Adventures on the High Teas

by Stuart Maconie

  The First World War haunts English music and culture for long passages of the twentieth century. This national wound may be at the core of the ineffable, indefinable sadness and loss beneath the loveliness of so much of Middle England’s music and poetry. It is a cliché to talk of a lost pre-war idyll and such. But it is also true. A generation was lost, amongst it writers like Wilfred Owen and composers like George Butterworth. For those who saw the bloodshed of Ypres and the Somme, the tranquil beauty of the Shires would forever after contain that sense of deep melancholy that the end of a late summer evening has, ripe with the sweet ache of mortality. It’s become a motif, a meme, of English art. And before we leave pop music, we should say that pop has not been immune to this Middle English melancholy, embodied in two lost talents whose stories echo those of Butterworth and Owen and the rest. These two young men didn’t go to war. But they did go missing in action.

  To reach the grave you take the curving path around the church and into the quiet wooded section to the rear. A very English vista opens up: mixed woodland and rich Warwickshire pasture land stretching towards the horizon where a line of comfortable houses stand. To the right of the path stands a fine oak tree and, below it, the family grave of the Drake family, who lived in nearby Far Leys House. It’s a late spring Saturday evening, the sun is slanting through the branches and glinting on the stained glass of St Mary Magdalene. The evening is golden but a chill is creeping into the sunlit air. There is no one here but me. It is, in a melancholy and very English way, perfect.

  The headstone tells you that here lies Rodney and Molly Drake and their son Nick. But more telling is the sign attached to the oak tree: ‘Fans are requested to pay their respects by leaving only small tokens or flowers.’ By and large, they have done that. There is no gruesome cairn of tat like the one at Jim Morrison’s grave in Père Lachaise, Paris, just a few Rizla papers and a couple of plectrums. Nothing much to suggest that Tanworth-in-Arden is a place of pilgrimage.

  Nick Drake could not have been a more different kind of pop star than Jim Morrison. Morrison of The Doors swaggered about in ludicrous leather trousers, was prone to getting his penis out on stage and partial to the odd armful of heroin or cocktail of narcotics. He sang about wanting to sleep with his mother, violent revolution and other very 1960s Californian notions and fronted a full-on psychedelic assault that made him a very rich and famous man.

  Nick Drake, on the other hand, was a quiet, bookish acoustic guitarist who sang plaintive, muted, lyrical songs about fruit trees, rivers, loneliness and lives quietly wasted. He studied at Cambridge but opted for a failed career as a musician. He sold few records, certainly far fewer than his talent deserved, and that fact only deepened his existing sense of depression and isolation. Nick Drake died when he was twenty-six, Morrison when he was twenty-seven, both deaths the result of drug use. Except Morrison died coughing up blood after a fix of heroin in a Paris bathroom and Nick Drake passed out in his parents’ house in a sleepy Warwickshire village after what may have been an accidental overdose of Triptizol, an antidepressant.

  Drake died in the winter of 1974. At that time his music was at best a coterie enthusiasm, largely ignored. Part of Drake’s problem was to have been an introspective balladeer at a time when rock music was at its loudest, most physical and most communal. In the intervening years, however, his cachet has grown to the extent that Brad Pitt, Jennifer Aniston and the late Heath Ledger have queued up to eulogise him. Documentaries and front covers abound now, a bitter irony given that one of Drake’s saddest songs ‘Fruit Tree’ concerns lack of recognition during life, concluding, ‘Safe in your place deep in the earth/ That’s when they’ll know what you were really worth.’

  Phil, the husband of the churchwarden at St Mary Magdalene’s, is standing in the sunlit doorway of the Bell Inn sipping his pint and looking contentedly at the sunset over his village church. He has much to be contented about. Tanworth feels like a delightful place to live, but it has seen the same changes that many of the villages of Middle England have. Once it would have been a self-contained community with its little shop, its blacksmith’s, its cluster of surrounding farms, possibly even its paternalist squire. You’d have worked here, in field or forge or mill or workshop. Now you probably work in Birmingham, and Tanworth, smarter than it once was, is a dormer village, a commuter’s dream, just half an hour from central Brum by performance car or ‘ultimate driving machine’.

