people gathered on the street outside the club’s entrance. One of these was Andy Matthews, who ran the club, and the only other one I recognized was Nick. He was dressed in a white shirt and black jacket, just like in most of his photographs, and stood out in those “tie-dyed” times. We were introduced and pretty soon we got into a conversation. He was very tall and I have this recollection of him having to stoop a little. He startled me by saying that he liked my album, and I remember saying something along the lines of that being good, given that I was supposed to sound like him.
‘My memory is of the conversation being relatively easy — given my own then-mastery of the pregnant pause. One question I remember asking him was concerning a small news snippet I’d seen in Sounds … I was convinced that I’d read a piece about Nick about to be doing some recording with one of the old black American blues legends — somebody like Mississippi Fred McDowell or Son House, somebody of that stature – and I remember feeling really envious. I mentioned it and recall him laughing at the somewhat bizarre prospect. I remember liking him a lot; my recollection is of us getting along pretty well. I think we all then moved along to the Pillars of Hercules pub, and then the memory fades.’
Only one account survives of Nick Drake actually playing at Cousins. It was written by Brian Cullman, who supported Nick that night in 1970, and appeared in Musician magazine in 1979: ‘He sat on a small stool, hunched tight over a tiny Guild guitar, beginning songs and halfway through, forgetting where he was, and stumbling back to the start of that song, or beginning an entirely different song which he would then abandon mid-way through if he remembered the remainder of the first. He sang away from the microphone, mumbled, and whispered, all with a sense of precariousness and doom. It was like being at the bedside of a dying man who wants to tell you a secret, but who keeps changing his mind at the last minute.’
An American exchange student, who got involved in the English folk scene when he came to London in 1970, and fell in with John and Beverley Martyn, Brian Cullman has kindly expanded his impression of Nick Drake in performance at Cousins: ‘There was a large though not capacity crowd there, and, if memory serves, they were polite, if not overly enthusiastic about my set. If I was amateurish and awkward, Nick was even worse, though in a far more interesting and charismatic way. He made no eye contact with the audience and shrank into himself, looking smaller and more lost and fragile than usual. And he seemed to wander between songs, starting one, then discarding it in favour of another, the way someone might choose between melons at a fruit stand, picking one up after another, trying to figure out which was ripe. He forgot lyrics or, if uncomfortable with what they revealed, he sang away from the mic or simply mumbled. I’ve never seen a performer as deeply unhappy or uncomfortable on stage (and I’ve never seen an audience as rapt and spellbound … there was a genuine affection and admiration, almost a sense of devotion, and the crowd seemed to be willing him through the songs).
‘He played many of the songs from Five Leaves Left (“Time Has Told Me”, which came across almost as a country song; “Three Hours”; “Cello Song” – I think – “Thoughts Of Mary Jane”) as well as some songs that turned up on Fink Moon (“Things Behind The Sun”, maybe another) though the song that left the deepest impression was nothing more than a fragment. He sang the first few lines of “Hazey Jane I”, over and over again, almost like a mantra, against soft and rolling chords. The effect was chilling, like eavesdropping on someone’s prayers.’
A flyer for a Bedford College all-nighter on 8 May 1970 announced Nick Drake at the bottom of a bill which proceeded upwards via John Martyn, Spencer Davis, Jo-Ann Kelly, Group X, Black August, Raw Spirit, East Of Eden and Graham Bond. Five years after he had hitched from Marlborough to watch The Graham Bond Organisation, Nick was sharing a bill with Bond. In another five years, both men would be dead.
Nick appeared at Ewell on 24 January 1970, playing bottom of the bill to Genesis and bill-toppers Atomic Rooster. He shared a booking agency with Genesis, who were just starting on the windy, wuthering route to success. It was to promote their recent album Trespass, on the new Charisma label, that the band — then consisting of Peter Gabriel, Anthony Phillips, Mike Rutherford, Tony Banks and drummer John Mayhew – were out working the circuit. Phillips, the original Genesis guitarist, was kind enough to share his memories: ‘Maybe it was the same agent, but I seem to remember we shared bills at those big university gigs, where there’d be lots of different acts on different stages. There was no simpatico because we were all ex-public schoolboys … I remember Nick was so shy and retiring … It was probably a combination of things, that we were so wrapped up in ourselves, and there wasn’t much time at gigs either … You used to arrive, get on with things, minimal soundchecks, play, then pack up and set off in the van. We had this ghastly old bread van, with no windows in the back. We never travelled with Nick. My abiding memory is that he was so shy, not the easiest guy to talk to.
