Rodney Drake had been sufficiently worried about Nick to write to his friend and erstwhile family doctor before Nick’s death, asking for advice. On the first day of the new year, barely five weeks after his son had died, Rodney Drake wrote another letter to my uncle, James Lusk, thanking him for his opinion and breaking the sad news of Nick’s death.
Written in fountain pen on Far Leys headed paper, Rodney’s letter is dated 1 January 1974, although he wrote it on New Year’s Day 1975 a common enough mistake to make with your first letter of the year. The first part of the letter reads:
My dear Lusko,
Thank you so very much for your most interesting letter and for the time and trouble you took to give us such a helpful opinion about Nick.
I am very sorry to say that we have lost poor Nick. On the morning of November 25th Molly went in to his room to wake him as it was nearly midday and found him collapsed across his bed and the doctor when he came said he must have been dead for six hours or more.
The cause of death was given as an over dose of tryptizol which was one of the three things he was taking on prescription the other two being stelazine and disipal. You can imagine what a stark and numbing tragedy this has been for us both and of course a dreadful shock for Molly finding him. What made it even worse was that he had seemed so much better during the previous two months; he had been staying with some very kind and understanding friends in Paris where he had seemed to be happy for the first time in three years and after he came back he had been talking about getting back to his music. He had seemed quite all right the night before when he went to bed fairly early but the next morning there were signs that he had had a bad night (as he sometimes did) because he had obviously been down to the kitchen some time and had some cornflakes. More often than not when this sort of thing happened Molly used to wake up and go down to talk to him but alas on this occasion neither of us woke. However we didn’t think anything of it at first and left him to sleep late. It must have been done on impulse in the early hours of the morning and, as I said, he was lying right across the bed on top of the bedclothes.
There had been a time a year ago or more when we had feared that something of this sort might happen (when he was really badly depressed) and anyway we always kept sleeping pills and aspirins locked up. I’m afraid we had not realised that tryptizol was dangerous and we’re not sure that Nick did either but he certainly did take a heavy dose according to the pathologist.
So now we’re trying to come to terms with what’s happened and of course it is some comfort to know that all the suffering we’ve watched Nick go through over the past three years is now over for him and perhaps it is really the best thing for him.
We have had some remarkable tributes about his music from various quarters. There was a very long article in a magazine about three months ago and his name was mentioned in an article in a recent issue of the Listener and this three years after he has produced anything. He told me once that music was running through his head all the time and I think that recently the fact that he could no longer produce it was one of the main causes of his unhappiness.
I’m afraid I have written rather a lot to you on this sad subject but I was encouraged to do so by your very sympathetic response to my last letter and it is nice to unburden oneself to an old friend particularly when he happens to have been one’s family doctor as well!
The letter continues for several pages, with news of Gabrielle and other family members as well as ‘the ex Burma brigade’, and poignant details of Rodney and Molly’s saddest Christmas, spent with friends ‘the first Christmas we have been away for many years’. Finally, after offering warm congratulations on the birth of a third Lusk grandson, it concludes:
‘Molly and I send our love to you both and thanks again so much for all you wrote about Nick.
‘Ever, Rodney’.
An inquest into Nick’s death was held on 18 December 1974, after which H. Stephen Tibbits, Coroner for the Southern District of Warwickshire, recorded a verdict of suicide, with the cause of death given as ‘acute Amitriptyline poisoning self administered when suffering from a depressive illness’. Unable to obtain a certificate of his son’s death until after the Coroner’s inquest, it fell to Rodney to officially register, on Christmas Eve 1974, the death of ‘Nicholas Rodney Drake, Musician’.
The verdict of suicide was challenged by Nick Kent in his piece for the NME which appeared in February 1975; and has subsequently been vehemently disputed by many people. Gabrielle Drake, however, is less certain; talking to Kris Kirk in Melody Maker in 1987, she explained: ‘I personally prefer to think Nick committed suicide, in the sense that I’d rather he died because he wanted to end it than it to be the result of a tragic mistake. That would seem to me to be terrible: for it to be a plea for help that nobody hears.’
No one will ever know what sad, solitary thoughts preoccupied Nick during his final hours on earth, or what misery and corrosive unhappiness he took with him to the grave. Even the facts of the matter remain stubbornly elusive; the number of Tryptizol he took that night has been variously estimated as anything from three to thirty tablets, neither figure apparently based on any hard evidence – though the tone of Rodney’s letter would suggest that a fairly large dose was taken. Curiously, Coroners’ reports are not a matter of public record, and the relevant document may not even have been kept this long.
