Utterly Unknown Nick Drake

 

On the cover of his 1969 debut album, the English singer-songwriter Nick Drake gazes out of an upstairs window in a derelict house, a faintly quizzical smile on his lips. Five Leaves Left was the first of three low-selling LPs he made before he took his own life in 1974, convinced he was a failure. Had he lived to witness the reverence his music has gone on to inspire across the world, his smile would surely be of outright incredulity.

There are several possible reasons for his ever-growing reputation. Most superficially, his early death has fixed him in the “poète maudit” tradition of John Keats, Arthur Rimbaud, Rupert Brooke and even Jim Morrison (all of whom he admired). Tall, dark and handsome, with a gently enigmatic aura, he projects a powerful charisma in photographs. “He looked striking, like a Romantic poet,” says his friend Chris Jones. “He tended to dress in dark, sombre colours – nothing bright. He often wore a rollneck, and in winter what used to be called a greatcoat. He cut quite a famous figure in that – part of his mystique was the sight of him coming down the street in it.”

Drake’s background did not point towards the classic narrative of a doomed artist. He came from a loving and supportive family and grew up in comfort in a large house in the English countryside. Although he was gentle and self-contained, he had a wry sense of humour and was popular at boarding school, where he excelled at athletics. Music was increasingly his focus, though, and his talent was encouraged both at school and at home: his mother, Molly, was an accomplished songwriter and poet.

By the age of 18 his guitar playing was good enough to impress the Rolling Stones, with whom he had a private audience in 1967 in Marrakesh, where he was travelling before starting at Cambridge. University didn’t suit him, but his blossoming talent stunned his contemporaries, most notably Robert Kirby, a music scholar who began to arrange the material he was writing. “I was astounded by the sheer inventiveness and absolute quality of his songs,” he says of their first encounter. At the end of Drake’s first term, just before Christmas 1967, he played his first public concert, a short set at a London “happening”. In keeping with his seemingly effortless rise, he was talent-spotted and signed up by the producer Joe Boyd.

Boyd was also stunned when Drake played him his songs, in January 1968. As he instantly recognised, they were sui generis. “The music stayed within itself, not trying to attract the listener’s attention, just making itself available,” says Boyd. “His guitar technique was so clean it took a while to realise how complex it was. Influences were detectable here and there, but the heart of the music was mysteriously original.” Indeed Drake’s songs, which teem with unusual tunings, melodies and countermelodies, are the most important factor in his ongoing appeal. His work is lyrically striking, too, rich with imagery yet cryptic enough for each listener to devise their own private relationship with it.

His guitar playing also inspires – and flummoxes – many of his admirers. “Nick was an absolutely phenomenal guitarist,” Kirby said shortly after Drake’s death. “He was very adept at highly complex double-picked rhythms, with the thumb on the bass string and the other fingers working on as many as four tunes at a time. He was a master of counterpoint.” For Drake’s friend Ben Laycock – himself a good guitarist – his playing was a revelation: “I’d never met anybody of my age who could do anything that well – just magically get those sounds out, strong fingers flying across the fretboard ...”

Drake’s first two albums were made with Boyd and the engineer John Wood, who went to great lengths to create the best possible recordings. They were committed to bringing out the best in the material, however long it took. “The way I worked with Nick was very different from the way I worked with other artists,” says Boyd, referring to the Incredible String Band, Fairport Convention, Sandy Denny, Vashti Bunyan, John and Beverley Martyn and others. “With them we tended to go in and do a record in a concentrated period of time, but with Nick we worked slowly. We went in, did a couple of tracks, listened to them, thought about what we wanted to do with them, worked on them a bit more, put down a few more tracks, waited a month, waited six weeks, thought about it some more.”

This was a luxurious position for an unknown artist to be in, and allowed Drake to keep his head above water at Cambridge while working on his music. After the release of Five Leaves Left he chose to drop out of college in order to focus fully on its follow-up, Bryter Layter. Sequestered in a shabby north London flat over the winter of 1969, he perfected another remarkable set of songs, continuing to collaborate with Kirby. Again, Boyd and Wood hired the best possible backing musicians and strove to deliver a masterpiece that also had commercial potential. “It’s the only album I’ve ever recorded where I wouldn’t want to change a thing,” says Wood. By all contemporaneous accounts, Drake was delighted with it.

Its release kept being pushed back, however, and he found it hard to make an impression at gigs. He had always been reticent, but over the course of 1970 he became antisocial and almost impossible to communicate with. Dope smoking didn’t help, but it was hardly the sole cause of the radical change in him. “It wasn’t the old Nick; it was a different Nick,” says his friend Ben Laycock, who visited him in his flat, which he rarely left. “I can’t explain it. I’ve never been able to. I would ask him why he was so down – things seemed to be going well – and he wouldn’t say, or couldn’t say.”

The failure of Bryter Layter to find an audience was crushing, and after Drake had completed his third and final album, Pink Moon – which featured none of the lush orchestral trappings of its predecessors – he returned to live at home, where his decline relentlessly continued. Whether he was suffering from a specific disorder such as clinical depression or schizophrenia is moot, but he was consistently reluctant to engage with treatment, and for much of the time his family and friends could only look on helplessly as his illness ravaged his creativity.

Although his family saw no shame in his condition, and focused on doing whatever they could to understand and ameliorate it, Drake was inevitably sensitive to the stigma surrounding mental health in the early 1970s. He spent periods in a psychiatric hospital in Warwickshire, where his friend Brian Wells visited him. “His main preoccupation was with emphasising that it wasn’t a ‘nuthouse’ or a ‘loony bin’ and that he wasn’t a ‘nutcase’,” says Wells. With far greater awareness today of how mental illness blights young lives, he stands as a beacon of sorts for many with struggles of their own, while others feel a powerful sense of pity and affection for him in his suffering.

Although his low record sales agonised Drake, he wasn’t hungry for fame and fortune as much as communication. “He had always longed to get through to young people, particularly young people who had difficulties in life like he did, and he just thought he hadn’t,” according to his mother. The extent to which his suicide has played a part in boosting his appeal is impossible to gauge, but momentum swiftly gathered after his death.

