Nick Drake Read Free Page A

champion Mike Hailwood is also remembered here. The graves are kindly tended; the grass, trim and neatly cut, does not intrude upon the solemnity of death. The leaves are raked, to leave the headstones clear and visible.
    The cult of death snakes around rock ’n’ roll like bindweed in the garland of a May Queen. But the grave of Nick Drake is not the graffiti-scabbed resting-place of Jim Morrison. The flowers around the headstone did not grow here; they are freshly cut, brought by someone who loves his music and was touched by his life. This is the grave of an only son, a lost boy, laid to rest in the village where he grew up: the only home he really knew.
    Tanworth-in-Arden is picture-postcard pretty, a cameo of Middle England. The church’s guidebook speaks regretfully of ‘unfortunate alterations’ in 1790. There is a war memorial and a general store, an off-licence and a garage, a church school and a pub. Inside the Bell, people drawn by the music of Nick Drake often sit over a pint or a coffee, reflecting on what they have seen in the churchyard. But here in the pub another erstwhile Tanworth resident is the focal point: a notice informs the casual visitor that Jack London, British and European Welterweight Champion, 1926-1935, was the landlord from September 1939 to December 1972.
    It was from Tanworth that Nick Drake set out on his short voyage into the outside world, and to Tanworth that he returned to die. It was only when my wife pointed it out that I saw the barely legible inscription, curiously located, almost hidden, on the back of Nick’s headstone: ‘Now we rise and we are everywhere.’ The words have aBiblical ring, a familiar scriptural feel, and it was only later that I realized they came from Nick’s ‘From The Morning’ – the final song on the last album released in his lifetime.
    Standing by his grave that autumn day, it struck me how short a distance Nick had actually travelled. But what a journey he had made. Largely ignored in his lifetime, with combined record sales barely reaching 20,000 copies, after his death Nick Drake has become the focus of a fascination which shows no sign of abating. And yet the mystery still remains: just what is it about this shy, introverted singer-songwriter, who made only three albums, that still draws people to his work?
    Why, when they have their own idols and eloquent spokesmen, are the children of Nirvana and Oasis drawn afresh to Nick Drake? To begin to understand that, you have to go back to another place and another time. From the leafy tranquillity of the Warwickshire countryside to the steamy Far East. To the far reaches of the British Empire, to a city perched on the edge of Burma, close to the Indian Ocean, where Nick Drake was born half a century ago.

Chapter 1
    Teak first drew the British to Burma. A heavy, durable timber, it was much favoured in the building of ships at a time when the British needed more and more vessels to service their expanding Empire. Even when the wooden hulks gave way to steel dreadnoughts, Burma still had plenty to offer far-away Britain, not least the fruit of its rubber trees. Rich in teak forests, and with rubber plantations stretching to the far horizon, Burma enriched the Empire.
    In 1824 a Burmese invasion of Bengal had led to fears of further incursions into British-ruled India, but the two nations managed to maintain their uneasy alliance for another sixty years until, in 1885, Burma’s King Thibaw decided to confiscate the assets of the Bombay Burmah Trading Corporation (BBTC), the leading Anglo-Burmese firm which would later employ Nick Drake’s father, Rodney. This sequestration led to a full-scale invasion by 10,000 British and Indian troops, and by 1886 Burma had become a fully integrated part of the British Empire.
    Long before Nick Drake was born there, and long before his father worked in the country, Burma was already the subject of fiercely divided opinion.