‘He was the most withdrawn person I’ve ever met,’ John Martyn said of Nick. To Andy Robson he said: ‘We were never that close. Except, I was as close as anybody could be. He was an impossible man to get close to … In another age he would have been a hermit.’ Martyn and his then wife Beverley, near neighbours to Nick in Hampstead, were among the very few who were ever really close to him. Martyn, three months younger than Nick, was always one step ahead of him during his early career, and was the first folk-related signing to Chris Blackwell’s Island label.
His early albums – London Conversation, The Tumbler – were cut from the folkie cloth, but soon Martyn got the hump, and working with bassist Danny Thompson, switched direction: ‘I was actually very shy and retiring,’ he told Q, ‘and ever so sweet and gentle until I was 20 then I just got the heave with Donovan and Cat Stevens and all that terribly nice rolling up joints, sitting on toadstools, watching the sunlight dapple through the dingly dell of life’s rich pattern stuff … I’m not really that nice, and I very consciously turned away from all that.’
That change was marked by 1973’s Solid Air, which Colin Escott in his booklet to accompany 1994’s double compilation Sweet Little Mysteries described as ‘John’s masterpiece’. Escott went on to explain that ‘The texture of the title song was dictated by Danny Thompson’s bass, mixed way up. Inasmuch as the lyrics offered themselves up for interpretation, they were for, or about, John’s Island labelmate, Nick Drake. Nick lived near John for a while, and died mysteriously, if not altogether unexpectedly, the following year.’
Martyn’s song was a cautionary note to Nick. Knowing him now to be unreachable, perhaps he hoped Nick would respond to a message written in a form he understood. Talking to Zig Zag, while Nick was still alive, Martyn said: ‘Solid Air was done for a friend of mine and it was done right with very clear motives and I’m very pleased with it, for varying reasons.’
In 1986 Martyn told biographer Brendan Quayle: ‘Nick was a beautiful man, but walking on solid air, helpless in this dirty business, an innocent abroad. He was killed, like [Paul] Kossoff, by the indecent, parasitic opportunism that pervades the music business.’
When I approached Martyn about being interviewed for this book, he rang to say that he felt he had said enough about Nick Drake over the years and was reluctant to run the risk of turning his memories into anecdotes.
Chas Keep, who is currently working with Martyn on his authorized biography, wrote to me in June 1997 with a memory of Martyn’s response to Chas’s profile of Nick in Record Collector: ‘I think the thing that sticks in my mind the most is the image of John reading my article on the day it was published in 1992. Driving back to his house, he sat in the passenger seat reading, with tears in his eyes, the silence only broken by his occasional muttered “Poor Nicky, poor Nicky …” Poor John, he does so blame himself for being unable to prevent Nick from withdrawing from the world.’
Following their move from Hampstead, John and Beverley Martyn relocated to the sleepy South Coast town of Hastings, where Nick became an irregular visitor. Fond as the Martyns were of Nick, it seems that by the time he visited them during 1972, he was in a place that they could never hope to reach.
David Sandison: ‘John Martyn told me a story about when Nick was staying with them, and they were all sitting round watching telly … and Nick got up and left the room, and he thought he’d gone to have a pee, or make a cup of tea, but then he suddenly realized that an hour had passed, and Nick hadn’t come back. He was slightly concerned – he didn’t suspect he was going to kill himself or anything – but just wondered where the hell he was. And Nick was sitting in a foetal crouch outside the door, and it kind of freaked John, because he said that it was almost like he was listening to see if we were talking about him. There was a hint of paranoia. There was also that kind of … vague insult that we were his friends, but he didn’t want to be with us.’
Rodney Drake wrote that Nick was ‘very close’ to John and Beverley Martyn during 1971-72, and that he was living near them in Hampstead around the time he was recording Bryter Layter. He had fond memories of Martyn, and recalled him visiting the Drake family home in Tanworth when Nick was at his most withdrawn: ‘They knew each other very well, and when Nick was up here, and was pretty bad, we got John Martyn to come up. We’d never met him, and he came up here, and he was a very charming person.’
