Wherever the intellect is most excited . . . there is an increase of insanity. This malady prevails most widely, and illustrates its presence most commonly in mania, in those countries whose citizens possess the largest civil and religious liberty . . . whose free, civil and religious institutions create constantly various and multiplying sources of mental excitement.
– Praying a Grant of Land for the Relief and Support of the Indigent and Incurable Insane . . . , Dorothea Dix, 1848
It seems to me that in England all feelings, selfish and liberal, religious and moral, low and high, are extremely active. Not only the feelings, but also the intellectual faculties, have no restraint but that of their own power. If genius be not always encouraged, its activity at least is not suppressed . . . Thus, the powerful activity of the mind seems to me a great cause why insanity is so frequent in England.
– Observations on the deranged manifestations of the mind, or, Insanity by J.G. Spurzheim, 1833
Throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, continental intellectuals were convinced that the unusual civil liberties enjoyed by the English – and its English-speaking ex-colony across the way – at least partly accounted for its tendency to produce a disproportionate number of lunatics. Although J.G. Spurzheim also mentioned the English proclivity for liking a drink, and connected this to ‘deranged manifestations of the mind’, he made no mention of the role of drugs in such an endemic dérèglement. John Jones’ The Mysteries of Opium Reveal’d (1700), though, had already commented on how opium, freely available by then, ‘in excessive dose, do[th] cause, at first, Mirth, and afterwards a kind of Drunken Sopor in some, in others Fury, or Madness’, while, ‘long and lavish use . . . causes a dull and moapish disposition’.
Likewise, the idea that a particular genus of mental disease was quintessentially English precedes Spurzheim by at least a century. It was one subscribed to by George Cheyne, who in 1733 published an entire book on The English Malady, or, A Treatise of Nervous Diseases of all Kinds. And in his introduction, Cheyne observed: ‘The Title I have chosen for this Treatise, is a Reproach universally thrown on this Island by Foreigners . . . by whom nervous Distempers, Spleen, Vapours and Lowness of Spirits, are in Derision, called the English Malady. And I wish there were not so good Grounds for this Reflection.’ Cheyne’s own explanation – it was ‘the Variableness of our Weather’ and ‘the Richness and Heaviness of our Food’ – may even now have its advocates. It may also partly explain why there was a network of private asylums around England – along lines established by the medieval hospital at Beth’lem (or Bedlam) in Southwark – long before any similar network grew up elsewhere in Europe.
However, any intellectual consensus conceiving of a relationship between freedom of expression and madness had long lapsed by the time the 1960s decided to test such a thesis once and for all. And this time freedom of expression came with a desire for experimentation wholly alien to the staid Victorians, ever concerned with social order and public decorum. If, in the period 1965–75, English rock produced an extraordinary body of work – I would suggest unparalleled in its popular culture since the heyday of Jacobethan drama – it was not only a case of the postwar traumas of a sundered society finding release in the popular arts, but also that intoxicatingly heady feeling this newly permissive attitude to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness fleetingly inspired. Such a spirit of optimism and experimentation inevitably fed into all forms of populist art.
This dewy-eyed optimism – which would-be hedonists did not merely apply to the traditional recourses of the aspiring aesthete, sex and drugs, but crucially extended to the preeminent form of contemporary artistic expression, rock music – died well before the concomitant spirit of experimentation did. Even in a recording studio – where the sums of money at stake could run to the millions a bestseller would bring – freedom of expression and a widespread encouragement of experimentation were the twin pillars of rock’s late Sixties/ early Seventies heyday.
For that is what it truly was. Bands were free to choose their producers (a relatively recent innovation), or even produce themselves; they were generally free to run up as much studio time as the demands of their artistic vision required (in the case of Pink Floyd, they had even had the wit to insist on an ‘open studio time’ clause in their original 1967 contract with EMI); they could and usually did employ independent designers to produce the packaging that formed such an integral part of The Album as Artefact (Floyd insisted on using their old friends at Hipgnosis, while artist Roger Dean provided bands such as Yes with their own ‘house style’); and when they delivered the finished sequence, the record company was expected to issue it exactly as it was given to them. Gone were the days when American labels could dictate the content, even in opposition to any UK release, creating a generation of American consumers who thought there was a Rolling Stones album called 12x5 and a Beatles collection named Yesterday and Today.
Even in the case of Nick Drake – after two albums, neither of which had sold more than a couple of thousand copies – Chris Blackwell’s Island not only released the twenty-eight minute Pink Moon exactly as they received it, but also gave the album a fold-out sleeve, and the budget to commission an artist friend of the family, Michael Trevithick, to design the cover after Drake informed them ‘he wanted a pink moon’. Indeed, the only one of the half-a-dozen albums at the heart of this microcosm of madness not lovingly wrapped in a fold-out sleeve was Ziggy Stardust, and even that came housed in an inner sleeve with a full set of lyrics. Meanwhile, the ostentatious packaging for Quadrophenia would run Jethro Tull’s Thick as a Brick and Elton John’s Captain Fantastic close in any contest for the most O.T.T. album-sleeve in rock history.
This free spirit in English rock was also reflected in the labels themselves, which were fronted by free-thinking overseers, independent in spirit and deed; witness Immediate (Andrew Loog Oldham), Island (Chris Blackwell), Charisma (Tony Stratton-Smith), Chrysalis (Chris Ellis), Virgin (Richard Branson) and Track (Chris Stamp). To compete with these independents, the mighty EMI were obliged to set up their own ‘prog’ label, Harvest (to whom Floyd, Barrett and Roy Harper all absconded), while Decca came up with Deram, and Pye brought in Dawn. Between them, these ‘indie’ labels would release most of the groundbreaking English rock music of the late Sixties and early Seventies.
