One Monday afternoon in Seattle, Peter Buck, guitarist with REM, The World’s Biggest Rock Band, bounces baby daughter Zoe on his knee as he crackles down the transatlantic line. It was the week that REM officially became TWBRB, after faxing confirmation of an $80-million deal with which Warner Bros secured the band’s services for five albums and on into the next millennium. But what drew Buck to the phone was not megabucks or REM hype, it was his fondness for the work of Nick Drake.
‘As a teenager growing up in Georgia, before punk came along, it was all those Allman Brothers, Lynyrd Skynyrd … Marshall-Tucker were huge. I saw Ten Years After play. It was all fine, but it wasn’t what I wanted. Folk music to me, then, was all 100-year-old guys playing bluegrass music incredibly fast.
‘What got me into Nick Drake was Led Zeppelin. I got that fourth Zeppelin album, liked the girl singing, and a friend said she’s in Fairport Convention, so I bought that record, liked that. It was a time when Duane Allman was God, and, you know, you’re a kid and you want to be different … The first Nick Drake record, I remember, was Five Leaves Left. I got it in a bargain bin, I guess he was still alive. I wasn’t drawn to it because of the … lonely adolescent thing. There was just something to me, as a teenager growing up in Georgia, incredibly sophisticated about it – the way the strings came in, that baroque sound, the guitar, that frail voice.
‘I guess I knew Joe Boyd’s name from the Fairport Convention records, Richard Thompson albums, saw he produced the Nick album, so thought that must be OK. We worked with him on Reconstruction Of The Fables because we wanted to use horns and strings for the first time, and liked the way he had achieved that, particularly on Nick’s records. At the time we came to work with Joe I was familiar with the myth, I had the Fruit Tree box set and had read the essay by then, and there had been articles in Crawdaddy.
‘To my mind, there is a line you can draw between Bryter Layter, Sketches Of Spain and Astral Weeks. I didn’t identify with the pained adolescent aspect, I was a teenager then, I didn’t recognize it. It was the … quality of an album like Five Leaves Left. What’s interesting about the guitar-playing is that he’s playing blues, but in a folk kind of way. We tried to do that on Automatic For The People, blues signatures, but disguised them.’
Clive Gregson is another musician who was aware of Nick’s work while he was still alive. Like many others, Clive first heard him on the Island Bumpers compilation, but it is Nick’s final album to which Clive is drawn back, again and again: ‘Pink Moon is my all-time favourite record. I think it’s just timeless music. If you listen to music from the early seventies – from any period actually – the fashionable, pop-orientated records usually only live best within that period.
‘I think the thing about Pink Moon, it still sounds great, just a voice and a guitar – apart from a tiny bit of piano on one track – I love the songs, I love the way it sounded. I thought it was incredibly well recorded: the closeness of everything. I’d never heard an acoustic guitar sound that good on any record. I think with Nick’s records, and Pink Moon particularly, you are always trying to figure out how they did it. And with that record, I can’t begin to imagine how they did it – any of it. I’ve talked to John [Wood] about it, and he just says: “Well, we stuck a microphone there, and that was it.” And you think, no, it can’t possibly be that simple.’
Peter Buck and Clive Gregson are fairly unusual in that they discovered Nick’s music while he was still alive; many, many more have come to it only posthumously. A trawl through the cuttings on the short life and career of Nick Drake would show that 99 per cent are posthumous, features full of retrospective wisdom and knowing hindsight. In 1993 a panel of experts at The Times chose the Top 100 rock albums of all time, and Five Leaves Left made a surprise appearance at number sixty, beating Michael Jackson’s Thriller, Wings’ Band On The Run, Pink Floyd’s The Wall and The Eagles’ Hotel California.
In a feature for the Scotsman in 1995, Brian Pendreigh charted Nick’s posthumous appeal: ‘Literature and painting have thrown up numerous examples of people whose work was recognised only after their death: few of Emily Dickinson’s poems were published in her lifetime and Vincent Van Gogh only ever sold one painting. But Nick Drake is probably the first rock singer to be discovered after his death. Death certainly boosted the careers of Jim Morrison, Jimi Hendrix and others, but they were already major stars. They were too wild to get through life. Drake was the opposite: Drake was too delicate.’
Pendreigh also asked Joe Boyd how Nick could have developed had he lived. Boyd replied: ‘His fatalistic view of his life and career was very much part and parcel of his view of the world, which is not to say he was always fated or doomed to a short life. But it’s very hard to say “Right, let’s assume Nick was a healthy, optimistic … person” … I don’t think Nick was hanging on as tightly as others of us do.’
