Far Leys was a large house but Nick’s bedroom was tiny, a simple room, with a small, circular window in one corner. He slept in a single bed, next to which stood a plain wooden chair with a cane seat. Near to the bed, just the other side of the window, was an old, wooden desk over which hung a still life of flowers in a vase.
To the right of the door was an alcove with a built-in bookcase; among its contents were volumes of verse by Browning and Blake, commentaries on the work of Chaucer, Buddhist scriptures, novels by D.H. Lawrence, a copy of that key existential text, Hamlet, and the Scaduto biography of Dylan which Brian Wells had given him.
In 1974 Dylan was briefly signed to Island, so for a short while during the last year of his life, Nick was a labelmate of the man who had so inspired him. Dylan was well represented in Nick’s record collection, with the sepia-covered Blonde On Blonde evident, as well as Tim Hardin’s Bird On A Wire, Leonard Cohen’s first album, Joni Mitchell’s Blue, Mike Oldfield’s Tubular Bells, Judy Collins’s In My Life, Randy Newman’s much-loved eponymous debut, Ralph McTell’s You Well-Meaning Brought Me Here and Island’s compilation album Bumpers, featuring Nick’s own ‘Hazey Jane I’.
An album of Bach’s Brandenburg Concertos, bought in Aix seven years earlier, was lying on Nick’s turntable when he died – presumably the last record he ever listened to. Next to his bed Molly found a copy, in the original French, of Albert Camus’ Le Mythe de Sisyphe. Camus was fascinated by the myth of Sisyphus, the father of Ulysses, whose punishment in the afterlife of Hades, was to roll a huge stone up to the top of a hill; but as the stone always started to roll down again just as it reached the summit, his task was never completed. Molly kept the book she had found by her son’s bed, and in the wake of his death struggled to read it in the hope that Nick: ‘might have been trying to tell me something’.
Nick went to bed early on the night of 24 November 1974, and never came back.
The world he left behind knew little of him any more. His name was never seen in the music press now. It had been two years since his last album, Pink Moon, and there were other names to be covered. New acts, who went out and gigged, who were seen by their fans and didn’t sit at their parents’ home staring out of the window.
The twenty-fourth was a Sunday, the day of rest. It seemed for ever autumn, for around Tanworth the lightly rising Warwickshire hills kept the worst of the wind at bay. Over to the east, the countryside around Cambridge was flat and exposed; the wind whipping off the North Sea came all the way from Russia, the Fenland residents boasted. Tanworth was spared the worst excesses of the English winter, but with less than a month to go until the shortest day, the days were already dark. That November Sunday the sun rose at 7.46 in the morning and had set by 4.04 in the glowering afternoon. It didn’t leave much opportunity for daylight to shine through. The Birmingham Post’s weather forecast for that day was: ‘cloudy with rain. Some bright intervals’. In meteorological terms, brighter later …
Sunday in England was always a dull day. A vague feeling of tasks left undone or a reluctant return to work the next day, the paucity of diversion, everything closed: a typical English Sunday in the late November of 1974. Radio 1 had been up and running for seven years, but was still forced to split its programming with Radio 2. That day on ‘the nation’s favourite pop station’ Between 5 and 6p.m., it was My Top 12 with Uri Geller. Manfred Mann’s Earth Band were in concert in Sounds On Sunday, then between 7.30 and 10 it was ‘as Radio 2’, before Radio 1 returned to close with two hours of jazz.
The Drakes’ local commercial channel, ATV, broadcasting from Birmingham, began its mid-evening programming with the lachrymose Stars On Sunday at 7p.m. (Joseph Cotten and Moira Anderson were the special guests). There was a film, The Professionals, at 8.20, and at 10.45 jazzman turned critic Benny Green hosted Cinema, reviewing the week’s big film, an all-star version of Agatha Christie’s Murder On The Orient Express. A rerun of Marcus Welby MD ended ATV’s evening schedule.
BBC1 was dominated by nearly three hours of The Royal Variety Show, boasting the timeless talents of Perry Como, Roy Castle and Paper Lace. There was an Omnibus profile of the author Jean Rhys at 10.10p.m., followed by Christopher Chataway talking to the head of British Steel. Closedown came at 11.35. BBC2 began its evening with the natural history series The World About Us, followed by a screening of the film The Asphalt Jungle. Broadcasting ended at 12.15, with a reading of Dylan Thomas’s poem ‘Fern Hill’: ‘Oh as I was young and easy in the mercy of his means, Time held me green and dying, Though I sang in my chains like the sea’ …
‘He went up to bed rather early,’ Molly Drake remembered in a 1979 interview for Dutch radio. ‘I remember him standing at that door, and I said to him: “Are you off to bed, Nick?” I can just see him now, because that’s the last time I ever saw him alive.’