 Five Leaves Left was finally released in the United States in March 1976, with ardent sleevenotes that praised his “masterful musicianship”, described him as a visionary and declared: “Life speaks for itself through Nick Drake.” They were written barely a year after his death and indicate how his reputation was growing. In April 1979, Island Records repackaged all three of his albums (and four demos he made shortly before his death) as Fruit Tree, one of the first retrospective boxed sets accorded an artist of his generation, and a striking indication of his increasing renown. It was followed in May 1985 by a compilation, Heaven In a Wildflower, while in 1986 Joe Boyd oversaw a collection of previously unreleased material, Time of No Reply.

Drake’s renown has never slowed since, his popularity growing with each reissue or use in film and on television. In despair, he had told his father in July 1972 that “he’d finished his life’s work and had done more than many in a lifetime. One day people would realise.” The fulfilment of those words helped his parents and sister reconcile themselves to his absence, and Boyd has come to understand that his short-term obscurity has yielded a long-term benefit. “The fact that Nick’s music failed to find an audience during his lifetime means it’s not identified with a particular time and place, which allows each generation to create its own connection to it ... I listen to the music now and it sounds the same as when I first heard that first demo. I thought his songs were genius and I still do. He was a unique and brilliant talent, and it’s heartbreaking for me that I didn’t think of a way to make him happy and famous.”

Nick Drake: The Life, by Richard Morton Jack, is published by John Murray.

 ‘It’s heartbreaking that I didn’t think of a way to make him happy’: Nick Drake’s producer on the doomed songwriter.  The singer-songwriter died by suicide aged 26, convinced he was a failure. The three albums he left behind tell a different story. By Richard Morton Jack.  The Irish Times, June 17, 2023.

From a youthful hook-up with the Rolling Stones to crafting his bleakly brilliant final album, three extracts from an exhaustive new biography offer the most nuanced portrait to date of the 70s singer-songwriter.

For a singer-songwriter who only made three albums, Nick Drake continues to cast a long shadow. A mixture of extreme shyness and difficulties with mental health meant that his beautiful, meditative and deeply melancholic take on mystical English folk slipped through the commercial cracks during his lifetime. There is no known footage of him performing live and very few interviews exist. Drake died from an overdose of antidepressants in 1974, aged just 26, but since his death, his music has found new audiences as successive generations have discovered an enigmatic but immaculate body of work.
 
Now a new biography of Drake, by the writer Richard Morton Jack, offers a definitive version of a life story previously shrouded in mystery and, eventually, clouded by tragedy. Containing unseen photos, previously unreleased correspondence and the insights of the people who knew Drake best, it provides a rounded portrait of an artist whose recorded works continue to beguile and resonate. In these exclusive extracts, we see the light and shade of Drake: his problems are laid bare, but so is his exquisite artistry. Phil Harrison

While Drake’s career as a musician was characterised by diffidence, his youth wasn’t entirely devoid of high jinks. A road trip with some friends to north Africa, for example, saw a memorable encounter with some of his musical heroes

Rumours were swirling around Tangier that the Rolling Stones were in town. [His friend] Julian [Raby] confirmed their presence on the penultimate night: “I was looking out of a tiny window over a narrow alley when I saw the Stones’ party passing, in sheepskins and bell-bottoms, like a medieval apparition.” Mick Jagger, Keith Richards and Brian Jones were there, as well as a court including Anita Pallenberg, Cecil Beaton, Robert Fraser, Christopher Gibbs and Michael Cooper. Urged by his companions, Nick took his guitar when they sallied forth the next evening. “Hoping to make contact with them, we went down to their hotel, the celebrated El Minzah,” he wrote home.

“Having seen them going in, looking quite extraordinary even by their own standards, we marched in and I made a request to play in the bar. After I had been turned down very politely, Bob [Drake’s friend Rick Charkin, so nicknamed because he was thought to resemble Bob Dylan], whose nerves seem to stop at nothing, proceeded to ring up the Stones’ suite and ask if they might be wanting a little musical entertainment! This was unfortunately refused in a similar fashion, and it was decided that my fortune should be made elsewhere. So we made a quick tour of the nightclubs, asking if I could play.

“Fortunately, one of those which accepted the offer was the Koutoubia Palace, Tangier’s most exclusive nightspot, which is done up in the style of a Moorish palace. I couldn’t help feeling a little out of place, but all the same I played for about quarter of an hour. The reception was extraordinarily good and we all got stood rounds of drinks, which was rather pleasant.”

It’s notable that – albeit egged on by his friends – Nick had the confidence to perform spontaneously. The following morning Mike [Hill, usually the driver on the trip] whisked them the 370 miles to Marrakech. He was overwhelmed by its souk, calling it “a huge, crowded gathering place where one finds musicians, magicians, soothsayers, acrobats, snake-charmers, dancers, and various other oddities which I am unable to find a name for. Best of all was a set of African drummers and dancers, who produced about the most infectious rhythms I have ever been infected by.”

By coincidence the Stones were also in the crowd, making a field recording. The friends revived the idea of getting Nick to play for them. Having established that they were staying in an old French colonial hotel, La Mamounia, they went there that evening. Upon discovering that they were in its grand dining room, says Julian, “Rick went in with Nick and told them how great Nick was at the guitar. Nick then played for them.” It’s striking that Nick was willing to perform alone and at close quarters in front of such an intimidating audience. Rick does not recall what he played, but when he stopped, continues Julian:

   “We all sat down. It was a large room with a long table immediately on the left, deserted but for the Stones and their entourage. Mick Jagger was at the head, and in my memory Nick sat at the opposite end. It was like a scene from The Decameron, with food everywhere, which they invited us to help ourselves to. We were very grateful, because we were starving. They were bombed out of their minds yet clearly impressed by Nick. At the end of the encounter Mick said to him: ‘You must come and see us when you’re back in London,’ which I doubt he said to everyone.”

Young musicians all over the world would have envied Nick, yet by Julian’s account, “He was so congenitally mellow that it seemed normal for him. He seemed to internalise it all.” His own vague account to his parents ran: “I went in and did them a few numbers. We in fact got quite chatty with them, and it was quite interesting learning all the inside stories.”

