All the Madmen

by Clinton Heylin

  By the time The Storyteller shows ran their course, brother David had realized the prospects of The Kinks continuing as a viable outfit were slim to negligible. He therefore decided he, too, would take his own version of The Kinks’ recorded history on the road. And so, in 1997, Dave Davies, bolstered by a band from the nearest garage, gave a version of The Kinks’ kanon that also included ‘I’m Not Like Everybody Else’, but precious little from post-1968. It was a battle royal for the right to define where the real Kinks legacy lay. And it was one David was bound to lose.

  The whole issue of who got to define a band’s legacy as an ongoing, viable touring entity had just been fought out over the far more lucrative battleground that was Pink Floyd, culminating in a 1994 world tour by the Waters-less Floyd that broke a number of records for tour grosses (which only served to piss off Waters a little bit more). The tour provided the English Rock Album of the early Seventies with a new kind of validation. Hundreds of thousands of young fans scrambled for tickets when it was announced that a band calling itself Pink Floyd (minus its main songwriter/s) would be performing Dark Side of the Moon in its entirety. A European tour, including a record-breaking fifteen nights at the still-soulless Earls Court arena, resulted in the inevitable CD/DVD, Pulse.

  Although Roger Waters had not been in Pink Floyd for thirteen years now – and had even initially pursued an expensive legal case to stop the others using the group’s name, proof positive he really thought it was ‘his band’ – this was the second world tour the residue trio had successfully undertaken. And this time they were determined to celebrate every aspect of the band’s history, from the preferred nightly opener, Barrett’s ‘Astronomy Domine’, to the latest song that concerned itself with ‘the state of Syd’, Dave Gilmour’s ‘Poles Apart’ (‘I thought of you and the years . . . I never thought that you’d lose that light in your eyes’).

  Gone but not forgotten – at least not by the ever-generous Gilmour – Barrett’s recorded solo legacy had in the interim been given its own boxed-set validation. In 1993 EMI issued a three-CD set that expanded the two solo albums and 1988’s welcome archival trawl, Opel, with alternative takes and bonus cuts. And if that remembrance of things past didn’t fully reaffirm his fleeting genius, there was also a thirtieth anniversary edition of the Floyd’s still-astonishing debut long-player, the timeless Piper at the Gates of Dawn, in its correct mono form, complete with a ‘bonus disc’ of all three official singles – ‘Arnold Layne’, ‘See Emily Play’ and ‘Apples and Oranges’ – from the Syd era. It was a much-needed reminder that the world was still catching up with Syd’s space-age imagination.

  Syd himself, though, was now long lost in the woods, and when the band was inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame on 17 January 1996 – along with David Bowie and The Velvet Underground (the latter having been turned down in 1992 so that Sam and Dave, I kid thee not, could be inducted) – he was as absent from the occasion as the band’s latterday frontman, Roger Waters. Thus did Barrett, Bowie and Reed join the likes of The Beatles, The Rolling Stones and The Kinks in this shrine to the notion that Rolling Stone could define this thing called Rock 3,000 miles away from its epicentre.

  Already successfully inducted were The Who, who in 1996 returned to the stage themselves, just not at the Waldorf Astoria at a thousand bucks a head. Instead, they prepared to perform the album that through most of the 1970s had been viewed as their albatross – Quadrophenia – determined to prove how much it had grown in stature in the intervening years. And no longer was Townshend an apologist for it. He was now its proud father. After debuting it to a huge London crowd at a Prince’s Trust concert in Hyde Park in June, he finally took the album to New York – the one obvious pit-stop they bypassed on the original 1973 tour – for five triumphant nights at Madison Square Gardens. Townshend himself had no doubts as to why the fans came out:

  Pete Townshend: One of the reasons I wanted to do this . . . [was] to draw attention to this great, great record, probably the best record that The Who made. Really, I think it’s almost perfect. I could write more material, I could edit it, but what we’ve actually done is tried to be very faithful to what is there . . . I’ve written a script around the album and that’s what people will see. [1996]

  He had indeed worked on the presentation, making for a tightly scripted performance of the entire double-album with brief narration at appropriate junctures, and with special guests playing some of the key roles (and hitting some of the notes Daltrey could no longer scale), including a surprisingly convincing Gary Glitter, pre-disgrace, as the Godfather, and Billy Idol as Ace Face. Finally, Townshend had successfully reclaimed the album from Franc Roddam’s 1979 film, which made some bogus love story out of Jimmy/Pete’s existential angst, and which even an enthused Pete admitted at the time ‘doesn’t have much to do with the musical journey I mapped out’. Such was the demand for this slice of Seventies nostalgia that the reconstituted Who proceeded to tour the album around the States for five weeks in the fall of 1996, and around Europe in the spring of 1997, culminating in a final show at Wembley Arena at the end of May.40 Throughout it all, the work continued to stand proud.

