CHAPTER 88

 

 

#13: MIKE OLDFIELD

“Ommadawn (Part One)”

from the album Ommadawn

Released: November 1975

 

 

Not many people bothered about Nick Drake when he was alive. A lot of people bothered quite a lot about Nick Drake when he was alive – people who were related to him or were friends or sometime employers of him, people who felt a duty to care for him when he didn’t care much about people, least of all himself, or rather he cared a lot, maybe too much, about people, most of all himself.

 

I don’t know that anybody really “got” Nick Drake, understood what made him do and live as he lived and did, least of all the ones who were closest, or possibly Closer, to him. More people should have cared about his music, it is usually said. But back in the early seventies, how could they have done? Not unless you had a slide rule and unlimited disposable income and expendable time could anyone keep up with the serenely-flowing but endless stream of introspective singer-songwriters who graduated from sixties Britain – and Drake was regarded as nothing more than that, if he could be regarded, or even spotted, at all; he being easier to miss than be missed.

 

One of the few people outside Nick Drake’s immediate world who bothered about his work when he was alive was Edward Carlin, my father. He was one of the few thousand people who bought the first two Drake albums because my father was funny like that. He generally despised rock music but was always keen to listen to someone’s work if there were jazz musicians involved in its making. Hence Danny Thompson and an uncredited Kenny Wheeler and Henry Lowther on Five Leaves Left, and Chris McGregor and Ray Warleigh on Bryter Layter. In some fathomable way, the music made sense to my father if jazz was involved.

 

This meant that I knew these records from a very early age, even if I wasn’t yet quite old enough to discern why they justified listening. I regarded them as engaging, bucolic rural meditations bearing a nice side of self-deprecation (“Poor Boy”). I liked how Bryter Layter was a concept of sorts, charting the course of a listless but pleasing long weekend; the instrumentals bracketing the songs were like incidental music for a travelogue, such as one would see on BBC2’s daytime trade test transmissions. I didn’t at the time consider Bryter Layter to be any more profound an exercise than, say, Roy Castle’s Songs For A Rainy Day (which also bears its own load of quietly-pleased melancholy and top drawer British-based jazz musicians – and is really quite a profound record in its own amiably distressed way).

 

The key track for me on Bryter Layter is its closing instrumental “Sunday,” a modestly-opulent pastoral lament for flute and strings. Nobody else likes it, not the blogger who in the 2000s sniggered at the piece, nor even Joe Boyd, who produced the bloody record and absolutely hated (and still hates) the instrumentals.

 

But in my life “Sunday” twice became a lament, a threnody. The first time was after my father died, at 7:40 a.m. on Wednesday 15 July 1981, eleven days after his fiftieth birthday. The second was after Laura died, at 11:30 p.m. on Saturday 25 August 2001 – and Oxford from certain dappled angles isn’t that far removed from Tanworth-in-Arden; from Headington Cemetery, where Laura is buried, there is a fine and comprehensive view leading towards the greenery of Erlsfield that she and her two sisters knew so deeply. “Sunday” at different times of my life made me miss both, was perhaps on the border of intolerable.

 

It is therefore somehow reassuring to learn in Nick Drake: The Life, Richard Morton Jack’s recent biography, that “Sunday” was actually conceived as a soundtrack for driving; one would emerge from the country side-roads onto the motorway, and the great hum of low strings that emerges towards its end represents an articulated lorry in another lane, travelling with its cargo and being overtaken by Drake’s car (if indeed that could have been done; Morton Jack makes no secret of the fact that Drake was one of the world’s worst drivers, sustaining innumerable accidents, close scrapes and totalling of both automobile and motorcycle.

 

As a just-the-facts-ma’am biography, The Life is the most thorough and comprehensive study there has been of Drake’s life – as opposed to his art, but more of the latter in a moment – and if you want to know what happened where and when – if not necessarily why – then it is unlikely ever to be beaten. Authorised by Nick’s sister, the actress Gabrielle Drake, who also contributes a foreword as well as opening up her diary of contacts for Morton Jack, the book’s aim would appear to be simply to tell Nick’s story, overriding any accumulated myths and avoiding any personal agenda – or so it would superficially seem.

