Nick Drake and Black Sabbath’s Geezer Butler — twinned under a musical dark star

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Nick Drake and Black Sabbath’s Geezer Butler were born within a year of each other and grew up just 13 miles apart. Despite this proximity, an immense gulf separated them. Drake was the upper-middle-class singer-songwriter with highly expressive acoustic songs who couldn’t translate critical favour into sales. Butler is the working-class bassist and lyricist who co-founded the band credited with inventing heavy metal. Critics abhorred Black Sabbath — “unskilled labourers,” in Rolling Stone’s sniffy phrase — but their albums sold by the millions.

Richard Morton Jack’s Nick Drake: The Life is a diligently researched biography whose subtitle is shadowed by Drake’s tragic association with death. He died of an overdose in 1974 aged 26, ruled suicide by the coroner, after which the fame that had eluded him accrued around his memory.

Geezer Butler’s Into the Void: From Birth to Black Sabbath — and Beyond is an entertaining memoir about decibels and debauchery on the road with Sabbath. Its Spinal Tap-esque title discloses its comic tone. But Butler also writes about suffering from depression, as Drake did, even to the extent of fearing he might kill himself. This is the dark star under which these two otherwise very different musicians are twinned.

Born in 1948, Drake was raised in Tanworth-in-Arden, a village outside Birmingham of stereotypical English idyllicism. His family was well off, with Burmese domestic staff from a prior colonial life. Society names such as Astor and Ormsby-Gore crop up repeatedly in the pages, while a footnote explains how to pronounce Drake’s boarding school, Marlborough (“maulbruh”). As a first-year student at Cambridge, he bought a top-end acoustic guitar costing £4,000 in today’s money.

Drake released his debut album Five Leaves Left in 1969 while ostensibly studying for his English Literature degree. Passive and stubborn, a difficult set of attributes to hold in counterpoint, he was obsessed by music and largely uninterested in anything else. Others in the coalescing London folk-rock scene to which he became attached marvelled at his guitar-playing; fellow singer-songwriter Richard Thompson thought he was “quite extraordinary”.

My first proper guitar made me feel that I could be whatever I wanted to be, wherever I wanted to be. Suddenly, life made sense

He had supportive parents and an important champion in American record producer Joe Boyd. Reviews were generally warm. Although his three albums sold poorly, the cult of Drake that took hold after his death was already emerging in his lifetime. Six months before he died, by when mental illness had transformed the unassertive young man of before into a catatonic statue, an Italian music magazine heralded him as “one of the most sensitive and genuine folk singers on the current global pop scene”.

Drake’s voice is only sporadically present in Morton Jack’s book. But the author has managed to create a substantial portrait of his uncommunicative subject. Songs seem to have acted not as a salve or escape route for Drake, but rather as markers of the rising tide of depression that would ultimately overwhelm him. One of his final recordings was “Black Eyed Dog”, a haunting account of tireless pursuit by a malevolent predator, figured by a claustrophobic guitar motif.

One reason for Drake’s lack of commercial success was his dislike of playing live: a Christmas engagement in 1969 before a “drunk and boisterous” audience of apprentices in Coventry was the final straw.

That rough milieu is recalled with contrasting fondness by Terence “Geezer” Butler in his memoir. He was born in 1949 into a Catholic Irish family in Aston, a working-class district in Birmingham. Unlike Drake, Butler had a deprived upbringing — outdoor lavatory, children’s games in bombsites — and there’s a lot of violence in his book, almost all of it recalled with comic cheeriness.

“Ozzy stuck a claw hammer in someone’s shoulder and I stabbed someone with a screwdriver,” runs a typical account of a night out with the band. That’s “Ozzy” as in Ozzy Osbourne, the wildman singer who hurtles through the book like the fireworks that he lets off as pranks.

But underpinning the jokey tone is pride in the distinctive sound forged by the band in the face of establishment taunts from critics. Their music had a proletarian genesis. Guitarist Tony Iommi’s distinctive fashion of playing derived from the loss of two fingertips while working in a sheet metal factory.

For Butler, music was a way out of his class destiny. “I knew I didn’t want to work in a factory or on a building site, like my dad and brothers,” he writes. It also enabled him to address the depression that caused him to self-harm and obsess over death. His first proper guitar “made me feel that I could be whatever I wanted to be, wherever I wanted to be. Suddenly, life made sense.”

The contrast with Drake, bent over his much more expensive guitar only a few miles away, is poignant. The latter was a virtuoso who made sense of the instrument to a far greater degree than Butler. But it couldn’t help Drake make sense of life.

Nick Drake: The Life by Richard Morton Jack John Murray Press £30/Hachette Books $32.50, 576 pages

Into the Void: From Birth to Black Sabbath — and Beyond by Geezer Butler HarperCollins £25/$29.99, 288 pages

Ludovic Hunter-Tilney is the FT’s pop music critic

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