‘He may have found the fact that he was this one person, and here was this phalanx of group, and roadies, he may have found that difficult. He performed, just him and his guitar. And it was a very crouched, husky performance. In techs, people didn’t really listen. You have to stamp on people with volume, unless you’re a name. The gigs we did with him – university gigs mainly — even we suffered in our quieter numbers, let alone Nick, doing his one-man thing in his soft, husky voice. It was concert-hall stuff, folk clubs, but not a tech gig, where the lads are there with pints … I don’t know why he was put on those big, loud tech gigs. It was difficult enough for us.
‘When you’re playing this quiet acoustic stuff to people who are shouting, it just kills the songs really. We used to start with a quiet acoustic set, and build up to a climax — but we got rid of that quite quickly! … We started strong — kick ’em in the teeth, quieten them down, then you can go a little bit quiet. One of our most popular acoustic songs was a very sixties-sounding song called “Let Us Now Make Love” … Nick obviously liked that one very much, I remember him coming up to me when he heard that I wrote it and saying … “Dangerous!”
‘All the gigs I remember with Nick were these big, multi-act tech gigs. He might have got £50 for a gig, maybe a bit more, certainly more than us, because we had to split it. I don’t remember Nick surrounded by anybody else. There was contact with Robert Kirby and Marcus [Bicknell], who were at some of the gigs. But I can’t remember who got the gigs. I don’t remember Nick with an entourage. I just remember this very sweet, but rather shy, tall man, who sang in this engaging husky voice, who you could never really hear properly!’
Bridget St John was playing the same circuit as Nick at roughly the same time, and she remembers Nick performing, and the sort of response he got from critics: ‘My memories of him playing are of a tall, lanky, long-legged young man — always seated cross-legged. I loved a lot of his music — especially from the Bryter Layter period: it was John and Beverley [Martyn] who introduced me to him. I remember we both opened for Fairport Convention in Croydon, and both of us felt good about our performances. Karl Dallas reviewed it and obviously hated both of us equally: “There’s only one question in my mind after having heard the Fairport Convention’s superlatively excellent performance at the Fairfield Halls last Friday: why the hell did the organisers make us sit through almost an hour of sheer tedium before the interval instead of letting the Fairports have the whole show to themselves?” ’
The Croydon Advertiser was rather kinder. Reviewing the 10 October 1969 gig, the local paper’s reviewer noted: ‘The first half of the evening’s programme was devoted to another folk direction – that of the solo composer/guitarist/singer. Unfortunately, Bridget St John and Nick Drake were too similar in outlook, and thus each robbed the other of impact. Both sing sad, personal songs in rather deep, hushed voices, interspersed with the slightly amateur incoherencies one associates with this sort of performance. Both are pleasing enough artists, with above-average skills at the guitar and composition … Nick Drake, a Cambridge undergraduate, wore youthful cords, an open neck shirt and jacket, and a rather anxious expression …’
Nick is also rumoured to have played a short, unbilled set at an open-air festival in Yorkshire, headlined by Free, who were Island labelmates. It could have happened: solitary guitarists who sung their own songs were cheap, didn’t need much in the way of PA, and could be slotted in between showers. There are other rumoured appearances, but even some of the ones advertised in Melody Maker may not have materialized. What does emerge from eyewitness accounts is that the weight of opinion about Nick’s live performances is at odds with that of his sister. Gabrielle remembers Nick electrifying the audience with his tremendous presence, and recalls that at one point he had wanted to become an actor, but she too recognized her brother’s intense vulnerability: ‘He did very few performances. What put him off, I think, was that he did a working men’s club somewhere, and they talked all through the performance. I always think if you’re going to be a performing artist of any sort, you have to have an inside that’s like a jelly, and an outside that’s as tough as nails. And I think Nick’s trouble was that he never had that tough outside. He was born with a skin too few …’
The solitary nature of Nick’s craft probably added to his feelings of being adrift and isolated. Following his appearance at the Haworth folk club in Hull, Michael Chapman remembers his wife seeing Nick on the pavement outside, alone with his guitar, looking quite forlorn: ‘She went up and said how much she’d enjoyed the gig and he said he didn’t have anywhere to stay; they hadn’t booked him a room or anything, so we asked him back to stay for the night. He was very quiet, well-spoken, but as soon as he came in and saw my guitars lying around, we were off. He was quite easy to be with. Once we were in the house, and he was away from an audience, he was fine.
