Nick Drake’s manager on his final days: ‘I was horrified by his state’
A new biography of the tortured star sets out to dispel the many myths surrounding him. People who knew him well talk to
When the debut album of 21-year-old singer-songwriter Nick Drake was released in 1969, only one newspaper reviewed it. The Daily Telegraph’s critic wrote that Five Leaves Left was an “excellent LP” and that “there was no mistaking the quality and promise” of songs such as River Man and The Thoughts of Mary Jane. It would be the best part of 20 years before those songs would be recognised as classics by an audience that continues to grow every year.
At the time, the album sank without trace, and its creator would make only two more before dying from an overdose of antidepressants at the age of 26. Drake rarely played live and gave almost no interviews; he remains one of the most elusive, enigmatic figures in the history of rock ’n’ roll.
His gentle, introspective music remains mysterious, too, yet when the 14-year-old Richard Morton Jack discovered him in 1992, the “cult artist” tag was loosening. “It wasn’t like I’d found some sort of hidden door in a tree trunk, with a flight of steps going down into the earth,” he says. “It was Neil Young, Bob Dylan, Nick Drake… he was part of what was normal to listen to.”
Morton Jack is now the author of a remarkable biography, Nick Drake: The Life, which over the course of 500-plus pages maps the guitarist and singer’s life and
In his prime: Nick Drake in 1971; he died just three years later
musical development alongside his descent into mental illness, correcting some grievous misapprehensions along the way.
“Nick, even though his life was fairly short, has been quite ill-served by biography,” Morton Jack says. “There’s been quite a lot of mythology and misunderstanding and misconception.” There have been works suggesting he was a heroin addict, that he was engaged and sent a suicide note to his fiancée before his death; a PhD was written dissecting Drake’s lyrics to prove he was a closeted gay man; most significantly, as I write this piece, Drake’s Wikipedia page still bears the claim: “Whether his death was an accident or suicide has not been resolved.”
Morton Jack knew Drake’s sister Gabrielle, an actress known in the 1970s for BBC One’s The Brothers; he had previously released an album of early works by Drake and compositions by his late mother, Molly – Family Tree (2007) – on his own record label. Gabrielle, though, was “hesitant” about agreeing to a biography, “fearing the intrusion and the re-opening of a wound that never heals”, as she writes in the book’s foreword. For his part, Morton Jack knew that without her blessing, “there was too much personal stuff that only Gabrielle knew or had access to”, too many people who wouldn’t talk to him unless she put him in touch with them. He wanted to avoid conjecture, resist treating Drake’s lyrics like they were cryptic crossword clues, and rely on first-person accounts. “I wanted to speak to absolutely everyone who knew him or encountered him,” he tells me. The book contains about 160 interviews.
The Life tracks Drake from the doted-on son of well-off excolonial parents to a musicobsessed public schoolboy at Marlborough College. Morton Jack captures the concentric social circles he moved in,
‘It was a fateful turn for him leaving Cambridge. Given his personality, he didn’t meet people’
including a posh set that included Lord Harlech’s daughter Victoria Ormsby-Gore. The late Sophia Ryde was one of them; she was the reported “fiancée” who in fact had not said yes to Drake’s marriage proposal, but as Morton Jack learnt, had had to cope with fans asking to see his non-existent suicide note for years.
His research demolished the belief that Drake’s death might have been accidental, that he had “taken a couple of pills, and then taken a couple more, because he’d forgotten he had taken the first two”. In the book he notes that the pathologist at the inquest into his death stated that “he had found evidence in Nick’s body of a ‘serious overdose’ – a minimum of 35 pills’ worth – from stomach samples and up to a further 50 from blood samples”. The coroner declared that “such a massive overdose could not have been taken accidentally”. “It’s a sad way to end the book, with that certainty,” Morton Jack reflects.
The phone call about his death in November 1974 did not come as a shock to Joe Boyd, Drake’s manager and the producer of Five
Leaves Left and its follow-up Bryter Layter. He tells me his own “moment of tragic shock was when Nick came to see me in London in the winter of 1973 – I had rented this flat in Notting Hill – and I was just horrified by the state he was in. He had deteriorated, his hair was dirty, he was sort of shaking almost, and had trouble articulating himself. He was always hesitant and shy, but this was different.”
It has often been suggested that Nick may have been gay. Boyd did not have that impression. “I saw him as very blocked sexually,” he says, noting that this was unusual in the late 1960s, although he adds that if he had been gay, he would likely have been good at hiding it. “I do think he was very conscious of the way he was perceived and worried about it,” he judges from Drake’s anxiety about people knowing that he was seeing a psychiatrist.
Morton Jack, though, asked the question to his interviewees. “My view is entirely led by what other people have said to me,” he stresses. “Not a single person who knew him said that in word or deed or body language that they thought Nick was gay. I’m sure he was certainly interested in girls sexually, whether he was bisexual becomes the question. I mean, I know he had sexual relationships [with women], very few, but they were there.” No one recalls him taking heroin, either.
The book strikingly captures the trajectory of Drake’s illness, and his ever-deeper withdrawal into himself as his musical career foundered. Could it have been triggered by excessive smoking of cannabis, in the light of recent studies linking its use in adolescents to depression? “There wasn’t the sort of super-‘skunk’type-stuff which causes problems now,” Morton Jack says. “I think it’s glib to say that Nick’s illness had any cause.”
Boyd does express concern, though. “I think that his isolation in London was really unfortunate and really contributed to his decline,” he says. (Drake left Cambridge without finishing his degree after his first album was released, moving to a bedsit in Camden.) “I think it was a fateful turn for Nick leaving Cambridge. Given Nick’s personality, he didn’t meet people. He just sat there. And I think when you’re isolated and you smoke a lot of dope…”
Ultimately, Drake would retreat to his parents’ home, where he would be briefly hospitalised for depression, and begin taking antidepressants, but not before he had had one last try at making a successful record. In October 1971, with Boyd in California, Drake arranged with Pink Floyd engineer John Wood to record some new songs. The resulting album,
Pink Moon, would become his bestseller, many years too late.
“It does feel like a full stop,” Morton Jack says, “I almost feel that he knew Pink Moon was it, I think he had to wring that album out of himself. And I think it cost him dearly to do so.” He was 23 years old. For Boyd, later generations discovering his gift was inevitable. “I was like, f---ing hell… took you long enough.”
‘Nick Drake: The Life’ by Richard Morton Jack is published on June 8 (Hodder)