  Inevitably, then, the older villagers, the farmers and such, drink elsewhere. Though not in the bar of the Crossroads Motel. For many years Tanworth played the village of Kings Oak in that long-running and much-mocked Midlands soap opera, and it’s odd to think that while Noele Gordon et al were hamming it up criminally for a film crew on the village green, Nick Drake may have been hunkered in his room just some yards away, writing the beautiful, stately songs that no one would listen to till after he was dead. In the graveyard, coincidentally, there lies another son of Middle England: the nine-times motorcycle champion Mike Hailwood, who drove his car into the path of an oncoming lorry one dark winter’s night taking his daughter to the chip shop. Phil tells me this as he sips his pint thoughtfully on the pub’s threshold.

  Inside the doorway is a sign proclaiming that this is one of the fifty best pubs in England and by it hangs a picture of Nick Drake. It is a typical picture, the handsome young man with his thatch of modish 1970s hair and his inscrutable, wry, slightly pained half smile. Inside, the restaurant is bustling and the bar is full of tanned, smart, new locals in smart casuals from Boden and Next. Is this Middle England? I ask one. ‘Oh yes, absolutely, and the best place on earth too. God’s own country,’ he says, draining half his pricey continental lager at a pull. He is wearing an aftershave full of woody top notes, wearing a Hugo Boss shirt and the keys to a top-marque German car are on the bar by him.

  Not everyone agrees with him. Some locals feel that the gentrification of the village has gone too far. ‘Overpriced food and beer obviously appeal to the wealthy villagers living behind their electronic gates’ is one comment on a local internet forum, whilst another reads, ‘I got the feeling that proper local villagers would only be welcome if they had suitable cool and trendy clothes on that would blend in with the modern surroundings. It is interesting to wonder (had he lived) what Nick Drake would have made of his new-look local.’

  I don’t know if Nick Drake went in for pubs much actually. I somehow can’t see him sinking a pint of Grolsch while watching Chelsea on the big-screen telly or engaging in ribaldry with the barmaid before putting money in the quiz machine. The church across the way is somehow more in his line. Phil is taking the choir to the Royal Albert Hall tomorrow for a competition. He shows me around. There’s a brass organ stop in memory of Nick, paid for by Rodney and Molly, and the visitors’ book is full of tributes to Nick from pilgrims from all around the world. They have come from Albuquerque and Athens, from Milan and Moscow. They leave sweet messages and quote his lyrics. Once a year what began as the organist playing a recital of his music has blossomed into a small, very Middle English festival. They come from far and wide, in BMWs and camper vans, pitching tents in the local farmers’ fields. They don’t, as a rule, stay at the Bell. When Rodney and Molly were alive, they’d let them in, make them copies of Nick’s home recordings, let them be photographed in his room. The new owners are, understandably, a bit less welcoming of these zealous strangers camping on their doorstep and hammering at their door.

  ‘We do get older people, the sort who might have bought Nick’s music the first time round, but it’s mainly younger ones. They’re often …’ here Phil chooses his words delicately – ‘they’re often a bit lost, I think…a bit unsure of themselves. A bit like Nick really.’

  This Saturday evening, a young girl who fits the above description rather well is sitting in the church porch on the bench below the parish notices. She is pale and thin, smoking furtively and reading from a battered paperback novel. When she sees me, she smiles and even gives a l
ittle wave but scuttles away before I can talk to her. I decide she’s a local girl getting out of the house for a crafty fag rather than an acolyte come from afar. But even so, it seems an apt image: a lost young woman in a twilit English graveyard where one of Middle England’s lost young men lies asleep.

  Syd Barrett was asleep, lost, even dead you might say, for three decades before his actual death. Like Drake, he was a well-brought-up son of Middle England. Like Drake, he spent his formative years in Cambridge and, like Drake, he was a delicate, attractive youth whose promise was lost due to mental fragility. In Barrett’s case, though, the former front man and initial genius of Pink Floyd was seemingly waylaid and devastated by a cataclysm brought on by hallucinogenic drug use in the late 1960s. Barrett’s music, both his solo work and that with Pink Floyd, teems with images of childhood and innocence and, lurking behind it, menace: scarecrows, gnomes, wonky bicycles.

  For me, Nick Drake and Pink Floyd are as much the sound of England, indeed the sound of Middle England, as ‘Greensleeves’ and the ‘Enigma’ Variations. Though they fall loosely under the auspices of rock music – very loosely in Drake’s case – their sound and their mien are literal and metaphorical miles from The Clash or Oasis or even The Rolling Stones. Mick and Keith are good suburban Kent boys rather than the plantation-owning piratical pimp hustler drag-queen romantic poets they would have you believe, but nothing in their work echoes Middle England like Drake or Floyd, with Barrett or after.

