‘Pink Moon does remind me of Robert Johnson,’ says Peter Buck, ‘and the fact that they recorded him in a hotel room, facing the wall, too shy to look at the people recording him; and I understand that’s pretty much how they recorded Nick for Pink Moon. There is that loneliness. Close up, intimate. Scary.’
Buck, REM’s guitarist and the band’s musical archivist, is only one of a new generation of musicians who are coming to appreciate Nick Drake. He also made that fascinating connection between Nick and the late Robert Johnson. Although he only ever recorded twenty-nine songs, at five sessions between November 1936 and June 1937, such was the passion and intensity of that music that Johnson’s position as the King of the Blues remains unassailable.
King Of The Delta Blues Singers, a sixteen-track album released in 1961, was the record which marked out the parameters of the British blues boom which followed: Eric Clapton, The Rolling Stones and Led Zeppelin were just some of the white boys who hailed Robert Johnson’s influence as seminal.
To the sheer quality of Johnson’s music, you must add a palpable sense of mystery, for his short life and hard times were shrouded in an impenetrable mist of myth. Columbia Records’ A&R chief, John Hammond, was intrigued by the blues he heard on Johnson’s recordings and went looking for the man in 1938 so that he could highlight him at his Carnegie Hall ‘Spirituals & Swing’ concert showcase. But by the time Hammond’s interest had been piqued, Johnson was already dead.
Johnson only ever made it to twenty-six, the same age as Nick Drake. But otherwise, their lives could hardly have been more different: Johnson was born in poverty, black and illegitimate – some say it’s a miracle he lasted as long as he did in the lynch-happy, Jim Crow American South of the thirties. As Peter Buck pointed out: ‘Blues is the music of the outsider, and you can’t get to be much more of an outsider in our country than a poor, black guy in rural America in the 1930s, which is where Robert Johnson came from.’
In view of the enigma that was his life, it is little surprise that the circumstances of Johnson’s death were also mysterious; though it now seems certain that he was murdered by the jealous lover of a woman who was showing too much interest in the bluesman. Before his death in August 1938, Johnson transferred some of the visions which haunted him in life on to shellac. Vocalion’s Don Law was the man who tracked down the bluesman and lured him into a makeshift recording studio.
Johnson’s first recording session took place at the Gunter Hotel in San Antonio, Texas, in November 1936. Johnson was young and nervous, and he mistrusted the motives of any white man who seemed interested in him. Law eventually persuaded him to record, but the singer was so nervous that he asked if the recording engineers could be located in the room next door. Finally, Johnson was coerced into singing, but not before he had turned his back to the engineers. He recorded facing the wall, lost in a world of his own, unobserved, wrapped in the isolation shared only with his music.
Although Johnson’s music was available in the Deep South during his lifetime, it was only posthumously that it became widely available and appreciated. Aficionados appreciated the high, lonesome quality of his keening singing and the strength of his guitar-playing, which came in part from his astonishingly long fingers. Throughout his life, and in the sixty years since his death, mystery has attached itself to Robert Johnson like wool to Velcro. The most enduring question is how he learned to play the guitar in that eerie, other-worldly way of his. They say that when he came out of Hazlehurst, Mississippi, he couldn’t play guitar worth a whit. Then the boy vanished. The next time Johnson appeared, folks said he must have sold his soul to the Devil to play guitar like that.
Like many poor boys, he believed that having his photo taken imperilled his immortal soul, and it was only in 1986 that a picture emerged which could be authenticated as that of Robert Johnson. After all those years, if this wasn’t an image of Johnson, then it should have been. Staring at you from a photo from over half a century ago, the eyes are rigid and inflexible, but what compels you to keep staring is not his eyes; rather it is the fingers of his left hand, which grasp the neck of his guitar like the throat of an enemy.
Nick Drake, like so many young white boys growing up in the 1960s, is known to have loved the plaintive blues which came up off the Mississippi Delta, and he was particularly fond of Johnson’s King Of The Delta Blues Singers. Friends speak of Nick’s penchant for the blues during his lifetime, and it is more than coincidence that ‘Black Eyed Dog’ was one of the last songs Nick ever recorded, and one of his best. It was a song which drew heavily on the blues tradition, and particularly that of the late, great Robert Johnson.