Inevitably, you have to ask just what it is about Nick’s music which sees it endure, so long after his death. I was curious what Boyd, who worked so closely with him, felt were the reasons his music has persisted for so long, in an industry renowned for its appreciation of the ephemeral: ‘He wasn’t observing other people, he was mostly observing himself, which is what makes his songs so interesting, his acute observations of his own predicament, which are full of humour and irony. I think it is partly in the structure of the songs; partly in the intelligence of the lyrics – because I think the two go together, the thing already fits together well, just with the guitar and the voice, and it’s just so well constructed that the more things you add, the better it gets. I find the more I listen to the records, the more … startled I am by the incredible high quality of Nick’s guitar work.’
Besides working closely alongside Boyd at Witchseason, Anthea Joseph knew Dylan, Paul Simon, Richard Thompson, Sandy Denny and Nick Drake. ‘I don’t think Nick had the chance to develop …’ she reflected. ‘But there was something about him which was special … The early death and unrealized potential, I believe, are absolutely factors. No question. And the fact that he was romantic, he looked romantic. You look at those sleeves … It’s Byronesque, isn’t it? Or Shelleyesque, actually …
‘But this is Joe, I suppose. Joe’s vision. The way he produced those records, the sleeves, and so on. They’re extraordinarily romantic. But you do wonder, had things been slightly different, because there’s undoubtedly a wonderful talent, given growing up, growing older, kicking the shit, what he would have developed into?’
Trevor Dann went on to produce the BBC coverage of Live Aid, and head Radio 1, but his enthusiasm for the music of Nick Drake remains undimmed: ‘What is it about his records that makes them last? The first record is a gloriously complete album, it’s one of those records that doesn’t have a weak track, it’s very consistent; very coherent, and contiguous in its mood. It’s one of the great mood records; it doesn’t try and have variety. This is not: here’s a mixed portfolio of my talents. It’s: this is what it is. And many of the great albums are like that … Astral Weeks being another example where it’s really one thing all the way through. Five Leaves Left is one of those records where if you’re in that mood, you put it on, and it stays there in that mood.
‘I guess the other thing is, most introspective raincoat student music is pretty twee, and you grow out of it. But there is something about the spare lyrical quality that means even when you’ve grown up, it doesn’t feel embarrassing. You have to remember back to the kind of lyrics that people were writing back in that era. They were, for the most part, hogwash … It was a particularly bad phase: hey, I’ve taken some drugs, and now I’m going to write a fairy tale. Here was a man who didn’t do that. To my mind, he wrote about how he felt, and they’re completely direct and personal.’
As a student, Iain Dunn was lucky enough to hear Nick Drake sit down and play the songs he had just completed: ‘That sense of alienation in his music is something that speaks very strongly to people in that age group, between your late teens and your late twenties … And I think Nick was very, very accurate in replaying what he was going through, and synthesizing it into his songs … which was art in its own right, but also spoke to people. I think that by its nature, it’s very direct, it’s very personal, and I think it can still speak to people at quite a profound level, because you can say quite complex things through that sort of structure, which you can’t necessarily say when it’s production-based.’
While Jerry Gilbert has long been associated with Nick Drake because of his Sounds interview, he was also in a position to appreciate the developing talents of Richard Thompson, Sandy Denny, Al Stewart, Cat Stevens and John Martyn: ‘I remember talking to Joe … just before Nick died when I was trying to get a story together … I know he’d laid down four tracks, and that Joe had definitely said to me how upbeat he was, and how he really felt this was almost like a renaissance for Nick, and how enthusiastic he felt about these four tracks. So in that sense I was shocked … It was like somebody who was terribly ill, and then suddenly started to get better, and then the next day they’re dead, and it’s like: so what happened then?
‘I suppose Nick’s reputation is built on a flimsy body of work. I don’t remember Nick being anything other than someone who was sucked along in what ultimately became a really good movement of contemporary English folk performance. A really accomplished player, but almost – and it’s an awful thing to say – a bit-part player.’