As for touring to promote the album after the fact, the record label just had to hope the artist felt like playing their newly released songs – rather than any they’d written in the interim. But, irrespective of touring activities or chart action, the record labels were expected to keep their albums in print until the world caught up – even if that was never. Meanwhile, a British concert circuit still built around many subsidised colleges and universities, town halls and larger theatres was able to sustain a veritable jamboree of pop acts who only ever teetered on the edge of chart-action.
But perhaps the greatest innovation in pop-culture, as of 1966, was the fact that no subject matter – even going ga-ga – was taboo. Once Dylan forever sundered the shackles at Newport, ‘nothing is forbidden, everything is permissible’ became the whole of rock lore. And although not many expected to export English rock’s ever-tenuous hold on sanity as a sensibility, for a while there it proved surprisingly easy to sell to the States. (Even Monty Python, as eccentrically English as jellied eels, would find a mass audience across the pond.) Only when the English got angry at the status quo – with Punk – did the Americans recoil. By then, they had more than enough English rock music to keep them going for the next decade.
However, Punk’s unnerving presence also brought a necessary stock take as the labels – many of which had now given their accountant a set of keys – realized they had been subsidizing some fine cult acts for nigh on a decade and, forgetting the virtues of classic catalogue, instituted a cull that did for the likes of Richard & Linda Thompson, John Martyn, Roy Harper, Vincent Crane and Peter Green. For those who had always preferred the nooks and crannies of cultdom, the days of wine and poppies were numbered. Gone went the ostentatious fold-out sleeves, unlimited studio time and a carte blanche approach to session-musician costs, along with the once-assured interest of a voracious weekly music press. In Britain this still numbered four major papers: NME, Melody Maker, Sounds and Record Mirror, but with the notable exception of Melody Maker, they all embraced punk with such Year Zero fever that the chances of a Roy Harper feature by 1977 were about as great as a Margaret Thatcher interview.
It was into this ocean of indifference that some of the more challenging English artists of the earlier era were hurled, and it was a case of sink or swim. Two of its leading lights threw their talented wives overboard in the process. By 1980 Martyn had chosen to swim in his own pool of booze and recrimination, captured on his last Island album, Grace & Danger, leaving Beverley to experience her own nervous breakdown in the aftermath of their marriage, culminating in a spell in a mental ward in 1984. Meanwhile, Richard & Linda Thompson got their more successful friend Gerry Rafferty to subsidize an album they never released (the original Shoot Out the Lights39), and then re-recorded it when Linda was heavily pregnant and suffering from an intermittently chronic case of dysphonia. Not surprisingly, the resultant record was their last together, and it would be 1984 before Richard Thompson was back on a label that could actually provide tour support and promotion – Polydor.
Both Martyn and Thompson were among the fortunate few survivors from the maelstrom of madness that had maintained such a grip on English rock, and had produced such a remarkable outpouring of bittersweet inspiration, through the first half of the 1970s. Although neither of these shipwrecked survivors ended up deranged by their trips into the unknown, each was a little damaged (in Thompson’s case, his flight into a Sufi community in the mid-Seventies has clear parallels to Peter Green’s earlier soul-searching). For others less blessed, the road to recovery was still awaiting the next delivery of rocks and gravel.
*
Indeed, throughout the early Eighties, strange things were happening in the land of rock, none stranger than the record Vincent Crane and Peter Green decided to make together in 1982. In a gesture of communal musical therapy, they agreed to make a blues album under the name Katmandu. It was in that autumn the musically gifted but perennially troubled pair found themselves jamming at ex-Mungo Jerry frontman Ray Dorset’s studio when an affluent Swiss entrepreneur turned up and made them an offer they couldn’t refuse: ‘I’ll buy anything you guys do.’
Both of them had been easing themselves back into the fray since the end of 1979, neither with any marked degree of success (at least outside of Germany, where Green’s 1979 album, In the Skies, was a sensation of sorts). In Crane’s case, a 1982 Atomic Rooster reunion album (Headline News) that even featured Dave Gilmour on four tracks still proved something of a commercial turkey, and he soon returned to life as a self-medicating slum landlord. Green himself had played with a succession of increasingly unsympathetic combos, searching for that Munich vibe. But already the business aspects of showbiz were once again giving him the blues.
Unexpectedly, the resultant album was something of a return to form for both parties, even though it started with the most ramshackle version of ‘Dust My Broom’ this side of shanty-town. ‘Crane’s Train Boogie’ showed Vincent in his element, suffusing a trainwreck of blues with some Southern soul, while ‘Who’s That Knockin’’ almost suggested Green had dusted off his broom and was ready to reclaim the room. But what the album lacked was any new lyrical insights from Crane or Green. Those they left to the author of ‘In the Summertime’ and ‘Baby Jump’.
And, predictably once the jam sessions became something more real, the pressure proved too much for Green. His mood swings and day-long silences delayed everything, until the others wondered if an album would ever be completed. When the record was finally finished, at the end of January 1983, it then took a year to see the light of day as Mr Mungo Jerry tried to wheel and deal it into a Dorset-plus-band release, by which time Green had disappeared under the covers, not picking up the guitar again for twelve long years. He still wasn’t ready – perhaps because, as he candidly admitted during a rare visit from his old friend Mick Fleetwood, ‘I sort of overdid it, you know.’