  With Nick Drake, it’s in the actual sound. The finger-picked acoustic guitar with its hint of minstrelsy and the delicate pastoral arrangements provided by his Cambridge friend Robert Kirby. No synthesizers or searing electric guitar solos here, but the plaintiveness of oboes and cellos, the sweetness of celesta and chamber strings. Drake’s voice too – deep, refined, thoughtful – is more Keats than Keith Richard and more given to regretful reveries than sexual braggadocio.

  Pink Floyd, especially after Barrett’s departure, evolved into a rock behemoth, massively amplified, hugely successful. But at the heart of their work is a comparable melancholy. On their magnum opus The Dark Side of the Moon they actually sing of ‘plans that either come to naught or half a page of scribbled lines’ and ‘hanging on in quiet desperation is the English way’. You don’t come across ‘naught’ in many Bon Jovi or Guns N’ Roses lyrics. And even though their music is self-evidently rock, it is full of evocations of otherness, a very Middle English otherness: the tolling of bells, the ticking of clocks, murmured conversations. It is an eerie world, reminiscent of Lear or Belloc, and dates back to Barrett’s earliest work with the group.

  ‘His old bike went for fifteen grand, you know. Just a rackety old thing that he used to cycle down to Budgens on.’ Marcus Barraclough vaguely remembers Barrett from his youth when Marcus’s dad gave the young Syd, or Roger as he was then, extra tuition in maths. Marcus is giving me a lift to the station after a few days in Cambridge for the folk festival. As we drive along the Cherry Hinton Road, he tells me that Barrett was a fairly common sight around town, shopping, cycling, largely undisturbed by locals if occasionally hounded by door-stepping journalists and fans. Pictures of him from this time show a bald, overweight, middle-aged man in dowdy T-shirts and shorts. Whenever a new one of these saw the light of day, taken without his consent or approval by some tittle-tattler or hack, the ensuing commentary would revolve around how terrible he looked. In truth, he doesn’t look that terrible. He looks depressingly like quite a lot of fifty-odd-yearold blokes in modern England. No, the problem is that he doesn’t look like Syd Barrett, the dark-eyed lysergic romantic of the summer of love. ‘He were a good-looking lad, alright, if you look at his old pictures,’ says the chatty, amiable lady in the very Budgens where Syd bought his provisions (milk, potatoes, cheese, eggs, nothing fancy). ‘Such a shame. That’s drugs for you,’ she says sadly, standing in front of her rows of Blue WKD, Smirnoff Ice and Marlboro Lites.

  Barrett had lived here, quietly, reclusively even, since his withdrawal from the world of rock and roll. The story is well known in the world of rock and a paraphrase will suffice here. Having been the presiding genius behind Pink Floyd’s first album, that high-water mark of British psychedelia Piper at the Gates of Dawn, Barrett’s behaviour became increasingly erratic. At live shows he would play one chord for hours, detune his guitar, stand immobile, rub Brylcreem and crushed-up Mandrax pills into his hair and generally right royally piss off his band mates. An old schoolfriend, David Gilmour, was recruited to cover for Barrett’s unreliability and for a while both were in the band. According to Gilmour, on the way to a show at Southampton University, one band member in the car said, ‘Shall we pick Syd up?’ and another replied, ‘Let’s not bother.’ That was the end of Barrett’s time in Pink Floyd.

  How much Barrett’s problems were clinical and psychiatric and how much drug-induced is hard to say. There are lurid tales of unscrupulous dealers and hangers-on keeping him a prisoner in a cupboard and feeding him massive doses of LSD. Whatever, after his departure from Pink Floyd and an intermittent attempt at a solo career, Barrett came home in 1981 to 6 St Margaret’s Square, Cambridge, and stayed there for the rest of his life.

  It’s a tidy if nondescript bay-windowed little house in a quiet suburb of Cambridge, or as the estate agents put it when it went up for sale in 2007, ‘occupying an outstanding position in a highly regarded cul-de-sac to the south of the city centre’. I like the idea of a highly regarded cul-de-sac. I myself have never come across one. However, it may be the cul-de-sac’s top-notch reputation amongst suburban mews devotees in addition to the Syd connection that brought in a hundred viewings. In the end it was bought by a French couple who hadn’t a clue that the lost genius of English rock had lived there. The new owners are not in evidence today. Then again, what was I expecting? Onions? Stripy T-shirts? Gallic shrugging and Gauloises? I don’t hang about as the place used to get its fair share of creeps and gawpers back in Syd’s day and I don’t wish to be lumped in with either category or chased off by one of the famously (and rightly) protective neighbours.