An exchange of letters between Drake and his father, Rodney, during Nick’s university years hints at his growing turmoil and confusion. His father’s reply is patient and kind but provides a sadly prophetic foreshadowing of the problems that were to undermine Drake’s musical career and overtake his life

Nick wrote to his parents on Thursday 23 January 1969.

“Cambridge has been quite pleasant this term, but here I am, becoming increasingly sure that I want to leave soon. I’m sure that our various conversations have made clear my general feelings … As far as performing is concerned, I am certainly no more than amateur. However, with regard to my songwriting, I can only progress from the stage that I have reached so far by developing a purely professional approach … I know for a certainty that I must make this progression with my music in order to achieve any sense of fulfilment.

“I hope you can perhaps appreciate that the idea of having my music as a ‘vacation hobby’ for another year-and-a-half is not a particularly happy one. It seems that Cambridge can really only delay me from doing what at the moment I most need to do.”

Having discussed the matter at length with [his wife] Molly, Rodney sent him a considered reply the following week. “Obviously it is a step which we have to consider carefully, because it is an irrevocable one,” he began, going on to pose two vital questions: “Are you more or less likely to succeed at your chosen career if you leave now? Secondly, what advantage unconnected with your career may you be throwing away if you leave now.”

He continued candidly: “We are slow developers in our family and you, I believe, are no exception. I would go so far as to say that you will surprise yourself in the next two years by the changes and development that will occur in your personality, your understanding and your outlook. In addition to this, any career involving self-employment demands a high degree of self-discipline and a will to overcome one’s weaknesses, and making the effort required to tackle problems which do not come easily. I think you have a long way to go here.

 
“You believe that the problem of turning yourself from an amateur into a professional can be solved merely by transferring yourself from Cambridge to somewhere where you are surrounded by, and under the influence of, professionals in your chosen field. From what you say I take it that you must believe that it was the prospect of returning to Cambridge for eight-week periods during the year that prevented you, in the long summer vac, from getting into the swim, so to speak, and of starting to acquire the professionalism which you are rightly seeking.

“But I doubt this very much and I would regard as far more likely reasons your reticence (which you must overcome), your difficulty in communicating (which you must overcome), and your reluctance to plunge in and have a go (which you conceal from yourself by self-persuasion that more solo practising and solo listening are required before the move is made) … If I am right in what I say, and the real trouble is that you have not yet overcome your weaknesses (and God knows we all have them), then you may well find that you have thrown over Cambridge simply to continue indefinitely on the outskirts of what you are looking for.

“At Cambridge you have a chance to fight your weaknesses and overcome them (and fight like hell you MUST), to discipline yourself from inside, and take a more active interest in your fellows (another weakness of yours – I am being very blunt, aren’t I?) and generally to prepare and develop yourself to make a real success of what you want to do. And, in the meantime, your creative powers will be developing, not stagnating, do please believe me. On the second aspect – what advantages unconnected with your career may you be throwing away – there is not a great deal to say except that it is a rounded personality which is most likely to lead its owner on a happy and full road though life. To specialise too early and to have interest in only one activity makes Jack a very dull boy. One-and-a-half years may seem a long time to you. Allow me to assure you it is not – but it is a terribly important time in the development of you as a person into something that you are going to start to be at about the age of 23.

“The winning of a degree may seem to bear little significance to you, and the argument that it is a safety net if you come a cropper with your music will doubtless evoke the response that a safety net is just what you don’t want. I would say to you, however, that the self-discipline which it involves, apart from anything else at all, is a priceless asset in whatever you want to tackle during the rest of your life. So there we are, Nick – there’s my view. I urge you to resolve to see Cambridge through.”

It was indeed a blunt statement, but Nick knew it was written out of love, recognised the truth in it and did not take it amiss. Rodney had written nothing that any concerned parent wouldn’t have thought under the circumstances, but he and Molly perhaps didn’t grasp the intensity of their son’s commitment to his music or – as they later conceded – his brilliance.

Drake’s third and final album Pink Moon is a bleak, minimal affair, seemingly wrenched from the depths of mental illness. As shown by the reactions of his family and contemporaries, it’s a reflection of his brilliance and the uncomfortably intimate nature of the material

Nick’s relationship to the finished album is unknown, and it’s likely his family and friends were unaware of it until it was released. [His friend] Brian Wells is convinced Molly and Rodney didn’t listen to it closely, and Gabrielle [Drake, Nick’s sister] doesn’t recall doing so, either; by the time it appeared they were more focused on his day-to-day condition than on his musical output. Rodney later wrote that it was made “when Nick was getting pretty bad, and it’s rather ‘way out’, as they say”. In another letter he admitted: “The material on Pink Moon has always bewildered us a little (except From the Morning, which we love).”

Joe Boyd [who produced Drake’s first two albums] had nothing whatsoever to do with Pink Moon. The first he knew of it was when Island sent a copy to him in Los Angeles. “When I saw the cover I was horrified, and when I played it I was even more horrified. I interpreted its starkness as a rebuke to me. I thought it was self-destructive, a capitulation, as if he were saying: ‘Fuck it, I don’t care whether people listen to it or not.’ I listened to it once.”

Nick’s close friends were upset by it, too. Wells says: “I wasn’t around when he was making Pink Moon, and when I heard it I found it bleak. I remember a friend from Cambridge describing it as ‘music to commit suicide to’.” Alex Henderson and Ben Laycock were taken aback by it after Bryter Layter. “We found its atmosphere dark and depressing, knowing how Nick had become,” says Alex. “We had no idea what musical direction he would or could take after that.”

“I was appalled by Pink Moon,” remembers Drake’s university friend Paul Wheeler. “I found it incredibly upsetting. I thought the songs were frightening. To this day I cannot ever imagine listening to it for pleasure. It’s like opening some terrible Pandora’s box.”

Folk singer Beverley Martyn had similar concerns. “I thought: ‘This boy’s gone, we’ve lost him. We can’t reach him any more, and he can’t reach us.’ I wondered why he’d bothered to record some of the tracks, and who had thought it was a good idea to let him go into the studio and do so. They were so dark and sad, and telling about the state of his mind: doom, gloom and despair, with apocalyptic elements. People listen to it and say: ‘That’s a great line!’, and talk about the songs and the surreal cover like they’re a puzzle they can solve, but Pink Moon is like the Book of Revelation. It doesn’t make sense and it’s a manifestation of illness, of madness. When people are really ill they don’t know what they’re saying, they don’t hear what’s coming out of their own mouth. I thought those songs, those words were the product of a sick person.”