It is easy to get caught up in attempting to understand what went through Nick’s mind that night, trying to guess whether it was a bleary, befuddled accident; a rash impulse with little thought for the consequences or the future; or a deliberate, calculated decision to gain control over something which he perceived as spinning, slowly and pointlessly, out of control. The absence of a suicide note only poses more questions. But Nick’s Cambridge contemporary Brian Wells, now a consultant psychiatrist specializing in substance misuse and addictive illnesses, makes a very powerful case for focusing purely on the intent, when trying to decide whether the overdose was deliberately suicidal: ‘Personally, I don’t think he had the kind of depressive illness that should have been treated with anti-depressants; and secondly, I don’t think Nick would have … you don’t commit suicide … I think this was an impulsive episode, one night, frustrated, probably didn’t sleep very well, took a few, took a few more, thought, fuck it, took a few more.
‘Tryptizol is an anti-depressant, but it’s a sedative as well, and I think he was taking it to help him sleep … If he wanted to kill himself … I don’t think he would have done it at home. I think he would have buggered off somewhere. I think if he had wanted to kill himself, he would have driven somewhere and put a hose into his car. Or he would have rung me up and said: “What could I take?” He wouldn’t have taken an overdose of Tryptizol, which he had no way of knowing was potentially fatal, at home, one night. This wasn’t a premeditated suicide, this was an impulsive guy, can’t get to sleep …
‘I can see it: “Oh, who gives a bugger if I don’t wake up?” kind of thing. You’re a bit stoned, a bit what the hell. That’s not somebody with suicidal intent. And a coroner should only diagnose suicide in somebody who’s had suicidal intent… I intend to kill myself: that’s suicide. Somebody who accidentally takes an overdose of pills, that’s not suicide. You diagnose murder and suicide by the degree of intent, and I really dispute that there was intent there.’
I spoke to journalist Nick Kent, who was one of the first to dispute the suicide verdict but was also intrigued by the drug connection in Nick Drake’s life. In the seventies Kent was as much of a star as the people he was writing about. No stranger to the dual addictions of rock ‘n’ roll and drugs, to get close to the fire Kent zonked out with Keith Richards and Jimmy Page. He danced with the Devil, with a short spoon. For all his dark stuff, Kent had a conduit to the lost and the wasted, the withdrawn and the mislaid. Like Syd Barrett and Brian Wilson. And Nick Drake. ‘I’ve taken Tryptizol,’ he said. ‘I’ve taken them once, and they are horrible, horrible drugs, almost overdosed on them, a doctor gave them to me when I was trying to get off heroin once, and I took two and they almost turned me into a zombie for about seventy-two hours, just two of these things. They were supposed to calm you out… but they turned you into a brain-dead zombie. Just taking one or two could do that to you …’
That Nick Drake died so young is a terrible tragedy; not just because of who he was, but because of what he might have become. The potential of all those years left unlived. But what made the waste even more unbearable for those left behind was the shaft of hope which came immediately before his death, a brief, shining moment of buoyancy which had hinted at a return of the old Nick. In the end, of course, only Nick really knew what happened that night, and that knowledge died with him.
The death of Nick Drake made little impact on the world outside Tanworth-in-Arden. Friends from Marlborough and Cambridge had scattered, and many were not aware for months that he had died. But few were truly surprised when they heard; most had chill memories of the last time they had seen him, transformed from the shy, smiling friend to a hunched, withdrawn spectre with whom they could no longer communicate.
Nick’s old colleague from Marlborough’s C1 House, Arthur Packard, told me: ‘My memories of Nick were very happy, but when I learned his life ended in tragedy I won’t say I fell off my chair in surprise. Nick was always … you felt there was a very reflective, pensive mode to his psyche. While he joined in the fun and the laughter, he was always a little apart from the crowd.’
Paul Wheeler: ‘I don’t remember the last time I saw Nick, because you don’t think, this is the last time I’m going to see Nick … But 1974, when Nick died, was, I thought, a crashing point for loads of people. That was like the end of the dream. I have a personal thing, that my son was born on the day that Nick died. He was called Benjamin Nicholas Wheeler, after Nick …’
Iain Cameron, who, like Paul Wheeler, had known Nick at Cambridge, also recalled the anticlimactic air of the 1970s: ‘I get Pink Moon, and he dies, and I try to make sense of that to myself. And what I see at that time is … like everyone’s having trouble, a lot of people who were at Cambridge at the time … It was more like a cultural trajectory, so you have the optimism, the floweriness of the late sixties, and then people are trying to make it work, and can’t really get it to hang together. It all got very grimy in the mid-seventies. We were a gilded, protected generation. Just look at Cambridge: you’ve got this wonderful built environment, loads of intelligent and articulate people all wafting around. No wonder people managed to write quite well in that environment.’