Meanwhile, the classically trained Crane became a pianist for hire on one of the longest series of sessions in rock history, intended to produce the third album by one of the most successful acts of the early 1980s, Dexys Midnight Runners. The resultant album, Don’t Stand Me Down, took even longer than Katmandu (or Tusk, for that matter) as bandleader Kevin Rowland insisted on recording everything live in the studio, refusing to overdub the slightest mistake, and narrating seemingly extemporized (but actually scripted) chunks of dialogue over the tracks, one of which revamped the riff to Warren Zevon’s ‘Werewolves of London’. The album took eighteen months to complete, and it was not until September 1985 – a full three years since a very different Dexys topped the charts with ‘Come On Eileen’ – that it appeared. But when it did, the combination of musical styles and off-mike rapping put an end to Rowland’s own lucky streak.
For Crane, it was a last reminder of how things had changed, and not in a good way. He began to sink into another whirlpool of fear and self-loathing. And this time it claimed him for good. By 1988, as his good friend Paul Green ruefully recalls, ‘He was living from one moment of delusion to another.’ On Valentine’s Day 1989, he took 400 aspirin, convinced that he had let everyone down, especially his ex-wife Jean, and they would be better off without this irrepressible firebrand. He was just forty-six.
The other Vince to intersect our tale was also by this time waist-high in dark waters. Vince Taylor, the king of failed comebacks, had made the last of half-a-dozen attempted resurrections in 1979, before moving to Switzerland in the early Eighties, hoping to deal head-on with his depression and chronic alcoholism. By then, he had published a fanciful autobiography, appropriately called Alias Vince Taylor (1976), and received a nice-size royalty cheque for The Clash’s 1979 cover of ‘Brand New Cadillac’. But a protracted spell in a Montreux rehab clinic in 1987 failed to chase those rhythmic blues away, and by now his health was fast deteriorating. He died in August 1991, ostensibly of cancer, but essentially just worn out from too much living in too short a time.
*
Coincidentally – or not – it was only after Taylor disappeared from people’s radar that a certain David Bowie began to talk of him as the prototype for Ziggy Stardust. At the same time, Bowie began performing Ziggy’s signature song in concert for the first time in twelve years. Twenty years after his breakthrough LP, The Man Who Sold the World, the ex-pat rock star was promoting his past again, as he announced his first ‘golden oldies’ tour on the back of a three-CD boxed-set retrospective called Sound + Vision, pending the reissue of all his RCA albums on Rykodisc/EMI. The set-list of the 1990 shows – partly compiled from the feedback of fans – confirmed what observers had long suspected: the years 1970–73 still held the strongest fascination for his worldwide audience. Nigh on half of each night’s show would be devoted to songs he once performed through Ziggy’s eyes.
It seemed there really was no escaping the shadow of Ziggy. Determined to debunk the notion that he had turned into an oldies act, Bowie told reporters that the tour would be his way of saying goodbye to the past, to ‘do these songs for the last time – just do them on this tour and never do them again’. But a disastrous second Tin Machine tour, and an even worse-selling album the following year, put paid to any idea that a large live audience would pay to see his latest metallic manifestation. They wanted Ziggy.
As such, by 1997 Bowie was again reconciled to serving him up in bite-size pieces on his largest-scale tour in a decade. As a preview of sorts for another reclamation of the past, he even arranged a fiftieth birthday pay-per-view TV bash at Madison Square Gardens on 9 January, with a number of musical guests from the trendier parts of the big country invited, none save Lou Reed with any obvious connection to his own illustrious history. The set-list took the cream of a choice crop (‘The Man Who Sold the World’, ‘Quicksand’, ‘Moonage Daydream’, ‘Queen Bitch’, ‘All the Young Dudes’, ‘Jean Genie’), but blended in with much that was of a recent vintage and which no amount of laying down could salvage.
The most unexpected guests were the mighty Sonic Youth, New York’s finest, who were asked to back Bowie on a song from his latest release, ‘I’m Afraid of Americans’, even though they had all pretty much stopped listening to his records by the time the band was formed in 1980. If the reasoning behind their employment as backing band was lost on the four youthful members, they were even more nonplussed when during rehearsals Bowie called out, ‘Schizophrenia’. It was a request – one of their cherished own, from their seminal Sister album – and an appropriate one, at that. The decade-old lyric had evidently struck a chord with the still-attentive Englishman:
I went away to see an old friend of mine
His sister came over, she was out of her mind
She said Jesus had a twin, who knew nothing about sin,
She was laughing like crazy at the trouble I’m in.
Slowly but surely Bowie was readying himself to slay some old ghosts. The day before his cable TV birthday bash, the BBC broadcast a nine-song studio session he had recorded during the Garden rehearsals, and six of the songs were from those golden years: ‘The Man Who Sold the World’, ‘Supermen’, ‘Andy Warhol’, ‘Lady Stardust’, ‘White Light / White Heat’, ‘Quicksand’ and ‘Aladdin Sane’. He was playing mind games with his fans again, just as he had on his previous tour, in 1995, when a giant mobile hung over the stage, which read ‘Ouvrez le chien’, the repeated refrain at the end of ‘All the Madmen’ – though the song stayed wholly absent from the shows.
He may have been willing to belatedly acknowledge the importance of Ziggy and his crazed cousin Aladdin Sane, but he remained more ambivalent about those paeans to his real brother, Terry. Perhaps he was still recoiling from the family feud he had reignited back in 1993, when he released ‘Jump They Say’ as the first single from his first ‘comeback’ album of the 1990s, Black Tie / White Noise. The song, which by his own admission was ‘semi-based on my impression of my stepbrother’ [sic], was another case of him playing the ‘mad brother’ card. This time, though, Terry was no longer around to hear the result – he had killed himself in January 1985, throwing himself under a train after absconding from Cane Hill for the second time in a month with the clear intention of taking his own life. He was one year older than Vincent Crane.