Nick’s close friend John Martyn found the myth-making wore him down, and talking to Rob O’Dempsey he admitted: ‘It gets a bit morbid at times, especially in America. It’s awful, you get these dreadful people with spaced eyes going: “Hey, wanna talk about Nick?” … The first couple of times you feel sorry for them, but after four or five of them you go: “Not another nutter. He’s dead, you fool. Dead! Dead! You’re alive. Rejoice! Rejoice!” ’
Danny Thompson also tires of the obsessives: ‘I’ve had Italians who drive me mad. “Oh, you work with Nick Drake, tell me …” and they’re always tortured souls. I look at the faces of, yet again, tortured people. I say: “Look, he wanted to top himself, and he topped himself. That’s it!” Very irreverent, and they look at me in absolute horror as if I’ve just shot the Pope. I’m fed up with all this precious … There are still people alive who need writing about. I said to Joe, all these albums with, bless their hearts, Sandy, Nick … I said: “Joe, I’m still alive, how about giving me a deal?” People like Davy Graham, great talents, who are overlooked.’
Like it or not, premature death does bestow an extra degree of greatness. Life gets in the way of the myth. If Richard Thompson had died immediately after the release of Henry The Human Fly, would he have become Nick Drake? It is no reflection at all on the inherent quality of Nick’s work to suggest that it was his premature death which guaranteed him his current cult status.
Late in 1996 Donovan played a showcase at Dingwalls in Camden Lock. He was magnificent. Opening the evening was singer-songwriter Beth Orton. Hailed as that week’s next big thing, she was nervous and edgy. She wasn’t captivating the crowd – she works better on record. As she tuned her guitar, she introduced one of her own songs, ‘Galaxy Of Emptiness’. Hello, I thought, here’s someone who likes Nick Drake.
While he was in London, I took the opportunity to speak to Donovan about Nick Drake. He too was wary about the cult which has labelled Nick as doomed: ‘Tim Buckley, Nick, Tim Hardin. You get these figures who didn’t quite make it, and they’re there, and they’re influential. There are those who like those cult influences, who would have preferred Nick not to have made it. They prefer it that he was dark and doomed. And yet he was like me in many ways, he was very isolated, and I felt isolated as a child and as a songwriter, until I got the support.’
After Nick’s death, Robert Kirby carried on working with Joe Boyd and John Wood, on albums for Julie Covington and Any Trouble. He kept busy arranging until 1975, when he joined The Strawbs, and toured America with them for two years. For someone who died in 1974, like the moon on the tides, Nick Drake still exerts a strong pull on fellow singer-songwriters. Kirby, though, is still very much alive and working: ‘Elvis Costello approached me to conduct the RPO at the Royal Albert Hall in January 1982 because of my work with Nick Drake. Jake Riviera’s office contacted me and said that Elvis was really into the Nick Drake albums, and the arrangements, and wanted me to do the arrangements – they thought I was dead! For a long time, when Nick died, a lot of people thought I was dead.’
There is a roll-call of Nick Drake disciples that musters Kate Bush, REM, The The’s Matt Johnson, Mark Eitzel, Beth Orton, Lucy Ray, The Cardigans, Belle & Sebastian (‘They sound like Nick Drake fronting the BMX Bandits,’ said the NME), Folk Implosion (‘Nick Drake goes Trip Hop’ – Mojo), Tom Verlaine, The Black Crowes, The Cure’s Robert Smith, Nervous’s Justin Travis and September 67. Stephen Duffy, who had flirted with Duran Duran and pop success as Stephen ‘Tin Tin’ Duffy in the early 1980s, came back in 1987 with a new band, The Lilac Time, who took their name from a line in Nick’s ‘River Man’.
Everything But The Girl were particularly keen on the legacy of Nick Drake. Selecting Five Leaves Left as one of his all-time favourite albums, Ben Watt told Q in 1994: ‘It’s the art of understatement – English folk-rock understatement I suppose. I love them as mood pieces as much as anything else, and again the fact that they have influences that are not directly from rock ‘n’ roll, and an unembarrassed ability to mix almost semi-classical string arrangements with acoustic basses and acoustic guitars. I also like what I’ve read about Nick Drake – that he was terribly frustrated that he wasn’t more popular than he was. He genuinely believed that what he was doing was potentially intensely commercial, which I find quite charming, because it so obviously isn’t. But he really felt that he was saying something that was direct and would appeal to people in an open-hearted way. Rock ‘n’ roll needs grander gestures, unfortunately.’
Without carbon-copying Nick, one way to pay homage is to cover one of his songs, but to date, incredibly few have been covered. It is not as if they are unwieldy word-orgies, like Dylan’s ‘It’s Alright Ma …’ or wilfully arcane like Richard Thompson’s ‘Don’t Sit On My Jimmy Shands’. Nick’s songs are open and accessible, melodic and rhythmically memorable. The lyrics are not challenging or abstruse. Yet, aside from the 1992 tribute album Brittle Days, Nick’s catalogue remains largely unplundered.
