TIME HAS TOLD
Richard Morton Jack’s new biography offers the deepest dive yet into Drake’s brief life.
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
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
“IT’S THE ONLY BIOGRAPHY WITH MY BLESSING” GABRIELLE DRAKE
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 were certainly few clouds on young Nick Drake’s horizon. Born in colonial Burma in 1948, he moved with his loving, supportive family to bucolic Tanworth-in-arden when he was four. An untroubled childhood followed the approved upper-middle class course, as he was sent away to Marlborough College, a public school in Wiltshire, in 1962. Where the likes of Eton prepared its pupils to run the country, if not the world, Marlborough was more liberal, suiting Nick’s easy-going nature.
“The school encouraged you to follow your interests,” says Crocker. “Nick and I formed an R&B band with a horn section, The Perfumed Gardeners. Nick was never the leader, but he was very confident in those days. He loved playing live. He was the one who said, ‘Oh, gosh, let’s put a band together.’ He chose the material and arranged it. He was lead singer, so played mainly at the piano, as well as saxophone. He was good.”
It’s hard to imagine the subsequently soft-voiced Drake as an R&B belter, and though he admired Chris Farlowe’s booming delivery, he made little attempt to follow suit. “He sang slightly harder than when he was recorded later,” says Croker. “But he wasn’t shouting. He had a good voice and sang clearly, but he didn’t overdo it. He was contained.”
Attractive and athletic, much came easily to Drake in those days, from female attention to sport to music. But it never seemed in his nature to chase after any of them. “Nick was certainly laid-back,” says Mason. “You have to picture us wandering across the playing fields on a long summer’s evening looking for somewhere to have a fag. Nick was always sloping off somewhere, which sums him up. Shoulders slightly hunched, because he was tall [6ft 2ins], and always wearing soft moccasins. He wasn’t fast or slow, he just lolloped.
“When he’s leaning against a wall in photos, that’s pretty much Nick,” continues Mason. “The word is sprezzatura. It means what appears to be complete disregard is well thought out. Beneath that, like ducks’ legs paddling in a pond, there was all this ambition. I like to think he always assumed that he was going to produce these records and blow the world apart.”
“He was a very bright guy, who dressed like a slightly smart hobo,” says Crocker. “He never hurried particularly. He took the time he needed and wanted to take. He was observant. He certainly had his own opinions, but he listened and chose his moment to talk. If there was something he disagreed with, he’d jump in and could be quite acerbic. But generally, he was a very nice, quite quiet, modest guy. We could have a laugh together, at the absurdities of life, and ourselves.”
Drake’s studies soon took a back seat as he developed a broader appetite for life. “He was cool and introverted, but not as introverted as later on,” says Mason. “He was quite happy to join in almost everything. We went drinking in pubs when we shouldn’t have done, sneaking out through the back lanes. Nick got sloshed quite readily. We went to a [post-impressionist French painter Pierre] Bonard exhibition too [at the Royal Academy in winter 1966]. To his dying day, he spoke the Queen’s English in a public school manner. He sang that way, too. This is the culture Nick came from.” Drake’s music tastes moved with the times. He and Mason regularly trekked up to Soho, visiting the clubs ruled by Georgie Fame, Zoot Money, Chris Farlowe and Graham Bond. “We’d hitch up from Marlborough to all-nighters at the Flamingo, where Christine Keeler used to go and American servicemen bought their drugs,” remembers Mason. “You can imagine two 17-year-old public schoolboys – we didn’t realise it was a den of iniquity. I never saw Nick dance – he wasn’t that exuberant…”
The Battersea flat belonging to his actress sister Gabrielle served as a crash pad during extended London forays.
“NICK WAS CONFIDENT IN THOSE DAYS” SIMON CROCKER
Nick also absorbed bossa nova’s soft lilt – and Miles and Gil Evans’ version of it, Quiet Nights – alongside an abiding love of Dylan, country blues and classical music. He also kept pace with jazz. “Nick understood that continuous blanket of sound Coltrane went into with Ascension,” says Mason.
Drake bought an acoustic guitar in December 1964. He quietly developed his playing over the next two years, although music didn’t dominate his schooldays. “I wouldn’t have defined Nick as a musician then,” says Crocker.
“Nick liked being a good athlete, too,” adds Mason. “We had to go and watch him run.”