Molly Drake recalled: ‘Nick, having said he could come, then went into the most awful torment of worry, because … Nick always went on about his two worlds, and he thought John Martyn’s one world, and you’re another world, and it simply won’t work. But in actual fact, it worked like anything, we absolutely loved John Martyn, we got on dreadfully well …’
Rodney: ‘He kept us both entertained, and Nick was very amused, and the next morning, Nick wanted him to go …’
Molly: ‘Nick was very bad, and John Martyn is a tremendously vivacious, ebullient character, and at that stage, it was more than Nick could take. It was all right for one evening, and the next morning he couldn’t take any more of it.’
Interviewed on Radio 1 in 1985, Martyn remembered Nick: ‘He came and lived with me in various locations, and was just distinctly unhappy in all of them. I think he distrusted the world. He thought it had not quite lived up to his expectations.’
Joe Boyd had settled in Los Angeles, and after years of scraping by with his Witchseason acts was finally on a regular salary from Warner Brothers. But in London, in the early 1970s, with Boyd gone, Nick felt even more isolated. Nick’s decision to record Pink Moon without the lavish Boyd production which had been such a feature of Bryter Layter meant that Boyd could leave for America with a clear conscience, though in later years he admits to wondering if Nick did in fact feel abandoned: ‘Bryter Layter took a very long time. It was very off and on, doing little bits here and there, over the course of a year. And so by the time it was released, I was on my way to Los Angeles, so when it actually came out and didn’t sell, I wasn’t around as a manager … I guess I feel badly that I couldn’t totally follow through on it.
‘I think he did feel abandoned. You can look back and see how … I didn’t think of myself as being that important to the people you were dealing with. You were young, you think things go on and you do this and you do that. I was a little frustrated, because a lot of the groups, and Nick, wanted to do things that I didn’t feel necessarily involved me that much. Nick had already announced that he wanted to do his next record stark, so I said, well, you can do that with John, you don’t need me for that.
‘Nick loved Five Leaves Left. I don’t know what he thought of Bryter Layter. Whether he thought that his music was being a bit overwhelmed, by the arrangements, by the visiting artists, by John Cale, by Pat Arnold and Doris Troy … I just don’t know. But definitely by the end, when we finished Bryter Layter, he said: “The next record’s going to be different. It’s going to be very simple.” This was before I left, before Bryter Layter came out and didn’t sell, before any of that. And that was one of the things which added to my feeling of well, why not take this job with Warner Brothers.’
Simon Crocker had lost touch with Nick since the release of Five Leaves Left, but assumed that, signed to the prestigious Island Records, with his third album just out, things couldn’t be better for his old schoolfriend: ‘Then I met Robert Kirby … and we had a long chat about Nick and he told me everything, and I was absolutely flabbergasted. One of the things was, Joe Boyd going to America really caught Nick on the hop. Basically he depended very heavily on Joe … and he was kind of lost after he went. I don’t think you can point the finger at Joe: he did what was right for him at the time … I don’t think there’s any blame to be placed. He can’t be responsible, but in a way the impression I got was that Nick didn’t really grasp what was happening until it was too late. He didn’t realize the gap that was going to be there.
‘What amazed me looking back was that Nick never had a manager. Nick needed people to get his act together. Nick was just not someone who was going to do that by himself … Anyone who knew him would realize that he needed someone to really help him, to structure his life … I’m sure if he had had the right manager with a bit of money, and he could have had other musicians playing with him, he could have performed very, very well indeed. Is it because Nick said: “No, I don’t want it?” I don’t know that.’
