The fact that there is no film footage of Nick Drake performing undoubtedly feeds the myth. The photos – and there are few enough even of those – freeze-frame the image of Nick, shy and hesitant before the camera, capturing him for ever in the aspic of immortality: half-smiling at half-remembered memories.
A rumour broke out in late 1997 that there was film of Nick Drake in existence. Not performing, but watching. In October 1970 James Taylor – then at his commercial zenith – was filmed in concert by BBC television; and there, so the rumour goes, in the audience, is Nick Drake. The timing fits, and, yes, that shadowy audience member could be Nick, but then, in London in 1970, there were an awful lot of young men who looked like Nick Drake.
In the early seventies television outlets for performers like Nick were strictly limited: he was too arcane for Top Of The Pops, too obscure even for The Old Grey Whistle Test. But as we approach the millennium, we look to the moving image to provide veracity. Perhaps if we could see Nick move, he would seem more real, less iconic. Certainly the shock of hearing his drunken teenage voice causes pause; reality threatens to intrude.
The idea that some fragment of Nick was caught inadvertently piques the imagination. Like the few precious seconds of moving film which captured the glee of a Dutch schoolgirl, caught by chance observing a wartime wedding in Amsterdam. There is nothing remarkable in the footage. She did not know she was being filmed: the amateur cameraman simply happened to sweep sky wards, and in so doing captured on film the only moving images of a teenager whom the whole world would one day know by name – Anne Frank.
Megastores in every mall on every high street are full of the work of brooding, introspective singer-songwriters – though rather disconcertingly, the music which was once regarded as being on the cutting edge is now, often as not, filed away under ‘Easy Listening’. So why Nick Drake and not one of the many others? Just three albums released in his lifetime, a grand total of thirty-one tracks; even posthumously only nine new tracks have officially surfaced, and the widely available bootleg of home demos is largely cover versions. These are frail foundations upon which to build a myth. But built it is.
Is it the pin-up appeal? But then pictures of good-looking boys are everywhere, from pre-teen magazines to coffee-table tomes. Is it the premature end which still entices? Sadly, rock ‘n’ roll is not short of victims: everyone from the late, great Johnny Ace to Kurt Cobain has been called and gone before. Whatever the explanation, it is the development from quiet interest (who, please, is the Olah Tunji of whom Bob Dylan sang?) through curiosity (did The Stones really cover Dobie Gray’s ‘Drift Away’?) to out-and-out obsession (‘Dear Apple, Please release everything The Beatles ever recorded …’) which is disturbing.
With Nick Drake, the obsession can be so strong that it becomes increasingly difficult to separate the life from the myth. He had strikingly good looks, and in photos his innate shyness and reluctance to commit himself to the camera only add lustre. There is something not quite there about Nick in photographs, a suggestion that he is slipping quietly away from the lens, and that when you look again he may have gone. Like trying to photograph a ghost or catch a wisp of smoke.
When you look at the photos, and listen to the records, it is almost as though he was never there. There is an elusive, illusory quality to Nick. The recording of him speaking reveals a voice that is well-modulated, precise, but waif-like and hard to hear – almost as if he is trying to talk himself out of his life. And in photographs, and from the reports of those who saw him on-stage, it seems as though it were the same: as if he was trying to edge himself out of existence.
David Sandison: ‘It wasn’t a down, it was just a kind of … distance. A disconnection if you like. He was going on his way, and if it meant he had to bump into people and communicate with them from time to time, then OK. But he’d rather not. I think that’s even true of people who were close to him.’
Meeting contemporaries of Nick while writing this book was like beating a path to an unmarked door, over terrain which bore no previous footprints, and for which there were no maps. As we sat and spoke of Nick, particularly his days at Marlborough, it struck me that these were Nick’s exact contemporaries: in the same year at school, born within months of him. And as we sat and talked, it occurred to me that this is what Nick too would have been like had he lived: approaching fifty, established in life, possibly married with children, and probably – like his father – balding. But we will never know, because Nick traded all this for enduring beauty, a striking image of perfect and timeless youth. And, with the surviving pictures, we are left with the first bloom not yet faded; and on record, with the breathless voice of young promise.
Perhaps this begins to explain, at least in part, the degree of obsession. Nick Drake becomes a blank canvas on which admirers can paint their own pictures, project their own lives and troubles; a mirror in which people see their own pain and lost promise. The danger is that in the process, Nick’s own life is lost for a second time.