Five years after ‘My Boy Lollipop’, Millie became one of only two acts to cover a song by Nick Drake during his lifetime, when ‘Mayfair’ appeared on her Time Will Tell album in 1970. Nick’s former labelmates Tir Na Nog included ‘Ride’ on their 1973 Chrysalis debut, Strong In The Sun; and singer-songwriter Lucinda Williams recorded ‘Which Will’; but otherwise, covers of Nick Drake songs are rarer than rocking-horse droppings.
For years, Joe Boyd has cherished the idea of a Nick Drake tribute album, on which contemporary acts would cover their own favourite song of Nick’s. The concept reached its high watermark in the early 1990s, when tributes appeared to Leonard Cohen (three times), Elton John, Jimi Hendrix and Richard Thompson (twice), among others. Among the names pencilled in for the Nick tribute were REM’s Peter Buck and The Psychedelic Furs’ Richard Butler together on ‘Pink Moon’, John Cale and Britain’s premier pedal-steel player, B.J. Cole (‘River Man’), All About Eve (‘Clothes Of Sand’), The Black Crowes (‘Black Eyed Dog’) and Everything But The Girl (‘Northern Sky’). Plans have been in the air since at least 1990, but at the time of writing, the Nick Drake tribute remains unreleased.
The kudos which is wrapped around the late Nick Drake manifests itself in the oddest ways and the strangest places. The 1996 catalogue for Polygram/Island music, representing the publishing interests of some of the greatest songwriters of the rock ‘n’ roll era (Elton John, Bob Marley, U2, Van Morrison), boasted a reproduction of Nick’s original handwritten lyrics for ‘Fruit Tree’.
In Record Collector’s poll of collectable artists, the second highest-climbing name in 1997 was Nick Drake, up 138 places to number eighty-seven. A sharp-eyed Mojo reader noted that the back sleeve of Five Leaves Left was just visible in a scene in the film Grace Of My Heart. But surely the most bizarre rumour recently to attach itself to Nick Drake was that one of his songs had been used as background music for a Nike ad screened on MTV; according to Nike’s advertising agency, there is absolutely no truth in the rumour.
By the beginning of 1997 Heartbeat: Number One Love Songs Of The 60s, which features ‘Fruit Tree’ as its closing track, had sold over 300,000 copies, to become the eighth-best-selling compilation album of 1996. As well as providing a good selection of golden oldies from pop’s most fondly remembered decade, the record obviously sold on the back of the enormously popular retro TV drama. Its success meant that in the space of just a few months roughly ten times more people heard Nick Drake than ever bought his records while he was alive.
Unquestionably, Nick Drake has been pigeon-holed; safely slotted into the template of tragic, doomed young poet, whose talent went unappreciated by record company and public at large, leading to depression, and ultimately, premature death. But that is all too pat, and it does the life and memory and work of Nick Drake a grave disservice.
So strong has the morbid myth become, and so delicate the body of work, I asked Peter Buck if he thought that Nick’s death was in danger of suffocating the innate quality of the music: ‘I don’t buy the posthumous appeal thing. The guitar player from Chicago died, and I don’t remember legions of fans going out and buying the first four Chicago albums. The thing with Nick is I couldn’t see him around now, or in the future, aged sixty-five, and doing the fourth farewell tour. I mean, hindsight is a great thing, isn’t it? – all the symbols that are there on the records and in the lyrics.’
Dave Pegg, who watched Nick opening the show for Fairport early in 1970 and worked with him on Bryter Layter, said: ‘It’s awfully sad what happened to Nick … he obviously did want to be successful, it’s all that stuff, you don’t know anything about people at the time. He was the last person I would have thought would have taken it that seriously …
‘Nick was a great talent, and it’s great that people appreciate him. It’s great that young people do; the only cred I get is that I played on a Nick Drake album. Which is quite good when you look like I do. If you were clever enough to analyse why people like something that much, I’d have retired thirty years ago. They are just great songs, and they sound good. Without knowing anything about the personality behind the songs, if you heard Bryter Layter for the first time, and you didn’t know who it was … I think most people would really like it. As a guitarist, he is so complete … He was really good. He could do stuff in one take. There was never a problem, and rhythmically he was incredibly sound.’