Another friend from Marlborough and Aix was Jeremy Mason. He was equally shocked when he saw Nick for the first time in two years: ‘He had changed completely. This would be early 1971. We couldn’t get anything out of him at all. He didn’t like the pub. He said it was a class of people he was not interested in any more – it was a pub for the Chelsea set, what you’d call yuppies today.
‘We did go back to his flat. He actually only loosened up when we got back to the flat. Whether he had just moved in, or whether this was it, but it had nothing in it except the boxes in which his stereo had come. You sat on the bed, and had coffee off the boxes.
‘I remember introducing him as my great buddy from school; and realizing that I had nothing further in common with him came as a bit of a shock … He had certainly gone a very different path by then … He had turned, from the time I knew him, from a relatively laid-back chap, with whom I had no trouble communicating …
‘I must emphasize that when we were at school and went to see Graham Bond, and we went to the Flamingo, and we came down to France, played the guitar … he was pretty normal. It was Aix that started it. He became more and more … “obsessed” is the wrong word. More and more interested in the music. It went from a schoolboy thing, to something he did more and more.’
Brian Wells had been close to Nick at Cambridge, and kept in touch when they both moved down to London. Knowing how abrasive the music industry could be, Wells knew how it could impact on such a sensitive individual as Nick, but he also remembered him as withdrawn and reclusive, even during their university days together: ‘It’s difficult for somebody to say he wasn’t depressed – any psychiatrist quite reasonably would have said this is a depression. But I think it was more to do with … you know how Howard Hughes just withdrew? I think it was more like that.
‘I think he was always slightly sensitive, not aloof, but distant from it. I’ve been in pubs with Nick, and he would laugh and joke and things, but he would then go after a while … Whereas most people would hang on for another hour, he would get up and go. From the minute I met him, he would get up and go, because you got the impression that he thought it was uncool to stay there getting pissed, or whatever. It had to do with cool, and image, a lot of it.
‘It’s interesting, isn’t it: Why wasn’t he a well-integrated, well brought-up English public-schoolboy who went off to do the same as everybody else? But, you see, he was. He was, and it seemed to change once he got into the music business. And I think the music business is a great place if you’ve got some rough edges. I think the music business is a much easier place for working-class lads to be…1 think you’ve got to be quite tough and almost ruthless to be successful in the music business.
‘I think he got into this arena with a fine, chiselled talent. I mean his music is not… he was not getting up on-stage and playing loud chords and boogying around or being sexy. He wasn’t into rock ‘n’ roll. He was sitting there, a kind of… timid figure, dressed in black, playing beautiful weird-tuning-type acoustic guitar stuff … He was never a rock ‘n’ roller.’
For those who only knew Nick after he arrived in London to make a career as a musician, the decline was less striking, but nonetheless still shocking. Because of his chosen career, many assumed that Nick’s problems could be put down to drugs. Only a 10/- cab ride away from Nick in London at this time, Linda Thompson remains convinced that his problems were not drug-related: ‘I never saw him do drugs. I saw him smoke dope, but I never saw him do anything else. I suppose he did. But then you know, looking back on him now, right from the start, there was something wrong.
‘If he did take a lot of drugs, he wasn’t an overt drug user. Then as time wore on, he was taking drugs for his depression. It was hard to tell. Then he had his Howard Hughes phase, which was really scary, with the long fingernails and the dirty clothes and stuff. At the time I certainly felt, oh, that’s disgusting – those long fingernails and the dirty clothes – instead of thinking it might be nice to try and help this person.’
‘I’ve known a lot of drug addicts … and I think he was ill. Clinical depression. If he’d been in a rehab, if he’d had lithium or something, maybe counselling, maybe something would have helped. But in those days, vegetarian food and shrinks were still very much fringe things. He must have found that hard, because he had to try and keep himself together on his own.’
At Cambridge, a mere three years before, Nick was fastidious about his nails because of his guitar-playing – Paul Wheeler laughed when he remembered that Nick would never do the washing-up because it might damage his nails. In London, by early 1972, Linda Thompson noticed that Nick’s nails had grown so long that it was hard to imagine he would ever play the guitar again.
