I recently had to come back home, to a village which is now only really known for one person — Nick Drake. I’m now two decades older than he was when he died, so I have definitely spent more time in that tiny village than he ever did. I went to school there, lived down the road, played tennis there. I sat on the steps beneath the village green cross and smoked weed — much like him. In the summer months there’s little better than getting a pint of ale and stretching out on the green, sinking into the buttercups and thinking about absolutely nothing — which, to be honest, he must also have done.
It wasn’t until my early twenties that I even knew he came from Tanworth-in-Arden. It takes a while for the brain to build up enough courage to properly experience sentimentality. For a brief moment back then, I wished I had experienced Tanworth in the 60s, gone to Oxford, drifted around with the band Fairport Convention and quietly disappeared. One of the things about his life is the banality of it; nothing really seems to have happened, and yet the world’s woes seem to pour out of it. It is certainly intriguing, and judging by his Reddit page, people still pour over every lyric and every detail in every photo.
Tanworth, for me, was a place of emptiness — and from that, a place of escapism. I wanted to leave, to finish school, to make things. Theoretically, the area carries all this cultural weight — the Pre-Raphaelites, fragments of English poetry, W. H. Auden, Philip Larkin, later the mythologised countryside of bands like Led Zeppelin and Birmingham bands like Black Sabbath or Steel Pulse — but in reality it was just another commuter-belt village, giving white-collar workers from Birmingham, Coventry and Solihull a kind of mini-castle in the country.
Historically it wasn’t empty at all. This is the Forest of Arden — Shakespeare’s Arden — As You Like It, and that line, “Now I am in Arden, the more fool I”, which always stuck out to me, being the fool in Arden that I am. A place that was once imagined as wild, magical and disorienting has slowly been flattened into something pastel green and off-white. But what I always wondered was what lay beneath the manicured lawns — perhaps a darkness. There is definitely darkness present in Drake’s work. In Riverman, for me, there’s a circular string arrangement based on Delius; at the end of the simple chord progression, the move from E inside a C major to E flat immediately draws a curtain across the open window. It’s as dark as anything Sabbath wrote.
My grandparents lived there too, just down the road — everything is “just down the road” in those villages. A web of places populated by a post-war generation who worked in Birmingham: factory workers, managers, owners. A few stops on the train and you were in Birmingham, which had once been the second richest industrial city in the UK until the industrial decline in the 60s and 70s.
That relationship — between the pastoral and the industrial — always sits slightly awkwardly, or strangely, within me. As illustrated by another Midland icon — J. R. R. Tolkien. The dichotomy in his work becomes moral: countryside good, industry bad. But in reality it doesn’t work like that. The countryside here wasn’t separate from industry; it was built on top of it. The “heaven” paid for by the “hell”.
My grandmother’s house sat in a large wood and, less romantically, right next to a golf club. It was built in a strange, almost meta way in the grounds of their previous house, and my grandfather filmed the whole thing, shown in the film above. After the war, before golf took over, he was obsessed with a Bolex camera. He shot, edited and directed everything himself. I sometimes think that, given the chance, he might have gone into film instead of making steel screws.
A path ran from the house to the golf club, cutting through one of the remaining fragments of the Forest of Arden. On either side were linden and oak trees. What I remember is the light — sunlight caught on these broad, semi-transparent green leaves, like open palms. It felt like being inside something architectural, like a church that’s bigger on the inside than the outside. It made me wonder if churches had borrowed from forests — trunks becoming columns, branches becoming beams, the steeple like in a nursery rhyme rising out of interlocked hands.
Halfway along that path, high up, there was a treehouse — a box perched and camouflaged in the highest branches. My uncle built it. He had a terrible car crash, almost died, and suffered serious injuries. Later, and according to my mother closely related to this, he became an alcoholic and died from that just a few years ago. Towards the end there were stories — empty vodka bottles hidden in bushes and behind trees. It became gossip, the kind of thing that floats around but isn’t looked at directly. I didn’t really take it in until he was found dead in his front room.
