{"id":195,"date":"2014-11-22T11:51:45","date_gmt":"2014-11-22T11:51:45","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/mirrorofhope.org\/?p=195"},"modified":"2014-11-22T11:51:45","modified_gmt":"2014-11-22T11:51:45","slug":"i-want-to-complicate-the-nick-drake-story","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/mirrorofhope.org\/?p=195","title":{"rendered":"I want to complicate the Nick Drake story"},"content":{"rendered":"

Read original here<\/a><\/p>\n

It\u2019s 40 years since Nick Drake died, aged 26. His music brought posthumous fame and a legion of fans still keen to speculate about the details of his life and work. Now his sister, Gabrielle, has written a revealing book about the singer-songwriter.<\/p>\n

One evening in the late 1960s, Gabrielle Drake was walking down Haymarket in London with her younger brother, Nick. She was taking him for a birthday treat to see Topol in Fiddler on the Roof. \u201cI\u2019ll never forget that moment. It was about 6pm. He had the most wonderful figure \u2013 broad shoulders and a small bottom, nice waist. He was wearing a beautiful tweed jacket, which had a slightly high waistband and he looked so beautiful. I\u00a0was so proud to be with him.\u201d<\/p>\n

Across the decades, that image of those glamorous strolling siblings remains poignant. It was late in the summer of love, 1967: Nick had just returned from Aix-en-Provence where he had been spending a gap year between Marlborough College and Cambridge University playing and singing in bars.<\/p>\n

It was before everything happened: before Gabrielle became a celebrated actor, perhaps best known for her TV roles in The Brothers, UFO and Crossroads; before Nick recorded the three romantic, desolate albums that brought him only posthumous fame. It was before the years of Nick\u2019s struggle with depression, which ended on the morning of 25 November 1974, when Molly and Rodney Drake found their 26-year-old son dead after overdosing on antidepressants in his room at their home, Far Leys, in Tanworth-in-Arden, Warwickshire.<\/p>\n

It was before Nick became fetishised, the depressives\u2019 pin-up, a\u00a0posthumous industry. Today, Gabrielle is the guardian of the flame. Rodney died in 1988, Molly five years later. Now it falls to Gabrielle to tend her brother\u2019s grave under the beech tree in the churchyard of St Mary Magdalene in Tanworth. \u201cWe\u2019ve just had the gravestone removed because it\u2019s been rather badly defaced one way and another with people chipping away at it.\u201d<\/p>\n

I tell Gabrielle that I once interviewed Oscar Wilde\u2019s grandson<\/a>, who was pleading with admirers not to cover his grandfather\u2019s tomb in P\u00e8re Lachaise, Paris, with lipstick kisses because it was damaging the stone. She\u00a0smiles: \u201cSomebody once said they saw someone taking a\u00a0piece away from Nick\u2019s grave and being thrilled. This person who said they saw that, said they tore them off a\u00a0strip.\u201d<\/p>\n

Sometimes dead artists need to be protected from their admirers.<\/p>\n

\"Nick
\u2018Nick had no outer skin, no defences\u2019 \u2026 says Gabrielle.<\/span> Photograph: Estate Of Keith Morris\/Redferns<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

We\u2019re meeting because Gabrielle is publicising a new book, Nick Drake: Remembered for a While. It\u2019s\u00a0a sumptuous coffee-table volume comprising family photographs, musical analysis of his songs, essays by\u00a0Gabrielle about her family\u2019s history in colonial Burma, where Nick was born in 1948, and tributes from friends and kindred spirits (\u201cWhen the world seemed too remote, too difficult to negotiate,\u201d writes gardening writer and broadcaster Monty Don, \u201cI recognised in him a spirit brave and brilliant enough to articulate in music what was an incoherent fog within me\u201d).<\/p>\n

It\u2019s a beautiful book, certainly, but hard to read because it includes so much hitherto private pain \u2013 not just family letters, but Rodney\u2019s diary of his\u00a0son\u2019s struggle with depression. \u201cThe worst day of our lives \u2026\u201d it concludes. \u201cSo ends in tragedy our three-year struggle.\u201d<\/p>\n

Didn\u2019t she have compunctions about publishing this intimate material? \u201cI always vowed I\u2019d never write a book about Nick and I would hate to have been seen as jumping on any kind of bandwagon,\u201d says Gabrielle. \u201cI\u00a0did have compunctions until various publications and articles appeared that have got the story so wrong that I felt that before I pop my clogs I had better get the story straight.\u201d<\/p>\n