It was Nick’s parents more than anyone who bore the brunt of their son’s depression. When he was back at home in Tanworth, Rodney and Molly Drake were the only people he saw regularly, and it was they who watched his tragic decline in his last three years. Rodney: ‘God knows where the depression came from … The experts didn’t seem to know much about it, because he did agree to go and see some very eminent people … and they didn’t seem to know what was wrong with him. They gave him pills to take, one of which, of course, was the cause of his death, and they did seem to help him, these pills.’
Molly: ‘Hampstead was the beginning … He took this room, all alone, and he decided to cut off from all his friends, and that he was just going to concentrate on music. He had a tremendous number of friends and at one stage he was very gregarious almost, and then he suddenly said this is no good, and he went off to Hampstead, which was where he started to get so depressed, and that was when we really started to get so terribly worried about him.’
Rodney: ‘He was depressed about the world … I think he thought deeply about things, but he couldn’t talk to us about it… He did feel that everything was going in the wrong direction … He always thought 1980 was going to be the time …’
His parents were sad, but not surprised that they could not communicate with their son. But even his contemporaries were unable to get through to him. Iain Dunn had lost touch with Nick after he left Cambridge early to record his debut album, but kept buying the records of the boy he remembered playing his songs in college rooms: ‘You could tell in the music as well, as soon as Pink Moon came out, you thought, this is … desperate. Most of the intelligence I got back was from Paul [Wheeler], who was still seeing him quite a lot, and was desperately, desperately worried.
‘I think an awful lot of people got their brains severely fried at that time, because most people didn’t really know what they were taking. All they really knew was that it felt good. I remember after leaving college and getting my first flat, sharing with some guys who worked on the NME… I mean I was the only person there who knew what time of day it was … People matured a lot later in those days, even by the time you went up to university, you didn’t really know what was going on in life. So you were coming to terms with all that; huge changes going on in society; this vast ingestion of all kinds of illegal substances … I don’t think Nick was alone in having his brains done in by this … cocktail. I think there were a lot of people who were just as badly affected; unfortunately for him it was far more severe in terms of where it went.’
On 3 September 1971 John Lennon and Yoko Ono left Britain for New York. Lennon was never to return. For the last two years, the couple’s home had been at Tittenhurst Park, a Georgian house on a sprawling seventy-two-acre estate near Ascot. Lennon’s personal assistants there were Nick’s friend from Cambridge, Paul Wheeler, and his then wife, Diana.
Tittenhurst Park played a substantial role in Lennon’s last years in the UK. It was in the grounds there, on 22 August 1969, that the four Beatles gathered for what proved to be their final photo session. During early 1971 the Lennons had much of the ground floor gutted, and it was there, during the course of one week in July, in one enormous white room, that Lennon recorded his best-loved solo album, Imagine.
After the Lennons moved out, Ringo bought the house, and when he in turn moved out in the late eighties, Tittenhurst became a recording studio. Set amid landscaped gardens, the house was everything you would expect of the sixties rock-star aristocracy. From the master bedroom, you looked out over lawns which descended like an enormous green staircase to the sweep of cedars for which the property was famous before the Lennons’ occupancy. Next to the window were a pair of switches for turning on the garden lights; rather touchingly, one was labelled ‘John’, the other ‘Yoko’.
The Lennons’ departure was connected with the long-running custody battle for Yoko’s daughter Kyoko, and there was every reason to believe that they would return to live in verdant Royal Berkshire. While Paul and Diana Wheeler were in residence, Tittenhurst – like Charles Foster Kane’s Xanadu – was kept in a state of permanent readiness in case the whim of the master and mistress dictated a swift return. It was during this time of limbo that Nick visited Paul Wheeler there.