I remember a midsummer evening when I was about fourteen. My grandmother told me it was the longest day of the year. I found that completely mind-blowing — how could someone possibly know that just by looking at a tree? It never occurred to me until much later that she’d probably just heard it on Radio 4 that morning.
That night, in front of the ever-blazing fire (summer and winter) in her 1960s modernist house sunk into the trees, I started looking more closely at everything. The furnishings all seemed to lean into the environment — green carpets like moss, heavy green curtains, parquet floors, probably sourced from some deforested part of the world and then placed back into a version of nature that felt controlled, aesthetic — the outdated aesthetic that shaped my memories and now somehow underlies my work.
The house hadn’t been touched since the 70s. It was full of strange pockets of time — tourist plates, childhood books from the 20s, balls of string, and vintage electrical equipment like torches and binoculars from the war. The binoculars now sit on my bookshelf — not as objects, but for what they might have seen. The place felt like a series of wormholes into 70s aesthetics, a lost and forgotten moodboard, with shelves of tourist plates and scattered remnants of earlier lives. These objects often crop up in films, old books and flea markets. The question of how you would ever choose something like that only gains context once you see it in a magazine image in a second-hand bookshop or — most recently for me — when I recognised the psychedelic carpet in Peter Bogdanovich’s film What’s Up, Doc?, set in a San Francisco hotel, made the same year the house was built.
My grandfather was in Burma during the war. He joined in 1939 through the Territorial Army and spent most of the war behind the front lines, clearing up after the fighting. He was buried alive by a mortar explosion at one point, but dug out. He survived it, carried on. He lived in extreme conditions — heat, illness, isolation — something closer to what we later associate with the Vietnam War, but with far less support and more primitive technology.
Nick Drake’s father was also in Burma, in the Royal Engineers. It’s hard not to think about that when listening to his music. However overplayed it’s become, there’s something in it that feels like it is constantly trying to heal something else. In a teenage sense it’s angst, but I suspect it could be related to familial, historical and geographic contexts.
After the war, Birmingham went through a huge economic boom. People made money, bought houses, moved outwards into places like Tanworth. Coventry, nearby, was heavily bombed and then rebuilt quickly in the 50s and 60s — effectively covered over. A clean surface put on top of something that wasn’t really resolved.
For a long time I thought of someone like Anselm Kiefer as exploiting that history — using the war as material. But his work doesn’t smooth anything over. It does the opposite. It leaves it exposed, like an open wound. His repetition of the open wound is a constant reminder. It’s a firm rebuttal to traditional monuments, but it is still the aesthetic of healing — perhaps suggesting that darkness can do just as much as light.
That’s what feels different here. Places like Tanworth feel calm, settled, resolved. But that calm is constructed. It sits on top of something else, something much darker. In the case of Drake, Kiefer and my own experience, it is always the war and its industrial aftermath. Those experiences didn’t disappear — they just became less visible. For a brief moment they were replaced by boom, but unfortunately it was an industrial, polluting boom. So in a way, the escape to the country was away not just from trauma of the war, but also from the trauma of the landscape.
We don’t really connect the music that came after the war in Britain to that inheritance. Before the hedonism of Zeppelin and Sabbath, there must have been a quieter atmosphere — something shaped by silence, by things not fully processed. Music as a kind of indirect expression, rather than something explicit. This was perhaps hinted at by the British folk movement, which never reached the same scale as hard rock.
This tendency to cover things over — to build something calm and coherent on top of something deeply disturbed — may be the heart of the matter. A village, a house, a type of music: a British attitude to trauma.
Nick Drake’s enigma sits at the centre of this. Lying on the village green, half soaked in English bitter, listening to Drake, dreaming of the past. It’s an easy balm to the world’s problems — violins over ruins — but we should be grateful to be here to listen.
After all, there’s a lot of bodies under those ruins.
Video – The Bowley Reels, No.43, Building Desails, 1974. Dir. Leonard Bowley
A MOMENT OF ETERNAL NOISE 