Those who shared their memories of Nick with me have come face to face with their own destiny: surviving and ageing and all these bring; but Nick never lived to make those discoveries. As Laurence Binyon wrote in his poem ‘For The Fallen’, which commemorated those who would never return from Flanders’ fields:
They shall not grow old, as we that are left grow old:
Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.
At the going down of the sun and in the morning
We will remember them.
Once upon a time there was a photograph of Paris, said to be one of the earliest ever taken, sometime during the 1840s. The camera was placed high on a building and took in all the boulevards, sweeping to the horizon as far as the lens could see. It showed trees lining the city streets, and a man caught in the act of tying his shoe. He was only there at all because in bending to tie his laces, he had stayed in one place long enough for his image to register on the lengthy exposure. His name will never be known, and he probably remained unaware of his date with posterity, but in the way of these things, that Parisian with the loose shoelace of 150 years ago is with us for ever.
Before compact discs diminished the imagery of rock ‘n’ roll, album sleeves were truly wonderful things. The sleeves of favourite records were as much part of their appeal as the music they protected. You were drawn to them, to the minutiae, and the strange, hypnotic power the pictures exerted. The images are so enduring, because when they were released, there was nothing else to look at. There were no long discourses on how the albums were made, or lavish coffee-table books celebrating the rock photographer’s craft. There was a record inside, and as it played you studied the sleeve. The covers of favourite albums became so familiar that it is dislocating to find an out-take from the session detailed on the sleeve – like coming home and finding the furniture rearranged.
The iconography of a sleeve became integral to the music’s appeal, and rarely was that iconography more powerful than on the record sleeves of the late Nick Drake. On Five Leaves Left, a black-and-white picture, perfectly clear and focused, had Nick nonchalantly leaning against a brick wall, quizzical and faintly baffled, while to his right a man dashes past, blurred by his hurry to be somewhere else.
Keith Morris is the man who did more than anyone to preserve the image of Nick Drake and present it to the world. Still snapping after all these years, Keith doesn’t do much music stuff now. After his work with Nick, he went on to shoot some classic images: John Cale’s Fear, Elvis Costello’s My Aim Is True …, but left rock ‘n’ roll imagery behind him in the mid-eighties. Keith still gets calls from fans all around the world, at all hours of the day and night. They all want to know about Nick Drake. He smiles at the incongruity of it all: two or three photo sessions, barely totalling a day’s work, nearly thirty years before, loom large over anything he has undertaken since.
We spoke in Keith’s flat in Little Venice, passing contact sheets across the battered wooden table – ‘That’s where Nick used to sit, if he dropped in … Sometimes didn’t say a word for hours.’ Because these shots form the bulk of the very few images of Nick which are left to us, you are struck by their familiarity. And as I looked at a life in miniature, Keith told me about the first time he met Nick: ‘It was in the Witchseason office in Charlotte Street. At that time, I was doing a lot of work for Oz and we had a thing about The Incredible String Band, and I had managed to wangle my way into Sound Techniques to take a roll of pictures which they really liked, and so I was summoned to meet this callow youth who Joe had just signed – I think he was still at Cambridge, and just about to begin work on the album.’
There is indeed something faintly familiar about the table from which Keith and I drink our tea, for this is where he photographed Nick for the shots used for the Bryter Layter advertisements; the table Nick is seated at on the cover of the Brittle Days tribute album. Wooden and gnarled, in the end it is still only a table.
And then that photo slides across the table: the ‘running man’ shot from Five Leaves Left. And seeing the whole contact sheet, you appreciate it as part of a sequence, with a whole series of shots either side of that particular photo. (The complete sequence can be seen in the booklet accompanying 1994’s compilation Way To Blue.) Ian MacDonald felt this was the image that captured the essence of the man he had encountered in Cambridge: ‘The back cover of Five Leaves Left, with him leaning up against the wall with the man running, that is absolutely Nick Drake. That is such a brilliant expression of who he was, except that it makes him appear a little more solid than he actually was in person. He was a little bit fading out himself, even though he was very still.’