Johnson’s blues are desolate and windswept, none more so than the chilling ‘Hellhound On My Trail’. Like the music of Nick Drake, you sift through the work of Robert Johnson looking for omens. In his case you don’t have to look far. From his youthful pact with the Devil, chronicled in ‘Crossroads Blues’, to the end-of-life fatalism of ‘Hellhound On My Trail’, life and death are marked out clearly on the sparse recorded legacy of the man.
A friend who encountered him during the dark days, remembers Nick comparing himself to the doomed Johnson, and claiming that he too had a ‘hellhound on my trail’. ‘A little shiver ran down my back,’ Ben Lacock told Mick Brown. Those echoes eventually become too loud to ignore: a sound of aching loneliness and solitary desolation. Sung by one man and his guitar to an empty wall.
Nick Drake’s third and final album, Pink Moon, was recorded over two nights at Sound Techniques studios. With only a smattering of piano on the title track, Pink Moon too is the sound of one man and his guitar, pouring out his despair into a studio microphone.
Though unable to articulate his despair in any other way, Nick was clearly aware that there was something gnawing away at him. Unable to cope any longer on Haverstock Hill, unwilling to answer the door, reluctant to communicate on any level – with his parents, his record company or his dwindling audience – Nick finally left London and returned to his family home in Tanworth.
Anthea Joseph: ‘When Joe left there was no one really looking after Nick, but he had a family, you see. I mean, it wasn’t as though he was an orphan of the storm really – he may have felt like one, I don’t know. I mean, it wouldn’t surprise me if he did. He wasn’t mentally stable. You can’t take – nobody can take – responsibility for that, apart from immediate family, and he did have a family who loved him dearly.’
In the period between the release of Bryter Layter in November 1970, and Pink Moon in February 1972, the depression continued to corrode. Despite his distaste for the mechanics of promoting his records, Nick was upset at the poor response which had greeted the release of both Five Leaves Left and Bryter Layter, and the transparent lack of success ate away at him. He saw poor record sales as a personal failure, and could not accept that for any singer-songwriter at the beginning of their career, it all took time. You could not expect to make it overnight: building a career involved doing just that, from the foundations up. Before the video age, touring was what gradually brought your name to a wider audience, and with Nick’s reluctance to perform, that most obvious avenue was cut off from him.
The reluctance to face the hard facts of commercial consideration became internalized, and where others might have taken advice or bided their time, he saw no future, only failure. ‘I’ve failed at everything I’ve tried to do,’ he told his mother. A terrible admission from a young man barely into his twenties. Concerned at their son’s unwillingness or inability to communicate, his parents consulted their local GP, who felt that Nick might benefit from seeking psychiatric help. During 1971 Rodney and Molly Drake took Nick to see a psychiatrist at St Thomas’s Hospital in London. His mother later admitted that ‘it never really worked … what do psychiatrists really know? They are fumbling in darkness too.’
What did come out of those first sessions was a prescription for anti-depressant drugs. Nick was prescribed three types of drug, which he reluctantly began to take daily. Friends recall his embarrassment at taking the pills in their presence. It was a very English, a very middle-class response to a depressive illness: to be seen to be taking anti-depressants was an admission that there was something wrong; an admission of weakness.
Friend and musical colleague Robert Kirby, who had worked closely with Nick and Joe Boyd on the first two albums, felt that Boyd’s decision to go to Los Angeles to work for Warner Brothers left a significant gap in Nick’s life: ‘That is one important thing: the length of time that Boyd was in America. I think that Nick felt sadly out of touch … He also admired Joe very greatly, and I think when Joe was in America, it did leave a big hole.’
When Nick did not respond well to the anti-depressants, his father consulted Boyd, who agreed to try to help: ‘I spoke to Nick a few times from LA. He was obviously having difficulties. His parents got on the phone to me once and said they really wanted him to seek help, and that he was afraid that everyone would look down on him if he went to a psychiatrist. He was reluctant, and they would appreciate it if I would speak to him because they said he respected me so much. So I spoke to him and said: “I don’t want to tell you what’s right or wrong, but you should never feel people are judging you. You have to deal with things from your own point of view, and if you need help you should get help.” The guy he went to, I think, was the guy who gave him the anti-depressants, and I think we know a lot more about anti-depressants now. Then, they were doling them out like candy, not aware of how dangerous they are.’