Another Cambridge visitor to Tittenhurst was Brian Wells, who was still studying to be a doctor: ‘We used to eat cannabis, I was getting this cannabis extract… and we’d put it into cookies and eat this stuff, and wander round the arboretum. There was all this Beatles memorabilia – the statues from the cover of Sgt Pepper, the Pepper uniforms and in John and Yoko’s bedroom there was a wall of Rickenbacker guitars. I said: “Oh, there’s John Lennon’s Rickenbacker”, and some guy said come and see this – and there’s a whole wall of them!’
Paul Wheeler remembers Nick being impressed by Lennon’s work even before he visited the house: ‘I remember when he wrote “Cold Turkey” late in ’69, Nick heard it and said what an amazing thing to do, to write about that … it’s a really tough song. And I was quite surprised to hear Nick saying it was a really interesting thing to do, because I didn’t associate Nick with that kind of pain.’
There is a striking incongruity in the image of Nick Drake stalking the corridors of Tittenhurst during 1971. From an early age Nick had been no stranger to home comforts, but surely even he would have been impressed by the opulence on display. The long corridors gleamed with gold records. The interior was so white that a casual visitor might have imagined he had strayed into an asylum – even the grand piano was white. No noise intruded. Here was the tranquillity of Tanworth and the beguiling other-worldliness of Cambridge, but on a scale which mere mortals could barely comprehend.
With record sales that scarcely registered, a career that hardly merited the name, and a darkness which seemed set to fill his horizons, Nick Drake wandered around the empty mansion of a millionaire rock icon who would never return.
‘John and Yoko had gone,’ Paul Wheeler recalls, ‘and Nick seemed to fit in with the “ghost house” image of Tittenhurst, the empty palace. It always stuck in my mind as an allegory of the times, this abandoned estate … They hadn’t definitely gone for ever, which is why we were still there, they could have come back any day. When he came to see us in Ascot, there were people he met there who were fascinated by him, by his presence. “Who is this guy?” He had very, very strong presence. There is this idea that he was just this shimmering, ghost … No, no.’
Fashionable as it has become to seek out conspiracy theories to explain Nick Drake’s lack of success during his lifetime, at a distance of twenty-five years you gain a perspective lacking at the time. By 1972, Island Records were enjoying their most successful year ever. Island had been very much an album-based label in the late sixties, but they had made the transition and were now making substantial inroads into the pop charts, selling singles to teenagers.
Some may feel uncomfortable remembering just how popular Cat Stevens was at his peak. Now, as Yusuf Islam, he is best known for condoning the fatwa passed on British author Salman Rushdie in 1989; but during the early 1970s he released a series of compelling and enormously popular albums which came to epitomize the sweeping appeal of the introspective singer-songwriter.
David Betteridge remembers Island being bullish about their chances in the American market at the beginning of the 1970s: ‘In the States, Traffic went out on United Artists; Free and Cat Stevens went out on A&M, we were placing act by act, which is why Nick finished up on Warners.’
Asylum Records founder David Geffen was known to be a fan of Nick’s work, and was keen to ensure Nick’s product was available for the American market. Geffen knew a thing or two about promising singer-songwriters, having graduated from the post room of the William Morris Agency to manage Laura Nyro, Joni Mitchell, Jackson Browne and Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young. With Asylum, Geffen had championed Tom Waits, David Blue and Judee Sill. He thought Nick’s records were ‘fabulous … I thought Nick Drake should have been a star, and that I could help him.’
