Nick Drake

Career In January 1968, Drake met Robert Kirby, a music student who went on to write many of the string and woodwind arrangements for Drake's first two albums. By this time, Drake had discovered the British and American folk music scenes, and was influenced by performers such as Bob Dylan, Donovan, Van Morrison, Josh White and Phil Ochs (he later cited Randy Newman and the Beach Boys as influences). He began performing in local clubs and coffee houses around London, and in December 1967, while playing at a five-day event at the Roundhouse in Camden Town, made an impression on Ashley Hutchings, bass player with Fairport Convention. Hutchings recalls being impressed by Drake's guitar skill, but even more so by his image: "He looked like a star. He looked wonderful, he seemed to be 7 ft [tall]."

Hutchings introduced Drake to the 25-year-old American producer Joe Boyd, owner of the production and management company Witchseason Productions, which at the time was licensed to Island Records. He sought to include a string arrangement similar to Simon's, "without overwhelming ... or sounding cheesy".

Initial recordings did not go well: the sessions were irregular and rushed, taking place during studio downtime borrowed from Fairport Convention's production of their Unhalfbricking album. Tension arose as to the direction of the album: Boyd was an advocate of George Martin's approach of using the studio as an instrument, while Drake preferred a more organic sound. Dann observed that Drake appears "tight and anxious" on bootleg recordings from the sessions, and notes a number of Boyd's unsuccessful attempts at instrumentation. Both were unhappy with arranger Richard Anthony Hewson's contribution, which they felt was too mainstream for Drake's songs. Drake suggested his college friend Robert Kirby as a replacement. Though Boyd was sceptical about taking on an inexperienced amateur music student, he was impressed by Drake's uncharacteristic assertiveness and agreed to a trial. Kirby had previously presented Drake with some arrangements for his songs.

Post-production difficulties delayed the release by several months, and the album was poorly marketed and supported. In July, Melody Maker described Five Leaves Left as "poetic" and "interesting", though NME wrote in October that there was "not nearly enough variety to make it entertaining". It received little radio play outside shows by more progressive BBC DJs such as John Peel and Bob Harris. Drake was unhappy with the inlay sleeve, which printed songs in the wrong running order and reproduced verses omitted from the recorded versions. In an interview, his sister Gabrielle said: "He was very secretive. I knew he was making an album but I didn't know what stage of completion it was at until he walked into my room and said, 'There you are.' He threw it onto the bed and walked out!" Eventually, in an attempt to bring some stability and a telephone into Drake's life, Boyd organised and paid for a ground floor bedsit in Belsize Park, Camden.

On 5 August 1969, Drake pre-recorded four songs for the BBC's Night Ride radio show presented by John Peel ("Cello Song", "Three Hours", "River Man" and "Time of No Reply" ), which were broadcast after midnight on 6 August. Nick subsequently recorded "Bryter Layter" for another BBC radio broadcast, in April 1970. A month after the initial BBC recordings, on 24 September, he opened for Fairport Convention at the Royal Festival Hall in London, followed by appearances at folk clubs in Birmingham and Hull. According to the folk singer Michael Chapman, the audiences did not appreciate Drake and wanted "songs with choruses". Chapman said: "They completely missed the point. He didn't say a word the entire evening. It was actually quite painful to watch. I don't know what the audience expected, I mean, they must have known they weren't going to get sea-shanties and sing-alongs at a Nick Drake gig!" Although Five Leaves Left attracted little publicity, Boyd was keen to build on what momentum there was. Drake's second album, Bryter Layter (1971), again produced by Boyd and engineered by John Wood, introduced a more upbeat, jazzier sound. Disappointed by his debut's poor sales, Drake sought to move away from his pastoral sound and agreed to Boyd's suggestions to include bass and drum tracks. "It was more of a pop sound, I suppose," Boyd later said. "I imagined it as more commercial." Like its predecessor, the album featured musicians from Fairport Convention, as well as contributions from John Cale on two songs: "Northern Sky" and "Fly". Trevor Dann noted that while sections of "Northern Sky" sound more characteristic of Cale, the song was the closest Drake came to a release with chart potential.

Bryter Layter was a commercial failure, and reviews were again mixed; Record Mirror praised Drake as a "beautiful guitarist—clean and with perfect timing, [and] accompanied by soft, beautiful arrangements", but Melody Maker described the album as "an awkward mix of folk and cocktail jazz".

Island Records urged Drake to promote Bryter Layter through interviews, radio sessions, and live appearances. Drake refused. Disappointed by the reaction to Bryter Layter, he turned inwards and withdrew from family and friends. Drake approached Wood in October 1971 to begin work on what would be his final release. Sessions took place over two nights, with only Drake and Wood in the studio. Drake appears on Pink Moon accompanied only by his own carefully recorded guitar save for a piano overdub on the title track. Wood later said: "He was very determined to make this very stark, bare record. He definitely wanted it to be him more than anything. And I think, in some ways, Pink Moon is probably more like Nick is than the other two records."