Drake also took several increasingly adventurous trips to France, hitching with his friend Dave Wright through the French Riviera to Germany in August 1965. Then, after finishing at Marlborough in July 1966, he drove with four friends via St-tropez to Mason’s parents’ holiday home in Lédenon, south-eastern France, strumming his guitar to fascinated locals along the way. “I have visions of him sitting on the small crossroads near the house,” says Mason. “The village gathered round.”
After spending the rest of 1966 finger-picking on his new Levin guitar and hanging out with friends in Chelsea – where he first tried pot – Drake scraped into Cambridge University’s Fitzwilliam College. But owing to a delayed entrance exam, he wasn’t due to go up until October 1967. Fortuitously, Crocker and Mason had both signed up for French courses at Université d’aix-marseilles, starting in February. Drake went, too. “Nick had become obsessed with France,” says Crocker. “We were keen to get out of England. We just thought, ‘This is a huge adventure.’”
JEan-louis Pujol moved to Aix-en-provence in 1965, where he enjoyed running local folk clubs. He still lives there today. For him, it is easy enough to recall the small, Roman-built spa town as it was in February 1967. “In Provence they call it ‘the beautiful, sleeping city,’” he says. “In those days, it was mainly a student town. Part of the city was created in the 17th and 18th centuries, with beautiful buildings famous for their sculptured wooden doors, and a few narrow medieval streets. Students mainly stayed in the old city, where it was like La Bohème! It was a very, very quiet town. For the students, it was like heaven.”
Bridget St John was a contemporary of Drake’s at the university – although they didn’t meet in Aix. She befriended him later and shared bills with him in London. She still fondly remembers the vibes in Aix. “It was a beautiful, comforting old town,” she tells Uncut. “You could choose fresh sardines from Marseille at the market, which they would grill for you, and you’d sit and Bridget St John, eat them with a baguette and who also lived wine. Just an easy life! It in Aix-enprovence: “Just was such a romantic an easy life!” place. You could just sit and play guitar.”
Drake and his friends arrived in Aix on February 11, shattered after a full day’s travel from London. Finding no accommodation waiting, they were considerably less sanguine about their new home. Eventually, they found spaces at the Résidence Sextius student apartment block.
“It was modern, grey architecture,” remembers Crocker. “When we saw it, it was pissing down, bleak and depressing.”
They rented two rooms, with Drake and Mason sharing one of them. “They were like concrete spaces, but we didn’t care,” says Crocker.
“We were on the cusp, from public school to real life – a pretty dramatic moment,” adds Mason. In common with most of their fellow foreign students, the university curriculum barely detained them. Music mattered more. “I’d brought my Dansette record player,” says Crocker. “I bought Donovan’s Mellow Yellow, which Nick played to death – that and Bert Jansch. At Marlborough, I have no memory of him being that interested in folk music, though he probably was. It was in Aix that he suddenly started playing Bert Jansch numbers.”
Drake played guitar whenever he could, intensifying efforts he’d made in the six months since Marlborough. “He suddenly homed in on it,” says Crocker. “If he’d go on too long, we’d have to tell him, ‘For Christ’s sake, we want to go to sleep!’ But he was good, that was the great thing. He got better, because he would play for long periods. I’m sure even then he thought, ‘Oh God, wouldn’t it be great if I could do something that involved music?’ I think those ambitions happened more after Aix. But people said he was good, so he kept on going. He was in the egg – and the egg was breaking open!”
In their room in Aix, Mason sketched Drake with his head hunched down over his instrument, deep in concentration. It’s the same intense focus that producer John Wood later saw in the studio. Robin Frederick agrees. “There’s a bootleg where Nick says, ‘Not the right tempo’ – and it is only a hair’s difference. He had a clock-like sense of time. He’d spend hours working on his finger-picking. In Aix, he had an incredibly fluid blues style.”
What Drake played also struck his listeners. “His guitar’s tuning was interesting,” says Mason. “How many nights did I listen to him as he unwound the strings ’til they were floppy, and then tuned it up?” For Jean-louis Pujol, a guitarist himself, the results were startling. “He detuned all the time, so it was impossible for others to play the same way. He was brave on the guitar.” It’s a sound that still intrigues guitarists, as Stick In The Wheel’s Ian Carter attests. “My initial attraction to Nick Drake was his unique approach to harmony – it’s not just major or minor, there’s an ambiguity in the key. There were things he did with rhythm that mirrored Son House, Charley Patton and Bukka White.”
