Nick Drake

Dreaming England

Nathan Wiseman-Trowse

• Publisher: Reaktion Books
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781780232119
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music

Since his death in 1974 at the age of twenty-six, singer-songwriter Nick Drake has gained a huge international audience and come to be thought of as the epitome of English romanticism. But while his small body of work has evoked poetic comparisons with Blake and Keats, closer inspection of Drake's music reveals many global and cosmopolitan influences that confound his status as an archetypal English troubadour. In this book, Nathan Wiseman-Trowse unravels the myths surrounding Drake and his work and explores how ideas of Englishness have come to be intimately associated with the cult musician. Probing deeply into Drake's music for clues, Wiseman-Trowse finds hints of the English landscape that Drake would have wandered through during his lifetime, but he also uncovers traces of blues, jazz, and eastern mysticism that hint at a broader conception of English national identity in the late 1960s, one far removed from parochial nostalgia. Wiseman-Trowse then looks at how Drake's music has been framed since his death, showing how Drake has been situated as a particular kind of English artist that integrates American counterculture, the English class system, and a nostalgic reimagining of the hippie era. An appealing story of folk music and English national identity, this book is essential reading for any fan of Nick Drake.

1 DREAMING ENGLAND

There are no explicit references to England, the country, or indeed Britain, the political union, anywhere in the music of Nick Drake. Drake’s music certainly cannot be said to be overtly patriotic, or even overly specific about place in any way, aside from a few cursory references to London, and his lyrics fail to engage with any sense of an English people, or a national identity, in any meaningful manner.¹ However, particularly since his death, Drake has often been placed within a context that situates him and his music as specifically English. While such claims are often rather vaguely put, others seek to situate Drake within a specifically English musical or lyrical tradition. Whatever claims are made about Drake’s work (and Drake made precious few claims about his own work, granting only one interview with Jerry Gilbert to Sounds magazine in March 1971 that constitutes only 236 words from the interviewee with no detail about his music or lyrics whatsoever) they are made from outside; that is to say, from his audience – an audience that is very much of the present. As such, they say more about how people find a way to express Englishness through his music than about how his music says anything about Englishness.

Clearly, however, there must be some locus, some point of contact, that causes such claims to be made. I will return to Drake’s music and lyrical preoccupations in more detail, factors that point towards potentially English (and international) characteristics, but first some clarification of what Englishness stands for. Englishness, as with most conceptions of national identity, is a particularly difficult idea to define. On a broad level one may choose to define Englishness as a set of characteristics ascribed to or exemplified by the people that inhabit or originate from the geographical space that is England. Yet what seems most immediately apparent when listening to Nick Drake’s music is that it can only be said to articulate specific states of Englishness; it does not – and perhaps cannot – connect with the multiplicity of experience that constitutes England as a totality at any given time, past or present. Therefore the associations we make between Nick Drake’s music and Englishness say much about how that very concept may be understood within certain contexts, even if they fail to account for English perspectives that step outside Drake’s frame of reference. Nick Drake’s music may say little to people about contemporary England – of working-class life or of the post-immigrant experience, for example – yet the very fact that his music is often utilized to represent what Englishness may mean points to certain ways of thinking about national identity in England, even at the start of the twenty-first century.

Before thinking about what constitutes national identity, or more specifically Englishness, the claims made about Drake’s work provide a useful starting point. Whenever Nick Drake is mentioned in relation to Englishness, two broad themes emerge. The first of these themes concerns the Englishness of Drake’s music specifically. This theme can be further divided into two strains: Drake’s music as it sits within a repertoire of English music, and as it seems to exhibit specifically English musical characteristics. The first strain places little judgement upon the music or lyrics themselves and is more concerned with Nick Drake’s music within a temporal and spatial context. Ian MacDonald, writing in Mojo magazine in 2000, suggests that ‘River Man’ is ‘the centrepiece of Drake’s early period, both artistically and in terms of his personal outlook, [it] is one of the sky-high classics of post-war English popular music’.² Len Brown, writing in New Musical Express (NME) in 1986, voices a similar sentiment when he describes ‘Northern Sky’ from Bryter Layter as ‘the greatest English love song of modern times’.³ Both claims seem to work on two levels. They both situate specific songs within a body of work that extends beyond Drake and that may include other artists, but is bounded spatially (music originating from English musicians) and temporally (‘post-war’ and ‘modern times’, while somewhat vague, give a sense of a frame within which such claims might be understood).

