Nick Drake at his family home Christmas 1967, taken after his Roundhouse gig (Reproduced by permission of Bryter Music – The Estate Of Nick Drake)
Despite receiving a warm critical reception, Nick Drake’s albums struggled to achieve commercial success during his lifetime. Nick found himself grappling with mental illness and in 1971, he sought solace by returning to his family home in rural Warwickshire, where he lived until his untimely death in 1974 at the age of 26. It was only in the following years that his music began to resonate with a much larger audience, hauntingly echoing the lyrics of his song Fruit Tree. Jason Barnard continues his discussion with Richard Morton Jack, author of Nick Drake: The Life taken from a forthcoming Strange Brew Podcast.
Hi Richard, the sound of Five Leaves Left is so well done, yet there seems to be a dichotomy in that you’ve got an album that’s so well made, and must have cost quite a bit, but didn’t get the push that it might have done. I don’t know whose responsibility it was. Was it Island? Was it Joe Boyd’s organisation, Witchseason? Was it something that got caught in the middle?
I think it’s a really interesting puzzle. I wish I had a good answer for that. No one has. I’ve tried. As you rightly say, you can tell on a first airing that Five Leaves Left is the result of a lot of time, trouble, love, care etc. And yet when it came out in July 1969, it headed into a vacuum. There was no real promo effort, no concerted PR campaign, which does seem weird. I can try to explain it by saying that Witchseason was reeling because Fairport Convention had very recently, in May, had a terrible blow when Fairport Convention’s bus had gone over an embankment and killed their drummer and Richard Thompson’s girlfriend. All sorts of mayhem ensued from that. So I think that was one reason why their eye wasn’t massively on the ball with Nick. But secondly, I think Nick was just such a bad self-promoter, he just didn’t have the right personality to big himself up.
I think there was also perhaps a degree of miscommunication between Witchseason and Island, but also that they decided the best way to build Nick’s reputation was to leave him to his own devices and create a certain mystique, to allow the quality of the music to speak for itself. At the time Five Leaves Left came out, everyone, by common consensus, and certainly everyone I’ve spoken to who knew Nick and the album and who had been involved in it, thought it was just a given that it was going to be a success. I think they made that common idealistic error, sadly, of thinking that something that good simply had to succeed. And unfortunately, as we know very well from rock history, many of the best things take a very long time to be recognised as such. Meanwhile, the junk gets to the top of the charts.
Perhaps Nick had a degree of complacency, but in general he was led to believe, ‘Don’t worry, Five Leaves Left will slowly gather momentum like a snowball and eventually become a juggernaut’ (to mix my metaphors). And, unfortunately, that didn’t happen, so Nick came to feel a little bitter –understandably so.
I wasn’t aware before reading that Nick did play quite a bit live, certainly in that first period of releasing records (often on the bill with Genesis, for some reason). He doesn’t seem to have been positioned right, being sent off to play for rowdy audiences in rugby clubs. Yet folk clubs weren’t really the right fit for his sound either.
No, and this was a very frustrating problem for the people that were trying to help Nick, and of course for Nick himself. The perfect live environment for him would have been a small-to-medium-sized room with good acoustics, with seating and perhaps one or two ancillary musicians, a double bassist or some strings backing him, and a respectful atmosphere. He would, I think, have thrived under those circumstances, but you had to work towards that. If you wanted to play in a room like the Purcell Room at the Festival Hall, you had to work towards it by schlepping around, which involved dealing with the standard response to an unknown folk singer, which was chatting and laughter and heckling and people coming in and going out while you were playing.
And Nick, I think, was just not suited psychologically to controlling an audience, holding them in the palm of his hand not only in performance but also between songs. And I think he recognized quite quickly that the sort of music he was playing was never going to make an impact in those environments. So whilst he was grateful for a tenner at the end of the evening, and to an extent was dependent on that to keep body and soul together in his first few months after leaving university, I think he became increasingly aware that he wasn’t achieving anything by doing it and that it was just demoralising and tiring.
I also think it wasn’t something that came at all naturally to him. Without wanting it to sound like a criticism of him, I think he felt a little bit outside of an environment of schlepping around on trains, eating and sleeping badly, sleeping on people’s floors and having camaraderie with people who very largely didn’t come from the same background as him. I suspect he was a bit self-conscious in the travelling musician milieu, and overestimated how easily he could slot into it.
What was the background to Bryter Layter?
Nick started his third year at Cambridge in October 1969, but left almost immediately because he felt an overwhelming need to build on whatever momentum Five Leaves Left had created, and to make another album. And, without it being explicit, the decision was taken that it should be more broadly appealing. I’m trying to avoid saying ‘more commercial’ because that sounds cynical – ‘Let’s just add whatever we can to it to get it on the radio and into the charts…’
It wasn’t like that, but Joe felt that he had found such a rare talent in Nick that they’d made Five Leaves Left without giving a thought to the market’s desire for it, or response. And then I think they thought with Bryter Layter, ‘Well, let’s try to create an album with a more broadly appealing sound, which isn’t as austere and so forth’. I think Nick went into Bryter Layter with a lot of optimism and wrote the songs very much with those arrangements in mind – the drums, the horns and so on – and was very happy with it all.