February 24, meanwhile, proved to be an auspicious date. “We went down to Jeremy’s parents’ house in Lédenon and we recorded Nick on a Philips tape recorder,” remembers Crocker of Drake’s recording debut. “I’ve no idea where it is now. He had only written one or two things.”
Industry hardly characterised their season in Aix. “Nick wasn’t driven,” explains Mason. “It was a very vague life, because we didn’t have enough to do. So we drifted. There were days when we got up in what we thought was the morning, only to find we’d slept the whole day through.”
“HE’D SPEND HOURS WORKING ON HIS FINGERPICKING” ROBIN FREDERICK
Though it was cold at first, in Mason’s memory the sun never set. “It was spring and it was glorious. We didn’t have heating in the flats so we all sat outside, where Nick played guitar. I don’t remember it raining, though it must have done. What better place to grow up? It was utterly freewheeling.”
There was a significant music scene for such a small city, though little chance for Drake to absorb the chansons some claim to have heard in his songs. “The club de poet with French songs was after Nick’s time,” says Pujol, whose folk nights ran in the Roman cellar at La Tartane restaurant. “It looked like a cave,” recalls Robin Frederick. “It was rough-hewn, dark and damp, seating about 30, with little round, candlelit tables.”
“I met him dozens of times in the street, because Aix is very small – you can cross it in 15 minutes,” says Pujol. “But he didn’t come to Club de la Tartane often; I don’t think he liked playing so much for other people. When he played, people would be interested and surprised by his sound. But he didn’t play his own songs in public.”
At Pujol’s, Drake even sat in once with a jazz group, playing sax and piano. “We had those instruments and if you wanted a gig with friends, you could pick them up,” confirms Pujol. “It was really a jazz ambience, free. People were having a drink and carried on talking while you were playing. It was only students. In that sense, it was not too risky for Nick. You could feel almost like you were at home when you were there.”
Most of Drake’s public performances were even looser affairs. “The main street is Cours Mirabeau, where every 100 metres there’s a fountain,” says Pujol, setting the scene. “Jean Cocteau said that if you close your eyes, you can find your way just following the sound of them. On the left side there are cafés where the students met. If you had a guitar, you could sing outside and make some money. I saw Nick play in front a café for law students, Le Grillon.”
This was a very different Nick Drake to the solemn, stilted performer of legend. “He couldn’t play his style in the streets, it was too difficult to detune,” says Pujol. “You had to be loud and efficient. He played Bob Dylan and popular songs.”
On these occasions, Drake was usually accompanied by his friends. “I held the hat out,” Mason recalls. “Or Simon did…”
Looking back on the ways in which he fitted in to the music community in Aix, Pujol considers Drake to be essentially comfortable among likeminded individuals but his willingness to engage on casual terms outside his immediate social circle only extended so far.
“It was a friendly, artistically stimulating town,” he says. “But Nick wanted to be alone, with his friends, and that was all. He was not interested in meeting French people, he didn’t care. I don’t even know if he spoke French. He was very friendly with me, but he wasn’t interested in Aix-en-provence.”
Simon Crocker concurs, to some extent. From the perspective of Drake’s inner circle in Aix, he understands that it was not necessarily for someone as independently minded as Drake to simply establish casual friendships.
“People liked being with Nick, he had a real charm,” he says. “But it wasn’t important for him to make masses of friends, or even to be liked, particularly. He could be stubborn at times. If he didn’t want to do something, he wasn’t going to do it. There was a backbone there, definitely. But he was difficult for people to get a grip of.”
Drake did bond with Robin Frederick, who with a weekly spot singing her own songs at La Tartane, was a step ahead of him. They began meeting at her apartment, where Grateful Dead posters on the walls signalled changing times.
“I remember him at the front door with his guitar,” she says. “Every time was the same. He’d be wearing what he’s wearing on Five Leaves Left, all he ever wore – velvet jacket, white shirt and jeans. He always looked crisp, neat and clean. He didn’t say hello. We’d have a glass of red wine and light up. The only light was the gas fire, and music was the way we talked, sitting facing each other. We all knew the same songs, but he changed them, so I couldn’t join in. He was self-sufficient.”
As Mason and Crocker attest, Drake seemed essentially asexual,
THE idea that Nick Drake would have a legacy might have seemed unlikely in 1974, when only Nick Kent’s outspoken NME obituary marked his passing. But since Molly Drake’s death in 1993, Gabrielle Drake and Cally Calloman have worked diligently and sensitively to embellish his short life and slender body of work with archival albums such as
A Treasury (2004) and Family Tree (2007) as well as 2014’s coffee-table volume, Remembered For A While.