Gabrielle was distressed, for instance, that she was quoted in one report saying her brother died a\u00a0virgin. \u201cI never said any such thing because I\u00a0don\u2019t know! I have no idea. And I\u00a0don\u2019t mind what he was.\u201d Her brother\u2019s romantic life, like much else to do with Nick Drake, remains an enigma and a prompt for speculation.<\/p>\n

\"Drake
Gabrielle and Nick with their parents, Molly and Rodney.<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

But Gabrielle says she wanted to do more than set the record straight. \u201cI also wanted to slightly complicate rather than clarify the Nick situation because it\u2019s so easy to come up with trite answers \u2013 that he came from a stuffy, upper-middle-class background, nobody understood him. That kind of thing. Well, everybody did understand him and still<\/em> it happened. It doesn\u2019t matter how much you love someone, you can\u2019t ultimately take the responsibility for them. You can do everything in your power but you might still fail.\u201d<\/p>\n

That\u2019s what makes the book unbearable. For all the parental fondness evident in the letters to their son (one letter from Rodney to Nick when the latter was chucking in Cambridge to pursue music, you suspect, is all that a child could have wanted from a parent in such circumstances \u2013 loving and supportive, despite disagreeing with his decision) and for all that Far Leys was a place of refuge for their son in his depression years that led to his death, they could not save him.<\/p>\n

\u201cFar Leys was not only a refuge \u2013 it was a prison too,\u201d says Gabrielle. \u201cMy father knew this and Nick said it too \u2013 that Nick found his home a prison. As well as the only place he could be.\u201d The diaries chronicle the years of Nick\u2019s depression at Far Leys, often uncommunicative, often disappearing without saying a word. \u201cHe led them a merry dance!\u201d says Gabrielle. \u201cBut they never hung on to him at home. They couldn\u2019t \u2013 they had to respect that he was a grown man. He was quite an impediment to their lives too while he was at home, though.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"Nick
\u2018My brother once said to my mother, \u201cIf only I could feel that my music had helped anyone at all \u2026\u201d and I just wish he could have known how many people his music has helped.\u2019<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

In the early 1970s, Gabrielle would visit Far Leys in between recording The Brothers at Pebble Mill studios and painfully witness her evidently tortured brother. \u201cMostly Nick was uncommunicative and occasionally he\u2019d become talkative and you hung on his every word even though, very often, one didn\u2019t know what they meant because he\u2019d talk in riddles. One wanted so much to do something to help, but just didn\u2019t know what to do.\u201d<\/p>\n

Does she think Rodney and Molly would mind her publishing their letters and diaries? \u201cIf they\u2019re up there looking down, I hope they\u2019re not too cross.\u201d<\/p>\n

The remaining years of Molly and Rodney\u2019s lives were dominated by their son\u2019s death, she says: \u201cThey talked, I\u00a0know, to parents in similar situations, trying to help them.\u201d Viewed thus, the book is a continuation of their work. \u201cI thought that it might just be of use to people going through similar problems. My brother once said to my mother, \u2018If only I could feel that my music had helped anyone at all \u2026\u2019 and I just wish he would have known how many people have said to us over the years how his music had helped them.\u201d<\/p>\n

Gabrielle also discloses that her mother struggled with depression when she was young. Molly and Rodney had met in Rangoon before the war. He was an engineer with the Bombay Burmah Trading Corporation<\/a>, she the daughter of an officer in the Indian civil service. \u201cShortly after they were married, she had pneumonia and went through a depressive illness. But my father was a great stay and support. I think he helped her through it.\u201d<\/p>\n

Later, that was what Rodney tried to do for Nick.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Read original here It\u2019s 40 years since Nick Drake died, aged 26. His music brought posthumous fame and a legion of fans still keen to speculate about the details of his life and work. Now his sister, Gabrielle, has written a revealing book about the singer-songwriter. One evening in the late 1960s, Gabrielle Drake was […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/mirrorofhope.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/195"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/mirrorofhope.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/mirrorofhope.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/mirrorofhope.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/mirrorofhope.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=195"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/mirrorofhope.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/195\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":197,"href":"http:\/\/mirrorofhope.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/195\/revisions\/197"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/mirrorofhope.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=195"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/mirrorofhope.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=195"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/mirrorofhope.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=195"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}