Terry’s aunt Pat, who had already painted an unsparing portrait of Bowie’s treatment of his half-brother in the Gilmans’ 1986 biography, was still around, however, and had evidently not mellowed with age. She was of the publicly expressed opinion that ‘he is using [Terry’s] tragic death to put his record in the charts and I find that not only macabre but pathetic. The picture of David [on the sleeve] upset me terribly. There is a real resemblance. David looks just like Terry did when he became schizophrenic.’
The controversy, splashed across the Sun, reopened wounds Bowie had done his level best to cover over, eight years earlier, when the Gilmans’ own serialized articles was splashed across the Sunday Times. Appearing just three months after Terry’s death, they described in detail the two brothers’ growing estrangement. The Gilmans were duly informed that Bowie ‘objected strenuously to the suggestion that there was any link between the content of his work and the traumas that have afflicted his family and, especially, his half-brother, Terry’, before setting his record company on to the Gilmans, claiming copyright infringement for daring to quote song lyrics in context – always the last refuge of the artist exposed. But the Gilmans’ book, published the following year, provided more compelling testimony of how Bowie had continued to pay lip-service to his guilt right up to the early Eighties, telling one reporter during the time he was acting in Merry Christmas, Mr Lawrence: ‘I have a step-brother [sic] I don’t see any more. It was my fault we grew apart . . . but somehow there’s no going back.’ It was a long way from Manhattan to Cane Hill, after all.
At the time of this interview Terry had recently been re-committed to Cane Hill, his condition having worsened after his own marriage breakdown, and he became prone to bouts of violence which merely brought heavier medication to dull the raging inside. Finally, in the summer of 1982, a near fatal cry for help brought Bowie to visit him in Mayday Hospital, where Terry lay recuperating from his first serious suicide attempt. Four weeks earlier he had thrown himself from a second-storey window (the ostensible inspiration for 1993’s ‘Jump They Say’). After this visit, Terry became convinced that his brother would finally orchestrate the means necessary to get him out of Cane Hill. He did not, and, in fact, from then on all contact ceased. Even Terry’s next cry for help in December 1984 – when he test-ran throwing himself in front of a train, but pulled back at the last second – did not bring his brother running. It just brought him five more days in a locked ward and a further dose of deadening drugs.
At his wits’ end, Terry finally ended it all three weeks later, this time seeing through his premeditated act. But even this did not prompt his brother to come and say one last goodbye. Bowie avoided the funeral. Instead, he sent a basket of flowers, with a strangely impersonal note that read: ‘You’ve seen more things than we [sic] could imagine but all these moments will be lost, like tears washed away by the rain. God bless you – David.’ Wisely, he said no more until that ill-advised 1993 track, though it is surely no coincidence that throughout the 1987 Glass Spiders tour he regularly included, for the first and last time, ‘All the Madmen’.
*
Not that Bowie was the only London-born brother still at war with his elder sibling after years of internecine strife. Ray Davies’ relationship with his brother David had always been fraught, but the 1980s had been a particularly difficult decade as The Kinks made album after album that proved the good times really had gone. Ray’s decision to disband The Kinks in 1995 (one he kept from his brother for quite some time) proved the last straw for the ever-supportive Dave, who had already begun to sketch out his own personal account of the band’s history, Kink. Published in February 1996, Kink was a rollicking read that suggested Ray was not the only brother with ‘issues’. According to its editor, the publisher had been obliged to heavily prune the finished text, removing a great deal of stuff about alien angels at David’s side. But he couldn’t stop the former Kink from telling interviewers of how, on the road in 1982, he ‘began hearing these strange voices [in my head] . . . two of them said they had always been my spiritual guides and two others were entities that were not of this earth’.
If Ray, in his own autobiography X-Ray, published eighteen months earlier, had paid minimal lip-service to the vital role David had played in keeping The Kinks together in the years before angels came to his aid, at least he had learned to recognize the value of what he himself had wrought in the cultural inferno of the Sixties and early Seventies. (The 400-page ‘unauthorized autobiography’ ended in 1973.) For the first time, this most difficult of interviewees wrote in his own words about his mental problems, albeit using two distinct voices.
Creating another of his alter egos – a young novice social historian who is sent by dystopian powers-that-be to interview a retired rock star called R. D. – X-Ray is told partially in the first person, and partly through the eyes of this ingénue – proof, were it needed, that Ray still had yet to resolve the source of these inner monologues – Max or him. He also re-analysed his recorded work with a surprisingly judicious ear for what still stood up. Although he devoted just two pages to his 1971 cult classic – making no mention of the Muswell Hillbillies play he claimed in 1979 he had been working on – the fact that twelve of X-Ray’s twenty chapters took their titles from lines on the album spoke volumes.
And as if to reaffirm the continuing relevance of all those songs castigating urban renewal, the loss of traditions and the scrapping of all things old, he took his autobiography on the road – spending eighteen months in 1995–96 performing for the first time as Ray Davies – The Storyteller – not as frontman to The Kinks. The shows, which would invariably include ‘20th Century Man’, ‘Days’, ‘Victoria’ and ‘Village Green’, drew almost exclusively from the 1967–71 heyday of the band, reminding enthralled attendees of the sheer quantity of great songs the man had penned in that half-a-decade of inspiration, attendant upon the realization, ‘I’m Not Like Everybody Else’.