Clive Gregson: ‘It’s kind of hard to imagine what he would have carried on doing … It was totally unfashionable then. It is, in many ways, totally unfashionable now. The fact that so many people come to it, is to do with the timeless quality. It’s just basically very, very good music, very good songwriting. There’s also the air of mystery surrounding his life and his death. There’s so little that’s really known about Nick …
‘The cult is certainly associated with the premature death. The fact that there will be no more records. It’s a very finite thing you can look at and say, well, there’s basically three records, a compilation of out-takes … But I do think that Nick was a great artist as well. There is something about Pink Moon. I don’t understand it. There’s something intriguing, it’s fascinating. I can always find something new in it even after listening to it all these years. Nothing feels out of place. To do something so personal, so sparse and simple, for me, I can’t think of any other record that captures that sound.’
Hidden in the hinterland of Shepherd’s Bush, Nomis Studios is a big rehearsal and recording complex where, early in January 1997,1 went to talk to Paul Weller about Nick Drake. Weller struck many as an unlikely convert to the cause: there appeared to be little to connect the fiery leader of The Jam and epicene co-host of The Style Council with the quietly introspective music of Nick Drake. But since the relaunch of Weller’s career as a solo act in the early 1990s, his own music had taken on a more reflective edge, and Weller is always careful to cite sources. While contemporaries in The Clash and Sex Pistols had railed against what had gone before, in pugnaciously punk fashion, Weller has always shown an appreciation of pop, R&B and soul history. He was turned on to Nick by hearing ‘River Man’, and when he began name-checking Nick as an influence in interviews, Weller’s fans also began taking an interest in the music of the singer-songwriter who had died before they were born.
Preparing for his fourth solo album, Weller sat alongside cappuccino compadre and Oasis biographer Paolo Hewitt, and talked about Nick Drake: ‘For me it’s quite simple: it’s the melodic side that attracted me. I only heard his stuff three years ago maybe, that was the first I ever heard of him. The first thing I heard was “River Man”, which I think is just fantastic. The melody is so brilliant. So that’s what hooked me … Intimate, the voice, the guitar, the melody … As a guitarist, I like the open tunings, which is probably a standard folk-music tuning, but I don’t know that stuff, so he was my introduction to that style. I’m not a “disciple” of Nick Drake. I just heard his records and liked them, liked that very distinctive thing he was doing.
‘The fact he died young, that always adds to the myth, plus the fact he only ever made three albums, and they’re all really good albums. He didn’t get to make the fourth or fifth shitty one … “At The Chime Of A City Clock”, Bryter Layter, is brilliant. The instrumental stuff on that, mixes it up a bit. “Hazey Jane”, “Northern Sky”, they’re just great melodies, moody and menacing. Great songs, that’s why they’re timeless, that’s why he lasts. There is an Englishness, pastoral … There’s a classical style in his music as well, which is very English.
‘With Nick, it was that one particular song, “River Man”, that did it for me. The arrangement, the strings, that alone. I like great melodies, songs. It’s really hard to come up with an original melody, to come up with something that you haven’t heard before. He’s got at least half a dozen that are real classics, as soon as you hear them, so distinctive. I don’t pay an awful lot of attention to his lyrics, because they’re so samey, but on top of the melodies, they take you somewhere else: they transcend a lot of that sadness.’
Weller was intrigued when I mentioned Nick’s virtual invisibility. With the prospect of recording a new album, resultant promo videos, the endless cycle of interviews and concerts to promote the album … With the next two years of his life effectively bound up, he seemed envious of the way things were back then. ‘So he only ever made three albums, a dozen gigs, never played America and one interview? That’s the way to do it!’
After Nick’s death in 1974, Rodney and Molly Drake were touched by the continuing interest shown in their son’s music, and were always welcoming to fans and admirers. Far Leys was open house to those who travelled to see the house where Nick grew up and died. Nick’s music was what drew them there, and his parents were clearly delighted by anyone who was touched by it. Only too aware of how neglected Nick felt during his lifetime, their joy in the lasting, even escalating, interest in his music was heartfelt.
Molly: ‘We always appreciated music, even if we didn’t understand the technicalities – the extraordinary ability on the guitar – neither of us played the guitar, so we didn’t understand. People come from far and wide and say: “How did Nick tune his guitar?” and of course we have to say we don’t know.’
Rodney: ‘It’s not surprising that we didn’t really appreciate his music, we were of a different generation, and even his own generation didn’t appreciate it at the time. I think he was ahead of his time, wasn’t he?’