As someone who remained a close friend until the end of Nick’s life, and has also trained as a psychiatrist, Brian Wells has memories of Nick at the time that are perhaps doubly revealing: ‘My view is I don’t think Nick Drake had what I as a psychiatrist would view as a biological depressive illness. I think he became more and more uncomfortable around people, and withdrew because he felt safety in his own company. A bit isolated, not for any particular reason … I think he got himself in a rut. If you are presented with that as a psychiatrist, there’s nothing else you can call it, other than depression. But I don’t think he had a biological depressive illness of the type we would normally prescribe anti-depressant drugs for. I’m not criticizing his doctor, because I think when his parents brought him to this psychiatrist up in Warwickshire, they were worried [because] he was at home. He’d had all this lively sort of stuff, he’d been at Marlborough, he’d been at Cambridge, you know. What had happened to this guy?
‘Psychiatrists are trained to think in terms of diagnosis. What would explain this behaviour? Well, he’s either got schizophrenic illness, which he didn’t have: he wasn’t listening to voices. The most obvious diagnosis to make with Nick was one of depression. I don’t think it was. I mean, it was a depression, but it was more a sort of existential state that he’d got himself into, rather than it being the kind of depressive illness that medical students learn about when they’re training to be psychiatrists. I would not have given him Tryptizol, which was an anti-depressant of that time … You hear stories that “it seemed to be making a difference”. But I don’t think that was the kind of depression he had. I think he was a sensitive, rather precious guy who became increasingly withdrawn. And I think that was diagnosed as depression.’
For a time, though, it did seem to those around Nick that his mind was made marginally clearer by the anti-depressants, and Nick himself began to feel that a change of scene might help. Following Boyd’s sale of his Witchseason roster before returning to America, Island Records boss Chris Blackwell had maintained a fondness for Nick and his music, ensuring that he continued to receive a weekly stipend. Now, concerned by Nick’s visible deterioration, Blackwell allowed him the use of his villa, in Algeciras, near Gibraltar. Barely seven years before, Nick and David Wright, his friend from Marlborough, had planned to use the area as a springboard for their round-the-world trip.
On his return from Blackwell’s villa, his mood perhaps slightly brightened by the Spanish sun, Nick began to think about recording again. In the absence of Joe Boyd, who was now installed in LA, he decided to make contact with one of his few remaining conduits to the music industry, John Wood. The mythic version is that Nick turned up out of the blue to record the third album in 1971, insisting that it be sparse and straightforward. ‘No frills’ is Nick’s most frequently quoted comment on Pink Moon. In fact, it seems that as early as 1970 Nick had determined that the new album would be much simpler. Back then, though, he was not to know just what torments lay ahead.
Even at the time of its release, Nick had felt that his second album erred towards the more lavish production favoured by Joe Boyd, rather than the simplicity he himself favoured. In an interview with Musin’ Music, Boyd remembered: ‘Nick came to see me before we’d even released Bryter Layter, as soon as we’d finished the record, before the cover was done or anything, he said to me “The next record is just going to be me and guitar …” I think he may have found Bryter Layter a little full, or elaborate … I know he liked it, but he did feel, “OK, we’ve done this, now we’re going to do something completely different …” Nick wasn’t somebody you really argued with, but again he could do that with John Wood, he didn’t need me to do a record with just him and guitar.’
Robert Kirby did not learn until later that there would be no place for his sumptuous arrangements on the new album: ‘I remember after Bryter Layter hoping there would be things for me to do, and I remember him saying: “No, it’s only going to be myself and guitar.” I don’t think this was immediately after Bryter Layter; it was more shortly before Pink Moon.’
As far back as Cambridge in 1968, Kirby remembers Nick performing guitar pieces and fragments, which he recognized four years later on the final album. One he particularly recalled was the guitar phrase which appeared as ‘Things Behind The Sun’.
‘I think at the time Bryter Layter was out, most people said it wasn’t up to Five Leaves Left… I think the decline began with the response to Bryter Layter. The decline had set in prior to Pink Moon. Nick … took less care of himself. In the early days he always looked immaculate. Towards the end, he looked ill. He looked haggard, unkempt … I don’t think he was eating, which didn’t help.
‘Between Bryter Layter and Pink Moon, he would come round, stay for a week, and not say anything. Nothing. I knew him. My friends knew him … He might get the guitar out and play. If we were in the front room, enjoying listening to sounds, he’d come and sit down and enjoy listening. If we went to the pub or restaurant, he might come with us. But he would quite often not say anything.’