  Instead I find a wi-fi hotspot by a town centre café, watch the students cycle by, order a latte and find various news items relating to the sale of 6 St Margaret’s Square after Syd Barrett’s death from pancreatic cancer on Friday 7 July 2006. The items are largely in the plonking, quite charming but largely uninformative style of the local teatime magazine show. It’s a little curious hearing Barrett, creator of ‘Interstellar Overdrive’ and doomed angelic avatar of British progressive rock talked of in the same jolly, RANDOMLY emphasised delivery usually employed for sheep who wear iPods or a retired dinner lady who has made a flan in the shape of Prince Charles.

  ‘These are the bizarre yet banal belongings of one of Britain’s true eccentrics,’ says the jaunty lady on the voiceover whilst the camera pans across examples of Syd’s botched DIY in the form of a couple of slanting shelves straight out of The Cabinet of Doctor Caligari and a useless-looking toilet-roll holder. Then we move on to Syd’s belongings being prepared for auctions. A blue anglepoise lamp is labelled, breathtakingly, ‘£70’, and there are two ‘sit up and beg’ bikes, one in red and one in blue. Just as Syd sang in the madcap classic ‘Bike’, they both have ‘a basket, a bell that rings and things to make it look good’. It’s this resonance with the 1967 song that means the bikes will eventually go for that reported cool fifteen grand. In all, Syd’s funny, touching collection of knickknacks and arty-crafty things fetches a hundred thousand pounds.

  I finish my latte and take a cab to the outskirts of town where there’s a Floydian landmark I want to see before I leave. The band were all very rooted in this university town, its cloistered cool, its sense of academe and reverie as well as hi-jinks and ‘games for May’. After Syd had gone, they made an album called Umma Gumma, apparently Fenland slang for sexual intercourse, and on this album was a track called ‘Grantchester Meadows’.

  I’m walking through those meadows now. Cambridge is a fine town
in terms of history and architecture and the famous ‘Backs’ are a nice spot for a punt but really first-rate scenery is at a premium. Flat and swampy make for evocative but not for romance. So generations of Cambridgians have come to frolic here, in these wild acres of riverside meadows. You can reach them by punt naturally – allow about three hours, you can hire one in the city – or via a long-ish walk from town via the path known as the Grantchester Grind, which gave its name to one of those comic novels by Tom Sharpe that I never found as funny as everyone else did. Or you can cheat and get a taxi and nip behind the Red Lion and the Green Man – you may even get distracted temporarily here – and down to the riverside from the village path. Curiously, I meet a lady in a cerise pashmina with diamante filigree struggling to contain a high-spirited cocker spaniel. ‘He once found half a pound of sausages here so he thinks it’s going to happen every time,’ she explained, as Benjy leaped and jumped and strained at his leash, the memory of his previous feast still very much alive in his mind.

  I don’t ask why his owner is so fabulously overdressed for Benjy’s daily constitutional. Perhaps she is an eccentric academic, an absent-minded astro-physicist or maverick poet. This is entirely possible since this outlying village of Cambridge is said to have a greater concentration of Nobel Prize winners than anywhere else in the world and, Pink Floyd aside, there are at least two other reasons for coming here if you’re searching for the soul of Middle England. That’s for later though. For the moment I stop and, slightly self-consciously as the day isn’t really good enough to merit sunbathing, I stretch out in the long grass on the sloping bank between the pubs of the villages and the lazy meandering river and take out my iPod, scroll to the Pink Floyd section and play the two songs I associate with this tranquil but slightly eerie spot.

  Appropriately the songs are tranquil and slightly eerie. One is ‘Cirrus Minor’, which may or may not be about Grantchester but I’ve always associated it with this kind of landscape in this flat, still part of England. It begins in a cloudy noonday haze of birdsong and unfolds into a gently bleak evocation of river, churchyard and willows, always trembling somewhere between reverie and nightmare (‘laughing in the grasses and the graves’) and eventually dissolving into what seems an acid-drenched fantasy backed by organ chorale (‘On a trip to Cirrus Minor/saw a crater in the sun, a thousand miles of moonlight later’). I’ve loved it since I first heard it on the copy of Relics I borrowed from John Howarth – he’d coloured in the Heath Robinson machines on the cover in felt-tip, bless him – in my first year at grammar school. Here, amongst the ripples and the reeds, it is creepily perfect.