By the time The Storyteller shows ran their course, brother David had realized the prospects of The Kinks continuing as a viable outfit were slim to negligible. He therefore decided he, too, would take his own version of The Kinks’ recorded history on the road. And so, in 1997, Dave Davies, bolstered by a band from the nearest garage, gave a version of The Kinks’ kanon that also included ‘I’m Not Like Everybody Else’, but precious little from post-1968. It was a battle royal for the right to define where the real Kinks legacy lay. And it was one David was bound to lose.
The whole issue of who got to define a band’s legacy as an ongoing, viable touring entity had just been fought out over the far more lucrative battleground that was Pink Floyd, culminating in a 1994 world tour by the Waters-less Floyd that broke a number of records for tour grosses (which only served to piss off Waters a little bit more). The tour provided the English Rock Album of the early Seventies with a new kind of validation. Hundreds of thousands of young fans scrambled for tickets when it was announced that a band calling itself Pink Floyd (minus its main songwriter/s) would be performing Dark Side of the Moon in its entirety. A European tour, including a record-breaking fifteen nights at the still-soulless Earls Court arena, resulted in the inevitable CD/DVD, Pulse.
Although Roger Waters had not been in Pink Floyd for thirteen years now – and had even initially pursued an expensive legal case to stop the others using the group’s name, proof positive he really thought it was ‘his band’ – this was the second world tour the residue trio had successfully undertaken. And this time they were determined to celebrate every aspect of the band’s history, from the preferred nightly opener, Barrett’s ‘Astronomy Domine’, to the latest song that concerned itself with ‘the state of Syd’, Dave Gilmour’s ‘Poles Apart’ (‘I thought of you and the years . . . I never thought that you’d lose that light in your eyes’).
Gone but not forgotten – at least not by the ever-generous Gilmour – Barrett’s recorded solo legacy had in the interim been given its own boxed-set validation. In 1993 EMI issued a three-CD set that expanded the two solo albums and 1988’s welcome archival trawl, Opel, with alternative takes and bonus cuts. And if that remembrance of things past didn’t fully reaffirm his fleeting genius, there was also a thirtieth anniversary edition of the Floyd’s still-astonishing debut long-player, the timeless Piper at the Gates of Dawn, in its correct mono form, complete with a ‘bonus disc’ of all three official singles – ‘Arnold Layne’, ‘See Emily Play’ and ‘Apples and Oranges’ – from the Syd era. It was a much-needed reminder that the world was still catching up with Syd’s space-age imagination.
Syd himself, though, was now long lost in the woods, and when the band was inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame on 17 January 1996 – along with David Bowie and The Velvet Underground (the latter having been turned down in 1992 so that Sam and Dave, I kid thee not, could be inducted) – he was as absent from the occasion as the band’s latterday frontman, Roger Waters. Thus did Barrett, Bowie and Reed join the likes of The Beatles, The Rolling Stones and The Kinks in this shrine to the notion that Rolling Stone could define this thing called Rock 3,000 miles away from its epicentre.
Already successfully inducted were The Who, who in 1996 returned to the stage themselves, just not at the Waldorf Astoria at a thousand bucks a head. Instead, they prepared to perform the album that through most of the 1970s had been viewed as their albatross – Quadrophenia – determined to prove how much it had grown in stature in the intervening years. And no longer was Townshend an apologist for it. He was now its proud father. After debuting it to a huge London crowd at a Prince’s Trust concert in Hyde Park in June, he finally took the album to New York – the one obvious pit-stop they bypassed on the original 1973 tour – for five triumphant nights at Madison Square Gardens. Townshend himself had no doubts as to why the fans came out:
Pete Townshend: One of the reasons I wanted to do this . . . [was] to draw attention to this great, great record, probably the best record that The Who made. Really, I think it’s almost perfect. I could write more material, I could edit it, but what we’ve actually done is tried to be very faithful to what is there . . . I’ve written a script around the album and that’s what people will see. [1996]
He had indeed worked on the presentation, making for a tightly scripted performance of the entire double-album with brief narration at appropriate junctures, and with special guests playing some of the key roles (and hitting some of the notes Daltrey could no longer scale), including a surprisingly convincing Gary Glitter, pre-disgrace, as the Godfather, and Billy Idol as Ace Face. Finally, Townshend had successfully reclaimed the album from Franc Roddam’s 1979 film, which made some bogus love story out of Jimmy/Pete’s existential angst, and which even an enthused Pete admitted at the time ‘doesn’t have much to do with the musical journey I mapped out’. Such was the demand for this slice of Seventies nostalgia that the reconstituted Who proceeded to tour the album around the States for five weeks in the fall of 1996, and around Europe in the spring of 1997, culminating in a final show at Wembley Arena at the end of May.40 Throughout it all, the work continued to stand proud.
*
It seemed at times like almost any album from this rich period was now ripe for re-evaluation, as this most populist of centuries wound down to a musically ‘retro’ conclusion. There was even a place to be for Nick Drake, the songwriter who, back in 1968, had sung of how ‘men of fame can never find a way / ’Till time has flown far from their dying day’.