Musician Richard Thompson, who had collaborated with Drake, heard Pink Moon when [producer] John Wood played it to him in Sound Techniques: “I was disturbed. Part of what had made Nick’s earlier music so appealing was a balance between dark and light. The sadness inherent in the music had been veiled behind beautiful arrangements and an intriguing voice that drew you in. However, his third album seemed a stark cry for help, the voice of a man teetering on the edge of sanity.”

Not everyone felt that way. “I find it’s got some of the most optimistic songs of his,” said [arranger] Robert Kirby. “I think Pink Moon is in fact my favourite, as far as the songs are concerned.” Despite his disappointment at not having worked on it, he supported Nick’s prerogative in eschewing arrangements and later stated: “I think it’s his greatest work, by far.”

These are edited extracts from Nick Drake: The Life by Richard Morton Jack, published on 8 June.
 
  
‘I thought: This boy’s gone, we can’t reach him any more’ – the tragedy and beauty of Nick Drake, by those closest to him. By Richard Morton Jack. The Guardian, May 27, 2023. 

 

Nick Drake is on the cover of the current issue of UNCUT. In this extract, we look at how a new biography of the beloved singer-songwriter illuminates his brief but indelible life and music…

 In a small turreted room in Wenlock Priory sits a trunk of clothes that belonged to Nick Drake. Gabrielle Drake has owned the prior’s 16th-century private apartments since the 1980s, where she has meticulously and painstakingly restored one room after another. One room, however, has been turned over to her late brother, Nick. Aside from the trunk of his clothes, the plain details of a life are laid bare: boxes with letters, school reports, university essays, bank statements, tax returns, his recording contracts, photo albums and old passports along with posthumous publishing and royalty statements.

Among other sources, including his own new interviews with Drake’s friends and fellow musicians, this material has been of critical importance to author Richard Morton Jack, who has spent five years working on his new biography, Nick Drake – The Life. There, in the turreted room, sifting through the boxes, Morton Jack set out on a detailed archeological survey of Drake’s short life and slender musical career – three albums released between 1969 and 1972 prior to his death in November 1974 aged 26. Sometimes, he discovered, the slightest details could yield unexpected results. “There were small but satisfying bits of puzzle,” Morton Jack tells Uncut. “I’d find a letter from Nick’s grandmother saying, ‘Happy birthday, here’s a cheque for something.’ So I’d think, ‘Ah,that’s how he afforded his new guitar!’ I was able to be absolutely forensic about almost every aspect of his life.”

Morton Jack had previously helped with research for Gabrielle and Cally Calloman, who manages Drake’s musical estate, on 2014’s coffee-table volume, Remembered For A While. Along with essays, tributes and analysis, the book also included previously unseen photographs, family letters and Drake’s father Rodney’s diaries. “It was a really useful accompaniment to a serious fans’ appreciation of Nick’s work and a good way of scratching itches as far as curiosity about his life went,” says Morton Jack. “But I felt that it was a bit of a shame that there wasn’t a proper narrative. I think Cally was a bit resistant to the idea of ‘authorising’ a biography, because that word would carry with it connotations of control and of most importantly of saying this is the one holy scripture on Nick. Gabrielle was resistant to that, too, because she knows better than anyone how baffling and private and inscrutable her brother was.”

Critically, Morton Jack also intended to dispel many of the myths and inaccuracies that have accumulated around Drake – a strategy that clearly gained approval from Gabrielle. Writing in her introduction to The Life, Gabrielle says, “This not an Authorised Biography… But it is true that this is the only biography of my brother that has been written with my blessing.”

Gabrielle’s blessing also unlocked a number of doors that may otherwise have remained firmly shut. “Nick’s London friends have been least communicated with because they’re private individuals who have no desire for self-publicity and who aren’t normally the sort of people that give interviews,” says Morton Jack. “They were happy to invite me to their homes and show me their photo albums – especially Sophia Ryde, who died very sadly during the course of writing the book, but not before she and I had spent a pretty long time together, going over all her memories. That wouldn’t have been possible without Gabrielle’s involvement.”

Morton Jack confirms that there are no great revelations in the book – “‘Oh, my god, he was gay!’ Or, ‘Oh my god, he was on heroin!’ There was nothing like that.” Instead, one of the book’s great achievements is how a strong consensus of opinion builds around Nick’s character. “His friends remember him vividly,” explains Morton Jack. “I tried to include stories, especially ones which involve any sort of physicality with him. Like a box of matches exploding and Nick jumping up into the air. Someone told a story about cutting her arm and Nick being very helpful with finding bandages. Someone else told a story about Nick falling into a roof space and crashing through the ceiling. I felt those stories were worth including. They tethered him to us mere mortals. There’s a tendency to think of Nick as some celestial apparition. He was a normal bloke and most of his friends remember him quite well.

“One of the myths that’s built up around Nick was that he was crippled by stage fright. Literally no-one said that to me in the course of putting the book together. It was more that he thought he was wasting his time performing on stages in front of strangers who were clinking glasses. But he made lists of producers and made a tape, went round and he hustled – not to a huge extent, because he was lucky enough to be picked up quite quickly – but he was willing to do that. I think that says a lot about the kind of person he was.”

 “There’s a tendency to think of Nick as some celestial apparition…” A new biography offers the deepest dive yet into Nick Drake’s brief life. By Michael  Bonner. Uncut, June 1, 2023.

 

A few years ago, obsessive fans started chipping away at the grave of Nick Drake in Warwickshire and taking bits of it home. It might have gone the way of Jim Morrison’s in Paris had Drake’s sister Gabrielle, a rather fabulous character who acted in Crossroads in the Eighties, not had it removed and renovated. Around the same time, she produced a book, Nick Drake: Remembered For a While, compiling dozens of letters and diaries from the family – a family that began in British India, where both children were born, in the last days of the Raj – in an attempt to dispel some of the myths that had grown up around her brother, who died aged 26 in 1974 after releasing three albums. Now, Gabrielle assists the music writer Richard Morton Jack by giving over those documents, her own memories and dozens of childhood contacts for a more conventional biography. It is not, she says, an “authorised” one, as that would indicate a “straitjacketed affair” tailored by the estate to fit a certain image of its subject. I thought her choice of words was unusual.