The period bordered by Bryter Layter and Pink Moon marked the almost imperceptible decline of Nick Drake. The outside world showed no real interest in that decline – merely curiosity. But those who knew him well, especially his family, found the change hard to bear. Gabrielle Drake: ‘The public image of Nick really stems from the years of his depressive illness because a lot of that coincided with his record-making. And of course one’s later memories are clouded by this – he was very depressed. But that wasn’t the essence of Nick as I knew him as a child …’
Formerly dapper and strapping and perhaps just a tad too aware of his own image, Nick now had so many real problems that simply making it from day to day was difficult. There was no longer space for worrying about a public image. Each and every day was a struggle, a period to be endured, to get through with gritted teeth. Nowhere was the grinding determination more evident than in the enormous personal struggle it took to record the songs which became Pink Moon.
Remembering Nick in happier times, John Martyn told Andy Robson: ‘He was extraordinarily lovable. And the most lovable thing about him was that he was so shy.’ But the sweet shyness had long gone, and now Nick seemed to have gone too. He was so totally withdrawn that he seemed to be teetering on the edge of something horrible, which he could barely discern and was fearful of truly comprehending. But some impulse – to work, to communicate, or to save himself – drove him to record. And determination, though never a part of the romantic myth, was always very much part of Nick the human being. Tremors of uncertainty, jarring discord, nagging awareness, fretful concerns, must have filled Nick’s head, for together they create the mood which saturates Pink Moon.
If Five Leaves Left – released a scant three years before Nick made this final album – is melancholy, but with the comforting glow of a November bonfire for comfort, Pink Moon is Manderley without lights, burned and razed, a hollow shell where once had dwelt happiness. Talking to Connor McKnight for his Zig Zag appreciation, John Wood recalled the sparse sessions which led to Pink Moon: ‘He arrived at midnight and we started. It was done very quickly. After we had finished, I asked him what I should keep, and he said all of it, which was a complete contrast to his former stance. He came in for another evening and that was it. It took hardly any time to mix it, since it was only his voice and guitar, with one overdub only. Nick was adamant about what he wanted. He wanted it to be spare and stark, and he wanted it to be spontaneously recorded.’
Singer-songwriter Clive Gregson first worked with John Wood a decade after Pink Moon was released: ‘I knew his name from Richard and Linda records, John Martyn, Fairport, Nick. We’d got a deal, and the record label wheeled in producers and said who do you like? They’d brought John in because he’d done the Squeeze stuff, which had just done so well – “Cool For Cats”, “Up The Junction”, great, great pop records. As soon as they mentioned his name, I just thought, yeah, great. I realized I probably had more records with his name on than anyone else.
‘He did the first and last Any Trouble records, then left the record business. He came out of retirement briefly in 1995 to do Boo Hewerdine’s record. I think he got to a point in the mid to late eighties, when records were so dismal … The kind of records John liked doing were: you get a band who could sing and play, who had good songs, and you mic it up right; they perform, and you get it on tape. But by then, you could take any old bollocks and make it sound glossy.
‘Talking to John about Nick, it was always how the records were made, and I think that he felt very proud of those records. I always got the impression with John that he felt Nick was probably one of the most talented people he’d ever worked with – and that’s very high praise when you look at the people he did work with. I got the impression that he admired the way Nick could translate the ideas and arrangements that were in his head.
‘Around the time of Pink Moon I think Nick’s health was obviously failing. John told me he thought Nick was having problems writing songs. I mean, Pink Moon is an incredibly short record. He just said: “That’s it. That’s what I’ve got. That’s how I want it to be. No overdubs. No nothing. Voice and guitar.” John always said that Nick had a very clear idea of what he wanted to do.’
As the last album Nick ever recorded, Pink Moon’s status is ensured. But like the house on the cover of Led Zeppelin’s Physical Graffiti, it is ever-changing, never static. Nothing is certain, there are few glimpses into the lives behind the blinds. The names on the doorbells bear little relation to the current occupants of the rooms.
Nick’s final album issued forth from a well of despair, a cell of isolation. Its songs were fashioned in an anonymous north-west London bedsit warren. The shifting, transitional nature of the location left its mark on Nick and the songs he was writing. There is no permanence on Pink Moon. It is too uneasy and restless.