David Wright, who had taught Nick his first chords on the guitar at Marlborough, and with whom Nick had planned to journey round the world, recalled the last time he had seen Nick: ‘That time at the Roundhouse, he was stoned, he wasn’t quite with us. I remember thinking at the time, the image which has never actually left me … I remember not being terribly surprised when my father told me that he had died. I remember thinking, oh Christ, the music business has got him …’
Linda Thompson was another who was not surprised when the news of Nick’s death was broken to her: ‘The last time I saw him he was looking really awful. Those incredibly long fingernails. He couldn’t possibly play the guitar, which was maybe why he did it. He couldn’t have played at all. He was filthy, like a hobo really. I wasn’t surprised when Nick died … He looked at death’s door for a long, long time. I don’t know how you can live through life not speaking to anybody. It was really a downward spiral… It was very sad, there was obviously this extraordinary talent, but also this inability to deal with life.’
The industry which had offered Nick Drake something resembling a career was even less surprised. High-profile rock ‘n’ roll casualties were no longer unexpected; by 1974, Brian Jones, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Jim Morrison, Duane Allman, Gene Vincent and Gram Parsons had already gone.
Ralph McTell: ‘I wasn’t at all surprised when I heard he died. Not at all. The illness, the going deeper and deeper into himself, only having his back photographed for his albums. I had a family by then, two kids, and when I heard I just thought, you poor sod. I hadn’t seen him, but I knew he’d got more and more dependent on mind-controlling stuff … and more or less vanished.’
Zig Zag’s Pete Frame remembers: ‘At that time you kind of got used to rock stars dying, in a sense it was part of the trip. It used to happen with alarming regularity.’ In January 1975 Zig Zag carried a heartfelt piece by David Sandison, Nick’s press officer at Island, entitled ‘Nick Drake: The Final Retreat’, which began: ‘The amount of coverage Nick Drake’s death had in the weekly musical comics just about sums it all up really. Jerry Gilbert did a beautiful piece for Sounds and they cut it down to half a dozen paragraphs. No-one else mentioned his departure with much more than a cursory nod of acknowledgement.
‘OK, so the guy did no more than a dozen gigs before more than 150 people, and they’d raised no ripple you’d notice. He released three albums in four years, and together they probably didn’t sell enough to cover the cost of one. What the hell do you want? front page in The Times? …
‘But. The biggest three-letter word in the dictionary, that. But Nick Drake was a lovely cat. But he wrote songs that’d tear your soul out if you relaxed for a second. But in a world full of bullshit, hype, glittery horrors with the talents of dead oxen and the integrity of starving rats, Nick Drake was a man of sincerity, an artist of tremendous calibre and one of the few entitled to be called unique. But what the hell do they care?’
The Sounds piece to which Sandison refers, a quarter page by Jerry Gilbert headlined ‘Nick Drake: death of a “genius” ’, was the only contemporary obituary; it began: ‘Nick Drake died in his sleep two Sundays ago, leaving a legacy of three superb, stylised albums on the Island label. He had been ill – perhaps weary is a better expression – for some time, but at the time of his death his enthusiasm had never been as high, for he was totally immersed in the prospect of completing his fourth album.’ It ended by quoting Robert Kirby: ‘He was ready for death all right, I just think he’d had enough, there was no fight left in him. Yet I get the feeling that if he was going to commit suicide he would have done so a long time ago.’
Talking to me more than twenty years after Nick’s death, Kirby was not alone among Nick’s friends in wishing he had done more to try to help, and regretting that he hadn’t fully recognized the depths to which Nick had sunk: ‘My memories looking back on Nick are predominantly happy, but stained with guilt and remorse that I didn’t do anything. But in 1974 I was twenty-six, and what can a twenty-six-year-old do to help someone like that?
‘There is a great element of guilt. I wish that between 1972 and 1974 I’d rung him up and said: “Are you working on anything?” And if he’d said: “Well yes, I’m working on this on my own”, I’d have said: “Well, can’t we try a few ideas and see if it works?” He would almost certainly have said yes, but I don’t think people ever pushed him because they always thought it was going to come from him, because they admired him so much.’
The issue of Sounds, dated 14 December 1974, which carried Gilbert’s obituary, indicated just how far rock ‘n’ roll had travelled since Nick first set foot on the highway, and just how far removed he had become by the time of his death. It was now the era of Topographic Oceans, the progressive bombast of Yes, Genesis and ELP; the guitar flamboyance of Carlos Santana and Jan Akkerman; the still accessible David Bowie and the silky style of Roxy Music. It was not, and never had been, the time of Nick Drake.