In 1986, twelve years after Nick’s death, a young American guitarist called Scott Appel wrote to Rodney and Molly Drake, expressing his appreciation of Nick’s music. Scott was particularly fascinated by the unusual guitar tunings which Nick had used, and wondered if his parents could help clarify them. Neither could, but his enquiry opened up a correspondence which continued until Molly’s death. Scott was clearly an aficionado of Nick’s work, and both his parents responded to his knowledge of, and enthusiasm for, their son’s music.
A Daily Express profile of Gabrielle in 1997, published to coincide with her West End opening in Lady Windermere’s Fan, dubbed Nick ‘Britain’s answer to Bob Dylan’ and quoted Gabrielle on the people who made pilgrimages to Far Leys: ‘After he died, youngsters from all over the world would turn up at my parents’ home to talk about Nick. They were welcomed. His fans were delightful. Some had the kind of problems which used to trouble him. My parents were destroyed by his death, but it never dominated their lives. They didn’t become sad. They took pleasure in the interest young people showed in Nick. That was a great help to them.’
They came from Europe and America, drawn to the neat and tidy house in the tiny village of Tanworth. Rodney and Molly were largely unaware of how valuable Nick’s possessions were to his fans, but they were touched by the continuing interest, and consequently, irreplaceable manuscripts, photos and other items were handed over in good faith, never to be returned. Joe Boyd and Island Records advised them, but they too were probably unprepared for the enduring intensity of interest in Nick’s music.
Scott Appel’s initial contact with Rodney and Molly coincided with the release of Nick’s posthumous fourth album, and Molly wrote to him just after they had received a finished copy of Time Of No Reply: ‘Knowing that young people still love and play Nick’s music has been our only comfort since he died … Rodney and I feel the more Nick’s music is given out to the world the happier we shall be.’
In their continuing correspondence with Scott Appel, the Drakes sensed someone with a real affinity for Nick’s music, and they wrote to him about some ‘work tapes’ which Nick had left behind: ‘Some time in 1974 Nick, who was by then very withdrawn and uncommunicative, went over to Suffolk to see John Wood who used to own a recording studio of his own and also recorded for Island and understood Nick and his problems. Nick returned with this tape but never told us what was on it – he just put it away with the other tapes he had. I did not discover it till after his death by which time Island had the recordings of his last four songs, complete with words.’
Through a mutual love of Nick’s music, Scott and the Drakes began to discuss the idea of Scott working from Nick’s tapes to develop the fragments, a prospect which delighted his parents. They were, however, very clear about how it should be handled: ‘provided the songs are kept the same in essence and not made unrecognizable – and providing too that it is always clear – and I know with you at the helm it always would be made clear – that these are Nick’s songs’.
True to his word, Scott sat down and began transposing snippets of tape, and trying to figure out the tunings, which were unique to Nick. It was like trying to crack the Enigma code. Nick’s friend Robert Kirby understood the problems Scott faced: ‘I defy anyone to sit down with a Nick Drake song and try to figure out how to play it,’ he was quoted as saying on the sleeve of Scott’s finished Nine Of Swords album, ‘the songs just don’t follow the ordinary rules of composition.’
Talking to me in 1997, Kirby was still keen to sing Nick’s praises as a guitarist: ‘When he first came into my room … as soon as he played the guitar, I’ve never heard anything like it before or since, in terms of virtuosity. Maybe some people play faster, maybe some people play more complicated pieces, but he never gave a bad performance … I know for a fact that he practised a phenomenal amount. When he was at home alone, he practised and practised and practised. He had to, just to maintain that technique. Even on the first album – something like “River Man”, or something like “Three Hours”, where there is a very complicated guitar part – it was always note for note the same. He might vary tempi sometimes … but every string, every fingernail connected at the same microsecond, each time he did it.
‘All five of the fingers on his right hand could be used equally for playing a melody … the thumb would come up and do the tenor part on the D and A strings. But he wouldn’t just get the notes right, he would control the tone and timbre … He’d got the technique of a virtuoso classical guitarist.’
At the core of Nine Of Swords are Nick Drake originals which he never lived to record. The record opens with ‘Bird Flew By’, one of the first songs Nick ever wrote; a wistful lament, and in Scott Appel’s hands, quintessentially Nick, with its rhetorical refrain ‘What’s the point of a year or a season?’ The song evokes the haunted territory which Nick had made his own, with its ‘list of false starts and crumbled broken hearts’. Though long in his repertoire, Nick had never felt happy enough with ‘Blossom’ to record it. It is one of the most optimistic songs in his canon, with the influence of Joni Mitchell’s ‘The Circle Game’ and ‘Both Sides Now’ faintly evident.