Drake delivered the tapes of Pink Moon to Chris Blackwell at Island Records, contrary to a popular legend which claims that he dropped them off at the receptionist's desk without saying a word. An advertisement for the album in Melody Maker in February opened with "Pink Moon—Nick Drake's latest album: the first we heard of it was when it was finished." Pink Moon sold fewer copies than its predecessors, although it received some favourable reviews. In Zigzag, Connor McKnight wrote: "Nick Drake is an artist who never fakes. The album makes no concession to the theory that music should be escapist. It's simply one musician's view of life at the time, and you can't ask for more than that."

Blackwell felt Pink Moon had the potential to bring Drake to a mainstream audience; however, his staff were disappointed by Drake's unwillingness to promote it. A&R manager Muff Winwood recalled "tearing his hair out" in frustration and said that without Blackwell's enthusiastic support "the rest of us would have given him the boot". At Boyd's insistence, Drake agreed to an interview with Jerry Gilbert of Sounds Magazine. The "shy and introverted" Drake spoke of his dislike of live appearances and little else. "There wasn't any connection whatsoever," Gilbert said. "I don't think he made eye contact with me once." His three albums had together sold fewer than 4,000 copies. Boyd and Wood noticed a deterioration in Drake's performance, requiring him to overdub his voice separately over the guitar. However, the return to the Sound Techniques studio raised Drake's spirits; his mother recalled, "We were so absolutely thrilled to think that Nick was happy because there hadn't been any happiness in Nick's life for years." He worried about their side effects and was concerned that they would react with his regular cannabis use. By this time, Drake was smoking what Kirby described as "unbelievable amounts" of cannabis and exhibiting "the first signs of psychosis". He rarely left his flat, and then only to play an occasional concert or to buy drugs. His sister recalled: "This was a very bad time. He once said to me that everything started to go wrong from [this] time on, and I think that was when things started to go wrong."

In the months following Pink Moon release, Drake became increasingly asocial and distant. He returned to live at his parents' home in Tanworth-in-Arden, and while he resented the regression, he accepted that it was necessary. "I don't like it at home," he told his mother, "but I can't bear it anywhere else."

Drake lived a frugal existence; his only income was a £20-a-week retainer from Island Records . At one point he could not afford a new pair of shoes. He would disappear for days, sometimes arriving unannounced at friends' houses, uncommunicative and withdrawn. Robert Kirby described a typical visit: "He would arrive and not talk, sit down, listen to music, have a smoke, have a drink, sleep there the night, and two or three days later he wasn't there, he'd be gone. And three months later he'd be back." Nick's supervision partner at Cambridge, John Venning, saw him on an underground train in London and felt he was seriously depressed: "There was something about him which suggested that he would have looked straight through me and not registered me at all. So I turned around."

Drake was a close friend of fellow folk musicians John and Beverley Martyn, and visited them regularly when they lived in London and subsequently Hastings. Martyn later wrote the title song of his 1973 album Solid Air about Drake and described him, in this period, as the most withdrawn person he had ever met. Drake would borrow his mother's car and drive for hours without purpose, until he ran out of petrol and had to ring his parents to ask to be collected. Friends recalled the extent to which his appearance had changed. During particularly bleak periods, he refused to wash his hair or cut his nails. He was initially believed to have major depression, although his former therapist suggested he had schizophrenia. Ryde has been described by Drake's biographers as "the nearest thing" to a girlfriend in his life, but she used the description "best (girl) friend". In a 2005 interview, Ryde said that a week before he died, she had sought to end the relationship: "I couldn't cope with it. I asked him for some time. And I never saw him again." John Martyn claimed to have had a heated argument with Drake around a month before the latter's death which was never reconciled. Phill Brown later said that this "destroyed" Martyn.

Drake's perceived inability to connect has led to speculation about his sexuality. Boyd detected a virginal quality in Drake's lyrics and music and notes that he never knew of him behaving in a sexual way with anyone, male or female. Ian MacDonald, who was distantly acquainted with Drake at Cambridge, wrote that he "was probably fonder of sex than has been suggested so far, but otherwise he held aloof from worldly attachment".

Death The grave where Drake's ashes are buried with those of his parents. alt=During the early hours of 25 November 1974, Drake died in his bedroom at Far Leys. He had gone to bed early after spending the afternoon visiting a friend. His mother said that around dawn he left his room for the kitchen. His family had heard him do this many times before, and presumed he was eating cereal. He returned to his room a short while later, where it is believed that he took an overdose of amitriptyline, an antidepressant.

