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 ick Drake was a weird, gentle, classically trained, insane singer/songwriter in the Syd Barrett line. Overdosed at twenty-six, probably on purpose. Wrote "Pink Moon." Was born upper-class British, was probably molested, smoked more marijuana than the rest of the world combined, owned and wore only one outfit for the last two years of his life, roamed. Despite writing three of the finest albums in jazz-folk-depressed history (with guest appearances by John Cale and members of the Beach Boys), had no career in his own lifetime, largely due to his refusal to give interviews or play live or even talk. But the longer he's dead, the better he's loved.
Hi Trevor. Are you familiar with Hooksexup? Well I wasn't, until the lady at Perseus got in touch with me. I got on it and I thought, "Oh blimey, it's a bit saucy." I got back to her and said, "I don't have to pose for this magazine, do I?" No, but really, I checked out lots of your other stuff, and I thought, blimey, if this feral author has any time at all to talk about a musician like Nick Drake, isn't that interesting? When you think, hello, this bloke died in 1974, never sold any records outside of the UK in his lifetime, nobody frankly cared if he lived or died, and now all these years later there's people like you, a young woman in New Hampshire, people in Boise, Idaho, people all around the world who have found him in some way. The musician Smog was influenced by him early on. He was the one who made me a Nick Drake cassette in my youth. Long before the Volkswagon commercial made him a household name. You do find that initially it was other musicians, mentioning him in interviews, spreading the word. I live quite near Syd Barrett, recently demised. People give Syd a big credit for being a huge influence, but I'm here to tell you I don't think a lot of people listen to Syd Barrett records. I think they recognize him to be a great hero; I'm not sure they listen to his tunes a lot. Whereas when you play Nick Drake records for people, you find them on. People play them at dinner parties. People use them as soundtracks to the World Cup. You just like Nick Drake records. Children like Syd Barrett records. At least my children do. I get that. I knew Syd Barrett a bit, or Roger as he was known. There was something rather . . . I wouldn't say childish, but childlike about what he did, and there's no parallel with Nick Drake, except that Nick Drake also made a lot of music that he didn't think a lot of people would like, but some people did say, "Oh hello, I quite like this — it's not showbiz, it's just plain real." You hint that he may have been molested. I can't prove this. I'd really like to give an interview where I could say, "Yes, Nick Drake was molested by his dad." But I can't prove it, so I can't say it. Which is why stuff I did put in my book was lawyered out. What we're dealing with is a family where children were seen but not heard, where things were not talked about. At a minimum, I get a sense that Nick was uncomfortable with his sexuality, and uncomfortable in general. I think his dad, who was an absolutely classic English bridge over the river quiet kind of bloke would have found Nick's ambivalence very difficult to deal with, and Nick and his dad had an issue, and I don't know what it is. If anything happened, I think it happened at home, not boarding school. I talked to [former Drake biographer] Patrick Humphries about this, and he said he never met anyone who thought he had that kind of relationship at school, but he said he did meet people who said, "Ooooh. His dad was a bit odd." But
What do you think of that scene where the guy walks in on Nick Drake in his dorm room and there's two naked girls? Weird! I don't think he did anything with them! I think they were just there, naked. Just hanging out, smoking. Yes, that's what I think. I think if you were picked up by Nick in a bar, what you got was an evening of, "Do you like my songs?" And after, "I think it's time you went home." I bet it was Asperger's! That inability to understand or translate emotions. Music as a conduit between him and the rest of the humans. Yes, that has a resonance. But again, I don't know. Have you met Linda Thompson [the singer]? No. She's great. I've never met you, but I rather suspect you and Linda would get along well, because Linda's very upfront in the physical department. You know, Linda wants to shag. A lot. Blimey! She's very warm, very giving. She said to me, and I quoted it in the book, that in that era, if a guy offered you a light for your cigarette, it felt churlish not to sleep with him. She was, as close as one got to that, Nick's girlfriend, and it would have been the most natural thing in the world for them to have sex — but it never happened. His friend Brian Wells said, "I can't imagine him ever having sex, because that would mean having to take his clothes off." Nick Drake was very repressed. The song your book derives its title from also has the line "I'm weaker than the palest blue." That was one of the first songs that he wrote. Like with Kurt Cobain lyrics, you could sort of see it coming with Nick. Here was a very troubled boy. I think your book narrates a