What was John Cale’s role? And why did Bryter Layter take an age to get released?
Most of the recordings were complete by the end of March 1970, but two songs – Fly and Northern Sky – hadn’t been finished. I wish I knew why Nick didn’t ask Robert to arrange those – no one ever asked Robert and he never explained. I can speculate that he tried to arrange them and just couldn’t come up with a sound he was happy with, as had been the case with River Man. Or it may be that Nick hadn’t finished writing those songs to his satisfaction in time for them to be recorded at the same time as all the others. I just don’t know.
But one way or another, in June 1970 Fly and Northern Sky existed as backing tracks but not with arrangements, and until they were arranged, the album wasn’t finished. Joe was in Sound Techniques mixing Desertshore by Nico with John Wood and John Cale. At one point Joe said to John Cale, ‘Why don’t I play you some of the other recordings John Wood and I have been making recently?’. They threaded up the Bryter Layter recordings and Joe recalls that when John realised that Fly and Northern Sky were awaiting completion he immediately said, ‘I want to do it, I want to meet this guy, I want to work on these songs’. But this is going back 53 years now, so I don’t know exactly how it went down, whether or not Joe actually said to John, ‘Maybe you should talk to Nick because we don’t have any other ideas.’ Either way, Nick was basically blindsided by having Joe send John Cale over to his flat, and in no time at all, it seems these arrangements were put together and the songs were finished.
So Bryter Layter was done and dusted in June 1970, by the middle of the month. And then it was over to Island – but Island was going through a turbulent period in the second half of 1970. Chris Blackwell was changing his role within the company, they were rebranding from their famous pink design to their palm tree design, which was a big exercise, they were doing a big marketing campaign called El Pea, which involved holding back new releases so they could tie them in, then Joe decided to move back to America, which meant that Witchseason’s relationship with Island had to be renegotiated and agreed. Meanwhile Island was negotiating with Capitol to release previously unlicensed material in America, including Nick’s. And at the same time there were huge postal strikes in the UK, which meant that sending records off to reviewers and radio stations became more complicated. For one reason after another, Bryter Layter just kept being pushed back.
And sadly, simultaneously, over the course of 1970 Nick’s mental health started declining quite sharply. And the delay in the release of Bryter Layter aggravated his condition. I don’t think it caused it, but I think Nick became more and more frustrated that he’d left Cambridge in order to make this album and show the world what he had in him, and it wasn’t even being released, let alone not being listened to. So Bryter Layter’s delays, I think, really agonised Nick, and when it did come out in March 1971, nine months after it had been finished, when plausibly it could have come out the previous summer, I think he felt that a lot of momentum had been lost and that no one really remembered Five Leaves Left.
And the atmosphere was very different in 1971 to 1969 – the death of the hippie dream and so on. And I think Nick felt Bryter Layter had missed its chance – and, indeed, it also had wonderful reviews and very low sales.
It was quite a tumultuous period where things were going in the wrong direction. You’ve got the Bryter Layter delays, Joe Boyd leaving the UK, the place Nick was staying in being sold so he moved back to his parents’ home, then back to London into what seems quite a grim bedsit…
Yes, and overarching all of them was the fact that Nick didn’t feel that his music was reaching an audience. And because that had become his only real priority, it undermined all the other areas of his life. I think there was still an element of enjoyment of life for him – he did a bit of European travel and certainly belonged to a devoted and close group of friends and so on – but he did drift away psychologically over the course of 1970 to 71.
I think, in particular, moving back home was very unwelcome. I mean, who would want to move back in with their parents after they’d been living alone for 18 months in their own flat in London? Suddenly you’re back in the English countryside in your childhood bedroom… I don’t think there’s anything unusual about feeling a sense of frustration at that. But I think more generally, where Nick found himself in late 1971 compared to where he’d expected and been led to believe he would be, was very different. And I think that did cause a lot of resentment and frustration in him.
John Wood was surprised when he asked to go into the studio and record Pink Moon, which had a purposefully sparser sound.
I think it’s easy to put two and two together and get five on that, by saying ‘Well, obviously he didn’t like Bryter Layter because it had all these pop trappings on it, and when it didn’t sell he decided to go and make this stark album as a sort of two-finger salute to Joe Boyd and Island’. I think that’s wrong. My impression is that Nick had Pink Moon in mind a lot earlier than he recorded it. I think he knew even in 1969 that he wanted to work towards making an album of just him and his guitar, to push the instrument to express everything he could get it to.
But obviously it was a lot simpler to record just a guitar, and the delays over the release of Bryter Layter consolidated in Nick’s mind the wisdom of just making an album on his own. But I think the songs on Pink Moon date from much earlier than the recording. And I wonder, although of course I can’t state it, whether Nick actually knew deep down, in his worsening mental state, that he needed to get Pink Moon down on tape while he was still able, because his creative powers were diminishing.