The latest attempt to deepen the possibilities of Drake’s music, The Endless Coloured Ways: The Songs Of Nick Drake finds a disparate collection of artists radically reinventing his songbook.
“I didn’t want to trouble artists who’d done great versions of Nick’s songs before,” says Callomon. “I wanted plunging contrasts, to show the elasticity of Nick’s songs.”
So Fontaines DC’S grinding, rockabilly rendition of “Cello Song” contrasts with Ben Harper’s rolling R&B piano take on “Time Has Told Me”. Elsewhere, you’ll find Guy Garvey’s saloon-singing on “Saturday Sun”, John Parish and Aldous Harding’s motorik goove on “Three Hours” and Nadia Reid’s bright take on “Poor Boy”.
“We wanted the songs turned inside-out,” confirms Jeremy Lascelles, CEO of Drake’s catalogue publisher Blue Raincoat Music. “Some diehard Nick Drake fans responded with shock and horror at Fontaines DC’S ‘Cello Song’, but Fontaines fans were loving it, saying, ‘Who is Nick Drake?’ That’s what we want!”
From the artists’ perspective, there was also an opportunity to bring age and experience to Drake’s works. In the case of John Grant, for instance, he could approach the reflective “Day Is Done” from an older viewpoint that Drake never reached, delivering lines like “When the party’s through/seems so very sad for you” with accumulated wisdom and pathos.
“It felt that way when I was doing it,” Grant agrees. “It means more now I’m 54, because I was quite young when I first heard it, and I didn’t know anything about a wasted life yet!”
It’s hard to imagine in the years immediately following Drake’s death that a project like this could ever transpire.
“In the late ’80s and early ’90s, nothing was happening,” says Callomon, who at that point worked at Island Records. “Because Chris Blackwell was close to Nick, there was no question of Island deleting his albums – but a few artists like Peter Buck and Paul Weller mentioning him were the only things in the background. Then in 1994 I persuaded Chris to do a best-of, Way To Blue: An Introduction To Nick Drake. Gabrielle was coming into Island, too, because she’d just taken over the estate.”
While Way To Blue introduced Drake’s music to a new audience of music fans, his profile took a dramatic turn upwards in 1999, transforming Drake from a hidden gem to a bona fide chart star.
“Volkswagen wanted to use ‘Pink Moon’ on an American TV ad,” explains Calloman. “We thought the ad was really good. Then it erupted. In America, Pink Moon went from selling nothing to being Nick’s biggest-selling album.”
Joe Henry, who covers “Time Of No Reply” on The Endless Coloured Ways, vividly remembers the impact of the Volkswagen commercial. “Before that ad introduced people to the lonesome intimacy of ‘Pink Moon’, Nick Drake was only known by a small, passionate group of people. When Bob Dylan licensed a song in an ad and a journalist challenged him on selling out, he brought up ‘Pink Moon’ and said, ‘Do you wish all those people didn’t discover Nick Drake?’”
In 2021, when Blue Raincoat signed the publishing deal for Drake’s catalogue, Gabrielle Drake reflected that she had done her “best to protect my brother’s legacy” for nearly 50 years. “My reward has been witnessing the burgeoning recognition of his talent… The downside has been trying to anticipate his wishes… in his utter absence I have so often agonised about what to do.”
Callomon explains about the responsibilities behind their decision-making processes.
“When we said yes to Garden State [Zach Braff’s 2004 film, which uses ‘One Of These Things First’], you could see its impact on Nick’s sales. But we turn down so many terrible uses. French Mcdonald’s wanted to use Nick and the ad was amazing. But I just think of deforestation and wouldn’t align Nick with that. Because Nick had a mental illness, there may be a passage in a film where someone’s having a mental breakdown, and they think, ‘We’ll use Nick Drake.’ But when Nick was ill he didn’t write and I don’t want his songs aligned with that. It devalues mental illness to sum it up in a song.
“There have been times when people have tried to end the mystery of Nick Drake,” continues Callomon. “So we always turn down any offers of biopics, however lucrative. Because you’re always ruining someone’s Nick Drake. We’ve tried very hard not to, as Gabrielle says, trample dreams in that respect.”
