The sad ballad of Nick Drake

Towards the end of his life, when his reserves of self-belief - his very will to live - had run almost to empty, Nick Drake returned to his parents' home in the Midlands village of Tanworth-in-Arden.

The depression that had plagued him for the previous four years had now settled on him like a shroud. The talent that had shaped three consummately beautiful albums - among the most beautiful ever to emerge from British pop music - could find no greater expression than strumming the same chords over and over again on his Gibson acoustic guitar. His parents came to see it as a sign.

At some point in the long afternoon, he would stand up, put the guitar to one side, leave the room and, without a word, set off in his car. Two, three or four hours later the telephone call would come. Unable to face the ordeal of stopping and buying petrol, he had run to a standstill. His father would patiently drive the 40, 60 or 80 miles to collect him.

When Nick Drake died in 1974, at the age of 26, from an overdose of antidepressants, it was a tragedy that passed largely unnoticed. The three albums which he had made in his short lifetime were all, by any strictly commercial criterion, failures.

Nor was there anything about his death to arouse the interest of any but his friends, family and a small band of loyal fans: no histrionics, no spectacular burn-out. The coroner's verdict was suicide, but even that is disputed by some of his friends. According to one of them, it was as if Nick Drake 'simply faded away', a victim not of excess, but of 'some profound, deep-seated unhappiness'.

ot long before his death, Drake went into a recording studio. Such was his condition, his lack of equilibrium, that he was able to record only four songs. Heard now, they have the ethereal quality of the last breath of a dying person captured on glass. Among them is a song called Black Eyed Dog.
It is a clear metaphor for death. Nick Drake was writing his own obituary. This air of fragility and foreboding hangs over all Drake's work.

Drake's tendency to introversion was hardly noticed. Friends remember him as shy, but with a droll sense of humour, 'a very sympathetic person, with a charming smile,' remembers Lloyd. 'He was always ready to laugh, quick to get the joke, without being loud or noisy.' Sometimes he would get out his guitar and play his songs for his friends, 'but even among people he knew well he would never face you; he'd be singing to his guitar.'

His friends recognised that Drake was a precociously talented songwriter and musician. But if he had ambitions towards a career in music he never mentioned them. Ambition was uncool. In one other respect, Drake stuck out. Most of his friends were couples. Drake was always alone.

t home, Drake kept his own hours, so his mother Molly thought there was nothing unusual when, on the night of November 24, she heard her son pad past her bedroom door and downstairs to fix himself some cereal.

The next morning, she entered his room to find her son's body sprawled across his bed. He had swallowed some 30 Tryptizol tablets. On the turntable in his room was a recording of Bach's Brandenburg Concertos.

The coroner's verdict was suicide. But among Drake's friends there is the belief that it was an accident. 'The week before he died he was euphoric, full of energy and optimism,' says Boyd. 'But the sorts of doses he was taking, you rollercoaster - you're up, then you're down. And when you go down you think, I'd better take extra . . . '

But for Gabrielle Drake, the belief that her brother had decided to take his own life has always been more consoling to her than the possibility that it was all a terrible mistake. 'I can just see him now pouring a whole lot into his hands and taking them at one swallow, and thinking, "What the hell, either I live or I die, but one way or the other something will change." But I somehow don't believe the pills would have killed him if he hadn't taken some kind of interior decision to die. I think the life force is so strong that unless somewhere deep inside you, you really want to commit suicide, I don't believe you succeed.'



'Safe in your place deep in the earth
That's when they'll know what you were really worth . . . '