Only a compilation of the first two albums – imaginatively titled Nick Drake – was released in America during Nick’s lifetime. The cover was the ‘running man’ shot from the back sleeve of Five Leaves Left and the album garnered a glowing review from Stephen Holden in Rolling Stone of 27 April 1972: ‘British singer-songwriter Nick Drake’s American debut album is a beautiful and decadent record. A triumph of eclecticism, it successfully brings together varied elements of the evolution of urban folk rock music during the past five years. An incredibly slick sound that is highly dependent on production values (credit Joe Boyd) to achieve its effects, its dreamlike quality calls up the very best of early Sixties’ jazz-pop ballad. It combines this with the contemporary introspection of British folk rock to evoke a hypnotic spell of opiated languor …’
Holden went on to draw the inevitable Cat Stevens and Astral Weeks comparisons, picked out Nick’s ‘softly seductive’ singing and his ‘densely textured guitar’ and suggested a ‘head cocktail … in a pool of sweet liqueur after a couple of downs and a few tokes’. Asking if this could be ‘the Muzak of 1984’, Holden goes on to find similarities with the work of Donovan and Astrud Gilberto, before concluding: ‘Drake’s greatest weakness – one he shares with all too many of today’s male lyric troubadors, especially those from England – is the lack of verbal force in his song lyrics, which by and large could be characterized as art nouveau. In the case of Drake, this is less serious a liability than it is for the artists who are more up front vocally. The beauty of Drake’s voice is its own justification. May it become familiar to us all.’
Unfortunately, Nick’s resistance to gigging even wrecked his chances of making it across the Atlantic, for as David Betteridge pointed out: ‘Generally speaking, you’ve got to break it in your own territory before you can break an act overseas … and touring was the way to do that.’
So if Nick hadn’t been so shy and hadn’t so obviously hated live performance, the plan would have been to release his records in America, tied in with a prestige showcase gig around the time of release, at the Troubador in LA, or New York’s Bottom Line, and then to land him some prestige support slot with, say, Carole King or James Taylor, where he could reach an audience sympathetic to his sort of music? ‘Yes, precisely. That’s exactly the way it worked. But not with Nick.’
Peter Buck thought back to being a teenager growing up in Athens, Georgia, and remembered just how little Nick was appreciated in America then: ‘I don’t think Nick’s albums came out here in the States while he was alive, and if they did nobody reviewed them, but then journalists, particularly music journalists, are great ones for rewriting history. Everyone says: “Oh yeah, Exile On Main Street is THE Stones album”, but you go back to the original reviews of 1972, and they’re all “Well, Side Two doesn’t rock”, “It’s kind of a muddy sound” … Go look for a review of the first Velvet Underground album, everyone thought they were these circus freaks from New York. At best they were irrelevant, at worst, a total con job, junkies, Andy Warhol’s puppets. If today’s journalists went back to 1968 and said: “We’re from the future, we’re going to tell you the names of the important artists – James Brown and The Velvet Underground” – they would all drop fucking dead.’
In his essay which accompanied the posthumous Fruit Tree box set, Arthur Lubow wrote of Nick Drake’s American launch: ‘When a compilation album was released in the US … the reception at the Troubador featured a cardboard cut out of Nick on stage as the record played. If he wouldn’t tour, perhaps his reclusiveness could be commercial.’
The fifteen months which separated the release of Nick’s second and third albums was the period of the most marked decline in his health and state of mind. Still living alone in Haverstock Hill, Nick was drawing further inward, curling up foetus-like in his own world, a world bordered by the four walls of his room.
Brian Wells: ‘He never said: “I’m utterly pissed off and I wish I’d sold more records”, you know – that wasn’t cool. I think he was very aware of what was cool, and I think he found safety in actually appearing to be withdrawn. And I think he was quite uncomfortable around people. In Cambridge he wasn’t one for sitting round and just shooting the shit. It would run out of steam, and then he would look nervous, and then say, right, I’ve got to go. And you knew that he wasn’t going to anything. He just wanted to withdraw from the situation. That went on in Cambridge, and I think became more and more the norm for him. I think he would withdraw from situations, but still feel awkward having done so. And he’d go back to his room on Haverstock Hill and stare at the wall for ages … A guy called Rick Charkin went to Morocco with Nick before Cambridge, and he once said to me that he went round to see Nick in Haverstock Hill, rang the bell and no one answered, so he went round the back and there was Nick in his room staring at the wall, just not answering the front door …’
A record as bleak and initially intimidating as Pink Moon was never going to get radio play, aside from the odd spin on John Peel’s late-night Radio 1 show; and with Nick refusing to perform live, the chances of anyone even being aware of the existence of the third album grew more and more remote.