Richard Morton Jack’s new biography presented a similar problem. “My fear was he was going to fill mystery with conjecture. But Richard’s book is incredibly well informed about his Nick Drake. And there are still huge gaps.”
“At 13 when I was at school and having a bit of a hard time time,” confides Callomon, “music got me through. I’d love a 13-year-old to discover Nick through the Fontaines and get that help. Nick used to say he hoped one of his songs made a difference to somebody. Well, we’ve gone past one song…”
The Endless Coloured Ways: The Songs Of Nick Drake is released on July 7 by Chrysalis
attracting women but appearing indifferent. Frederick still found his music magnetic. “It was so heartbreaking to hear him sing and play the palest blues.”
This wasn’t, though, the singing voice familiar from his albums. “He was singing out blues and Dylan in my room. He was not whispering! He had a 1960s folk-singer, clear baritone voice, completely different to Five Leaves Left. That other voice seems to have developed as he was writing those songs in his room, or singing into Simon’s mic.”
They were supposed to meet at a café one day, but he stood her up. Without a word, Nick Drake had left for Morocco.
MIKE Hill, another foreign student at Aix, suggested heading to North Africa for the Easter break on March 7. Four of them went: Drake, Hill and his Paris acquaintance Richard Charkin and Julian Raby, a student in Résidence Sextius.
“Mike fancied himself as a bit of a rally driver,” Charkin tells Uncut. “He had a Cortina GT. The idea was to drive to Chad – fuck knows how. Mike was some sort of viscount, Julian was more cerebral and Nick was always playing his guitar.”
They were a little ahead of the hippie trail, with its hunger for eastern culture and high-grade hash. Still, “tired and possibly a little stoned”, according to Charkin, they visited the Alhambra, Granada’s Moorish fortress complex in the Sierra Nevada mountains that he describes as “an extraordinary experience, and our first exposure to Islamic art and culture”. From Gibraltar, they took the ferry across to Tangier. There the rhythms of Morocco were “a major hit with me”, Drake wrote home to his parents.
“Then we ran into this crowd of people outside the El Minzah hotel, that was housing the Stones,” says Charkin. “I think they’d come to visit Paul Bowles.”
As it transpired, the Stones had been tracing much the same route through Spain and Morocco, fleeing the heat of the Redlands drug bust on February 12. Mick Jagger, Keith Richards, Brian
Jones, Anita Pallenberg and an entourage including art dealer Robert Fraser and the avantgarde artist and poet Brion Gysin had been in the El Minzah since March 5. Charkin cheekily rang up to their rooms suggesting Nick serenade them, although he got nowhere.
Driving at breakneck speed, Hill arrived in Marrakesh the next day. Drake was fascinated by the acrobats, musicians and snake-charmers in the city’s central square, Jeema al-fna. Incredibly, the Stones were there, too. The group had now taken over the upper floors of the Es Saadi hotel, where Brian, Anita and Keith’s love triangle was reaching its crescendo.
“We saw Cecil Beaton fannying around in a white hat, the Stones and the drummers in the main square,” Charkin recalls. Later, he again approached the Stones on Drake’s behalf. This time they agreed to an audience, which took place in what Charkin recalls as a café. “It seemed perfectly natural,” he says. “Music was a big part of Nick’s life. There was something about the way he played his guitar, more than his singing, that was utterly distinctive. Here was a business opportunity. He was slightly reluctant and shy. He sang and played some covers, the singing accompanying the guitar more than the other way round.”
“It’s extremely intimidating,” contends Drake’s biographer Richard Morton Jack. “You’re confronted with Mick and Keith and their very cosmopolitan, bohemian entourage. It must have been like being shoved into an Egyptian Pharaoh’s court. For Nick to have gone into a room with Mick and Keith and others, played some songs and to have impressed them – that’s telling. How many unknown
18- or 19-year-old singer-guitarists would have had the cojones?
“Nick had such confidence that he was able to give an account of himself musically. I think the Moroccan trip was validating for him in that way. To be told by Mick and Keith, ‘You’re pretty good, son. Come and see us when you’re back in London’ – which is what they said to him – that must have been a big compliment.”
“MICK AND KEITH SAID, ‘COME AND SEE US’” RICHARD CHARKIN
Charkin offers a more contemporary take on why Drake took the Stones in his stride. “It was ’67 and they were very famous – but they weren’t gods like they are today, and they weren’t that much older than us. Did the Stones seem part of the same youth culture as Nick and me? Yeah. Absolutely.”