Yet both views hint at another level of meaning that extends beyond when and where the music was released. Both MacDonald and Brown seem to hint not only at the fact of Drake’s music being constituted within an English temporal and spatial context but at the quality of that music connecting to something more oblique and abstract. In an article for the Sunday Telegraph in 1997, Mick Brown suggests that in an age when

the prevalent musical influences were American, Drake’s music had an unmistakably English quality. His songs, melodies and open-tuned guitar playing owed as much to his love of Vaughan Williams and Delius as to Dylan and the Band; his lyrics were as much influenced by the vernacular and sensibility of the 19th-century Romantic poets, as by the locutions of blues and folk, lending his themes of love, yearning and self-identity a particular literacy.⁴

The strap line of the article accentuates this point by describing Drake as ‘a very English singer’. Here the subtexts that may be read into MacDonald’s and Brown’s claims are made evident as Drake’s music and lyrics are understood to connect to specific strains of culture associated with England and Englishness.

These kinds of claims are frequently made in descriptions of Drake’s work, and they connect with differing aspects of what his music provides. One common connection is made through the quality of Drake’s singing voice and his vocal delivery. Among the promotional material advertising a Drake tribute concert at the Barbican in London in September 1999 (part of a series of concerts branded English Originals) is his music, exemplified by ‘his intricate guitar work, introspective songs and understated English voice’.⁵ The musician Paul Thompson echoes Mick Brown when he says, ‘I like the Englishness of [Drake’s] pronunciation at a time when many British artists were trying to sound as American as possible.’⁶ Clearly the manner in which Drake delivers his lines suggests a certain national character that is easy to identify.

More frequent than claims about Drake’s voice are claims about his music’s relationship to Englishness or English musical traditions. Sometimes these claims are very specific; sometimes they are more vague. In another article from Mojo, Mark Cooper describes ‘Drake’s peculiarly English chamber music’.⁷ Another, posted on the website of music magazine Magnet, describes the song ‘Northern Sky’ as ‘unfussy English pop’.⁸ Both of these observations highlight potential musical genres or styles that we may connect Drake’s music with. Again there is a sense of geographical boundaries but the respective time frames differ, pointing to contrasting stylistic elements within Drake’s music. Thus his music, at least in light of the two views above, is both ‘chamber music’ – a point most evident in tracks such as ‘Way to Blue’ or ‘Fruit Tree’ – and ‘pop music’. The use of the term ‘unfussy’ seems to set this particular version of pop music apart, presumably most significantly from any Americanized versions of that form. It may be pop, but it is restrained, uncluttered and not histrionic. Whether this is true or not, and whether non-English popular music may be said to hold contrary values or not, something is being suggested about what English pop music might be before any engagement with Drake’s music takes place. As such, both perspectives offer up a space that exists prior to Drake that his work can be understood to sit within.

Two musical contemporaries of Drake’s, John Martyn and Vashti Bunyan, have also commented upon the ‘Englishness’ of Drake’s music. Bunyan, talking ahead of another Drake tribute show in Brighton in 2010, said: ‘Nick Drake and I were siblings in Joe Boyd’s family. I think Joe, coming from America, appreciated the innate Englishness of our music in a way nobody here could see.’⁹ Martyn, a close personal friend of Drake, suggested to Richard Skinner in an interview broadcast on BBC Radio 1 in 1986 that ‘it’s just very good music. It’s very British isn’t it? And that’s one of the things I like about it.’¹⁰ Martyn goes on to situate Drake’s ‘Britishness’ in opposition again to American influences, but both Bunyan’s and Martyn’s perceptions underplay the complex web of influences and stylistic associations evident in Drake’s work that extend across England and Britain’s national borders. Chris Jones, in a review of Five Leaves Left, gets closer when he describes Drake’s music as ‘a whole different kettle of Englishness, with more than a hint of jazz about it’.¹¹ Clearly the status of Drake’s Englishness is more complex than Bunyan and Martyn suggest and it is a subject that we will return to.

I suggested earlier in this chapter that there were two themes that were often used to connect Nick Drake to concepts of English national identity. While the first is most audible in his music and lyrics, as we have seen above, the second of these themes is potentially more abstract, as it often seems to exist above or outside Nick Drake’s recorded output. Here connections are made to Englishness via a further two strains: landscape and psychology. While both might be articulated through Drake’s music, there is a wider sense of Drake’s internal and external environment that audiences might relate to.