The photos weren’t taken off Charlotte Street as Joe Boyd remembered, but by a wall outside a factory called Morgan Crucible, in Battersea, south-west London. Neither the factory nor the wall is any longer there. The running man sequence was taken at the end of a working day, and the staff had begun flooding out of the factory gates, streaming homewards: ‘The guy in the photo we ended up using was just running because he was late for his bus,’ Keith remembered. Simple as that. Like the man who stopped to tie his shoe in Paris a century and a half before …
Flicking through the sequence, you can see Nick and his faintly bemused self, leaning against the wall that late afternoon in 1969, and all around him flock the factory workers, keen to get away, unaware that, at random, one of them will be plucked, and his fleeting, blurred image will endure on a record sleeve which will be pored over for years and years to come.
Keith Morris: ‘One of the good things about Joe is that if he sees something he likes, he goes with it – there’s none of this “Have you done an album before?” I’d never done an album sleeve before … It was “This is Nick Drake. Listen to the tape. Will you do the sleeve?” So that was Five Leaves Left. Nick and I went off and had a nonalcoholic extended lunch, and I said, have you got any ideas you want to do? … I always work better bouncing ideas off people, and between us we came up with a number of ideas that we then shot. So the actual session ranged from my studio over a lot of south London. The cover shot – the one looking out the window – was in a deserted house just off Wimbledon Common …’
Because of what we know is to come, perhaps there is a temptation to read too much into the front sleeve of Five Leaves Left. What you see is simply a young man looking out of a window, surrounded by a border of Lincoln green. For the many who have come to Nick long after his death, Five Leaves Left is an emblematic treasure, an icon. Taken three-quarters on, Nick is gazing hazily out, a half-smile playing on his lips. The black jacket would be familiar to Nick’s Cambridge friends. Behind him, a half-open window looks out on to a shed (with a man in it?) Below the window, what looks like a carpenter’s bench stands, empty save for wood shavings. It is the mundane transmuted into the iconographic.
Nigel Waymouth, who shot the front cover for Bryter Layter, was a co-founder of the Swinging London boutique Granny Takes A Trip. He came up through the English underground of the late sixties with his partner Michael English. As Hapshash & The Coloured Coat, they created psychedelic posters to promote albums by The Crazy World Of Arthur Brown, Soft Machine and events staged at Brian Epstein’s Saville Theatre. English and Waymouth’s posters have come to be regarded as definitive artefacts of the era, and examples were included in the Barbican’s 1993 exhibition of ‘The London Art Scene In The Sixties’.
Keith Morris: ‘We did a few things for Bryter Layter, but we still hadn’t got a front, and Nigel Waymouth, who I’ve got a lot of time for as a designer – I think I was out of town – and at the last minute they decided they had to get this thing done, so Nick was dragged in the studio for the front cover.
‘The one on the back, on the motorway, was the one I did, on the Westway. It is Nick standing there, I’ve heard people say it wasn’t him, but it was taken one evening … We did a whole series of ideas, which is why we’d never got on with the front… double exposures, shots looking out over a desolate city, which we did in black and white. I suppose that back shot is like the one on Five Leaves Left… Nick always cast himself as an observer, this solitary figure, a very romanticized idea of himself. I think that was how Nick thought of himself …’
During the time he spent with Nick in the studio and on location, Keith Morris got as close to him as anyone, and had the opportunity to observe him, and the cultivation of his image. Nick’s surprisingly acute image-consciousness was something which friends from school and university had commented on, and Keith likewise noticed that Nick was quite astute in casting himself as the sensitive outsider: ‘He was very shy … but he really wanted to be famous, which was quite bizarre, given how laid-back about his career he was. But he was very shy and diffident.
‘He used to come round occasionally, sit at this table, have a cup of coffee. If he was up, yeah, you could have a conversation with him. He wasn’t … an Elvis Costello, giving it all that all the time, but yeah, you could have a normal conversation with him. He’d play the guitar while I was setting up. If he was down … there’d be a knock on the door, I’d let him in, he’d sit there, have a cup of tea, and he wouldn’t have said a word before leaving.
‘ “Vain” is a bit strong, but he knew what he wanted to look like, and I think one of the reasons he quite liked working with me was because I never tried to force things on him. I was quite happy to go with what he threw at me, try and work it different ways. You didn’t have smiling pictures, but occasionally he would laugh if something funny happened on the set, and you’d be quick to get that. He was very much the sucked-in cheeks. He … posed naturally. I used to photograph Marc Bolan a lot, and Marc once said to me: “I’m not the greatest guitarist in the world, but I’ve got great movements because I practised in front of the mirror for years.” I think in a funny sort of way, Nick knew what he was doing visually.’