The students and the Stones settled down to eat, with the group offering “insider stories”, as Nick wrote to his parents, perhaps beginning to imagine himself a regular fixture at rock’s top tables. With the Stones entering their most decadent phase, one wonders exactly how debauched the meal was? “That’s an exaggeration!” laughs Charkin. “We were all lusting after the unattainable Anita Pallenberg, but we were mainly drinking mint tea. I don’t think we drank alcohol at all. I expect a couple of joints went round. It didn’t feel decadent.”
Drake and his friends set off for Chad, but disaster struck. “We turned the car over – another fuck-up, bugger it,” says Charkin. “The main thing was it stopped us crossing the Sahara without a map!” The car was eventually repaired by Moroccans who mistook the four long-haired Englishmen for the Stones and Nick – for perhaps the only time in his life – for Mick Jagger. Finally, they limped back to Aix.
“His hair was longer and he had beard stubble,” recalls Crocker, when he first re-encountered his friend back in France. “But we were closing up Résidence Sextius by then and I hardly saw him.” Drake and his original companions drifted apart, no longer needing each other. “Nick went off on his own with the Etonian crowd, where more drugs became apparent,” says Mason, who left in April.
There was one more significant event in Aix. On May 15, Drake sat in the kitchen of his friend James Calvocoressi and taped his current repertoire. This cassette survived and, amidst Jackson C Frank, Dylan and Jansch covers, features two Nick Drake originals. “Leaving Me Behind” demonstrates his sense of timing, where fast, finger-picking runs beneath slowly sung lyrics which decry such “breakneck pace” and warn: “Success can be gained at too great a cost”. Meanwhile, the guitar lines of “Strange Meeting II” dance more; written on a trip to the coastal town of Cassis, it’s a watery fantasia pursuing a mystical woman in “forgotten dreams”.
Robin Frederick traces the songs begun in Aix to Five Leaves Left, with its lustrously warm, woody Robert Kirby arrangements and lyrics of courtly resignation. “That trip to Morocco loosened up something in him,” she says. “Then he comes back and does his own songs. ‘Three Hours’ [inspired by his friendship with Jeremy Mason] is from then, ‘The Thoughts Of Mary Jane’ may have been based on me. You hear a North African rhythm on ‘Leaving Me Behind’. Whatever he needed to digest emotionally, in terms of ‘Am I ready to do this?’, by the time he comes back from Aix to England, he’s ready. That’s the fulcrum right there.”
THE friends who started 1967 with Nick Drake ran into him occasionally in the years that followed. Richard Charkin was a fellow student in Cambridge. “We’d go to the Criterion pub,” he says. “‘River Deep, Mountain High’ was the backdrop, with Golden Virginia tobacco nestled in the ashtrays. He had rooms with a big bay window, where he’d roll joints on album covers. He’d played covers in Marrakesh, but it was his own stuff in Cambridge.”
The release of Five Leaves Left by Island Records on July 3, 1969 was greeted with pride. “When I heard it, it wasn’t like, ‘Christ, where did that come from?’” smiles Crocker. “I knew where it came from.” It came from Aix.
“That first album’s full of dappled sunsets and optimism,” says Mason. “This English pastoral. Then Nick’s songs got darker, filled with drugs and disappointment.”
Mason and Crocker watched with concern as Nick Drake’s career faltered and faded, hampered by declining mental health. Each remembers their final meeting with their former schoolfriend. “It was in his flat in Battersea,” says Mason. “There was nothing in it, except the cardboard boxes his hi-fi came in. He was a bit spaced out by then and very disappointed that his music wasn’t acknowledged. We did finally at the end of the evening kind of get back to where we were.”
By 1974, Crocker had become a musician’s manager. “I heard from mutual friends that Nick hadn’t been well,” he says. “So I left a note at Island. About three months later, he rang. I said, ‘Why not come round for tea?’ But he wasn’t the Nick I knew. He was disconnected and finding it difficult to talk. I said to him, ‘Nick, is there anything I can do to help?’ He said, ‘I don’t know. I don’t think anyone can help me, really.’ It stayed with me for a long time.”
“The only reason I kick against ‘doomed youth’ is that I don’t think Nick would like that,” concludes Mason. “I gather that on his final night he played a record that we played together, The Brandenburg Concertos. I would like to think that it reminded him of our time in Aix. A time of some happiness.”
My Back Pages by Richard Charkin is published by Marble Hill