 

We should get past his modestly-privileged upbringing, which is something the man himself never succeeded in doing. Rodney and Molly Drake were not exactly skint but they were not abundantly rich either; they were able to subsidise their son’s lifestyle if he so wished, but he very rarely called upon them for that. The same pattern appears to repeat itself throughout his life; prep school (which was right next to Sandhurst, so Drake spent time as a young cadet while there), Marlborough, Cambridge, Old Church Street, back to the family home (Far Leys) – he feels pronouncedly uncomfortable in all of them and does as little as he can get away with while he’s there.

 

Well, almost everywhere; at Marlborough he was an outstanding athlete, and some of his sprint records there still stand. This attracted the attention of Fitzwilliam College, viewed at the time as an ingenue upstart which was not really considered part of the Cantab world, who thought that by offering him a place they would be getting a potential world-class runner. What they ended up with was a distanced introvert who seemed to do very little of anything other than playing his guitar and writing songs. His essays, when he could be bothered to submit them, were generally deemed muddled, vague, colourless, clichéd, unoriginal and dull, as though written to rote, like it was something he was obliged to do, like I’m obliged to send you to sleep with this tiresome précis.

 

Nick Drake was an introvert with whom the world didn’t quite fit and the only occasions when he came alive were when he was not particularly expected to be “someone”; roving around France and Morocco in 1967, or writing those songs which never really reproduced what he heard in his head or felt in his fingers and which only struck people a decade after he’d ceased to exist, in a different time and world. Was it the well-meaning shelter he received in his younger years which rendered him incapable of handling the world, or was the world simply incapable of handling him?

 

Is Morton Jack capable of handling Drake? He was given all the metaphorical keys and his only declared aim was to tell Drake’s story. But I’m not certain he knew what to do with those keys. The closing section of A Life makes for horrific reading, but who generated the horror? Did Morton Jack feel the need to pull punches because if he told us anything else Drake’s people would have turned on and disowned him, just as Ted Hughes’ estate turned on Jonathan Bate (that Cambridge thing again)? In A Life he goes out of his way to emphasise that Drake’s people gave him carte blanche to tell the story as he felt it needed to be told.

 

Getting beyond the bare facts of Drake’s life – which in a lot of ways would appear to constitute the very barest of lives – I found two central problems in A Life. Firstly, we see far too much of some people’s old friend Captain Hindsight. Over and over, both author and interviewees reiterate their sadness that Drake couldn’t bend, even a little, to accommodate an outside audience and become well-known. We get repeated MSC buzzwords like “relentlessly” and “hard-working” to tell us what Drake wasn’t, and evidently could never have been.

 

Why didn’t Drake tour? Well, people tried to get him out there, but sticking him in rowdy folk clubs in the North of England, full of blotto zealots wanting hearty sea shanties, was clearly no way to encourage his art. In other places he’d play but nobody could, or didn’t want to, see or hear him. If only he’d played the game, say Joe Boyd and others. If only he’d been – Cat Stevens, or Elton John, who in 1970 recorded a series of straight demos of Drake’s songs for Boyd to send out to interested parties (without success).

 

Two scenarios from this Glastonbury weekend which at the time of writing has just passed; 78-year-old Cat Stevens amiably ambling on in the afternoon, singing to and for a crowd exhausted by noise and conflict and wishing some quiet and space. They respected and loved him. You could see them crumble when he sang “Father And Son” – look at me, I am old, I was once like you – and in his way he has settled for something approximating Drake’s unhurried softness, even if it took him half a century to get there.

 

And then there was Elton, the sloppy survivor of a show-closer, playing twenty of his hits and covering a song from 2022 that only those who kept up with the charts would know about, and you think about such songs as “Don’t Let The Sun Go Down On Me” and “Someone Saved My Life Tonight” – both composed in 1974 – and wonder, just how much was he thinking about Drake when he wrote them? But he hasn’t remained in a roseate past, brought Jacob Lusk and Rina Sawayama out on stage, has, despite everything, come to terms with his life and managed it with profound aplomb.

 

But it isn’t so often that genius and shrewdness mix – perhaps the single most important factor in Elton’s songwriting is that he has had the good sense to leave the lyrics to somebody else to write. His great songs with Bernie Taupin are two sides of a worried but ultimately very satisfied coin. Drake just had himself, and for those who wistfully imagine a parallel universe where “Northern Sky” was a huge hit rather than “Your Song,” Morton Jack gently reminds us that Island had absolutely no intention of releasing any singles from Bryter Layter, least of all “Northern Sky,” and listening to it now you can understand why – it’s a little too evasive and undemonstrative to stay in listeners’ minds; the chorus, if such a thing exists, is muttered and perhaps thrown away like a used Toffee Crisp wrapper. It was never going to go into FM radio syndication; too knotty by a modest half.

