Nick Drake: The Life

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I couldn’t help feeling a little out of place, but all the same I played for about quarter of an hour.

It’s not because he went to boarding school, it’s not because he smoked too much dope, it’s not because his records didn’t sell. To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. But, as you rightly say, Nick did have a broad taste in music, which reflected his generation’s exploratory interest in contemporary culture and what was coming over from America and so on. I mean, it’s perfectly possible, because it was widely around in 1967 and some of the imagery in his songs from that year seem to suggest hallucinatory experiences – but equally, maybe he didn’t.There are a few which have been kept, including copies of his own albums and one or two John Martyn albums and the Brandenburg Concertos and so on. 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. As for walking in Tanworth, I don’t think Nick did much exercise at all in his last years, but of course he knew the village back-to-front. Richard Morton Jack is the editor of the music reference books Galactic Ramble and Endless Trip , and the author of Psychedelia: 101 Iconic Underground Rock Albums 1966-70 . Instead, it pivots into a story about mental health and a family, a dynamic in a family, which doesn’t lend itself to mythologising and to funny anecdotes, for obvious reasons.

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. But I fear that was wishful thinking, and that they were allowing themselves to concoct a narrative that wasn’t supported by what had actually happened. What I think I was – perhaps clumsily – trying to express was the fact that the counter-narrative that he was ‘getting better’ towards the end of his life is not borne out by evidence. To me, it’s obvious that Nick was listening closely to Donovan’s fingerpicking, especially on the acoustic second record in A Gift From A Flower To A Garden.RMJ: I think the most important assumption or rumour about Nick that I wanted to clarify is the extent to which he took drugs. So Bryter Layter was, in a sense, what he did instead of his degree, in the expectation that it would be released in the summer of 1970. Do you think that’s an interesting part of how they could spur each other on, and work together productively even when they didn’t initially have the same end goal in mind? But Nick did materialise by Nigel’s side in a crowded room the following year and said, ‘I just want to say that I now understand what you were trying to do with that album cover, and I really like it’. But for me personally, Bryter Layter is so closely tied up with the image of him on the front that I find it impossible to unpick that and imagine it with a different cover.

So I suspect Nick did keep abreast of the other artists Joe was working with, and of course had it in mind that he wanted to work with Joe again himself. So let’s just keep going, because if we don’t he might end up just being at home without much idea of what to do with his future next summer’, or whatever the timeframe was when they started worrying about this. 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.

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. But by the summer of 1971, when that compilation album came out, Nick wasn’t in a position to perform, or even to travel, really. You have to be out there visiting the local radio stations, playing second on the bill to Black Oak Arkansas or whoever.

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. Of course, what I wanted to know most from the biography was what is most important about Nick Drake, and that is his songs and his acoustic guitar playing. But, partly because I’ve got Rodney’s diary, partly because of the amount of people I’ve been able to speak to and so on, I feel that Nick is more known now than they are: his personality and the detail, what he liked doing, what he watched on TV. He understood that putting musicians together could create magical results, and John Wood regards that as one of Joe’s greatest strengths as a producer: knowing who to bring onto which session to create the best result.

Previous biographies and documentaries have given thorough accounts of his life and work, including one in 2014 by his sister, Gabrielle Drake, the actor. 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. After interviewing them all I didn’t have to work out who to believe and how to navigate different versions of events.