Linda Thompson: ‘I saw him around the time of Pink Moon, we were doing Bright Lights around that time. We were both in the same studio. Nick did those sessions very late at night, so he’d be going into the studio as we were coming out … I would grab him and tickle him, but he was … incommunicado.
‘Sound Techniques itself was fairly big … You walked in, and you went up a very windy staircase, and then there was a big studio, a big ground-floor studio, the control room was set up, so that you could look down into the studio. Then you went up some more windy steps to the kitchen. It was a lovely studio, in two parts, a front part and a back part; mostly they used to do vocals in the back part. Nick liked that studio. He was always very close to John Wood. John had a sixth sense about what you wanted for the record.’
Trevor Dann was still at Cambridge when Nick’s final album was released, and remembers how uneasily its sombre mood sat with the times: ‘Pink Moon I didn’t care much for when it came out. I’d gone all Mahavishnu Orchestra, if I wanted to be cerebral, and Roxy Music if I wanted to dance, and Pink Moon was just so bleak. The other bloke of my acquaintance who was completely besotted by Nick Drake was another guy from my school, Dick Taylor, who was also at Cambridge, and we used to spend nights arguing which was his best record. Dick would always plump for Pink Moon, ‘cos it was the darkest, the most in touch with the psyche. Dick was a fairly boisterous, rather upper-class bloke, the same age as me, and when he was thirty-eight he shot himself. I hadn’t seen him for ten or fifteen years, I had no idea what had been going on, but almost my first thought about it was – Nick Drake! That Dick had been so obsessed by that really dark stuff.’
To their credit, Island had not given up all hope. Garrell Redfearn was a young assistant to Muff Winwood in radio promotion, who remembers being dispatched to Hampstead to try to interest their most retiring act into doing something, anything, to help awaken interest in his new album. The idea was to get Nick along to the BBC’s Maida Vale studios – where he had gone in such high spirits barely two and a half years before – to record a session plugging Pink Moon on one of the nightly Sounds Of The Seventies programmes. One day during the early part of 1972 Garrell went along to Haverstock Hill. He was one of the last people from Island ever to see Nick Drake: ‘By broadcasting a session, you could get more than one track played from an album, maybe three or four in one broadcast. As he was known to be very difficult about performing at that stage, and I can’t quite remember why, maybe because we were about the same age … I was asked to see if I could chat to him and persuade him to do a session. I think it was a request from one of the producers to try and get him on.
‘I went along to the big, old run-down house on Haverstock Hill, the bottom end, near to Chalk Farm Tube … I don’t think he said an absolute no, but we never did get him into the studio again. I remember the flat being extremely grotty: tatty, filthy bits of fabric covering the windows as curtains, keeping the light out. All dark inside … There was a big, heavy, old Victorian sideboard. It was on the ground floor, as far as I remember. It wasn’t a bedsit, because he’d got up and out of bed to let me in, and the bed wasn’t in the room that we sat in.
‘He sat in a chair with very long hair, head down, hair falling over his face so I couldn’t even really see his face. A few mumbled responses. He wasn’t being difficult or unpleasant, he really just had difficulty talking to anyone, just making that contact. I just explained the situation, how it would really help if we could get him to do a session because it would mean a lot more exposure for the album … He said something like “I don’t think so at the moment, maybe in the future” type of thing.
‘It was almost down to nods and shakes of the head, grunts. I remember saying to him: “Do you want the album to sell?” … It seemed illogical to me that you take all this trouble to record your music and you don’t make any effort to try and help it get exposure, for people to hear it. But I think he may have got to a stage where … if it was important, it wasn’t important enough for him to overcome whatever the inhibitions were that stopped him performing and promoting it.’