 

But if only Drake had…not been Drake! If he’d gone out into the actual world, and, I don’t know, tell a few jokes while endlessly retuning his guitar (which worked to a superficially superb point for Jake Thackray, but again it wasn’t what he wanted – and Drake did not have it in his bones to be another Billy Connolly or Jasper Carrott) – well, he wouldn’t have been himself and no five-hundred page biography would have been written about him. He would simply have become your everyday cuddly cult performer, trotting up to you, licking your face and giving you exactly what you want, rather than suggesting that you might wish to think differently (another – I don’t know – John Otway!).

 

(And maybe the pigeonholing of Drake’s art into “folk music” was unhelpful. Listen to his songs’ changes and the musicians Boyd persuaded and hired to play them; they are far, far closer to jazz than to folk, much like the work of his sometime ally John Martyn – while the latter does not come out in a good light at all in Morton Jack’s book – Beverly Martyn is, at several points, thisclose to running off with Nick, perhaps even with John’s laddish approval - it is bewildering to attest, as a “fact,” that nobody can hear or understand what he is singing in the song “Solid Air.” It is a very clear verse-long mantra which is repeated then twisted back into itself. It’s very likely that Drake, had he even heard the song, would have realised it was about him, but that is fundamentally different from being incomprehensible.)

 

Far more severe a problem, however, is Morton Jack’s absence of wonder in relation to Drake’s music. He boringly describes Drake’s songs – ticks them off, really - in ways people feel I use far too much in my own writing which ends up sending everyone to sleep, as this chapter has long since confirmed, and it is unlikely that any newcomer to Drake’s music is actually going to be moved sufficiently by Morton Jack’s descriptions to want to listen to it, create a work of ekphrasis from it. As I’ve already said, in his lifetime Drake was regarded as just one of many, not the type of sui generis phenomenon into which Elton or Marc or even Cat was prepared to turn themselves. Why did he become special (whereas for instance someone like Gilbert O’Sullivan was arguably a far more radical songwriter than Drake, but because of the way in which he deliberately promoted himself, he was viewed as an easy listening novelty act – imagine Nick Drake performing “Nothing Rhymed” or the reluctant cadences of “We Will”)? Why is he still considered sufficiently special to justify this sort of biography? You won’t find suggestions, let alone answers, here.

 

As for the alleged frightening and terminal nature of the eleven songs on Pink Moon – Drake’s third album, and the one my father didn’t buy because it was Drake alone, with no jazzers backing him up – all the truly observant spectator can say as a response is HANG ON A BLEEDING MINUTE, MATE. These songs are amongst the lightest and most optimistic ones Drake ever wrote (and, of those asked, only the late Robert Kirby, fellow Cambridge student and subsequent chief arranger of Drake’s songs, seemed to understand that). Those who regard the record as a premature suicide note are not only not listening to it properly, but in some cases may have unwittingly contributed to the collaborative fucking-up of Drake’s rationality.

 

After 1972, all we get are fuck-ups, piled atop each other like unwashed dishes. The final verdict on Drake’s death – no spoilers - is arrived at through ostensibly rational means. I don’t think all these facts, much like those of Charles Foster Kane, help us understand the man better or more fully; perhaps nothing and nobody can. What I do like, though, are the little details of home life; Nick watching television, laughing at Some Mothers Do ‘Ave ‘Em and The Two Ronnies. Oh, and what appears to be the last record he ever bought was Tubular Bells. Which, in November 1973, is where the person capable of writing this book you’re now reading came in, and after years of being introverted and laughed at, the artist not only finds the benefactor Drake so sorely needed, but can then turn around and scream, angrily, about fools. Look at the final ten minutes or so of Tony Palmer’s television documentary about the history of popular music, All You Need Is Love. Once the screaming and history are done, we simply see the artist, at his mixing desk, staring into somebody’s space, and if we’d known better in 1977 we might have realised that Nick Drake, in a perverse but logical way, lived, even if somebody else was doing the living for him.