NICK DRAKE – THE LIFE by Richard Morton Jack

It is the summer of 1966 and Nick Drake is with friends in St Tropez, playing his guitar for passers-by late into the night. “He played beautifully and people would clap at the end of each song,” says one of the friends. “But he never looked up in any way to solicit their applause or adoration.”

        “It was as if he was playing for himself, and the appreciation of others was incidental,” adds Richard Morton Jack, establishing a theme that runs throughout his exhaustively detailed yet simultaneously gripping biography of the singer, songwriter and – most significantly – immensely gifted guitarist who died at the age of 26 after swallowing an overdose of tablets prescribed to combat depression.

In truth, Nick never did seek acclaim for his work, not in St Tropez nor anywhere else in the years that followed. It was his absurdly romantic notion that acclaim would come anyway, without his taking steps to achieve it, and while a lack of material success in his lifetime is mooted as the cause of his depression, fame is nevertheless unlikely to have sat easily on his fragile psyche. “Fame is but a fruit tree, so very unsound,” he sings in ‘Fruit Tree’, a chillingly prescient song from his debut LP Five Leaves Left. “It can never flourish, ’Til its stock is in the ground.”

        This is one of the many conundrums that Morton Jack wrestles with as he shadows Nick from his birth in 1948 in Rangoon, where his father worked as an engineer, to his death in 1974 in Tanworth-in-Arden in Warwickshire, to where the upwardly mobile family, dad Rodney, mother Molly, sister Gabrielle and infant son, relocated in 1952. 

This is a desperately sad book, all the more so because it opens with his passing, but the popular notion of Nick Drake as a friendless loner is put to the sword by Morton Jack’s scrupulous research. Although he tended to compartmentalise them, Nick had plenty of friends and admirers in both the music business and elsewhere, from his home in Tanworth, from school and college in Cambridge, and from the creative world in which he immersed himself in London. Morton Jack has tracked down dozens of them, and their testimony leaves no doubt Nick was loved and admired by many. Trouble was, hardly anyone bought his records, not until long after he lay in the ground. 

The book benefits from the co-operation of Gabrielle, an accomplished actor, now retired, and from Drake’s estate which has been astutely managed by Martin ‘Cally’ Callomon, whom I met many years ago as the designer of Pete Frame’s book Rockin’ Around Britain. In a heartfelt Foreword, Gabrielle points out that this is not an ‘Authorised Biography’ which to her mind translates as a ‘straightjacketed affair, tailored … to fit the desired image of the protagonist’. It’s certainly no whitewash, for Nick Drake is presented warts and all, with high praise for his music tempered by excruciating aspects of his otherworldliness as he passes through life utterly incapable of dealing with its practicalities. “Nick’s story has too often been overshadowed by the tragedy of his final illness,” writes Gabrielle. “There was nothing romantic about it: like most mental illnesses, it was grim, repetitive and relentless, and it cruelly robbed him of his creative muse.”  

This makes the last 100 pages of the book fairly harrowing reading, with details of Nick’s descent into a private netherworld that involved extreme examples of behaviour we can euphemistically describe as eccentric. Rodney Drake noted all of this in a diary, to which Morton Jack had access, and it is fortunate for him too that the Drakes were not only dedicated letter-writers but also hoarders. Gabrielle evidently handed over a treasure trove of personal correspondence that, among other things, leaves no doubt as to the closeness of a loving family that supported Nick in every way to the very end, even if they were as baffled as to how to deal with their strange son as everyone else. “We could never get through to him either,” one friend told Rodney after the funeral.

The bare bones of Nick Drake’s life, his comfortable childhood, public school education, somewhat fortunate ascent to Cambridge, from where he dropped out to make records with producer Joe Boyd that were released via Boyd’s Witchseason production company on Island Records, is well told but not new. Patrick Humphries’ 1997 biography and Trevor Dann’s Darker Than The Deepest Sea in 2006 told much the same story, but both lack the immense detail that Morton Jack brings to his book, not to mention the personal touch afforded by the family archive. At times I felt I was sitting on Nick’s shoulders. 

        Similarly, Morton Jack lists just about every gig Nick performed – “a few more than thirty” – and speaks to many who saw him on stage. The common belief that almost all were disasters due to his lack of presentation skills is also dismissed, though some were, and he concedes that Island were at a loss as to how to promote him beyond sampler albums and the usual ads in the music press. Furthermore, with help from Nick’s musical collaborators, Morton Jack delves assiduously into the construction of his songs, the guitars that Nick used and the literary roots of his lyrics, scrutinising them with the proviso that his analysis is simply his interpretation and that no one can know for sure what Nick was singing about. That, of course, was his special genius and the reason why, almost 50 years after his death, Nick Drake is as revered as he is. 

Joe Boyd agrees. “He was a better [guitar] player than Bert Jansch, John Renbourn, John Martyn and Robin Williamson,” he says, a statement that took me aback somewhat. “I thought Nick was obviously a genius,” adds the producer who even now feels a twinge of guilt that he was unable to somehow help his protégé during the mental illness that devoured him. In this he is far from alone. 

Tenderly perhaps, Morton Jack does not dwell overlong on the aftermath, the posthumous recognition that in many ways softened the grief for Nick’s family and others. It is, after all, The Life, and it is a given that those who read the book will already know how Nick’s music reached out to and became enjoyed by millions in the decades that followed. This reticence on Morton Jack’s part somehow echoes the reticence of Nick himself, the introverted artist who in his own mind knew his capability but was somehow unable to communicate it to others. 

        Nick Drake The Life is a wonderful book, the last word on an enigma that, in equal measure, never ceases to fascinate and inspire.