No one will ever know what thoughts went through Nick Drake’s mind in the long and solitary, dark hours before dawn. Both Rodney and Molly said that they would not have been surprised had Nick committed suicide some months before, but in recent weeks he had seemed happier. More than anyone else, his parents observed the ebbs and flows of his life.
The world spun on. National and local news continued to be dominated by the killing of seventeen people by IRA bombs which had destroyed two pubs in the centre of Birmingham the previous Sunday. The Prime Minister of the recently elected Labour government was Harold Wilson. The police were ‘anxious to interview’ Lord Lucan about the murder of his nanny. Helen Morgan, who was briefly 1974’s Miss World, was forced to stand down when it was discovered that she was an unmarried mother.
Conservative middle England opened their copies of the Daily Telegraph at breakfast on 25 November 1974 and noted that there was ‘Support for Mrs Thatcher as leader’; MP John Stonehouse was still missing; following the Birmingham bombings, Home Secretary Roy Jenkins had banned the IRA; Cornelius Ryan, author of The Longest Day, had died; and in Cambridge students had thwarted ‘left-wing manipulators’, with student leaders calling it ‘a vote of confidence for moderation’.
‘He didn’t often get up early – he sometimes had very bad nights,’ Molly Drake remembered, ‘and I never used to disturb him at all. But it was about 12 o’clock, and I went in, because really it seemed it was time he got up, and he was lying across the bed. The first thing I saw was his long, long legs …’
Nick was prone to sleepless nights, frequently prowling the house in the small hours. His mother, alert to his movements, would often get up and sit with him in the kitchen until he returned to bed. But that night, when Nick woke and went down to the kitchen, Molly slept on. He had a bowl of cornflakes, then returned to his room. Sometime before dawn on the morning of Monday 25 November 1974 – probably around 6a.m. – the extra Tryptizol he had taken that night caused Nick Drake’s heart to stop beating.
An announcement in the Birmingham Post on 28 November read: ‘DRAKE – On November 25 Nicholas Rodney (Nick) aged 26 years, beloved son of Rodney & Molly, dearest brother of Gabrielle. Funeral service Tanworth-in-Arden Church on Monday December 2 at 12.15 p.m. No flowers please.’
The funeral took place at the church Nick had known all his life. Canon E. Willmott, who himself lies buried in St Mary Magdalene’s graveyard, conducted the service, and afterwards the body was taken seven miles to Solihull Crematorium, where the mortal remains of Nicholas Rodney Drake were consumed by fire.
Rodney: ‘Of course we thought the fact that he couldn’t communicate with us was possibly something to do with the generation gap and all that… his world and our world, which he used to talk about occasionally. But when the sad day of his funeral came, a lot of his young friends came up here, we’d never met many of them. They were wonderful people, and they all said to a man really, in effect, that it really wasn’t anything to do with you – we were just the same, we could never get through to him either.’
Molly: ‘They said he just went away into a world where none of us could reach him.’
Rodney: ‘There was a very close friend called Brian Wells …’
Molly: ‘I think he was closer to Nick than almost anybody, but he couldn’t really get through to Nick’.
Brian Wells: ‘I missed the actual funeral. We got to Tanworth just as everyone was coming out of the church. There was Gabrielle in the doorway of the church as everyone was leaving. So we followed everyone else to the crematorium … and then went back to Far Leys afterwards, where there were all these different people, from Marlborough or wherever. The only one I knew was Robert Kirby … Rodney gave me Nick’s guitar at that post-funeral thing. There were about fifty people there, none of whom seemed to know each other.’
Nick’s funeral was the first, and final, occasion when all the diverse strands of his life were drawn together. Gathered at Tanworth that December day were friends from school, university and the music industry, all gathered to remember the boy who had barely had time to become a man.
Anthea Joseph stayed away: ‘I didn’t go to the funeral, but Joe went. I’d had enough of funerals by that point. I just felt that Nick had had enough of this life, which was not getting any better. Again, maybe if, if, if … some shrink had got hold of him, sorted him out, but it was physical as well as mental. You know, he was let free.’