His ability to generate new material and to play the guitar and sing simultaneously were going by 1971. The awareness that not only had he not found the audience that he really wanted, but also that he was losing his ability to generate material and to record and to perform was absolutely devastating for him.
I suspect that Nick really had to wrench Pink Moon out of himself and that it was an unpleasant and torturous process for him. As you say, it involved going back to live in a very unpleasant bedsit in Muswell Hill, which barely anyone gained access to – that’s where he put Pink Moon together. And he recorded it swiftly over the course of two evenings in October 1971. John Wood, who had worked closely with him on Five Leaves Left and Bryter Layter, was shocked by his physical appearance and his psychological condition. He was no longer as assertive or as talkative as he had been, and yet he delivered these wonderful, note-perfect recordings absolutely fluently. So the brilliance was still there, but things were running away from him in psychological terms.
Over the next few years it wasn’t as if Nick lacked people who would try and help him. He had Muff Winwood trying to push him – there was a time when he found a place for him on the Old Grey Whistle Test, but Nick pushed that away. You’ve got Joe Boyd, in terms of recording new material, and then – crucially – you’ve got Nick’s family trying to provide support where they could.
That’s absolutely right, Nick was not isolated in terms of other people’s encouragement and support and love and help – including professional help. I think one of the good things about the way Nick was handled is that people didn’t push him, but Island and Joe did say, ‘We’re here when you want us’. And that’s because the culture at Island, from Chris Blackwell downwards, was: ‘When we sign an artist, we believe in them. We don’t just sign people, stick out a record, and if it fails kick them out onto the street again. It might take them three or four albums before they have a hit, but it’s worth waiting for.’ The classic example was Free – Tons of Sobs and their second album didn’t do anything, then Fire and Water broke through. Island’s understanding and sympathetic infrastructure was perfect for Nick.
But the problem, the tragedy was that Nick had just lost his mojo, as it were. Obviously his whole life was going awry, and certainly he was unable to write new material. And the awful thread that runs through the last three years of his life is this desperate, ongoing attempt on his part to find his muse again.
And what we have is all there is. He wrote and recorded five more songs in that period, although I can’t even swear that he wrote those songs then – they may well date from earlier. And I think part of the reason that he took his life was a sudden moment of clarity, perhaps, where he realised that things weren’t going to change for him, that this was it. He didn’t have an album’s worth of new songs and he didn’t have a vision for his artistic future. If he didn’t take his medicine, he was miserable, but if he did take his medicine he was being controlled by an outside influence. The pills would dictate his moods and his ability to interact. And I think it was all too much for him. There’s this optimistic myth that a fourth album was on its way and he was immersed in recording it, but alas he just didn’t have the material, and I think that was eating him up.
One of the remarkable things about Nick Drake is that the quality of his material has shone through and his popularity just continues to build. After his passing there were pieces in the music papers, but in terms of his popularity things really started to build in the mid-90s.
Yes – when I was a teenager in the mid-90s it was just as normal to listen to Nick Drake as it was to listen to Neil Young or Bob Dylan or Joni Mitchell. So by then there wasn’t much of a sense in which he was an obscure ‘cult’ artist. He was part of the mix, certainly for my group of friends. And for that to have happened within 20 years is quite unusual – to go from nowhere to being on the same pegging as those sorts of people.
But I think Nick’s music is just very good. It’s well written, it’s well performed, the guitar playing is beautiful, the tunings are unusual, the structure of the songs is unpredictable and very carefully plotted out. And his voice is unusual. I think everything about his material is distinctive. So, as Joe Boyd says, it’s no surprise that an audience has connected with it – it’s just a shame it didn’t happen while he was around.
But Nick died in the belief that his music was absolutely obscure and unknown. I think he was unaware – perhaps because of the condition that he was in – that he did actually have quite a large fan base in his lifetime, and not just in England, and that there were people who would have loved to learn more about him.
I think, at the time of his death, had there been a full-page advert in the music press saying ‘Nick Drake performing tonight!’ at a reasonably sized venue, it would have filled up. I think he would have been surprised. In the years immediately following his death – 1975, 76, 77, 78, 79 – his records sold steadily more. His royalty statements grew every single year, culminating in 1979 with the release of Fruit Tree, which was pretty much the first retrospective box set any artist of Nick’s sort had ever had.
That in itself indicates that he was regarded as being in quite a special category within a few short years of his death.
So I think things were happening for Nick at the time of his death, but he just didn’t know it. Of course, the extent to which his death has lent itself to his popularity is hard to gauge, but I think things were starting to happen and I suspect, if he had lived, we would still be celebrating and enjoying his music. It would just be so nice for him to have been part of that.
Further information
Nick Drake: The Life by Richard Morton Jack
The audio podcast version will be available soon.