Annie Sullivan’s career was as vivid and colourful as the sixties themselves by the time she arrived at Island in 1970 to become Art Director. Annie had been a house dancer at Ready, Steady, Go; helped coordinate the infamous legalize marijuana advert in The Times in 1967; and worked on the backstage organization of the Woodstock Festival in 1969 – she still has the correspondence detailing Janis Joplin’s requirements (‘a case of Southern Comfort!’)
Annie Sullivan: ‘I bumped into Guy Stevens at Marine Ices opposite the Roundhouse, and he said come to work for me on Monday at Island … At the time Island had King Crimson, Free, Traffic, Spooky Tooth, Cat Stevens, Jethro Tull, Fairport, Sandy Denny … The sleeves were very much the lingua franca of the time. I always felt the artwork should be an extension of the contents, reflect it in some way.’
As Nick became more and more withdrawn, the likelihood of a third album grew ever more remote. Then, to Island’s surprise, Pink Moon appeared out of nowhere. Nick never stated that he didn’t want his picture on the cover, but as with much of his communication at the time, it was just understood, and the album did appear with no portrait of the artist visible. Annie Sullivan worked with Nick for the first and last time on Pink Moon: ‘I’d been warned beforehand. Chris Blackwell said to me you’re going to do the album sleeve for Nick Drake, but it’s going to be difficult. And I thought, well, I’ve got a quite good, sensitive manner. But it was difficult.
‘I remember going to talk to him, and he just sat there, hunched up, and even though he didn’t speak, I knew the album was called Pink Moon, and I can’t remember how he conveyed it, whether he wrote it down … he wanted a pink moon. He couldn’t tell me what he wanted, but I had Pink Moon to go on. So I went to the Radio Times Hulton Picture Library and got lots and lots of pictures of moons. I got someone to photograph the moon and put a pink light over it. I got historic old pictures of the moon. And I commissioned an artist called Michael Trevithick – I’d seen his work and liked it, and he wasn’t someone I’d used before.
‘He was a painter, and I remembered his folio, quite surreal, which at that time was very unusual – nowadays, of course, everything is surreal. It was very different, very strange. I’m pretty certain he hadn’t done any album sleeves before. I just had the feeling that he might come up with something, and he came up with the artwork. I would have given him the album to listen to. I went and showed Nick the different ideas – “Do you like this?” – and the best I could get was “Mm” … But at the same time I sensed he knew what he wanted. It was a challenge, I quite liked trying to find something that reflected him. I don’t remember him talking about “Pink Moon”, the song or the sleeve. I know he liked it. I don’t remember him talking about anything.’
The Keith Morris photo used for the posthumous Time Of No Reply album is symptomatic of the time. The setting is Regent’s Park, one spring day in 1969, with Nick seated beneath a tree. He is captured as the eternal student and nascent songwriter, with his bulky book, Chelsea boots and trusty guitar never far from his side. The Time Of No Reply inlay, the photo actually underneath the CD itself, is a familiar cropped shot from another Morris session. The three-quarter-face shot was taken on a day when the two men were trawling south London for locations. It was taken overlooking the urban desolation of New Cross, squeezed between Deptford and Peckham, with the green, leafy spread of Greenwich just round a curl of the Thames.
It has come to be believed that the striped blanket in which Nick is enveloped on the cover of Way To Blue was Nick’s own special blanket, the blanket he wrapped himself in to keep warm while living so frugally in Hampstead. And over the years Joe Boyd has had patiently to point out that perhaps Nick’s fans shouldn’t take everything quite so … literally. ‘The wrapped in a blanket shot,’ he explained to Kevin Ring in Zip Code, ‘was not because he lived wrapped in a blanket, it was just a blanket the photographer happened to have with him.’
But that blanket just won’t go away. Early in 1997, following the appearance in Mojo of a feature I had written on Nick Drake, Gary Hill wrote in from Smile records in Dublin: ‘Many thanks for … having the consummate good taste to put Nick on your cover. That very same photo was taken by a friend of mine, Julian Lloyd, and when he told me he still possessed the rug that Nick wrapped around him in that glorious shot, I was obviously fascinated. Julian kindly allowed me to hang the rug on the wall of my shop where it has attracted much attention and comment. Please find enclosed photographic evidence that a small corner of Dublin will forever be Tanworth-in-Arden! ’
By the time of Pink Moon, Nick was visibly crumbling. Linda Thompson observed the decay during Nick’s last months in London: ‘Towards the end of his life, there were signs that everyone should have seen. He completely stopped washing I mean, he shut down. We all tried to help a bit, but… I was very shocked the last time I saw him, he really did look very ill, he wasn’t eating. I don’t know if he was doing any drugs, he was apparently on medication. I think there’s no way that Nick could have survived. Absolutely no way at all. He had no survival skills.’
