Nick Drake Read Online Free PDF

stagnant end of Empire came in 1956, when Nick was eight. A joint Anglo-French invasion set out to destabilize Egypt’s President Nasser, following his nationalization of the Suez Canal. It ended in a humiliating defeat.
    The Suez débâcle occurred the same year that John Osborne’s
Look Back In Anger
opened in London. Railing against the values around which men like Rodney Drake had built their whole lives, the play was a clarion call to disaffected ‘Angry Young Men’, and the effect was seismic. Nineteen fifty-six also marked the first British sighting of an alien from a planet called Tupelo, Mississippi. It was the year the writing was first sprayed on the wall, the year the English middle classes were all shook up by the two-pronged attack of John Osborne and Elvis Presley.
    Little of this sneering, urban rebelliousness percolated to secluded Tanworth-in-Arden. Asked about Nick’s youthful musical influences, Gabrielle grimaced: ‘Well, we are talking about our childhoods, and of course it sounds ridiculous now, but someone like Russ Conway was a great favourite of Nick’s, because Nick used to play the piano a lot as a little boy. We both had piano lessons.’
    Rock ’n’ roll was barely tolerated by the BBC. The Drake family listened in to an old-fashioned radio which eventually wound up in Nick’s bedroom, and the music which issued forth was safe andunthreatening: Pearl Carr & Teddy Johnson, Frankie Vaughan, Russ Conway, Ruby Murray … For Nick and Gabrielle, Saturday morning was a favourite time to cluster round the radio, for
Uncle Mac’s Children’s Favourites
on the Light Programme. For two hours, songs like ‘Champion The Wonder Horse’, ‘Robin Hood’, ‘Nellie The Elephant’, ‘A Windmill In Old Amsterdam’ and ‘Sparky’s Magic Piano’ kept the nation’s infants mesmerized. It was all very consoling, seated safely at the knee of Auntie BBC.
    British cinema in the 1950s was no less cosy. Thousands of schoolboys like Nick Drake grew up with a fiercely nationalist film industry. Incapable of dealing with the painful legacy of a lost Empire, it dwelt instead on the celebration of a war well won. Films like
The Dam Busters, Reach For The Sky, The Wooden Horse, The Cruel Sea
and
The Colditz Story
, seemed so much more reassuring than the ugly questions posed by Teddy Boys, Elvis Presley and the botched imperialism of Suez.
    Well into the seventies the final cinema performance of the night would conclude with the audience standing, more or less to attention, for the National Anthem; but by then the comforting, flickering, black-and-white images of steaming mugs of cocoa and duffle-coats were already period pieces. Gritty Northern realism had subverted the mainstream: the male icons of the mid-sixties were Albert Finney and Tom Courtenay, not Richard Todd and Kenneth More. The new role models questioned and challenged the status quo, rather than epitomizing established values.
    Rock ’n’ roll also created ripples in Britain during the late fifties, but the stone had been dropped a very long way away and the ripples were still very faint. Few authentic rock ’n’ rollers appeared in Britain during that decade – Buddy Holly and Eddie Cochran were the best-remembered. Jerry Lee Lewis’s tour was cut short after it was revealed that he had married his thirteen-year-old cousin, and Elvis never made it beyond Prestwick Airport in Scotland, where his plane touched down to refuel while taking him home from military service in Germany.
    The soundtrack of
South Pacific
remained at the top of the UK LP charts from their inauguration in 1958 until March 1960; another popular long-player featured numbers from George Mitchell’s
Black & White Minstrel Show
. For all the hip, café-society image of the nineties’ Easy Listening revival, the real sugary root of that ghastly phenomenon lay in