Rodney and Molly Drake continued living at Far Leys after Nick died, though after Rodney’s death in March 1988, Molly spent her last years at Orchard House, a smaller home, nearer the centre of the village. Canon Martin Tunnicliffe, who came to St Mary Magdalene in 1979, grew used to fans from around the world coming to the church and vicarage. Patiently, he would point out the grave, and encourage comments in the visitors’ book. On Sunday 20 November 1994 a memorial service was held at the church to mark the twentieth anniversary of Nick’s death. Molly had died in June the previous year, but the service was attended by Gabrielle, and a tape of some of Nick’s songs was played.
As an artist, Nick Drake was thwarted during his lifetime; his glory came posthumously. The tapes of his parents speaking reveal undeniable pride in their voices as they talk of the young pilgrims who make their way to Tanworth, as well as their realization that Nick’s single-minded determination in pursuing his chosen career was justified. The tragedy is that it all came too late.
Pete Frame: ‘I think he was the archetypal figure who was ignored in his lifetime, and his worth was only seen later. You have to remember that Them could have broken up, and Van Morrison could have gone back to Belfast to be a gas fitter or whatever he was. They had two albums out and split up, and nobody knew the name of Van Morrison. There wasn’t that kind of interest in rock history. That’s why Zig Zag was so unique, because we cared about the footnotes of rock history, which is what Nick Drake was. Because he wasn’t generating millions of dollars, people wouldn’t care so much.’
How Nick’s life would have developed had he lived, is of course the question which continues to fascinate those who have grown to love his music. If he had conquered his depression, would he have wanted to write and record again? Would he ever have felt capable of returning to his former life? Indeed is it possible to imagine a life for Nick which didn’t involve music?
When I asked Robert Kirby, long one of Nick’s closest friends, what he thought Nick might have done had he given up music, he told me: ‘He talked about literature when he wasn’t talking about music. In another life, I could have seen him running a very good publishing company … I think he would have been able to select potentially good writers.’ Kirby also confirmed that one of the strangest tales associated with Nick’s last years, a story I had always assumed to be apocryphal, had actually happened: ‘He told me he did go into an Army Recruitment Office. That’s absolutely true, he was quite seriously considering it. Funnily enough, if he’d decided to do that, he could have cut the mustard. If he had made that decision, he could have been officer material.’
However disenchanted he was with the music business, however angry about his own lack of success, it is surely significant that just months before he died Nick Drake went into the recording studio again. Only four tracks were laid down in that session, but at the time they constituted the start of a new album. Nick may not have been pursuing his career with anything like the hope and enthusiasm which had marked his early years at Island, but he did still consider himself a musician. The prospect of negotiating a contract, a record deal, of being pushed out on tour to promote his records, all filled him with dread; but for all that, music was what he did.
Molly remembered the trepidation which surrounded Nick’s last recordings: ‘Those four songs were supposed to be the beginning of another album … I remember finding a letter after he died from Joe Boyd saying that this was wonderful and that they’d got to have a proper contract, and it was all rather businesslike, and I think it scared Nick to death.
‘I think he felt, I can’t really cope with this. Joe was obviously very anxious that he should make another record, but I think things had just become too much for him altogether. The idea of having to do all the business of another record, and all the contracts, I think it just was more at that stage than he could cope with.’
David Sandison believes that sometime after Pink Moon, Nick’s deal with Island had lapsed and with it the weekly retainer. Whether this may in part have influenced his decision to return home is impossible to know. Certainly Island were still interested and Boyd was trying to interest Nick in renegotiating.
Had Nick Drake survived, it is inconceivable to imagine him battling it out as support act to the new wave of British rock ‘n’ roll attractions. When Nick’s old Marlborough rival Chris De Burgh found himself in the unenviable position of opening solo for Supertramp soon after Nick’s death, he had to face the slings and arrows of outraged punters.
It is possible to imagine Nick staying offstage, but continuing to function as a songwriter, supplying material to sympathetic acts, but even those who admire Nick’s work seem wary of covering his songs, perhaps because they are so very personal and so indelibly associated with their creator. There are precedents for an in-house lyricist (Keith Reid for Procol Harum, Pete Sinfield for King Crimson) and the role of ‘visiting genius’ was precisely what Pink Floyd initially envisaged for Syd Barrett, and the Beach Boys for Brian Wilson, though neither example was a spectacular success.
As well as being impressed by Randy Newman’s debut album, Paul Wheeler remembers Nick’s admiration for Newman’s refusal to gig, and his awareness of Brian Wilson’s role in the Beach Boys: ‘That was definitely out of step with the John Martyn, Richard Thompson, up and down the Ml stuff. That concept of a private world, which had nothing to do with the stage, or the road, maybe that was more what Nick was relating to … But I could also understand why the road musicians would resent his lack of “paying his dues”. But Nick’s reluctance to gig could be seen as being ahead of its time, maybe it was the very mystique that attracted … Which is why we’re speaking now!’