progression of becoming a certain way — pale blue; then of making something out of it — these songs, his persona; and finally, being overtaken by it, and destroyed. Which was kind of what he was asking for. He almost chose to take the magic moments, to see something in the air, over having a life . . . being weighed down by living, by being real. I think that's a very good analysis of him. At the time, I knew kids who thought a Rimbaudesque, possibly drug-induced decline was noble. And I wonder if a piece of Nick Drake went, "Yeah. This is really cool! I fucked up and I'm going down." So maybe it was something that he not only saw coming, but made happen. Is it true that Nick Drake only gave one interview in his life? Yeah. With Melody Maker. That was his one written interview. He did no radio interviews, no television, nothing. I worked in the music business and in radio in the '70s, and it was not that difficult to get other reluctant performers like John Martyn to speak. But Nick just, from the very first days, felt sort of got at by the media. He wouldn't be doing this interview for sure, Lisa! I think he would have gone, "Ohhh God, no, can't stand it!" It would have hurt his head. Yes, that's why I have this nice, cool Pinot Grigio here. Can you talk about the high link between excessive cannabis consumption and schizophrenia? Brian Wells was one of Nick's best friends at Cambridge and has since become a top psychiatrist whose specialty is narcotic addiction. He suggested I read the recent papers on cannabis, and I did. And what substantial amounts of cannabis do is render you liable — if you are that way inclined — to schizophrenia. There's a lot of folks now at the age Nick Drake would be — fifty and sixty — showing signs of schizophrenia because of their enormous indulgence of cannabis when they were in their teens and twenties and thirties. Nick, ill at ease with people, probably thought, "Oh, I'll smoke a few jays and I'll be cool." But actually the more of it he smoked, the more dysfunctional and the less receptive to other people's company he became. There's no movie footage. There's the one interview where he didn't say much and then he left. In conversations, he wouldn't answer. His friend Jeremy asked if the song with his name in it was about him, and Nick said yes, and Jeremy asked what does it mean and Nick said if you don't know, it's too late, and he wouldn't say anything else. That's classic Nick. He didn't want any of that. He didn't want a conversation. There were maybe no completed relationships. There is nobody who will stand up and say, "I had sex with Nick." I think if he had been, you know, a great swordsman, by now we would have had a whole procession of dodgy old blueridges and tarts saying, "Oh yeah, I was shagged by Nick Drake." Even his friendships seemed less than whole. They'd play music together, but as far as being human, it seemed like he wandered in and out of people. Yeah. Everyone you meet, they say, "I knew him really well." And then you ask them, "Well did you know about such-and-such?" And they say, "Well, no, I didn't know that." I think the key word is compartmentalization. He had his university friends; he had his London debutantes/Chelsea bohemians; he had his musical Witchseason friends — but he never introduced anyone from one group to another. So none of them ever met one another until the funeral. We're all like that a bit, but he went out of his way to keep people separate.
That chimes a big bell for me. I read a lot about that while writing this book. Because there's so much fog, so much unsaid, his lyrics really stand out. Like they're glowing in nothing. No business to distract from them. Right. And we can all analyze lyrics from anyone and any era. But I have a feeling that Nick Drake's lyrics didn't mean nothing. I don't think he wrote lyrics just to have songs. I think he meant them. I think he wanted us to understand them. Before he died, he rewrote them all into a notebook. I think he liked them in a way as an epitaph. Are they easy to interpret? Well, no. But they give you a reason to think about them. I think he wanted us to peer through that fog, as you call it, and find him. Perhaps more than anyone I can think of, I think he lived out the William Blake quote you mentioned in your book: "Create your own symbols or be ruled by another man's." It's easy to fall for that, of course, when somebody dies young. If he was now an old man working as a lawyer, we'd not believe any of this, all these theories. But I really do believe he had some sense of where he belonged in that canon of English poetry as well as English songwriting. Some lyrics: "So leave your house/ Come into my shed/ Please stop my world from raining through my head." I think he's asking a sane girl to love and protect him, in his insanity. I think "Clothes of Sand" too, and quite a lot of his songs, are about that: "Sort me out, come help me, because Lord this is hard work." Oh, the ladies love that plea! They do like that. But it doesn't necessarily mean he wanted a girl. He wanted somebody to come find him. Was it his mum? His dad? God? A bloke? Who knows? n°
©2006 hooksexup.com and Lisa Carver. |
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