Alone and isolated, Nick rarely left his hideaway. He would venture out occasionally, but otherwise he waited, and let the world come to him. And waited. And waited. With no involvement on Nick’s third album, and his own career as an arranger burgeoning, Robert Kirby had seen less of his friend since the release of Bryter Layter. But he was quite used to Nick just turning up, a silent visitor: ‘I think Nick regarded groups of people and places as bolt-holes. After I left Cambridge, I lived for a long time in Cranley Gardens in Muswell Hill. Nick lived on Haverstock Hill, and then towards the end – his very last place in London – was a very grim bedsit on Muswell Hill Road. It was only about 100 yards from where I lived. That was very grim …
‘He would arrive at all hours, quite unannounced, totally unexpected. He’d stay for one day. One week … And then he’d be gone. Then you’d find out he had gone to John Wood’s house, out in Mildenhall in Suffolk. He’d stay there. Then you’d find he’d gone home. Then you’d find he was staying somewhere near Brian [Wells] … and I’m sure there were other totally independent groups of friends that we didn’t know anything about at all. I think he did compartmentalize them a bit. Maybe by the time he got bored with one group he’d move on.’
Molly Drake attributed Nick’s decline to the solitary years spent living in and around Hampstead: ‘He once said to me that everything started to go wrong from the Hampstead time on.’
‘His parents were wholly supportive the whole of the time,’ Robert Kirby recalled. ‘I was never privy to the family at home, but the phone calls that I had from the dad were … “Have you seen Nick? Don’t get him. Don’t tell him I called, but is he all right?”
‘I think underneath it all, Nick did have a hankering that maybe he should have got a proper job … He did try to please his father. But I didn’t believe that his father pressured him. I remember when his father got him this job working in computers in London, and Nick disappeared, his father phoned quite distraught. “Have you seen him? Ask him to get in touch. Can you try and help?”
‘I feel elements of guilt about not doing more … I was always very overawed by Nick. I always admired him, looked up to him, and so if he wasn’t saying anything, I said to myself: “This is what a genius does.” The first thought wasn’t, oh, he’s ill …’
A particularly painful glimpse of Nick Drake’s decline was provided by Nick Kent. Probably best known as the chronicler of excess during those sybaritic seventies, Kent never met Nick, never saw him perform, but was captivated by the three albums. ‘Requiem For A Solitary Man’, his NME piece about Nick, appeared in 1975 and some years later he got John Martyn to talk about their friendship: ‘I met Martyn, and he was very emotional about the whole thing – you know he wrote that song “Solid Air” – and I tried to get him to sit down and talk on the tape about it, but he was very close to tears whenever the subject was brought up. It was an incredibly emotional thing for him, and so what he did was he said: “I’m going to take you to some friends of Nick’s. I’m going to take you to a place in London. I’m going to introduce you to some friends of Nick Drake’s who knew him up to the end, and you can make up your own mind there.”
‘He took me to this place in Ladbroke Grove, which was kind of a squat. It was not a particularly pleasant place to be in. And these people were mostly … they were all drug addicts … they weren’t heroin addicts, but they had barbiturate problems. They were good people who’d had a bad time with drugs. They basically just told me this story: Nick would come round to their place a lot, and he would just sit there. He wasn’t a drug addict. He wasn’t a big druggie himself. But my understanding was that he had been involved to some degree with obviously smoking dope, and taking acid, not a lot … and these things had turned him. The whole thing had turned him.
‘And what I remember is that there was a woman there who seemed to know him very well, and she spoke very, very affectionately about him … It’s awfully, awfully sad. The thing that she said to me … I just started crying when she said it, because she said he came round to this flat three days before he died, and he said to these people: “You remember me. You remember me how I was. Tell me how I was. I used to have a brain. I used to be somebody. What happened to me? What happened to me?”’