Nick Drake
Nicholas Rodney Drake (19 June 1948 – 25 November 1974) was an English singer-songwriter. An accomplished acoustic guitarist, Drake signed to Island Records at the age of twenty while still a student at the University of Cambridge. His debut album, Five Leaves Left, was released in 1969, and was followed by two more albums, Bryter Layter (1971) and Pink Moon (1972). While Drake did not reach a wide audience during his brief lifetime, his music found critical acclaim and he gradually received wider recognition following his death.
For the British poet and mystery writer, see Nick Drake (poet). For the American racing driver, see Nick Drake (racing driver).
Nick Drake
Nicholas Rodney Drake
19 June 1948
Rangoon, Burma
25 November 1974 (aged 26)
Tanworth-in-Arden, England
- Guitar
- vocals
1967–1974
Drake suffered from depression and was reluctant to perform in front of live audiences. Upon completion of Pink Moon, he withdrew from both performance and recording, retreating to his parents' home in rural Warwickshire. On 25 November 1974, Drake was found dead at the age of 26 due to an overdose of antidepressants.
Drake's music remained available through the mid-1970s, but the 1979 release of the retrospective album Fruit Tree allowed his back catalogue to be reassessed. Drake has come to be credited as an influence on numerous artists, including Robert Smith of the Cure, Peter Buck of R.E.M., Kate Bush, Paul Weller, Aimee Mann, Beck, Robyn Hitchcock and the Black Crowes. The first Drake biography appeared in 1997; it was followed in 1998 by the documentary film A Stranger Among Us.
Personal life[edit]
In 1971, Drake's family persuaded him to visit a psychiatrist at St Thomas' Hospital, London. He was prescribed antidepressants, but felt uncomfortable and embarrassed about taking them, and tried to hide the fact from his friends.[63] He worried about their side effects and was concerned that they would react with his regular cannabis use.[64] By this time, Drake was smoking what Kirby described as "unbelievable amounts" of cannabis[65] and exhibiting "the first signs of psychosis". He rarely left his flat, and then only to play an occasional concert or to buy drugs.[49] According to photographer Keith Morris, by 1971 Drake was a "hunched, dishevelled figure, staring vacantly...ignoring the overtures of a friendly labrador or gazing blankly over Hampstead Heath."[66] 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."[49]
In the months following Pink Moon's release, Drake became increasingly asocial and distant.[67] 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."[8] His return was often difficult for his family, as Gabrielle said: "Good days in my parents' home were good days for Nick, and bad days were bad days for Nick. And that was what their life revolved around, really."[28]
Drake lived a frugal existence; his only income was a £20-a-week retainer from Island Records (equivalent to £257 in 2021[16]). At one point he could not afford a new pair of shoes.[69] 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."[70] 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."[71]
John Martyn (who in 1973 wrote the title song of his album Solid Air about Drake) described Drake in this period as the most withdrawn person he had ever met.[72] 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.[73] During particularly bleak periods, he refused to wash his hair or cut his nails.[60] Early in 1972, Drake had a nervous breakdown, and was hospitalised for five weeks.[62] He was initially believed to have major depression, although his former therapist suggested he had schizophrenia.[74]
By late 1974, Drake's weekly retainer from Island had ceased, and his depression meant that he remained in contact with only a few close friends. He had tried to stay in touch with Sophia Ryde, whom he had met in London in 1968.[75] 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".[76] 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."[77] As with the relationship he had shared with fellow folk musician Linda Thompson, Drake's relationship with Ryde was not consummated.[77]
Musical and lyrical style[edit]
Drake was obsessive about practising his guitar technique, and would stay up through the night writing and experimenting with alternative tunings. His mother remembered hearing him "bumping around at all hours. I think he wrote his nicest melodies in the early morning hours."[17] Self-taught,[86] he achieved his guitar style through the use of alternative tunings to create cluster chords,[87] 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.[87] He sang in the baritone range, often quietly and with little projection.[88]
Drake was drawn to the works of William Blake, William Butler Yeats, and Henry Vaughan, whose influences are reflected in his lyrics.[10] He also employed a series of elemental[89] 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.[10] Throughout, Drake writes with detachment, more as an observer than a participant, a point of view Rolling Stone's Anthony DeCurtis described "as if he were viewing his life from a great, unbridgeable distance".[89]
Drake's perceived inability to connect has caused speculation about his sexuality.[90] 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.[91] Kirby described Drake's lyrics as a "series of extremely vivid, complete observations, almost like a series of epigrammatic proverbs", though he doubts that Drake saw himself as "any sort of poet". Instead, Kirby believes that Drake's lyrics were crafted to "complement and compound a mood that the melody dictates in the first place".[69]
Posthumous popularity and legacy[edit]
There were no documentaries or compilation albums in the wake of Drake's death.[84] His public profile remained low throughout the 1970s, although his name appeared occasionally in the music press. By this time, his parents were receiving an increasing number of fans at the family home. Following a 1975 NME article by Nick Kent, Island Records said they had no plans to reissue Drake's albums,[92] 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.[92]
By the mid-1980s, Drake was being cited as an influence by musicians such as Kate Bush, Paul Weller, the Black Crowes,[93] 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".[94] In 1986, a biography of Drake was published in Danish;[95] an updated version with new interviews was published in English in 2012.[96] By the end of the 1980s his name was appearing regularly in newspapers and music magazines in the UK,[97] where he frequently was cast in the role of the "doomed romantic hero".[98]
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.[99][100] 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.[72]
In 1999, "Pink Moon" was used in a Volkswagen commercial, boosting Drake's US album sales from about 6,000 copies in 1999 to 74,000 in 2000.[101][102] 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.[103] 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."[101]
Over the following years, Drake's songs appeared in soundtracks of "quirky, youthful" films such as The Royal Tenenbaums, Serendipity and Garden State.[101] Made to Love Magic, an album of outtakes and remixes released by Island Records in 2004, far exceeded Drake's lifetime sales.[101] The American musician Duncan Sheik released an album of songs inspired by Drake, Phantom Moon, in 2001. In 2017, Kele Okereke cited Pink Moon as an influence on his third solo album, Fatherland.[104] In November 2014, Gabrielle Drake published a companion to her brother's music.[105] An authorised biography by Richard Morton Jack was published in June 2023, with a foreword by Gabrielle Drake.[106] Other contemporary artists influenced by Drake include José González,[107] Bon Iver,[107] Iron & Wine,[107] Alexi Murdoch[107] and Philip Selway of Radiohead.[108] In 2023, Chrysalis Records released The Endless Coloured Ways – The Songs of Nick Drake, a tribute album featuring artists including Selway, Liz Phair and Feist.[109]
In 1994, the Rolling Stone journalist Paul Evans said Drake's music "throbs with [an] aching beauty" similar to the 1968 Van Morrison album Astral Weeks.[110] According to the AllMusic critic Richie Unterberger, Drake was a "singular talent" who "produced several albums of chilling, somber beauty", now "recognized as peak achievements of both the British folk-rock scene and the entire rock singer/songwriter genre". Unterberger felt that Drake's following spanned generations "in the manner of the young Romantic poets of the 19th century who died before their time ... Baby boomers who missed him the first time around found much to revisit once they discovered him, and his pensive loneliness speaks directly to contemporary alternative rockers who share his sense of morose alienation."[44] The American critic Robert Christgau wrote in Christgau's Record Guide: Rock Albums of the Seventies (1981): "Drake's jazzy folk-pop is admired by a lot of people who have no use for Kenny Rankin, and I prefer to leave open the possibility that he's yet another English mystic (romantic?) I'm too set in my ways to hear."[2]