When someone dies by suicide, you ask why. But Nick Drake is unique among famous musicians who died young: aside from his songs he has no voice at all. There are only two interviews, as he shirked most press commitments, and there is no moving footage of him, as he played only 40 (mostly small) gigs; there is nothing besides his music from which to piece together his psychology. Though he stokes new imaginations and gains new fans year on year, he is also strangely static: a country headstone playing incandescent music, with a velvet voice, waterwheel finger-work and lines such as “Fame is but a fruit tree/so very unsound/It can never flourish/Till its stock is in the ground.”

 Morton Jack’s book – accidentally, I believe – is a long, sharp shock for anyone who romanticises the figure of the tortured songwriter. It does not illuminate the creative methods of an enigmatic artist but brings into lurid relief the reality of Drake’s mental illness: his depression was not a feature of his genius but the very thing that stood in the way of it. Creativity receded into darkness very quickly as commercial success failed to follow from the hopes placed on him when he was a student at Cambridge.

No one from the music world got to attend his funeral – not his mentor, Joe Boyd, nor the elite musicians on the Island label with whom he recorded. In the genteel service the vicar talked about how he was good at running at school. The author thinks the funeral reflects how Drake compartmentalised his life and friends – but it wasn’t as though he was in charge of the guest list. To me, it says more about the shock and shame of suicide, and the grief of the family with whom he had lived in his final months. “Sad little ceremony this morning at the churchyard,” wrote his father, Ronald, a playful retired engineer, after the private interment of his ashes in mid January 1975.

Publishers love authorised biographies but an author is always at risk when writing a book with the family. They are doubly at risk when the subject died without speaking for himself, and the family are recalling a boy who lived 70 years ago. “He was the handsome, delightful child that every parent would want their own to be,” recalled the Drakes’ old friend Andrew Hicks, who knew him when they were both about six. This is the tone for the first part of the book – a strange sense of turning over stones: this was such a happy family, nothing to see here.

 His sister, quoted by Morton Jack, has a very powerful voice – a voice from another time, both vivid and concealing. “Mother was very glamorous, and father was the most wonderful sort of strong person,” she effuses. Gabrielle – and, through letters, her mother and father too – shape Morton Jack’s writing an odd way. “It did not reflect emotional coldness on his parents’ part,” he writes, that they sent Nick to the famously harsh Eagle House school in Sandhurst, where one boy was known to have been forced to eat a rotten egg; it was simply convention. “Uprooting Nick from his happy home for months at a time was collateral damage that had to be borne… to maximise his chance of fulfilling his potential.” This is not the voice of a rock critic, but lofty and strange and entrenched in family lore.

Although Rodney and Molly Drake adored their son – and his music, in a strikingly modern, generation-gap-traversing way – and although  they did everything they could to save him, something about the family dynamic feels stifling. When he was sectioned at a psychiatric institution not far from his home, his duty officer found him to be “muddled” as to his relationship with his parents, with “some guilt complex about leaving Cambridge” – which he had done, against his father’s wishes, upon the release of his first album, Five Leaves Left, in 1969 – and Molly and Rodney were advised not to visit so often.

Drake became morbidly obsessed with the story of the artist Richard Dadd, who had murdered his father after the latter’s intervention in his mental health treatment, and he worried that he, like Dadd, would live out his creative life in an institution. But Morton Jack does not investigate these relationships. He shuts things down. Drake’s key musical influence was his mother, herself a songwriter, who had also had a nervous breakdown straight after her marriage to Rodney and had to move back in with her parents. This compelling revelation is covered in just one line. “She had no more such episodes,” Morton Jack writes. One envisions Gabrielle taking a neat sip of tea.

Dozens of first-hand accounts of Drake’s young life stack up to say pretty much the same thing: as a teenager he was “detached” from all things apart from music; passive, uninterested, unengaged. “There is evidence of an all-round lack of drive, almost sleepiness,” said his teacher at Marlborough College. One family friend remembered him aged 14 on a bad day: “It was as though one were sitting next to a black hole.” As he comes of age, there is a sense of a mysterious mental makeup hardening. There was some concern over his heavy marijuana use, which began at Cambridge, though it appears to have stopped when he returned home. A doctor gave his parents a diagnosis of “simple schizophrenia”, an archaic term for a subtype of the condition characterised by blunted emotional effect and low motivation: it often presents in early adulthood, and generally gets worse.

Drake’s Island labelmate John Martyn once said that Drake’s lack of commercial success floored him because until then he had always excelled at everything. Martyn, more of a frenemy than a friend, exerted a powerful influence over Drake and had little tolerance for his mental health struggles. Martyn wrote the song “Solid Air” about Drake: “You’ve been taking your time/and you’ve been living on solid air.” Though Drake had been signed to Island at the age of 20, and early reviews were enthusiastic, his albums only sold around 3,000 copies each. Reluctant to promote his second record, Bryter Layter, in 1971, he started to isolate himself.

Here Drake takes shape as someone who had it all at his feet but was never confident enough to act: who expected success – felt he deserved it – but hovered on the edge and ran, then spent the rest of his extremely short life beating himself up. No one rated his final album Pink Moon at the time (these days, it is seen as a masterpiece). Yet still, when he handed it in at the reception of Island Records, so unwell by then that he could barely speak, they wrote him his £500 advance cheque on the spot without listening to it. Island wanted anything he had to give.

The label didn’t care if he didn’t tour, and on the album’s release in 1972 they issued a satirical press release saying that his records “haven’t sold a shit” but they believed in him, even if no one else did. Like so many of the most difficult people Drake also believed in himself – the problem was, he hated himself too. He told his father at 24 that he had finished his life’s work – and that people would understand it one day.

In December 1974, in a rambling obituary, the journalist Nick Kent said that Drake’s death, from an overdose of his antidepressants, could not possibly have been suicide, as he was working on new songs – Boyd was keen to record with him again (in reality, when Boyd drove Drake to Island for a meeting, Drake could not face getting out of the car).