  *

  It seemed at times like almost any album from this rich period was now ripe for re-evaluation, as this most populist of centuries wound down to a musically ‘retro’ conclusion. There was even a place to be for Nick Drake, the songwriter who, back in 1968, had sung of how ‘men of fame can never find a way / ’Till time has flown far from their dying day’.

  For the longest time it had seemed like Drake – of all those English artists who shattered their psyches in the cause of pop-as-art back then – was destined to remain known only to the cognoscenti, while his searing sensibility had been seen as a near insurmountable obstacle to widespread recognition Stateside. As far back as 1978 Neil Powell had pointed out, in the incongruous setting of The London Magazine, the fact that Drake ‘delineates more tellingly than any other contemporary songwriter the hinterland between despair and fragile happiness which is the territory of a peculiarly English melancholia’. (John Martyn always felt that ‘the thing that set him apart . . . [was] his implicit, innate Britishness’.) Even a tragically early death, usually the smartest of all career moves, had failed to produce more than a slowburn of cultish interest in keeping with the deeply personal, introspective nature of his music. The expanded, four-disc edition of the boxed-set Fruit Tree (1986) seemed like the final word, even as the demand for more – scratch that, any – information was imperceptibly achieving critical mass.

  Then in 1994, a sixteen-track introduction specifically for the CD age, Way to Blue, compiled and sequenced by Joe Boyd, proved that the cult was in full swing critically, if not commercially. It prompted both a two-page overview in Q by Stuart Maconie – who at the end of his article pulled to pieces those who ‘make romantic noises about his being “not of this world” . . . while ignoring the fact that he was mentally ill’ – and a ruminative think-piece in the Independent by Ben Thompson.

  Lucinda Williams had already made ‘Which Will’ (penned by Nick Drake), a cathartic coda to her magnificent 1992 album, Sweet Old World, when Mark Eitzel gamely attempted to get inside his fellow songwriter’s head, writing a brief verbal riff about ‘Pink Moon’ for NME. Eitzel, the main songwriter in those critical darlings American Music Club, considered ‘Pink Moon’ quite an ‘inarticulate song, which is where it gets its power . . . Even though you don’t know what the catastrophe is, you know there is no pretence to him [Drake]. The only hook is the descending chorus [when] you get the feeling that you’re descending with him.’ So, no romantic noise emanating from this direction, even as the album and title track almost imperceptibly continued to make its disturbed presence felt across that lonesome ocean. A year later, an alt-grunge rendition of ‘Pink Moon’ by Sebadoh, on their album, Sebadoh Vs Helmet, proved beyond a shadow of doubt that Drake’s songs could survive even the most head-banging of arrangements.

  Finally, in Feb
ruary 1997, the diffident Drake graced his first major magazine cover, as Mojo ran a lengthy profile by respected pop journalist Patrick Humphries – hard at work on his long-threatened biography of the songwriter. And despite all the usual obstacles that a first biographer of an obscure dead artist must surmount, Humphries’ 280-page study, published at year’s end, finally filled in a fair few blanks. Three years later, Mojo gave Ian MacDonald thirteen more of its internationally distributed pages for a think-piece on Drake that attacked ‘the aura of romantic doom which accompanies [his work] like some unwanted orchestra dubbed on by sentimental hindsight’. MacDonald even decided to challenge the view that Drake was cripplingly depressed by the time he recorded his 1972 album:

  Pink Moon is spoken of as bleak, skeletal, nihilistic, ghoulish, a suicidal plea for help. This grim view is unfair, the crowning misconception created by viewing Nick Drake as a troubadour of tragedy . . . This uncanny, magical record, far from bleak and ghoulish, is a stark, sparingly beautiful meditation on redemption through spiritual trial. Pink Moon isn’t about death, but about resurrection.