Nick’s voice never sounded more consoling than here. But, knowing what was behind him and fearful of what lay ahead, it is in the fragmentary instrumental ‘Horn’ that he encapsulates Pink Moon’s terrible, desolate beauty. You can picture him bent over his guitar in a recording studio late at night – long, sinewy fingers moving slowly and deliberately across the neck of his guitar, evoking his own desolation in a way words never could.
Knowing this to be the final album, you search for those omens and portents which seem to so dog Nick Drake’s career. Here is a bleakness and unspoken tragedy to match any found in the blues. Here is raw grief and unassuaged anger. ‘Horn’ is music communicating the incommunicable, inarticulacy articulated. Here is Drake groping for a thread to guide him out of the maze of despair. Maybe the music could do it. Or maybe it would desert him, and leave him as alone and isolated as before.
For all its bleakness, and the outright despair of the voice begging, pleading for comprehension and understanding, Pink Moon concludes on a note of optimism. The final track, ‘From The Morning’, speaks of a beautiful new day dawning. Is it simply hindsight which finds us snatching at straws of hope? Or is there a real sense that, bad as things get, low as you can go, there is always a way up, always the brightness of a new day to follow even the bleakest night?
Is it significant that the song is placed last? Is Nick trying to tell us something? Or is that just the listener hoping that out of all the darkness which engulfed him during the final three years of his life, somewhere, however far in the distance, Nick Drake saw a beacon burning?
Hearing Pink Moon play, late at night, with the headphones wrapped tight around your head, so that you are isolated and alone, is chilling – and eerily intimate. It is a testament to John Wood’s skill that you feel as though you are part of the mood, and there is nothing between you and those songs, or the man performing those songs.
Pink Moon has all the hallmarks of a finely crafted beauty, a sombre resonance which finds echo all these years on. The songs are pale and wistful, like the late light of a Warwickshire afternoon. It is like watching smoke coil up from a hand-rolled cigarette, as the chill fog of a late-autumn evening sneaks up and wraps itself around you, like an old friend keen to betray you. Hearing Nick Drake’s voice here conjures up again the lost boy, creating a mood as irredeemable as childhood, as plaintive as unrequited love, as tragic as lost promise.
The starkness of Pink Moon sets it apart. Along with John Lennon’s Plastic Ono Band, Bob Dylan’s Blood On The Tracks and Syd Barrett’s The Madcap Laughs, it stands as an iconoclastic record. A record made to shatter the myth of the invincibility of the artist. All are albums made at times of great personal stress in the songwriters’ lives. But whether they were cathartic, or simply compounded the turmoil, only John, Bob, Syd and Nick could say.
Pink Moon is a cri de coeur. There was, transparently, no commercial consideration in its creation. This was not the record of an artist intent on alerting the world to a change in his personal life or private philosophy. This was a record which Nick Drake seemed to have no choice but to make. He had once told his father that there was music running through his head all the time.
Because of its harrowing nature, and the bleakness of the circumstances surrounding the record, it is no surprise to learn that Nick’s final album was his parents’ least-favourite. Writing to Scott Appel in 1986, Rodney Drake noted that: ‘The material on Pink Moon has always bewildered us a little (except “From The Morning”, which we love)’. Two lines from that song form the epitaph on Nick’s headstone in Tanworth churchyard.
In a Dutch radio broadcast of 1979, presumably aired to commemorate the release of the Fruit Tree box set, John Wood expounded further on his memories of those sessions: ‘The most startling conversation I ever had with him was when we were making Pink Moon. And as you’ve probably read, we made the record in, I think, two evenings. Nick was determined to make a record that was very stark, that would have all the texture and cotton wool and sort of tinsel that had been on the other two pulled away. So it was only just him. And he would sit in the control room and sort of blankly look on the wall and say: “Well, I really don’t want to hear anything else. I really think people should only just be aware of me and how I am. And the record shouldn’t have any sort of… tinsel.” That wasn’t the word he used, I can’t remember exactly how he described it. He was very determined to make this very stark, bare record and he definitely wanted it to be him more than anything. And I think, in some ways, Pink Moon is probably more like Nick than the other two records.’
Even the circumstances in which Island Records acquired Pink Moon have become the stuff of legend. The tale runs that Nick delivered the master tapes to Island, but left without talking to anyone, and it wasn’t until days later that the receptionist realized that the package she was holding was the new album from one of the label’s acts. It is suggested that Island was indifferent to Nick Drake, failing to nurture him while he was still alive.
