Free Nick Drake by Patrick Humphries Page B

was often getting light by the time last night’s party was ending, and Nick would still be strumming away.
    â€˜Nick was a performer and yet despite the many people who would gather, most of them well lubricated, the sessions never became raucous singalongs; he didn’t play to the crowd. Every string of his guitar seemed to be playing a complementary tune and his repeating melodies cast a mesmerizing spell. Very few left early for home.’
    It was all quite idyllic – to be young and sleep under the stars in France on Bastille Day. To read Hemingway’s
Death In The Afternoon
and
The Sun Also Rises
, and then to witness the bullfights of which the grumpy old master had written. St Tropez, made popular by Brigitte Bardot, was the premier summer vacation spot for the
demi-monde.
As millionaires’ yachts bobbed in the tiny harbour, and the jet set sought their pleasures in the bars and boutiques, Nick and his three friends chitty-chitty-bang-banged their way along the French coast in Molly Drake’s quintessentially English Morris Minor.
    Jeremy Mason was in France that summer too: ‘The year we left Marlborough, in the summer, Nick came down to France with his guitar. My parents had this house near the Pont du Gard, near Nîmes.’ The faded colour photos of Nick during that holiday, taken near Nîmes, show a group of ghostly-white, almost transparent English schoolboys; the jet-blackness of their ubiquitous sunglasses only emphasizing the paleness of their flesh.
    Provincial France was lagging a long way behind the perceived coolness of Britain and America, but it was, nevertheless, an awfully big adventure for English visitors only a few weeks out of schooluniform. Jeremy Mason: ‘In those days, the tradition was to walk to the main road, which was about a mile away. Very old-fashioned, 1966 Provence, and every evening all the young of the village used to walk to the main road.
    â€˜Nick was a great hit. We used to sit on a wall at a junction of the roads, and Nick would play, and I remember them all singing along – “Michael Row The Boat Ashore”, “House Of The Rising Sun” – all that sort of singalong folk stuff … None of us spoke French terribly well, but there was a bond formed, so much so that we were asked to an enormous village fête. It consisted of long trestle-tables, where Nick and I were persuaded to drink pastis without any water in it, which we duly did. We got so drunk, we ended up running along the tops of the tables and jumping into strange people’s arms.
    â€˜We asked them all back to the house. I’d said: “Come back and have a drink; Nick will play his guitar some more.” But my mother came downstairs to shoo them all away … She said: “I could hear this cacophony of sound approaching, led by you and Nick.” ’
    Another conversation with his mother — one that he and Nick had one night towards the end of their holiday in France – stuck in Jeremy’s mind: ‘That’s when drugs came up: I don’t think any of us had anything to do with drugs at that time … But Nick sort of said: “Oh, well, you know, it’s one of those things one tries …” And I remember a conversation we had with my mother, after dinner, doing the washing-up. My mother got quite cross, and it’s always been a source of some irony. Nick was effectively saying it was all right to try drugs … This was the summer of 1966, long before The Beatles admitted to taking LSD or anything. It was obviously discussed, but as far as I know, there were no drugs at school at all. We were just into Disque Bleu cigarettes.’
    Dylan may have been advising that ‘everybody must get stoned’, but drugs and rock ’n ’roll weren’t yet the close companions they would soon become. Being busted for drugs still spelt the end of a career, even for a pop star. The Beatles were