For me, the most awful aspect of Drake’s decline in this book is the sense of just how hard he was trying to write songs in the weeks before he died. Forget the artist wandering in the woods, waiting for the muse: he’d lock himself in the music room – orange armchair, reel to reel tape recorder, set of Encyclopaedia Britannica – and force himself for days on ends. Once, his parents returned to find his equipment smashed. Another time he sat for many hours unmoving with his head in his hands. He never stopped trying, writing a track list for an imaginary fourth album, only part of which he ever completed, reproduced here in his curly hand. In an unusual moment of confession three months before his death, he told his friend David Ward of his frustrations with two people: Boyd, “because [Drake] hadn’t been more successful, and his father, from whom he felt an undercurrent of pressure to do something else with his life, commit to a course.”

One day around this time, after another trip to London on one of his sporadic better days, Drake was found by police at a zebra crossing in Swiss Cottage unable to “muster the wherewithal to cross the road”. The image of the suffering creative will always appeal, and Drake will always hold some of our most powerful projections, because he was enigmatic, beautiful, nomadic and utterly unknown. To know him better, through this book, is to reimagine that figure as a very sick man unable to walk across a road. Though clearly written as an act of love, it is hard to read. 

Nick Drake’s dark places. By Kate Mossman. The New Statesman, June 11, 2023. 

 “Do you curse where you come from?” Nick Drake asks an imagined lover in his 1971 song Hazey Jane I. This first comprehensive account of the revered singer-songwriter’s short life makes it clear that he did. It uses previously unseen family papers to illuminate Drake’s final years, in which, despairing at his apparent failure as a musician, he withdrew to his detested childhood home in Tanworth-in-Arden.

 Towards the end of his life, Drake was pulled between two places he felt damaged him in contrasting ways. London, the hub of his musical career, was overwhelming; his family’s comfortable home in rural Warwickshire was safe but stultifying. “There’s no outlet to say what I think about this bloody place!” he told his mother and bemoaned that in Britain, unlike the US, people could never “break away from their background”. This meticulous and ultimately heartbreaking biography is the story of a man who believed he’d “failed in every single thing I’ve ever tried to do”. It’s true that a quarter of a century after his death he would become famous for his music; but also as an archetype of the doomed artist whose only acclaim is posthumous.

This painfully taciturn man lived for 26 years, the first three quarters in smooth upper-middle-class transit from early childhood in newly independent Burma through the English private school system to Cambridge, despite academic mediocrity. He was enigmatic and inscrutable, leading an uneventful life until his final five years. It was then that he released three exquisite albums – the romantic pastoral Five Leaves Left; Bryter Layter with its focus on the city; the chillingly introspective Pink Moon – but refused to promote them, causing their commercial failure and contributing to his psychological collapse.

Richard Morton Jack’s diligence, sensitivity and musical knowledge have enabled him to extract a readable and informative biography from sometimes unpromising material. He has tracked down schoolfriends with whom Drake travelled to Aix-en-Provence and Morocco; fans who attended his few concerts; musical collaborators (producer Joe Boyd and studio engineer John Wood make vivid contributions); a family friend who tried to help before Drake’s death in 1974. He acknowledges the generous help of Patrick Humphries, whose 1997 biography was hamstrung by a lack of cooperation from key figures. Morton Jack’s has been written with the blessing of Nick’s sister, Gabrielle Drake, which is both a strength and a weakness.

In her foreword, Gabrielle pays tribute to their parents, the “outstanding”, “exceptional” Molly and Rodney. The book closes with a psychiatrist’s letter reassuring them they could have done no more to prevent his death. But by then it’s clear that, however good their intentions, Drake’s relationship with them was fundamental to his distress. He was consumed by rage at feeling misunderstood, monitored and controlled, especially by Rodney, who tried to steer him towards a “proper” career. After moving back to the family home in 1971 he would ignore his parents for days, breaking his silence only to swear at them. I wanted exploration and analysis of this, his most important relationship – for instance through Nick’s friends’ recollections of exactly why he so resented his parents, which need not have implied culpability for his death. But perhaps doing so would have turned up material contradicting Gabrielle’s line that they were beyond reproach.

Even so, the book’s greatest asset is the access Gabrielle granted to revelatory documents from the family archive. Candid letters from Rodney scold Nick for his indolence, introversion and cannabis-smoking. “The man who resorts to pot as the solution to his problems becomes bemused, befuddled and vegetable-like,” lectured Drake senior, the self-assured old Burma hand and managing director of an engineering company. “How do I know this, you say? Because I saw it again and again in the East.” A letter Nick wrote to the radical psychiatrist Leon Redler gives a rare insight into his own thoughts about his breakdown. “There was a lot of pressure around and I suppose I sort of cracked up,” Drake explained. He said that although he’d been treated for depression, “I never really understood the word and felt that ‘confusion’ was more apt.” Psychiatrists were mystified by his decline into a state of mute catatonia, interrupted only by explosions of fury and destructive violence (he smashed guitars, a chair, a radio, his car window). They tentatively diagnosed “simple schizophrenia” but conceded that this catch-all term had little meaning.

As I finish writing this review in a cafe, Pink Moon has started to play. The waitress tells me she’s a Nick Drake fan. So many people are now. Drake knew he lived at the wrong time, as well as feeling he was from the wrong place. He took an overdose of antidepressants in November 1974. Two years earlier, Rodney noted in his diary that his “despondent” son said “he’d finished his life’s work and had done more than many in a lifetime. One day,” Nick Drake insisted, “people would realise.”

 Nick Drake by Richard Morton Jack review – genius remembered. By Kieron Pim. The Guardian, June 7, 2023. 

Richard Morton Jack’s Nick Drake: The Life begins at the end. It is Monday, 25 November, 1974 and, as the author explains in his exhaustive new biography, “the magically gifted, frustratingly unfathomable” singer-songwriter has decided to swap the family home of Far Leys in Tanworth-in-Arden for “oblivion”.

Drake was just 26 when he died following an overdose – ruled suicide at the inquest – of the Trypitzol pills designed to treat the depression that had entrenched his musical career and personal life. Morton Jack’s book is the first of its kind to be written in tandem with Drake’s family and seeks to bring an equal measure of light and shade to an English musical figurehead who has become uniquely mythologised.