Nick’s press officer at Island, David Sandison, remembers the event differently: ‘I saw him in reception after I came back from lunch … I saw a figure in the corner on the bench, and I suddenly realized it was Nick. He had this big master tape box under his arm, and I said: “Have you had a cup of tea … Do you want to come upstairs?” So we went upstairs to my office … and he just sat in my office area for about half an hour, then said: “I’d better be going …” He went down the stairs with the tapes under his arm, and about an hour later the girl who worked behind the front desk called up and said: “Nick’s left the tapes behind”, so I went down and it was the big sixteen-track master tape box, and it said: “Nick Drake: Pink Moon.” So they called John Wood and said: “What’s this?” and he said it was the new album. So we ran off a safety copy and said let’s hear it.’
In the dangerously deep waters of analysing what Nick Drake’s records ‘mean’, there is much to be gleaned from Pink Moon. The title track, particularly, lends itself to ominous symbolism: the ‘Pink Moon’ which is going to get the singer is widely taken to be the harbinger of Nick’s own death. The Dictionary Of Folklore, Mythology & Legend notes that during eclipses of the moon, ‘the earth’s shadow casts a dark reddish colour on the moon, dimming its light or blacking it out altogether. These “bloody” moons, or other aspects of the moon when the atmosphere makes the moon’s face seem red with blood, are evil omens, portending catastrophes. The Chinese, for example, see in an abnormally red (or an abnormally pale) moon, a warning of evil.’
Pink Moon, released on 25 February 1972 as ILPS 9184, appeared in a busy month for Island re-releases. The label was more concerned with re-promoting Emerson, Lake & Palmer’s Tarkus, Jethro Tull’s Aqualung, King Crimson’s Islands, Sandy Denny’s The North Star Grassman And The Ravens, Mott The Hoople’s Brain Capers, Mountain’s Flowers Of Evil and Fairport Convention’s Babbacombe Lee than the new album by Nick Drake.
In an extraordinary move, Pink Moon’s official full-page advertisement, which appeared in the music press in the month of the album’s release, took the form of an open letter from David Sandison under the heading ‘PINK MOON – NICK DRAKE’S LATEST ALBUM: THE FIRST WE HEARD OF IT WAS WHEN IT WAS FINISHED’. The letter included a warts-and-all account of Nick’s Queen Elizabeth Hall gig, before telling the tale of the new album: ‘The last time I saw Nick was a week or so ago. He came in, smiling that weird smile of his and handed over his new album. He’d just gone into the studios and recorded it without telling a soul except the engineer. And we haven’t seen him since.
‘The point of this story is this: why (when there are people prepared to do almost anything for a recording contract or a Queen Elizabeth Hall date) are we releasing this new Nick Drake Album, and (if he wants to make one) – the next?
‘Because, quite simply, we believe that Nick Drake is a great talent. His first two albums haven’t sold a shit. But, if we carry on releasing them, then maybe one day someone authoritative will stop, listen properly and agree with us. Then maybe a lot more people will get to hear Nick Drake’s incredible songs and guitar playing. And maybe they’ll buy a lot of his albums, and fulfil our faith in Nick’s promise.
‘Then. Then we’ll have done our job.’
Dave Sandison – December 1971
Island’s Press Officer.
It was as if the sheer naked honesty of Nick’s record had simply made hyperbole impossible. But perhaps even more strange is that a record company would simply accept the tape, press it up and release it immediately, exactly as it was, without any attempts at interference. In that context, the ad begins to seem quite ordinary, though Sandison does admit now that it was a bit of an admission of failure: ‘I don’t know what else I could have done. It was a statement of faith as much as anything: we’ll stay here as long as he wants to make records. Whether long-term and realistically, it would have been like that, I don’t know. Probably not.’
Gabrielle Drake was touched by the concern Island Records displayed over Nick during this dark period; Chris Blackwell particularly wanted to ensure that Nick was looked after. But as David Betteridge pointed out, the label did have other priorities at that time: ‘So many things were happening at Island. Nineteen seventy-two was an extremely busy year for Island. We had Sparks, Roxy Music, Cat Stevens … I mean, Cat Stevens amounted to something like 20 per cent of our sales that year. Worldwide, he was huge.’
