50 years on from Nick Drake’s death - a glorious prophesy fulfilled
This week marks 50 years since singer Nick Drake died at his family home in Tanworth-in-Arden. Steve Sutherland pays homage to the legendary singer/songwriter whose influence endures.
THERE it is, just under that big old oak tree, the small, weathered headstone damp from the drizzle and stained by lichen and moss. You can just about make out the inscription on the back. It reads: “And now we rise. And we are everywhere.” It’s a quote from a song called From The Morning which you’ll find at the end of Pink Moon, the third and final album by Nick Drake, the finest singer/songwriter this country has ever produced.
We’re here because Drake passed away 50 years ago last Monday (25th November) aged just 26, overdosing on amitriptyline, a strong antidepressant prescribed by his doctor who, like Drake’s family and friends, was at his wit’s end as to what to do about Drake’s increasingly troubled state of mind. So we’re here in the graveyard of St Mary Magdalene parish church in the peaceful village of Tanworth-in-Arden, some 12 miles north of Stratford, to pay our respects.
Drake grew up in Tanworth and he died here too, in his childhood bedroom at Far Leys, his parents’ house a little way down the road. The path to the stone that marks where his ashes are interred is well worn from the footfall of the many pilgrims who continue to make similar journeys to ours from all over the world to leave flowers and poems in tribute to a talent who died virtually unknown but whose work has since touched the hearts and souls of millions.
Drake was born into quite a posh family who were in Burma because his dad was an engineer in the Bombay Burma Trading Company. The family moved back to the UK, to Tanworth, when the boy was three and that’s where they put down their roots, the only other Drake child, Gabrielle, Nick’s older sister, growing up to become a renowned actor. The lad attended Marlborough College where he won awards for athletics, played a lot of rugby and got the guitar bug listening to Bob Dylan. He then lazily studied English literature at Fitzwilliam College in Cambridge after bumming around in France and Morocco for a while, a typical mid-’60s hippie student who liked to get stoned and chill out. Cutting classes to cultivate chords, he developed a gentle, mesmerising style which, accompanied by his warm, honeyed voice and Haiku-like lyrics, began to gain him a reputation as a talent to watch.
One who was listening was Joe Boyd, an American music impresario whose Witchseason publishing company was licensed to the prestigious Island record label. Boyd produced Drake’s first LP, Five Leaves Left, in 1968 with Drake still nominally at college, and it’s by anybody’s standards an absolute classic. Cheekily named after the tab which was revealed in the packet when your Rizla papers were about to run out and also suggestive of the album’s fateful autumnal atmosphere, it featured beautiful youthful reflections on love and mortality with a patchouli whiff of eastern philosophy.
A Cambridge friend, Robert Kirby, enhanced the pastoral elegance with his baroque string arrangements and Time Has Told Me, Way To Blue and my personal favourite, River Man, are as quintessentially English as a Pre-Raphaelite painting or A Lark Ascending by Vaughan Williams.
Very few people bought it. I was one of them. It bombed and Boyd et al were baffled. Drake was downhearted but determined so he and Boyd returned to the studio in 1971 to create Bryter Layter. Boyd had decided that Drake’s phenomenal talent should not be pigeonholed to appeal solely to a staid folk audience so he drafted in some help to flesh out the songs with a jazzier tint. Guests included The Velvet Underground’s John Cale and soul singers Doris Troy and Pat Arnold. A smooth, sophisticated work with an expansive range of subject matter from the wonderfully awestruck Northern Sky, through the ode to reincarnation One Of These Things First to the self-mocking Poor Boy, it is again top-to-tail brilliant.
And again, no-one bought it. Drake was devastated and began to sink onto a deep depression which nobody seemed to able to coax him out of. His confidence shattered he withdrew into himself and became reclusive bordering on surly. While Boyd had business back in America, Drake drew on what was left of his inner resources and convened on the quiet with John Wood, who’d engineered both his other albums, and in two nights, unaccompanied by any other musicians, Drake created Pink Moon, the tapes of which he then dumped unannounced on the front desk at Island’s London office and walked away.
Pink Moon is sublime. There’s a darker tenor to the songs, the title track positively ominous, the playing darkly exquisite. I’ll never know how he played the guitar part in Road – it defies mere mortal accomplishment. It was pure genius but posed a problem for the record company who didn’t know what to do with it considering the prevalent trend was for prog and glam rock. Here’s the press ad that accompanied its release: “Nick Drake’s latest album – the first we heard of it was when it was finished. We believe that Nick Drake is a great talent. His first two albums haven’t sold a shit. But if we carry on releasing them, maybe one day someone authoritative will stop, listen properly and agree with us.”