  This eloquent case for the defence was clearly written from the heart, being a view that the chronically depressed MacDonald was himself desperate to believe. Indeed, shortly before taking his own life in 2003, he would place the unedited version of this article as the final, telling piece in an anthology of his collected writings, The People’s Music. It certainly opened up the debate on what drove Drake, as well as how much drugs had played a part in both his music-making and decline into silence. But even MacDonald’s angle on this touchy subject smacked of the unregenerate hippy idealist: ‘Drake’s interest in drugs is well documented but less well understood. Nowadays associated with pure pleasure, drugs meant something different in the Sixties, being often linked with the . . . quest for “enlightenment” . . . His drug use . . . involve[d] a fascination with perception and reality.’

  What MacDonald refused to acknowledge was that this ‘aura of romantic doom’ was commented on by every reviewer who wrote of Drake’s work in his short lifetime. Indeed, according to John Martyn – and he should know – it was something Drake himself assiduously cultivated. Shortly after his friend’s death, Martyn depicted Drake as someone who ‘was quite conscious of the image portrayed in his songs. He was not [just some] manic depressive who picked up a guitar; he was a singer-songwriter in every sense.’ Brian Wells, not only an intermittently persistent presence throughout Drake’s decline into despair but an eminent addiction counsellor in his own right, also came to the view that, although ‘the most obvious diagnosis to make . . . was one of depression, it was more of an existential state that he’d gotten himself into, rather than . . . the kind of depressive illness that medical students learn about’.

  By 2000, though, there were forces at work determined to shape the narrative of Drake’s short life and intricately woven canon in a more benign, less contradictory direction. Gabrielle Drake, Nick’s surviving sibling and executor, had refused to help Humphries fill in the gaps as only she could, concerned that she would not be allowed the final say on any portrait poor Patrick might produce. At the same time, she began assuming a pro-active role in her brother’s legacy. In that year she finally approved the use of one of Nick’s songs in a TV ad, albeit for a car he wouldn’t have been caught dead in.

  As a result, at the end of November 2000, America was blasted with repeat broadcasts of the title track of his third album, Pink Moon, on prime-time TV, the soundtrack to a one-minute advertisement for the Volkswagen Cabrio convertible. People who then watched the ad on the VW website were invited to click on one of two buttons: to learn about the car, or purchase the music. As a result, annual US sales of Drake’s most resolutely downbeat album jumped from 6,000 to 74,000, and America at large was finally introduced en masse to this most English of singer-songwriters. Here was ‘Pink Moon’, on the face of it the least accessible of introductions, setting off any number of inner fires.

  Nick Drake – who, in his lifetime, had lived continually in the shadow of Island contemporaries such as Thompson, Denny and Martyn – had by the simple act of biding his time beneath the fruit tree, now superseded them all as a cultural reference point. Denny’s own premature death in 1978, killed by her mother’s sense of propriety (I refer interested parties to my Sandy biography, No More Sad Refrains, for the full story), had generated no such groundswell of misty romanticism. Martyn had just made ever more mediocre demonstration discs for his beloved Echoplex effect pedal. Even Thompson, whose Seventies canon remains a full fathoms five deeper, and who slowly built his own American audience by annual touring from 1982 on, had produced a body of work just too damn eclectic and erratic to reach this constituency.

  Drake’s three-album career, on the other hand, seemed to provide a remarkably straight trajectory. The moonstruck car manufacturer even went as far as to claim, in their initial press release, that the track ‘Pink Moon’ ‘is actually a very good introduction to Nick Drake, if you’re not familiar with him’. In truth, it was only ever a good introduction to Pink Moon, the album. Those who plumped instead for Boyd’s 1994 anthology, still on catalogue, would have found the same sensibility elsewhere, but hardly in the same undiluted, unadorned form.

  There was now a demand for Drake’s work that could only be fuelled by a new product – which, in this case, meant doing away with some old product. Time of No Reply, the well-conceived single LP of outtakes and lost songs, which ended with the four recordings from 1974, was quietly deleted. In its place came a new 2004 compilation, Made to Love Magic. This time the 1974 tracks – bolstered by the addition of the ‘unheard’ demo version of ‘Tow the Line’41 – were scattered across a set that forsook the intimacy of those home versions of ‘Fly’, ‘Strange Meeting II’ and ‘Been Smoking Too Long’ for newly orchestrated versions of ‘Time of No Reply’ and ‘Magic’.