‘He was playing a Martin guitar, and I had a Gibson, which for guitarists are two totally different philosophies. As soon as we sat down we started jamming, improvising scraps of songs. We played all night, from midnight to 5a.m. I have to say that substances did play a part in the proceedings. He played some lovely stuff on the guitar, interesting, Brazilian-type tunings.’
Nick was hauled out regularly and put in front of audiences keen to witness Fairport Convention, Fotheringay, John and Beverley Martyn … Support acts are the timid Christians thrown to hungry lions in the auditorium, and even tiny club audiences could be pretty doctrinaire in those days. For anyone without the necessary chutzpah, folk clubs could be fairly unforgiving places.
Jerry Gilbert, a regular observer on the folk circuit, saw Nick play half a dozen times: ‘I always remember him seated on a stool. He always seemed to be the token opening act, which was sad, as he was worth more than that. I don’t ever remember a showcase for him. He was out there as a stooge to whet the crowd’s appetite … There was always a huge amount of nervousness … let me qualify that: Nick’s performances were always very accomplished. I don’t recall huge amounts of shaky fingers and bum notes or anything at a Nick performance. I think once he got into the song, he lost himself in his own world — he could have been in Sound Techniques recording, he shut the audience out entirely, created this cocoon around himself… then he thought, oh God, there’s got to be a link here, a bridge, between here and the next song. The actual performance of the songs I remember as being pretty OK.’
For career purposes, the dozens of gigs, most of them supporting other people were not nearly enough – though for Nick personally they were obviously far too much. But to put it in some sort of perspective, Nick’s Island labelmate and contemporary, Cat Stevens, racked up 145,000 miles of travel in one calendar year alone, touring to promote his albums. Venturing out from Little Hadham, Fairport Convention also clocked up the miles, hacking across the country during 1970. With little likelihood of picking up airplay for their albums, they recognized that their heartlands were the university campuses and regional clubs.
Dave Pegg: ‘We were in a band, and bands are like a different thing. If you’re not in a group, you’re always an outsider — you don’t spend five hours in the van together. Bands develop their own sense of humour, it’s difficult for an outsider to get in on stuff like that. I think Nick used to come in the van with us occasionally, but he did take things very seriously, whereas we were the opposite … They were very, very happy days, we just seemed to be working all the time. That year we were at the Angel, we must have done about 300 gigs.’
As a live performer, Nick Drake’s career fizzled out barely two years after the release of his debut album. The ability to face an audience across the footlights was slowly and irrevocably lost. From then on, the only place for him to turn was in on himself. Back in Soho, Steve Tilston saw Nick for the last time. The elegant young pretender was gone now: ‘There was another brief meeting on the stairs going down to Les Cousins. He looked strange and unkempt, given that before he had appeared quite elegant and it was I who had felt like Wurzel Gummidge; and then, I suppose about a year or so later, the word was that Nick was not well.
‘He would still occasionally come down to Soho, but then it was specifically to see Andy Matthews – he and his wife Di were very concerned and protective of Nick. The last time I saw him, I remember going into the Pillars of Hercules and spotting Andy deep in conversation with Nick; all I saw were [Nick’s] hunched shoulders. I didn’t join them, so my last memory is of Nick Drake’s back. I didn’t see his face again’.