No one at Island was really clear just what was wrong with Nick. Many of the people I spoke to who saw him around this time assumed it was a drug-related problem. His increasing isolation meant that even keeping the lines of communication open was a nightmare, as Sandison pointed out: ‘He was very difficult to contact. He was living in one of those places, four floors of flats, a couple of flats on each floor, and people only stayed for three weeks. It wasn’t a squat, but it wasn’t far off … so when you called, nobody was really sure whether Nick was there. Somebody would tramp off, and come back about ten minutes later and say: “Well, I’ve knocked on the door and there was no reply.” But that didn’t mean anything. You didn’t know if he was there or not.
‘But then he would just pop up. He would arrive at Witchseason, out of the blue … or he would swan off to Paris. He was together enough to organize that sort of thing. Whether after having become a “recording artist”, he just didn’t want to do it. And because he was so incredibly lucky to fall into Witchseason’s hands, and then Island, where this sort of thing was indulged. I mean, any other record company that might have signed him at the time wouldn’t have pursued him past the first album, given the fact that he wasn’t going to do any gigs or interviews.’
With the benefit of hindsight, you can see why Pink Moon and Nick Drake were so marginalized. The same issue of Melody Maker which carried Sandison’s letter down a whole page featured advertisements or reviews of other albums released that week – Paul Simon’s solo debut, Jethro Tull’s Thick As A Brick, Neil Young’s Harvest, Ry Cooder’s Into The Purple Valley, Carly Simon’s Anticipation, Al Stewart’s Orange, as well as debut albums from singer-songwriters John Prine, Steve Goodman, David Blue and Judee Sill. The number-one album that week was from Nick’s labelmate, Cat Stevens: his breakthrough Teaser & The Firecat.
The music industry was biding its time, treading water, following the break-up of The Beatles and Simon & Garfunkel, Bob Dylan in hiding and The Stones in tax exile. No one was sure if Glam was a flash in the pan, or how much longevity you could expect from Savoy Brown or Jonathan Kelly. Wherever the bright lights were shining, though, Nick Drake was well out of sight, edging into the shadows.
In his Time Out review of Fink Moon, Al Clark was clearly aware of the problems surrounding Nick: ‘Sadly, and despite Island’s efforts to rectify the situation, Nick Drake is likely to remain in the shadows, the private troubador of those who have been fortunate enough to catch an earful of his exquisite 3a.m. introversions.’
Even Nick’s most loyal supporters in the press were hard pushed to be unequivocally enthusiastic about Pink Moon. In his review of the album for Sounds, Jerry Gilbert wrote: ‘Island appear to have forgotten about Nick Drake until he ambled into the offices one day and presented them with this album. No-one knew he’d recorded it except the engineer and it’s a long way removed from the mighty sessions that Joe Boyd used to arrange for him. Nick Drake remains the great silent enigma of our time – the press handout says that no-one at Island even knows where he’s living, and certainly he appears to have little interest in working in public again.
‘The album consists entirely of Nick’s guitar, voice and piano and features all the usual characteristics without ever matching up to Bryter Layter. One has to accept that Nick’s songs necessarily require further augmentation, for whilst his own accompaniments are good the songs are not sufficiently strong to stand up without any embroidery at all. “Things Behind The Sun” makes it, so does “Parasite” – but maybe it’s time Mr Drake stopped acting so mysteriously and started getting something properly organised for himself.’
Within a couple of months of the release of Pink Moon, Nick had suffered a breakdown, and was hospitalized in the Warwickshire countryside. Like an ocean liner, slowly and inexorably, he was slipping the ropes which connected him to the shore. David Sandison’s poignant press statement had only confirmed the rumours which were already percolating around the music industry. With so much else happening – the first post-Beatles hysteria accompanying Bowie and Bolan; the increasing interest in the progressive movement epitomized by ELP and Yes – the absence of the already shadowy Nick Drake wasn’t exactly headline news.
In Melody Maker, Mark Plummer’s review of Nick’s last album was strikingly foreboding, given that Nick was still alive and only believed to be temporarily absent: ‘John Martyn told me about Nick Drake in ecstatic terms and so it seemed the natural thing to do, bag the album when it came in for review that is. It is hard to say whether John was right or not. His music is so personal and shyly presented both lyrically and in his confined guitar and piano playing that it neither does or doesn’t come over. Drake is a fairly mysterious person, no-one appears to know where he lives, what he does – apart from writing songs – and there is not even a chance to see him on stage to get closer to his insides. The more you listen to Drake though, the more compelling his music becomes – but all the time it hides from you … It could be that Nick Drake does not exist at all.’