  If the latter would always be mere juvenilia, whether it was Richard Hewson or Robert Kirby scoring the strings, the former needed no (such) embellishment. Indeed, alongside the unreleased, unstrung ‘River Man’, it only proved what attentive listeners had long suspected – the strings on Five Leaves Left and Bryter Layter were a mistake Drake rectified on Pink Moon. Way to Blue was meanwhile superseded by another inferior anthology, A Treasury, an estate-approved compilation that lacked the skilful sequencing seasoned producer Boyd had brought to the earlier set. Stuck on the end of this otherwise ill-conceived CD was all forty-six seconds of ‘Plaisir D’Amour’, wholly decontextualized.

  The rewriting of history continued through 2007, when the Fruit Tree box was reissued in an inferior, remastered form, minus Time of No Reply. A DVD version of the fifty-minute 2002 Dutch TV documentary, A Skin Too Few – a skilled exercise in selective storytelling made with Gabrielle Drake’s approval – took its place. In tandem with this reconfiguration of the canon came another Drake archival release, Family Tree, a selective cherry-pick of the oft-bootlegged home demos put together under Gabrielle’s eagle eye, bookended with a couple of tracks by Nick’s mother, Molly, designed to illustrate the similarity in their vocal style, but largely demonstrating that his accomplished mother lacked her son’s divine spark.

  Try as she might, Drake’s sister still could not control the now-public discourse on Nick’s worth as a songwriter, the deep-rooted causes of his depression and the role drugs might have played in his downward spiral and (possible) eventual suicide. Even before 2007’s concerted exercise in rebranding, another biographer, Trevor Dann, had thrown his hat into the ring. And though his Darker Than the Deepest Sea (2006) would inevitably tread much the same ground as Humphries’ study, Dann seemed less inclined to tow the party line, and more willing to mention the elephant in this well-to-do living room:

  Still smoking what his friend and collaborator Robert Kirby describes as ‘unbelievable amounts of cannabis’, [by 1971 Drake] was beginning to exhibit the first signs of psychosis . . . Not until many years later did scientists begin to prove a link
between cannabis and schizophrenia, [but] schizophrenia doesn’t only mean split personality. Among its other symptoms are lack of emotion . . . low energy . . . lack of interest in life . . . affective flattening (a blank, blunted facial expression) . . . alogia (difficulty in speaking or inability to speak); lack of interest or ability to socialise with other people . . . By 1972 he was exhibiting all the signs . . . Nick’s behaviour over a long period is highly suggestive of a cannabis-fuelled psychosis, a mild schizophrenia, which a combination of prescribed and illicit drugs did nothing to cure and most probably worsened.

  The very fact that Drake expressed so consistently and cogently that ‘peculiarly English melancholia’ convinced Ian MacDonald and others – but not Dann or I – that he was merely exercising an artistic conceit in his songs. In truth, a predisposition to melancholia was one thing Drake shared with a number of other, equally talented English contemporaries. But so was his penchant for imbibing the kind of psychotropic drugs that might act as a creative trigger, even if – like any trigger – it might end up blowing one’s brains out. It was a fateful combination. Unfortunately for him, and those others, once the doors of perception were opened by that mighty wind blowing, it took the strength of generational experience to close them again.

  *

  It proved a difficult lesson for some to learn. Many a badly singed survivor became an apostate from acid, but only in the fullness of time. It took until the 1980s for the teachings of Laing and Leary to really be discredited in countercultural eyes. In Allen Ginsberg’s case, it took him some three decades to fully acknowledge the truth in Edith Sitwell’s observation, made directly to him at her Oxford lodgings in 1958: ‘No poet should need a drug to produce extreme sensibility, which must be, if he is any good, a part of his equipment.’ But even this fierce advocate of LSD’s potential beneficence duly admitted to Steve Silberman in 1987: ‘I’ve changed my mind about the relationship between acid and neurosis – it seems to me that acid can lead to some kind of breakdowns . . . I think in the Sixties I wasn’t prepared to deal with acid casualties from the point of view of a reliable technique for avoiding those casualties.’