Nick Drake released three albums of bucolic folk for Island Records between 1969 and 1972. Richly melancholic but universally ignored, his songs and character became increasingly foreboding and isolated. But in the years since, posthumous releases like 1979’s Fruit Tree box set and 1994’s Way to Blue compilation, alongside veneration from the likes of Kate Bush, The Cure and Paul Weller, helped deliver tangible momentum. A further sign of his reappraisal will come later this summer, with The Endless Coloured Ways: The Songs of Nick Drake, featuring multiple contemporary acts, including Fontaines DC, John Grant and Feist.

Morton Jack’s intention in opening with Drake’s suicide was to immediately take readers beyond the desperate end of his life, which “looms so large in people’s perception of him”, he tells me. In fact, the book – timed to coincide with the 75th anniversary of Drake’s birth – is a forensic tome that not only celebrates and humanises its subject but also straightens out the unreliable biography that has propelled his mystery across half a century.

 “I think Nick’s sister Gabrielle gave permission and was willing to collaborate with me because a lot of the people who knew Nick are inevitably now in their 70s or older, and with them would die a lot of interesting and valid history,” he explains.

“There is also so much misconception and error surrounding Nick, there was a realisation that unless something was approved and assisted by her and his estate, it would pass into fact.”

Morton Jack, who cites the 200 factual errors on Drake’s Wikipedia, carried out a similar number of interviews for Nick Drake: The Life. “Fundamentally, the image he’s always had is accurate. He was this mysterious, enigmatic, charismatic, talented, doomed youth. None of that is challenged but the cumulative impression I built of him was not as cut and dried as the one a lot of people have.”

One thing that has been overstated, he says, is “the extent to which Nick’s background was privileged”. Drake was not a “Cambridge scholar”. He dropped out of the city’s Fitzwilliam College in 1969 after the release of debut album Five Leaves Left. He also did not “retreat to the country estate” when the 1971 follow-up, Bryter Layter, also failed to deliver the commercial success or critical acclaim he craved. “Nick’s upbringing was comfortable but his parents weren’t millionaires.”

However, Morton Jack does believe being raised “in the bottom of the one per cent” could explain Drake’s fabled indifference – frequently depicted as paralysis – to self-promotion. Despite recording alongside pre-eminent producer Joe Boyd and rubbing shoulders with Fairport Convention, The Incredible String Band and John Martyn, he played only around 40 concerts and gave just two interviews. “He found the idea of being interviewed and saying ‘I’m brilliant, look at me’ instinctively problematic.”

No footage – and one photograph – of Nick Drake performing live exists, although Morton Jack points out he was happy to play various “cavernous auditoriums”, including London’s Royal Festival Hall, to kickstart his career. “He had this slightly unrealistic expectation of it being like people watching a string quartet, and he would be listened to and applauded at the end of each song. The fact that’s not how it worked is where there was the most obvious clash between his background and art.”

Morton Jack’s book is founded on “minutiae”, bringing its subject into unparalleled focus. The author’s diligent research provides insight into his movements during the “Summer of Love” era. He watched The Doors play London’s Roundhouse in September 1968 and Bob Dylan a year later at the Isle of Wight Festival.

“Nick came home elated and declared that now, finally, the world would change and peace would prevail. It was one of the few political statements he ever made,” Gabrielle tells the author.

The biggest revelation about his interest in the emergent rock’n’roll scene comes in the pre-Cambridge description of an unlikely audience with The Rolling Stones on a March 1967 trip to Marrakesh. Mick Jagger and Keith Richards – fleeing the infamous Redlands drug bust – were staying in a French colonial hotel. Despite being “bombed out of their minds”, the group agreed to a friend’s request for Nick to play for them.

“What’s interesting is that Nick’s willingness to perform was right there. He knew he was good and wanted to hustle.” Still just a teenager, Drake was already an effortlessly skilled guitarist.

“Playing in front of The Stones gives us an early glimpse into the fact he wasn’t always crippled by self-doubt and embarrassment,” says Morton Jack.

Elsewhere, the book details the more improbable events that accompanied Drake’s drift into reclusion following the 1972 release of the stark and spectral final album Pink Moon. By now receiving treatment for depression and back living at home in rural Warwickshire with his parents Rodney – who kept a diary of his son’s final years – and Molly, Drake could be found chuckling away to Some Mothers Do ‘Ave ‘Em, The Two Ronnies and Monty Python. Despite Pink Moon’s limited impact, Drake told his father “he’d finished his life’s work and had done more than many in a lifetime. One day people would realise.”

It’s a comment that tallies with the luminous, soothsaying aura that runs through songs like “Time Has Told Me”. But it also frames a deeply troubled and painfully withdrawn individual unable to banish the demons devouring his mental health. Indecision and contradiction dominated this phase. There was talk of enlisting in the army or working in a bank. He even accepted the offer of a six-month traineeship as a computer programmer in Droitwich. This, inevitably, fell through.

There was also a failed first suicide bid involving Valium, as well as one session of ECT, and countless medical appointments and in-patient spells in various institutions. Of his “depression”, Drake writes in a letter included in this biography: “I never really understood the word and felt that ‘confusion’ was more apt.” Morton Jack’s caveated view is he “probably had some form of schizophrenia”. Rodney was a member of the Schizophrenia Society and Nick read books about the condition.

Morton Jack describes a man whose decline would occasionally manifest itself in destructive – numerous guitars were destroyed – rather than creative bursts of energy. When he did leave the house, it was to drive aimlessly – often to London and straight back again – clocking up an incredible 10,000 miles in two months during 1973 in his Austin 1100.

In March 1974, six months before he died, Drake’s erratic behaviour peaked in an entirely unexpected marriage proposal to a close – but platonic – female friend: Sophia Ryde. “She told me it came completely out of the blue and was not remotely supported by their relationship to that date,” says Morton Jack. “It was unfortunately just another figment of his illness and desperately trying to find a solution.”