Concerned that the release of Nine Of Swords would sully Nick’s memory, Joe Boyd was reluctant to grant Appel permission to tamper with Nick’s music. Nick’s parents, however, had no doubts: ‘I’m sure there can be no objection whatever to your developing the piece you are interested in – indeed, as far as Molly and I are concerned we should welcome it,’ wrote Rodney in 1986. The following year he confirmed: ‘On the legal position over your making use of Nick’s music (developing his themes and so on) I do not see that there can possibly be any restriction on your using songs that have never been published, beyond getting our agreement, and that you have.’
There is no knowing how Nick himself would have tackled these works in progress, or indeed if he would have chosen to develop them at all. But Nick’s fans are insatiably hungry for any crumb of unreleased music, and if the only way they can hear ‘Bird Flew By’ or ‘Blossom’ is to hear them interpreted by Scott Appel, then they will happily settle for that.
Having spent so much time assimilating his unique musicianship, Scott Appel wrote a revealing article on Nick’s guitar playing for Frets magazine: ‘Drake’s right hand technique was considerable. He produced a dreadnought-like sound with a small-bodied Guild M-20 – the only guitar he ever used to record. He fingerpicked with a combination of flesh and nail, and used only his nails for strumming. He never used picks of any kind. The recorded sound of Drake’s guitar was also partly due to the miking techniques of his sound engineer John Wood, who already had recorded British musicians Richard Thompson, John Martyn and Robin Williamson, using a four microphone setup for Drake’s acoustic. One ambient mike was placed all the way across the room. Power was not the only characteristic of Drake’s right-hand technique. He played unusual and irregular patterns with his thumb, contrary to the clearly defined bass rhythms played by the thumb in most fingerpicking patterns (the alternating bass, for example).’
Paul Wheeler, who had innumerable opportunities to observe Nick and his guitar technique, smiled when he remembered those Cambridge days: ‘There was a professionalism about Nick … I don’t remember many gigs, but even just sitting round people’s rooms, if he’d written a new song or something, if he played through something, he would always get it absolutely right. He would wait until people were listening before he played it. He would never play it twice. There was always a sense of professionalism. He never played a bum note. He wouldn’t do the washing-up because it might break his nails. So he was conscious of his reputation.’
As a fellow guitarist, Paul Wheeler studied Nick’s playing closely; he too felt that the unique strength lay in his right hand: ‘As a guitarist, Nick used his right hand in a way that I don’t think anyone like John or Bert used it … You see, even someone like Richard Thompson doesn’t use his right hand that subtly … Speaking as a guitarist, it’s his right hand that’s interesting. Synchronizing your fingers, most guitarists only use two fingers on the right hand. Nick definitely used his whole hand, and he used it in a very interesting way. Listen to “River Man”, and get a guitarist to explain to you what’s happening, and he won’t be able to!’
Over the years, Nick Drake’s inimitable guitar playing has contributed hugely to his enduring appeal. While the songs are timeless and beguiling, for musicians Nick’s tunings, his fluent fingering and playing are transcendent. An accomplished singer-songwriter and nimble guitarist himself, Clive Gregson is fascinated by Nick’s playing: ‘I cannot figure out the guitar tunings, I don’t know what the guitar’s tuned to 99 per cent of the time; the chords, the fingerings, the way his voice sounds that good, it’s so dry. It’s a complete mystery. But at the end of the day, it’s just a bloke playing the guitar and singing. But it doesn’t sound like anything else I’ve ever heard.’
Just what is it about Nick’s guitar tunings which continues to fascinate people?: ‘I think it’s incredible technique, for a start. He’s finger-picking in really odd rhythms … “River Man” is in 5/4, and the rhythmic part, the playing on that, is just astonishing. And in some ways it sounds simpler than it really is. I can sit down, and pick out certain things, but it never sounds … right. It’s a technical facility way beyond … I guess it’s a very musician thing, and a lot of the latter interest in Nick is from musicians and players. It’s terribly understated, it’s very tasteful. “The Road”, off Pink Moon, that is just rhythmically so complex, and yet it’s not hard chords. There are aspects of it that are simple … There’s a little instrumental called “Horn”. The way he plays it, tiny little thing, most people wouldn’t even think that way. The comparison with Richard [Thompson] is interesting, because having worked with Richard, I can rationalize, I can understand what Richard does, because I’ve seen him do it a lot – I can’t do it, I can’t begin to do it – but I kind of understand it. Whereas with Nick, there’s a lot of it that I don’t understand.’
