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trying to hide their provincial origins, they revelled in them, and theirs were the first defiantly regional accents to be heard regularly on the upper-crust BBC airwaves. One of The Beatles’ oddest gigs was at Stowe. At the height of Beatlemania in 1963, following a request from a pupil, the Fabs played to a sedate, seated audience of public schoolboys. But The Beatles soon came to embody the new classlessness of the sixties: suddenly it didn’t matter where you were from – only what you did. Cockney photographers and pop stars became the new aristocrats.
    Jeremy Mason was Nick’s closest friend during his early days at Marlborough. The friendship was forged over cigarettes, and as the two teenagers puffed away on Disque Bleu in ‘smoking holes’ dotted around the college, the conversation invariably turned to the music they both liked: ‘At that time, Nick played the saxophone and the clarinet. The alto sax I think it was … Which meant that a lot of the music we liked early on was definitely sax-based: One of the records we liked was called
Giant Steps
by John Coltrane … But I remember going to listen to a John Coltrane record with Nick at LiverpoolStreet Station, which must have been on the way back to school. I think it was called
Ascension
, which was one complete barrage of sound, and we rather lost interest.’
    Michael Maclaran also remembered music always being a priority for Nick: ‘We spent hours in common rooms and studies listening to records (45s were 6/6d) and the Top 20 on Sunday afternoons.’
    With no television in the House in Nick’s time, and Film Society shows limited to a couple each term, pop music was all-important. Nick’s housemaster, Dennis Silk, couldn’t help but notice the intrusion of pop music in his house: ‘It was as much as your life was worth not to know what was in the Top 20. You lost face terribly.’
    Cigarettes behind the bike sheds and listening to pop records were crucial, but the public-school tradition of team sports was also an integral part of Nick’s life at Marlborough. David Wright recalls that once on the sports field, Nick was an enthusiastic participant: ‘One thing Nick was very good at was running, he was very quick. While I was playing cricket, which he wasn’t remotely interested in, he was on the athletics track. He was a very quick 100-yarder. And he used to play rugby, on the wing, because he was quick.’
    Cricket has became irrevocably associated with the English public school, but the ponderous process of a cricket match held little allure for Nick. He would sprint in track events or tear off alone on the wing of the house rugby team, and on occasion he could even be found on the hockey field; but, perhaps surprisingly, cricket never appealed to him.
    â€˜In the summers we used to meet on the athletics track for training and for competitions against other schools,’ Michael Maclaran recalled. ‘No one liked to admit to having to train – it was assumed that natural talent would get you through. But Nick had good motivation and a competitive streak and achieved great success in sprinting, with his long stride, high knee action and powerful build.
    â€˜Rugby was the main winter game, but I turned to hockey after some rugby injuries and often played with Nick for Marlborough Second XI. I think Nick played centre half, which was a key position, and he could hit the ball hard and well. He may well have been captain, because he had leadership qualities in a persuasive rather than dictatorial way, as well as talent.’
    Confounding the familiar image of Nick Drake as a withdrawn and virtually catatonic individual, Michael Maclaran’s recollection of his ‘good motivation’ and ‘competitive streak’ paints the very different picture of a vigorous, even ambitious teenager.
    Nick’s days at Marlborough were, by and large, happy ones. A bona fide