For the longest time it had seemed like Drake – of all those English artists who shattered their psyches in the cause of pop-as-art back then – was destined to remain known only to the cognoscenti, while his searing sensibility had been seen as a near insurmountable obstacle to widespread recognition Stateside. As far back as 1978 Neil Powell had pointed out, in the incongruous setting of The London Magazine, the fact that Drake ‘delineates more tellingly than any other contemporary songwriter the hinterland between despair and fragile happiness which is the territory of a peculiarly English melancholia’. (John Martyn always felt that ‘the thing that set him apart . . . [was] his implicit, innate Britishness’.) Even a tragically early death, usually the smartest of all career moves, had failed to produce more than a slowburn of cultish interest in keeping with the deeply personal, introspective nature of his music. The expanded, four-disc edition of the boxed-set Fruit Tree (1986) seemed like the final word, even as the demand for more – scratch that, any – information was imperceptibly achieving critical mass.
Then in 1994, a sixteen-track introduction specifically for the CD age, Way to Blue, compiled and sequenced by Joe Boyd, proved that the cult was in full swing critically, if not commercially. It prompted both a two-page overview in Q by Stuart Maconie – who at the end of his article pulled to pieces those who ‘make romantic noises about his being “not of this world” . . . while ignoring the fact that he was mentally ill’ – and a ruminative think-piece in the Independent by Ben Thompson.
Lucinda Williams had already made ‘Which Will’ (penned by Nick Drake), a cathartic coda to her magnificent 1992 album, Sweet Old World, when Mark Eitzel gamely attempted to get inside his fellow songwriter’s head, writing a brief verbal riff about ‘Pink Moon’ for NME. Eitzel, the main songwriter in those critical darlings American Music Club, considered ‘Pink Moon’ quite an ‘inarticulate song, which is where it gets its power . . . Even though you don’t know what the catastrophe is, you know there is no pretence to him [Drake]. The only hook is the descending chorus [when] you get the feeling that you’re descending with him.’ So, no romantic noise emanating from this direction, even as the album and title track almost imperceptibly continued to make its disturbed presence felt across that lonesome ocean. A year later, an alt-grunge rendition of ‘Pink Moon’ by Sebadoh, on their album, Sebadoh Vs Helmet, proved beyond a shadow of doubt that Drake’s songs could survive even the most head-banging of arrangements.
Finally, in February 1997, the diffident Drake graced his first major magazine cover, as Mojo ran a lengthy profile by respected pop journalist Patrick Humphries – hard at work on his long-threatened biography of the songwriter. And despite all the usual obstacles that a first biographer of an obscure dead artist must surmount, Humphries’ 280-page study, published at year’s end, finally filled in a fair few blanks. Three years later, Mojo gave Ian MacDonald thirteen more of its internationally distributed pages for a think-piece on Drake that attacked ‘the aura of romantic doom which accompanies [his work] like some unwanted orchestra dubbed on by sentimental hindsight’. MacDonald even decided to challenge the view that Drake was cripplingly depressed by the time he recorded his 1972 album:
Pink Moon is spoken of as bleak, skeletal, nihilistic, ghoulish, a suicidal plea for help. This grim view is unfair, the crowning misconception created by viewing Nick Drake as a troubadour of tragedy . . . This uncanny, magical record, far from bleak and ghoulish, is a stark, sparingly beautiful meditation on redemption through spiritual trial. Pink Moon isn’t about death, but about resurrection.
This eloquent case for the defence was clearly written from the heart, being a view that the chronically depressed MacDonald was himself desperate to believe. Indeed, shortly before taking his own life in 2003, he would place the unedited version of this article as the final, telling piece in an anthology of his collected writings, The People’s Music. It certainly opened up the debate on what drove Drake, as well as how much drugs had played a part in both his music-making and decline into silence. But even MacDonald’s angle on this touchy subject smacked of the unregenerate hippy idealist: ‘Drake’s interest in drugs is well documented but less well understood. Nowadays associated with pure pleasure, drugs meant something different in the Sixties, being often linked with the . . . quest for “enlightenment” . . . His drug use . . . involve[d] a fascination with perception and reality.’
What MacDonald refused to acknowledge was that this ‘aura of romantic doom’ was commented on by every reviewer who wrote of Drake’s work in his short lifetime. Indeed, according to John Martyn – and he should know – it was something Drake himself assiduously cultivated. Shortly after his friend’s death, Martyn depicted Drake as someone who ‘was quite conscious of the image portrayed in his songs. He was not [just some] manic depressive who picked up a guitar; he was a singer-songwriter in every sense.’ Brian Wells, not only an intermittently persistent presence throughout Drake’s decline into despair but an eminent addiction counsellor in his own right, also came to the view that, although ‘the most obvious diagnosis to make . . . was one of depression, it was more of an existential state that he’d gotten himself into, rather than . . . the kind of depressive illness that medical students learn about’.
By 2000, though, there were forces at work determined to shape the narrative of Drake’s short life and intricately woven canon in a more benign, less contradictory direction. Gabrielle Drake, Nick’s surviving sibling and executor, had refused to help Humphries fill in the gaps as only she could, concerned that she would not be allowed the final say on any portrait poor Patrick might produce. At the same time, she began assuming a pro-active role in her brother’s legacy. In that year she finally approved the use of one of Nick’s songs in a TV ad, albeit for a car he wouldn’t have been caught dead in.
As a result, at the end of November 2000, America was blasted with repeat broadcasts of the title track of his third album, Pink Moon, on prime-time TV, the soundtrack to a one-minute advertisement for the Volkswagen Cabrio convertible. People who then watched the ad on the VW website were invited to click on one of two buttons: to learn about the car, or purchase the music. As a result, annual US sales of Drake’s most resolutely downbeat album jumped from 6,000 to 74,000, and America at large was finally introduced en masse to this most English of singer-songwriters. Here was ‘Pink Moon’, on the face of it the least accessible of introductions, setting off any number of inner fires.
