Nick Drake Read Online Free PDF Page B

the singalong pulp which constituted the pre-Beatles, musical dark ages.
    Home-grown rock ’n’ roll — on television and in the still thriving variety halls – was essentially a novelty act, a bill-filler put on to placate teenagers between juggling and comedy acts. For all the inroads made by Cliff Richard & The Shadows, Johnny Kidd & The Pirates, Joe Brown, Billy Fury and producer Joe Meek, ‘all-round entertainment’ was still the name of the game in Britain as the fifties lapped, like a slow tide on a pebble peach.
    In the spring of 1957, at the age of eight, Nick was sent away to prep school at Sandhurst in Berkshire. Until then he had lived at home and attended local primary schools, but for the next five years, holidays apart, Eagle House School would be home. He did well at the school, becoming a prefect, and eventually, in his final term, Head Boy. Already Nick was proving to be an ‘outstanding’ athlete, and gained his colours as a ‘fine wing three-quarter’ for the rugby XV. He was in the school choir, and at thirteen, even appeared in the school play, playing ‘Jack Pincher, a detective’ in the old favourite
The Crimson Coconut
by Ian Hay.
    Twenty-six years after Nick left Eagle House, his former headmaster, Paul Wootton, wrote that he remembered Nick ‘for his fine voice as a leading member of the Chapel choir’. Mr Wootton also mentioned ‘another master … who just may have had some influence on the career in music of Nicholas Drake. This French teacher earned fame, particularly among the boys, for having come second in the Eurovision Song Contest with his song “Looking High, High, High”.’
    Rodney Drake remembered a school report from Eagle House, which he found not long after Nick died: ‘He was a very strong character at school, they always said in the reports we got … His first school, he left it when he was just under fourteen, and he was Head of that school, and they said he was a very strong character. In the report, which I’ve still got, the Headmaster said: “Nobody knows him very well.” ’
    At the end of the Christmas term of 1961 Nick Drake left Eagle House for the last time. After the Christmas holidays he would follow in the footsteps of his father and grandfather and travel the sixty or so miles from Tanworth down to Wiltshire, to study at Marlborough College. As much a product of his heredity as of his times, Nick thought it only natural to attend a fee-paying public school.
    The Duke of Wellington was disingenuous when he claimed that‘the battle of Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Eton’. Like all subsequent military victories, it was won in the slum lean-tos and back-to-back squalor of British cities; in the hamlets and shires of rural England. The officers who blithely but bravely led their troops over the top may well have learned their pluck at Eton (or Marlborough, Harrow, Rugby or Dulwich), but the ‘poor bloody infantry’ certainly didn’t.
    The public-school ethos, based almost entirely on a belief in ‘playing the game’, drew its strength from tradition and continuity. And so it was always understood that N.R. Drake would follow his father and grandfather to Marlborough. It may seem incongruous that someone as enshrined in rock legend as Nick Drake should have had such an establishment upbringing, but quite simply, that is what he was born to. Ironically, Paul Weller, a recent convert to Nick’s work, chose to attack the institution which bred Nick in ‘Eton Rifles’: ‘What chance have you got against a tie and a crest,’ he snarled on The Jam’s 1979 hit.
    It was in January 1962 that Nicholas Rodney Drake entered Marlborough College, which would be his home until July 1966. Having heard so much about the isolation and introspection which blighted his later years, I was more than a little surprised, when talking to