MARCH 29, 2023. Set back from a busy modern street in Wandsworth, south London, are a row of terraced houses dating from 1710. Inside one of these, Jeremy Mason sits in a wood-panelled room, with bookcases lined with his vast Oscar Wilde collection and Chinese porcelain from his days as an oriental dealer. Mason is 74 – but as a teenager at Marlborough College and for a formative, dreamy season in Aix-en-Provence in the South of France, he was a friend of Nick Drake.
His wife Jo enters with tea and biscuits for Uncut, as Mason settles in to spend the afternoon reminiscing about his old schoolmate. Alongside the Wildes, Mason’s house also contains Drake mementos – such as a pocket edition of Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs Du Mal, with a detail of three women from Ingres’ painting The Turkish Bath on its maroon cover. Drake kept this copy to hand as he walked Aix’s ancient streets. Then Mason opens the doors of an old, shelved cupboard to reveal the albums that he and Drake heard at Marlborough.
“Nick guided my musical tastes, and these are the records we listened to,” explains Mason. “This shows where we were coming from. Organ Grinder’s Swing, Jimmy Smith. We were rather keen on Astrud Gilberto. Charlie Parker, “Ornithology”. Miles Davis, Quiet Nights. Dylan, Dylan, Dylan. Have a look at this – Graham Bond Organisation, The Sound Of ’65. They were our heroes for a term or two.”
He reads aloud a note scribbled on the album sleeve: “‘Performed at the Manor House Friday evening, 12 o’clock on the 29th of October’, where Ginger Baker’s solo so amazed Nick he poured a pint down his front. We played that record endlessly. What else? Well, we weren’t averse to The Beatles,” he says, pulling out Revolver. “Nick liked The Beatles and the Stones. The Zombies, Begin Here. He liked this very much indeed – John Hammond, Big City Blues.”
Mason then pulls out another sheaf of battered LPs. These are the original albums that he and Drake had shared when they were 18, living in an apartment in Aix. “There’s one of the ones I bought with him there – Adamo, Olympia 67. Typically French. ‘Inshallah’ was his great song. We listened to Johnny Hallyday, too. The Brandenburg Concertos. Here’s another record we shared – Segovia, Les Romantiques. We played the side-long ‘Sonata Romantica’ a lot in Aix. Nick listened with a guitar-player’s understanding.
“We divided the LPs up when we broke up the flat,” continues Mason. “Nick took John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers, Bert Jansch and John Renbourn. He had moved into the songwriter-guitarist realm by then.”
JEREMY MASON
Drake is often viewed now through the prism of his final three years – when he retreated to Far Leys, his parents’ home in Tanworth-in-Arden, Warwickshire, as depression closed in, culminating in his fatal (1969), (1971) and (1972) –Drake has become a romantic, desolate figure, seemingly crippled by failure and, in one of the biggest myths that has built up since his death, stage fright. But this wasn’t the boy his teenage friends remember. “Forget the doomed youth bit,” counsels Mason. “When I knew him, he was a perfectly normal English public schoolboy. We had a laugh. There was none of this angst. He couldn’t wait to perform for everybody.”