Nick Drake – who, in his lifetime, had lived continually in the shadow of Island contemporaries such as Thompson, Denny and Martyn – had by the simple act of biding his time beneath the fruit tree, now superseded them all as a cultural reference point. Denny’s own premature death in 1978, killed by her mother’s sense of propriety (I refer interested parties to my Sandy biography, No More Sad Refrains, for the full story), had generated no such groundswell of misty romanticism. Martyn had just made ever more mediocre demonstration discs for his beloved Echoplex effect pedal. Even Thompson, whose Seventies canon remains a full fathoms five deeper, and who slowly built his own American audience by annual touring from 1982 on, had produced a body of work just too damn eclectic and erratic to reach this constituency.
Drake’s three-album career, on the other hand, seemed to provide a remarkably straight trajectory. The moonstruck car manufacturer even went as far as to claim, in their initial press release, that the track ‘Pink Moon’ ‘is actually a very good introduction to Nick Drake, if you’re not familiar with him’. In truth, it was only ever a good introduction to Pink Moon, the album. Those who plumped instead for Boyd’s 1994 anthology, still on catalogue, would have found the same sensibility elsewhere, but hardly in the same undiluted, unadorned form.
There was now a demand for Drake’s work that could only be fuelled by a new product – which, in this case, meant doing away with some old product. Time of No Reply, the well-conceived single LP of outtakes and lost songs, which ended with the four recordings from 1974, was quietly deleted. In its place came a new 2004 compilation, Made to Love Magic. This time the 1974 tracks – bolstered by the addition of the ‘unheard’ demo version of ‘Tow the Line’41 – were scattered across a set that forsook the intimacy of those home versions of ‘Fly’, ‘Strange Meeting II’ and ‘Been Smoking Too Long’ for newly orchestrated versions of ‘Time of No Reply’ and ‘Magic’.
If the latter would always be mere juvenilia, whether it was Richard Hewson or Robert Kirby scoring the strings, the former needed no (such) embellishment. Indeed, alongside the unreleased, unstrung ‘River Man’, it only proved what attentive listeners had long suspected – the strings on Five Leaves Left and Bryter Layter were a mistake Drake rectified on Pink Moon. Way to Blue was meanwhile superseded by another inferior anthology, A Treasury, an estate-approved compilation that lacked the skilful sequencing seasoned producer Boyd had brought to the earlier set. Stuck on the end of this otherwise ill-conceived CD was all forty-six seconds of ‘Plaisir D’Amour’, wholly decontextualized.
The rewriting of history continued through 2007, when the Fruit Tree box was reissued in an inferior, remastered form, minus Time of No Reply. A DVD version of the fifty-minute 2002 Dutch TV documentary, A Skin Too Few – a skilled exercise in selective storytelling made with Gabrielle Drake’s approval – took its place. In tandem with this reconfiguration of the canon came another Drake archival release, Family Tree, a selective cherry-pick of the oft-bootlegged home demos put together under Gabrielle’s eagle eye, bookended with a couple of tracks by Nick’s mother, Molly, designed to illustrate the similarity in their vocal style, but largely demonstrating that his accomplished mother lacked her son’s divine spark.
Try as she might, Drake’s sister still could not control the now-public discourse on Nick’s worth as a songwriter, the deep-rooted causes of his depression and the role drugs might have played in his downward spiral and (possible) eventual suicide. Even before 2007’s concerted exercise in rebranding, another biographer, Trevor Dann, had thrown his hat into the ring. And though his Darker Than the Deepest Sea (2006) would inevitably tread much the same ground as Humphries’ study, Dann seemed less inclined to tow the party line, and more willing to mention the elephant in this well-to-do living room:
Still smoking what his friend and collaborator Robert Kirby describes as ‘unbelievable amounts of cannabis’, [by 1971 Drake] was beginning to exhibit the first signs of psychosis . . . Not until many years later did scientists begin to prove a link between cannabis and schizophrenia, [but] schizophrenia doesn’t only mean split personality. Among its other symptoms are lack of emotion . . . low energy . . . lack of interest in life . . . affective flattening (a blank, blunted facial expression) . . . alogia (difficulty in speaking or inability to speak); lack of interest or ability to socialise with other people . . . By 1972 he was exhibiting all the signs . . . Nick’s behaviour over a long period is highly suggestive of a cannabis-fuelled psychosis, a mild schizophrenia, which a combination of prescribed and illicit drugs did nothing to cure and most probably worsened.
The very fact that Drake expressed so consistently and cogently that ‘peculiarly English melancholia’ convinced Ian MacDonald and others – but not Dann or I – that he was merely exercising an artistic conceit in his songs. In truth, a predisposition to melancholia was one thing Drake shared with a number of other, equally talented English contemporaries. But so was his penchant for imbibing the kind of psychotropic drugs that might act as a creative trigger, even if – like any trigger – it might end up blowing one’s brains out. It was a fateful combination. Unfortunately for him, and those others, once the doors of perception were opened by that mighty wind blowing, it took the strength of generational experience to close them again.
*
It proved a difficult lesson for some to learn. Many a badly singed survivor became an apostate from acid, but only in the fullness of time. It took until the 1980s for the teachings of Laing and Leary to really be discredited in countercultural eyes. In Allen Ginsberg’s case, it took him some three decades to fully acknowledge the truth in Edith Sitwell’s observation, made directly to him at her Oxford lodgings in 1958: ‘No poet should need a drug to produce extreme sensibility, which must be, if he is any good, a part of his equipment.’ But even this fierce advocate of LSD’s potential beneficence duly admitted to Steve Silberman in 1987: ‘I’ve changed my mind about the relationship between acid and neurosis – it seems to me that acid can lead to some kind of breakdowns . . . I think in the Sixties I wasn’t prepared to deal with acid casualties from the point of view of a reliable technique for avoiding those casualties.’
