I guess I must have become, for want of a better expletive, an aficionado of Nick Drake’s music when I found myself ensconced for a time at university.
In retrospect, it all seems pretty logical now: straddled at the tail-end of a self-indulgent bout of thoroughly earnest teenage introspection, which had manifested itself through long solitary gambols over village greens; vague, confused affairs with willowy, callous girls; occasionally picking away tardily at cheap open-tuned guitars in an effort to “express myself”; studious, worshipful dialectics over the hidden gem-like enunciations on Blonde on Blonde – above all, that arch-affectation of the world-weary Misunderstood Youth.
It was fun for a while, and Nick Drake with his fragile quasi-bossa-nova inflected voice and almost overwhelmingly gentle hypnotic music fitted into the landscape perfectly for that time. Drake, mind you, had probably risen from roughly similar circumstances. Born while his parents were stationed in Burma, he was brought to his homeland when aged six and, through a long illustrious sojourn within England’s educational network, later landed himself a place in Fitzwilliam College, Cambridge.
Once in Cambridge, Drake had become a part of both that whole cerebrally obsessive elitist capriciousness that the likes of Cambridge and Oxford seem fond of cultivating, and the activity on the outer periphery of the town itself. Cambridge was at that time (early ’68) starting to simmer with a certain well-honed enthusiastic self-enveloping energy: the Pink Floyd had probably set the ball rolling the previous year, their appearance providing a spotlight for the area which carried on through to such cultural events as the staging of a Cambridge Free Festival, John and Yoko doing one of their dynamic displays of “bag-ism” at the Lady Margaret Hall – a four-hour avant-garde extravaganza which also featured John Tchicai (a black saxophonist who had once worked with Archie Shepp), and the whole of the Cadentia Nova Danica...
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One of my favourite pieces of rock journalism primarily as I was such a fan of Nick Drake after first hearing Time Has Told Me on this compilation which I bought secondhand in 72/73. I did buy the NME that contained this piece at the time but it got lost in the process of moving down to London in 1977. I do remember at one point traipsing down to the NME office to try and get a photocopy of the piece but it had already been taken from the archive. The staff there that day immediately suspecting the hands of Kent himself. I only got to read it again when Jason Creed reprinted it in one of the early Pink Moon fanzines
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