Keith Morris hadn’t seen Nick for a while, and was pleasantly surprised to receive a call asking him to take some publicity photos to help promote Pink Moon. He too was shocked by the dreadful decline: ‘I got a call saying would I do this session with Nick. I was really surprised because I hadn’t seen him for months. They came round in a car to pick me up, then went to get Nick, and out to Hampstead Heath. It was the quickest session we ever did, barely an hour. We didn’t talk about any ideas, I just snapped away.
‘I had seen him before when he’d been very introverted … But that day at Hampstead, he wouldn’t even look at me, let alone do anything. It was just “stand there, stand there, look over there”. He just did it … My favourite photo of the session is him going down the hill, his back to the camera, with the dog jumping up. I think there’s a tragic simplicity to those pictures. Anyone could have taken them, I just happened to be the person … I still remember that I felt if I’d said something at the time, it might actually have stopped him … Normally I was quite chatty and sixties: lots of “Yeah, man” and “beautiful” …’
Gabrielle Drake points to one of the Keith Morris photos from that final Hampstead Heath session as her most abiding image of her late brother. ‘He used to do this thing of just sitting there, lost,’ she told Melody Maker’s Kris Kirk. ‘The most truthful photo I’ve ever seen of him is in the record booklet, where he is sitting on a park bench. Everyone, no matter how bad they are feeling, will try to pose when they are having their photograph taken, but here all Nick’s desire to pose has gone – he’s not even aware of the camera.’
Keith Morris: ‘I have to agree with Gabrielle. She liked the ones of Nick in Hampstead on the bench; she says they’re the most honest pictures of Nick … I think that’s right, he was just sitting around, looking … uncomfortably Nick.’
The sense of bleakness and isolation which Keith captured on those final photos on Hampstead Heath are coloured retrospectively by the knowledge that it would be Nick’s last-ever photo session. Even so, Nick’s obvious detachment and frailty have him looking like a character left marooned by Samuel Beckett. There is nothing coming from the eyes. The photographic evidence is conclusive: here is a person barely capable of comprehending what is going on around or inside him. Nick Drake seated on Hampstead Heath that day is the sight of a man shutting down.
The only lightness to come from that final session is provided by the dog who bounds up, as Nick walks, back to the camera, away from the lens and towards the pond. Annie Sullivan remembers that day: ‘Keith was brilliant with people. I think one of the keys of being a good Art Director is putting the right photographer with the right person, and not interfering … I had my dog Gus, a golden retriever with me. I’d brought him along because everybody liked Gus, and also dogs have a way of getting through sometimes, where people don’t. Nick didn’t talk to Gus, but he obviously liked him. And that’s where that picture came from: Nick walking down the path, and Gus came rushing round the corner and looked up at Nick.’
Annie got a call from Melody Maker: ‘They were asking, where’s the ad? A space had been booked, and I had to make an instant decision because they were going to print “This space was booked by Island Records”, which would have been disastrous. I thought, I’ve got to put something in, and I had half an hour to make up an ad. I was looking at the pictures, and I thought, this picture says more about Nick … there was no point in using a full-frontal picture of him, because you’d just have had this rather shy, sad-looking person. I thought that was a kind of enigmatic image.’
For many, that image of Nick Drake with his back to the camera, walking away from … everything, is the one which endures. It is the one featured in the Melody Maker advertisement of 26 February 1972, and the one which Jason Creed has featured on the back of every single issue of his fanzine, Pink Moon. But as Annie points out, the reality wasn’t that romantic: ‘He wasn’t fashionably down at heel, he was kind of sad. Such a shame, he was such a nice-looking boy. I never asked, but I suppose I presumed, at the time, it was drugs.’
Keith Morris was one of the few people close to Nick who had watched the arc of his short professional career, and for him that last meeting was memorable: ‘I remember him in two ways: one was the first time I met him – incredible personality – and the other is the last – a grey day, a grey mac … Certain sessions you remember for their colour. I remember that one because I don’t remember a single colour. Everything about it was grey. I don’t remember green, I remember grey.’