Ginsberg was lucky, in one sense anyway. His was a surprisingly unintrusive kind of fame (as anyone who ever walked down a New York street with the man can confirm) – for his was the benign face of free-thinking – even if his fraught relationship with an increasingly disturbed Peter Orlovsky, troubled family relations and prodigious drug-taking suggested someone who never overcame the traumas he suffered as a child. For others, fame itself became the drug and the disease. And such a fate was not reserved solely for rock stars.
By 1968, ‘anti-psychiatrist’ R. D. Laing was one such troubled soul, perhaps because he already lamented what the generally sympathetic Daniel Burston called ‘the decline in creative power that seemed to follow on his increasing infatuation with fame’. No matter how much Laing changed the angle of attack, he was forever fixed in mass-media eyes as this psychedelically charged, highly politicized psychiatrist who refused to call anyone plain mad. In fact, much like Ginsberg – and undoubtedly influenced by the man he shared a rostrum with at the Dialectics of Liberation – Laing consciously attempted to remove himself from the limelight, travelling to India in 1970 to spend eighteen months studying Buddhist meditation and Shiviite yoga. When he returned, he was a changed man, proclaiming that ‘a kind of gentle, Buddhist austerity [was] the best path to liberation’.
But by that time Laing’s cherished Philadelphia Association, the umbrella organization he hoped would set up Kingsley Hall-type establishments around the world, had been hijacked by people who had little time for his endlessly shifting theories. Burston has described how Laing returned to find that ‘many former colleagues [had] left the organization, like David Cooper, Aaron Esterson, Morton Schatzman and Joseph Berke, ha[ving] published books and acquired followings of their own. Moreover, many old allies on the left who were wounded or puzzled by his retreat to Asian mysticism now turned on him. [While] in the mental health field . . . [the likes of] Peter Sedgwick, Joel Kovel, Giles Deleuze and Felix Guattari vigorously denounced him.’
By the late 1970s Laing was largely an irrelevance in psychiatric circles, while remaining fixed in the wider public’s eyes to ideas he never really held (or at least not in the simplified terms that were increasingly assigned to him). As Burston, Laing’s most vociferous modern advocate, has written: ‘Mention Laing nowadays and most people can dimly conjure up a flamboyant rebel of the psychedelic era, a chum of Tim Leary, Ram Dass, and Allen Ginsberg . . . But press them to describe what he stood for, what he actually thought or said, and you’ll only elicit a trickle of platitudinous sound bites.’
Being misunderstood was something else that was hardly the sole preserve of pop stars. For Laing, as for those whose world he ineluctably shaped, the 1980s proved to be hard work. Those cherished Buddhist beliefs seemed to have gone the way of some of his earlier, more controversial theories. In September 1984 he was arrested after throwing a bottle through the window of a Buddhist centre in London, and when searched was found with cannabis on him, the possession of which he was obliged to plead guilty to. The following year, in a radio interview with Anthony Clare, he admitted to bouts of severe depression and ‘occasional’ abuse of alcohol. In fact, he was now an alcoholic in all but name.
Finally, in May 1987, as accusations of appearing drunk before patients hovered in the wings, he reluctantly agreed to let the General Medical Council remove his licence to practise medicine, in order to avoid what would have been a very public defrocking. He had published a self-justifying autobiography the previous year, appositely called Wisdom, Madness & Folly, in which he baldly asserts: ‘I have never idealized mental suffering, or romanticized despair, dissolution, torture or terror. I have never said that parents or families or society “cause” mental illness.’ Even as he grew increasingly selective about the parts of his very public past he would own up to, he gradually allowed the booze to take hold, and his mind to fritter itself away on labyrinthine schemes destined to come to naught. He died in 1989 – at the same age (sixty-one) as his most famous non-client, Syd Barrett.
Whether the death of Laing registered with the reclusive Roger K. Barrett is never likely to be known. But his death completed some kind of circle, even as Barrett remained the one that got away. Drake was dead. Green’s sporadic re-emergences merely proved that he no longer had fire in his fingertips42. But while Barrett’s old friends from the Floyd had long ago removed themselves from Syd’s closed circle, he simply refused to articulate who he was, or whom he had been, only furthering an abiding sense of mystery. If Peter Green could still maintain a hands-length relationship with those who had witnessed him at the height of his acidic madness, Barrett couldn’t even manage that. And there was a reason. As his nephew Ian Barrett wrote in a 1996 internet posting, hoping to dissuade his uncle’s acolytes from confronting the poor man: ‘Without going into details, I [really] don’t think people are prepared to understand the true extent of Roger’s breakdown, or the pressures he was put under.’
Whatever the cause of the man’s debilitating depression, that 5 June 1975 studio sighting proved to be the madcap’s last, anywhere other than his own doorstep. From then until his death in 2006 of pancreatic cancer, Roger Barrett remained Syd’s silent spokesman. If he ever wondered what really happened to that former self, he never said. Instead, in later days he scribbled notes in his copy of The Oxford Textbook of Psychiatry and drew up a shortlist of other psychology books he maybe should get around to reading, including Charles Rycroft’s The Innocence of Dreams and Jonathan Glover’s anthology, The Philosophy of Mind. What was altogether absent was the slightest reference to the works of R. D. Laing. Those he had cut up a long time ago.