Since his death, Nick Drake’s legacy has been thoughtfully shepherded, with selected reissues, an incongruous but beguiling Volkswagen TV advert and 2014’s handsome coffee table book, Remembered For A While. As Morton Jack attests, he is now in exulted, once unthinkable territory alongside the likes of The Rolling Stones and Bob Dylan. Nick Drake: The Life underscores his family’s decades of grief and enduring belief in his music. It also amplifies the words inscribed on his headstone in the St Mary Magdalene Church, Tanworth-in-Arden: “Now we rise and we are everywhere.”

The truth about Nick Drake, the most mythologised man in music. By Ben Gilbert. iNews, June 6, 2023. 

When the cult singer-songwriter Nick Drake’s third album, Pink Moon, was released in 1972 many of his friends were horrified. Now held to be a stone-cold classic, it is a spare, beautiful sequence of songs, many of which lay bare its 24-year-old author’s inner tumult. Drake’s two previous albums, Five Leaves Left (1969) and Bryter Layter (1971), had sold poorly. Although he was an English singer-guitarist whose unconventional tunings and numinous lyrics set him apart, even in a crowded folk revival field, a chasm had opened up between the promise of his talent and his meagre public profile.

 Now, Drake is revered as a depressed romantic too fragile for the world. The Cure took their name from one of his songs. In the 80s, artists as diverse as Kate Bush and the Dream Academy cited him as an influence. Volkswagen used Pink Moon’s title track in an ad in 1999, prompting a fresh upsurge of interest in his oblique pastorals.

Pink Moon was the product of a period of intense, secretive songwriting, during which the singer’s behaviour became more erratic and his mental health deteriorated, much to the anguish of family and friends. It was a mark of the regard in which he was held by associates that the album was recorded with little warning, late at night, exactly as Drake prescribed by engineer/producer John Wood with no external input (the previous two LPs featured arrangements).

Drake handed over a recording of Pink Moon to Island Records’ bewildered boss Chris Blackwell, who had not been expecting it, before going dark again. Blackwell ploughed ahead with his most mysterious charge’s release, even though Drake had no interest in artwork or press. There was little hope of the erratic, retiring musician touring. Pink Moon didn’t sell much either.

Drake is now ensconced in myth as a doomed poet whose life ended at 26 through an overdose of antidepressants. Previous biographies and documentaries have given thorough accounts of his life and work, including one in 2014 by his sister, Gabrielle Drake, the actor. The work of their mother, Molly Drake, has been folded into the story. Her son had grown up to the sound of Molly composing songs at the piano; there are resonances in their bodies of work.

Richard Morton Jack’s authoritative doorstop is, though, the definitive word on Drake, insofar as the story of a deeply inward-facing man can be told by others. It builds on everything that has gone before and adds so much detail it can seem, at times, overwhelming. Although a foreword by Gabrielle Drake maintains that this is not an authorised work, she provided Drake’s own papers, her father’s diary and gave her blessing for everyone around Drake to contribute. Patrick Humphries, who published a biography of Drake in 1997, even handed over his own archive. There is something of Mark Lewisohn’s approach to the Beatles here: no childhood friend or university contemporary is left un-interviewed. There are a great many school reports. Drake’s guitars are reverently documented.

The outcome of this forensic but always eloquent account is two-fold. The first half of the book sets out to establish just how normal and, indeed, biddable and cheerful Drake was as a child. Born in Rangoon, he lived a life of genteel privilege in Warwickshire from the age of two where his parents, “old Burma hands” in the colonial parlance, doted on him and his sister. Their Karen nanny, Naw Rosie Paw Tun, acted as third parent (the Karen people originate along the Thailand-Myanmar border and remain in conflict with the Burman majority in Myanmar). Although Drake disdained sports, he was athletic and could be persuaded to join in; he got up to high jinks at Marlborough College and, later, Cambridge, where he gravitated towards other “heads” into the burgeoning 60s music scene. Most agree that he could be detached or preoccupied with his own interests. But there was little in his early years that predestined a life of artistic torment.

  Among the many interviewees, a couple of material witness accounts are absent. The family’s housekeeper, Naw Ma Naw, died in 1988 and so could not have been consulted by Morton Jack. Her aunt, Naw Rosie Paw Tun, the Drakes’ long-serving nanny, is also presumably long gone.

Even so, it is a small shortcoming in this assiduously researched work that Morton Jack follows the lead of this largely upper-middle-class cast in reporting that Tun and Naw were part of the family, rather than servants, and yet their thoughts on Drake and his end have not been recorded or conjectured. The book is full of public schoolboys weighing in on whether the singer was odd. Naw was the one to discover Drake’s body on a November morning in 1974. She was reportedly the last to hear him alive, moving about around 5.30am. Her thoughts and feelings can be imagined, but are not known.

In an interview with Uncut magazine, Morton Jack makes plain there are no shocking revelations in his work. Drake’s lack of interest in the opposite sex has led some to speculate whether he was gay; Morton Jack finds no evidence, and records his proposal of marriage to a friend, Sophia Ryde. Drugs might have explained Drake’s decline. But although much dope was smoked – and it remains plausible that the singer’s cannabis consumption might have precipitated a form of psychosis – Morton Jack concludes that he almost certainly wasn’t using anything harder.

The last third of the book is difficult to read – through no fault of the author’s, but because Drake’s final months are chronicled almost day by painful day. There is no ending other than that foretold.

Drawing on the diary Rodney Drake kept when his son moved back to the family home at Far Leys in Warwickshire, Morton Jack bears witness to Drake’s alarming unravelling: all the psychiatric interventions, all the missed pills, all the false dawns. Drake smashed things up, he would disappear for days, go to Paris ostensibly to write an album for Françoise Hardy, come straight back. He would take long drives, then abandon his car when it ran out of petrol. Often he was unable to speak. Astoundingly, he considered joining the army and accepted a job in IT, but never took it up.

Everyone around him tried to help; from time to time, some did, leading to more heartbreak when Drake relapsed. The diagnosis was “simple” schizophrenia. But in a moving letter to Rodney, one of the doctors who saw Drake implored his devoted parents not to blame themselves. “People who have studied this illness all their lives have no better understanding of patients than you had of Nick,” he wrote. This book is illuminating, but Drake himself remains painfully unknowable.

Nick Drake: The Life by Richard Morton Jack review – folk’s fragile man of mystery. By  Kitty Empire. The Guardian, June 4, 2023.