Drake’s connection to landscape and environment seems strange, given the lack of specificity of place in his lyrics, yet as we shall see in the next chapter, they are significant themes not only in his lyrics but in people’s responses to his music. Ian MacDonald paints a vivid picture of place in his writing on Drake’s music:

To listen to Nick Drake is to step out of this world of pose and noise, and enter a quiet, oak-panelled room, dappled with sun-light – a room opening, through French windows, into a lush green garden, equally quiet because we’re in the country, far from the sound of the city. It’s summer, bees and birds are abroad in the shade, and, beyond the nearby trees, a soft tangle of voices and convivial laughter can be felt, along with the dipping of languid oars in a rushy river that winds through cool woods and teeming meadows hereabouts: an English landscape with Gallic ghosts from Le Grand Meaulnes and La maison de Claudine. And an acoustic guitar playing gently beyond the hedgerow in jazzy 5/4.¹²

Here Drake is playing in the open air, unseen within an intrinsically English landscape. But of course there is more at play here – European and American voices, we note, come together in the English garden, much as they do within Drake’s music. The British musician Alison Goldfrapp has made of connections:

I think also what I like about Nick Drake is that he makes me think of England, you know? English countryside, ruralness – which a lot of folk music does . . . There’s not that much English folk music that is really appealing. But with Nick Drake there’s so much atmosphere to it, which is why so many people like it.¹³

Jonathan Wolff, writing in Jason Creed’s Pynk Moon fanzine, works the other way around. Wolff is recounting a trip to Tanworth-in-Arden to visit Drake’s grave, followed by a visit to nearby Stratford-upon-Avon to see a production of Romeo and Juliet. He describes his day as ‘all very autumnal, very English, very Nick Drake’.¹⁴ Here, Drake becomes the yardstick by which to measure environment, whereas MacDonald approaches the relationship from the other direction. It is interesting to note that the two writers associate Drake’s music with different seasons, although the connection to autumn suggests a specific interiorized state that forms the second strain of relationships between Drake and Englishness.

Nick’s family grave at St Mary Magdalene, Tanworth-in-Arden.

Perhaps because of his death at a very young age, possibly by his own hand, much has been made of Drake’s mental state and a perceived melancholy within his music. This sense of melancholy (perhaps evident in Wolff’s association of Drake’s music with autumn rather than summer) is often used in the discourse around him to signal a national trait, or at least an English response to the world. Len Brown describes Five Leaves Left as ‘a masterpiece of English melancholy’, while Mark Cooper evaluates his music as ‘a continuous stream of melancholic contemplation’.¹⁵ Barney Hoskyns, reviewing the Family Tree compilation of Drake’s early recordings in Uncut magazine, makes similar statements.¹⁶ Hoskyns suggests that:

There’s a peculiarly English bashfulness to Drake that suggests some coy conflation of Donovan and Colin Blunstone. Listen with both ears and you hear the monkish beauty of that light baritone alongside its close companion – Drake’s inimitably intricate fingerpicking. Together these intertwined “voices” create a melancholic magic that sounds completely unique to this day.¹⁷

Here Hoskyns is touching on a number of characteristics that situate Drake’s music as English: a particularly English kind of shyness or reserve; a simple, austere aesthetic; and again, melancholy. Of course, what such perceptions reveal, above and beyond Drake’s music, is how we all might imagine Englishness, using Nick Drake to do so.

Clearly, the writers mentioned above are responding to Nick Drake’s music in ways that sketch out the terrain (at least for them) of Englishness, but outside Drake’s work the concept of nationhood and national identity requires further interrogation if it is to work in any meaningful sense. Nations, nation-states (independent states with some level of ethnic, cultural or linguistic homogeneity) and nation states (states that may be held together by a collective sense of civic identity) may all be bounded geographically, yet their borders or limits in space tell us little about how the inhabitants of such places understand their own sense of a collective national self.¹⁸ Indeed, even geographical boundaries change over time, and England’s shifting relationship with its neighbours, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland, has produced a dynamic set of national and regional identities refracted through ideas of Britishness.

National identity itself is even more dynamic and porous, fluctuating over time and in relation to internal and external influences. Whenever I ask my undergraduate students how important a sense of national identity is to them, few express any real connection to Englishness, Britishness or whatever national identity they may potentially identify with. Some express a deeper connection to ‘regionality’ (particularly those from the north of England, often centred around northeast and northwest regional identification), but national identity only seems to come to the fore in one of two circumstances: moments of collective national ende...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• CONTENTS
• INTRODUCTION
• 1 DREAMING ENGLAND
• 2 LISTENING TO THE LAND
• 3 THE COUNTRY AND THE CITY
• 4 MELANCHOLIA AND LOSS
• 5 DRAKE’S LEGACY
• Chronology
• References
• Select Bibliography
• Discography
• Acknowledgements
• Photo Acknowledgements
• Index