Drake had been accustomed to keeping his own hours; he frequently had difficulty sleeping and often stayed up through the night playing and listening to music, then slept late into the following morning. His mother later said: "I never used to disturb him at all. But it was about 12 o'clock, and I went in, because really it seemed it was time he got up. And he was lying across the bed. The first thing I saw was his long, long legs." According to Rodney Drake's personal diary, Nick's body was first discovered by their housemaid who looked in on Drake around 11:45 and called out to Molly who went in to discover he was dead. There was no suicide note, although a letter addressed to Ryde was found close to his bed. At the inquest on 18 December, the coroner stated that the cause of death was "Acute amitriptyline poisoning—self-administered when suffering from a depressive illness" and concluded a verdict of suicide.

On 2 December 1974, after a service in the Church of St Mary Magdalene, Tanworth-in-Arden, Drake's remains were cremated at Solihull Crematorium and his ashes interred under an oak tree in the church's graveyard. The funeral was attended by around fifty mourners, including friends from Marlborough, Aix, Cambridge, London, Tanworth and Witchseason Productions. Referring to Drake's tendency to compartmentalise relationships, Brian Wells observed that many met each other for the first time that morning. His mother recalled "a lot of his young friends came up here. We'd never met many of them." which drew from West End acts such as Noël Coward, Sandy Wilson, and Julian Slade. and according to Kirby, the instrumental tracks on Bryter Layter were inspired by the Beach Boys' Pet Sounds and the 5th Dimension's The Magic Garden. Similarities have been noted between Drake's compositions and the work of Johann Sebastian Bach; he achieved his guitar style through the use of alternative tunings to create cluster chords, which are difficult to achieve on a guitar using standard tuning. Similarly, many of his vocal melodies rest on the extensions of chords, not just on notes of the triad.

Drake was drawn to the works of William Blake, William Butler Yeats, and Henry Vaughan, whose influences are reflected in his lyrics. symbols and codes, largely drawn from nature. The moon, stars, sea, rain, trees, sky, mist, and seasons are all commonly used, influenced in part by his rural upbringing. Images related to summer figure centrally in his early work; from Bryter Layter on, his language is more autumnal, evoking a season commonly used to convey senses of loss and sorrow. but in 1979 Rob Partridge joined Island Records as press officer and commissioned the release of the Fruit Tree box set. The release compiled Drake's three studio albums, the four tracks he recorded with Wood in 1974 and an extensive biography written by the American journalist Arthur Lubow. Although sales were poor, Island Records did not delete the albums from its catalogue. Peter Buck of R.E.M. and Robert Smith of the Cure. Drake gained further exposure in 1985 when the Dream Academy included a dedication to Drake on the sleeve of its hit single "Life in a Northern Town". In 1986 a biography of Drake by Gorm Henrik Rasmussen was published in Danish; an updated version with new interviews was published in English in 2012. By the end of the 1980s his name was appearing regularly in music magazines and newspapers in the UK, where he frequently was cast in the role of the "doomed romantic hero". The earliest Drake profile in a US magazine was the article "Hanging On A Star" by the AllMusic critic Peter Kurtz, which appeared in the 3 September 1993 issue of Goldmine.

The first biography of Drake in English was published in November 1997 by Patrick Humphries. On 20 June 1998, BBC Radio 2 broadcast a documentary, Fruit Tree: The Nick Drake Story, featuring interviews with Boyd, Wood, Gabrielle and Molly Drake, Paul Wheeler, Robert Kirby and Ashley Hutchings, and narrated by Danny Thompson. In early 1999, BBC Two broadcast a 40-minute documentary, A Stranger Among Us—In Search of Nick Drake. The following year, Dutch director Jeroen Berkvens released the documentary A Skin Too Few: The Days of Nick Drake, featuring interviews with Boyd, Gabrielle Drake, Wood and Kirby. Later that year, The Guardian named Bryter Layter the best alternative album of all time. The Los Angeles Times saw this as an example of how, following the consolidation of US radio stations, previously unknown music was finding audiences through advertising. Fans used the filesharing software Napster to circulate digital copies of Drake's music. According to The Atlantic, "The chronic shyness and mental illness that made it hard for Drake to compete with 1970s showmen like Elton John and David Bowie didn't matter when his songs were being pulled one by one out of the ether and played late at night in a dorm room." Also in 2014, a 10" live EP, released alongside the book, Remembered For A While, was released, titled The John Peel Session. An authorised biography by Richard Morton Jack was published in June 2023, with a foreword by Gabrielle Drake. Other contemporary artists influenced by Drake include Mikael Åkerfeldt of Opeth, José González, Iron & Wine, Steven Wilson, and Brian Molko of Placebo .

Discography

Five Leaves Left (1969) Bryter Layter (1971) Pink Moon (1972)