Again, it went unheralded and unbought. By now Drake was pretty much finished. He would make no more albums. So, there are just the three, all so extraordinary it’s almost beyond belief that the ’70s album-buying public passed them by.
Those who knew him, equally dumbfounded, point to his reluctance, inability even, to promote himself the way other artists like, say, Cat Stevens did. Strikingly tall and handsome, he should have had them all in the palm of his hand but he only ever played a few gigs – a dozen support slots or small folk club affairs – and witnesses recall a hunched figure traumatised by shyness, never making eye contact or addressing the inattentive audiences who chatted through his brief sets. It was torture and he couldn’t take it so he simply stopped.
He also only gave one solitary interview as far as anyone knows, to Sounds music paper, a small piece which revealed nothing of note. Perhaps in the arrogant assumption that his songs should speak for themselves he gave up on the rest of the showbiz hoo-ha.
Displaying signs of serious mental illness, Drake went to sofa-surfing with friends, monosyllabic on a good day, totally silent on the rest, to retiring back to his family home in Tanworth.
He made one final attempt at recording, the four tracks released posthumously, the results harrowing, Black-Eyed Dog just about as scary as it gets.
I’ll spare you his last days, the paranoia, the erratic tempers, the electric-shock treatment, the shame of failure that led to 25th November.
Today, as if there really is such thing as cosmic justice, Drake’s work has risen to such rightful esteem that his reputation has far outstripped the folk royalty of his era – Fairport Convention, Pentangle, John Martyn, Roy Harper and the like. He is now to be found enjoying exalted comparisons with doomed romantic poets such as Thomas Chatterton who did himself in with arsenic at the age of 17, broke, unappreciated and lacking a patron. Or John Keats who died of tuberculosis aged 25, exiled in Rome, coughing up blood. It’s among these, released too young into the void but immortalised through their work, that his fans are happiest heralding Drake.
One such devotee was the actor Heath Ledger who was apparently Drake-obsessed and planning a movie about him until he, just like his hero, died in his bed after taking a cocktail of six prescription drugs. He was 28.
Then there was Ian MacDonald, a brilliant critic whose essay, Exiled From Heaven: The Unheard Message Of Nick Drake, is the best thing ever written about our subject. He put an end to himself in Wotton-Under-Edge once his writings were published. Here’s what he had to say trying to describe Drake’s aura: “To listen to Drake is to step out of this world of pose and noise and enter a quiet, oak-panelled room, dappled with sunlight, a room opening through French windows, into a lush garden, quiet because we’re in the country, far from the sound of the city. It’s summer, bees and birds are abroad in the shade and beyond the nearby trees a soft tangle of voices and convivial laughter can be felt, along with the dipping of languid oars in the rushy river winding through cool woods and teeming meadows.”
It doesn’t do Drake full justice but nicely captures the vibe and five years after we lost him, Island reissued his three albums plus the previously unreleased tracks as a box set called Fruit Tree.
Sales didn’t exactly set the world on fire but it introduced Drake to a new young audience and by the mid-1980s it had grown fashionable for the likes of Kate Bush, Paul Weller, Peter Buck of R.E.M and The Cure’s Robert Smith to namedrop him as an influence in their interviews. The Lilac Time, formed by ex-Duran Duran founder Stephen Duffy, took their name from a line in River Man and The Dream Academy dedicated their 1985 hit single Life In A Northern Town to his memory.
The accolades began to pile up. The Independent voted Five Leaves Left the “greatest alternative album of all time” while The Guardian in a similar end-of-millennium poll, opted for Bryter Layter as the best alternative album of the century. Pink Moon’s title track was then chosen to soundtrack a Volkswagen commercial on TV, launching interest in the United States, where fans who hadn’t been born when he died began to circulate his music via the now-banned file sharing software Napster. It prompted The Atlantic magazine to observe that, “the chronic shyness and mental illness that made it hard for Drake to compete with 1970s showmen like Elton John and David Bowie didn’t matter when his songs were being pulled one by one out of the ether and played late at night in a dorm room.”
In 2003 Rolling Stone included all three of Drake’s albums in its definitive list of the 500 Greatest Albums of All Time and he finally scored a gold record as his songs began to appear in groovy movies such as The Royal Tenenbaums, Hideous Kinky, Fever Pitch and Serendipity.
It seems there’s a melancholy majesty to Drake’s nigh-on perfect trio of albums which has not only survived down the decades since his death but has blossomed beyond the appreciation he sought and expected during his lifetime. “And now we rise. And we are everywhere” – those lines carved in sad memoriam now read like a glorious prophesy fulfilled.