No mean guitarist himself, Nick’s friend John Martyn was equally fascinated by his guitar tunings. Martyn had watched Nick firsthand, but was still baffled by just how he did it. He spoke in 1986 of his memories of watching him hunched over his guitar, endlessly tuning and retuning: ‘Nick was extraordinarily secretive about all that. I could probably work them out for you … he used seconds quite a lot, very strange tunings, diminished as well, so when you applied just two fingers you’d change the thing in a very radical way. I remember his fingering here – he had the most beautiful fingers when he played, and they were made even more beautiful by the fact that the shapes that he’d play were not those you would normally see when other people play. Very interesting little shapes … I just never asked him, I was too busy toddling off on my own and doing my own stuff. He’s a much-underrated player.’
Jeremy Mason was there, in early 1967, as Nick Drake developed his guitar tunings. Nick had learned the basic guitar chords from David Wright at Marlborough only a few years before, but in Aix, Jeremy was driven mad by Nick’s endless tuning and retuning of his guitar. Because there was nothing else to do, Jeremy began drawing, and because there was nobody else to draw, his first subject was the teenager on the bed opposite: ‘What was probably my first attempt at drawing was a drawing of Nick playing his guitar, which I turned into a linocut. And bad as I was, that was the way I remember him sitting. He always wore those moccasins. He always looked at the guitar. The guitar picking, the sound that you hear now on the records, he developed in Aix … He sat for hours on his bed. I knew then he was getting pretty serious about it.
‘He used to sit on his bed, and loosen the strings on his guitar, completely, as I recall. I think he had now obviously started to smoke – marijuana – and he would strum away, and tighten them up as he went. I think he formulated it there, because the sound I hear on the records now is the sound he was getting then.’
At Cambridge and at Sound Techniques, Robert Kirby watched Nick develop his unique guitar style. He was also one of the few people with whom Nick ever discussed the actual mechanics of songwriting. For Nick, the genesis of a song came from playing the guitar, and finding a phrase which he could make his own and develop. With memories of Nick in London and Cambridge, Kirby remembered: ‘What he’d do is play for fifteen or twenty minutes, non-stop, moving from figure to figure, and the figure that I’m thinking of is the introduction to “Things Behind The Sun”. That was going for years before he recorded it on Pink Moon. I think a lot of Nick’s writing came from the fact that he would experiment with a detuning, experiment with a figure within it, and that would give him the basis for a song …
‘He did talk about the music, when we were at Cambridge, or when we were doing Bryter Layter. He would come up with strong guitar phrases, harmonic sequences, tunings … He would have these parts in his head for a long time, and then as lyrics came, he’d got a library of parts that would go with that. It makes it sound a bit mechanical, but I believe that’s the way they came … I’m sure there must have been plenty of songs when he was sitting there and a lyric came, and then he wrote some music for it, but all of his experimentation came with the guitar. He took the guitar to extremes.’
Both Rodney and Molly Drake were delighted with what Scott Appel had achieved with Nick’s music on Nine Of Swords and they continued to correspond for years. When Molly moved to a smaller house after Rodney’s death in 1988, Scott suggested donating Nick’s manuscripts to a museum archive, but Molly’s reply confirms what many still fail to understand: ‘there is so little that Nick left behind him – apart from the legacy of his music. He never wrote anything down, never kept a diary – hardly even wrote his name in his own books. It was as if he didn’t want anything of himself to remain except his songs – to quote from one of those songs – I have always described him to myself as “a soul with no footprint” …
‘The only written thing I have of Nick’s is one exercise book (from Cambridge University) in which he put down the words to most of his songs. This is one of my most precious possessions and I could not part with it… Apart from this all I have are his letters from school – Marlborough College – every single one of which I have kept. But these are just schoolboy letters talking of football, hockey and cricket matches, athletics, lessons or lectures etc – and nothing about music whatsoever, except an occasional reference to a classical lesson.’
At the beginning of their correspondence in 1986, when the Drakes sent Scott Appel the tape containing over four hours’ worth of works in progress, which Nick had recorded but never released, his mother Molly noted poignantly that ‘Bird Flew By’ was ‘one of Nick’s earliest songs, played on his old original 20 dollar guitar. It has never appeared on any record – I love it and it reminds me of the very young – and still happy – Nick before the shadows closed in.’