Nick Drake

Nick Drake

Nicholas Rodney Drake (June 19, 1948 – November 25, 1974) was an English singer/songwriter known for his gentle, autumnal songs, his innovative guitar tunings and his virtuoso right-hand fingerpicking guitar technique. Between 1969 and 1972 he recorded three haunting albums, which though failed to find a wide audience during his lifetime, have steadily grown in stature since , to the extent that he is now widely considered to be one of the most influential acoustic songwriters of the last 40 years .

Drake battled with depression, insomnia and acute shyness through out his life , and the topics would often appear as the subject of his lyrics. He was increasingly frustrated by the lack of recognition given to his music, and upon completion of his third album, 1972's Pink Moon, he drew back from both live performance and recording, retreating to his parent's home in Tanworth-in-Arden, where he became increasingly introverted and distant from those close to him. On November 25, 1974, Nick Drake died from an overdose of antidepressants, at the age of 26.

In the years since his death, Drake's profile and popularity has grown, initally through word of mouth, latterly exponentially. His posthumous popularity has led many fans consider the lyrics to “Fruit Tree”, a song from Five Leaves Left, to be prophetic:

“Fame is but a fruit tree / So very unsound.
It can never flourish / Till its stock is in the ground.
So men of fame / Can never find a way
Till time has flown / Far from their dying day.”

"During the early Eighties, I drifted away from the music scene. When I returned, I was surprised to find that Nick Drake was becoming famous." Ian MacDonald, 2002.

Biography

Early life

Nicholas Rodney Drake was born in Rangoon, Burma in 1948. When Nick was three the family moved back to the Warwickshire village of Tanworth-in-Arden, England, where his father Rodney worked as an engineer. He had one older sister, Gabrielle Drake, now an actress. Both parents were musical, and encouraged by his mother Molly, Drake learned to play piano at an early age , and was soon composing his own tunes, which he would record on a reel-to-reel tape recorder the family kept in the drawing room.

Aged 9, Drake began to attend English public boarding school, taking residence at Marlborough College, where he developed into an accomplished athlete, performing equally well in track and field and rugby. He played both clarinet and saxophone in the school orchestra, and around this time bought his first acoustic guitar, in which he showed early promise. He was soon experimenting with open tuning and double-pick techniques .

He secured a place at Fitzwilliam College, University of Cambridge, where he was to study English literature, though he delayed attendance to spent six months at the University de Aix-en-Provence, France, beginning in February 1967. Upon returning to England, Drake moved into a flat in London with his sister before beginning at Fitzwilliam in October 1967. By this time he had discovered the British and American folk music scenes, and was taking influence from performers such as Bob Dylan, Josh White and Phil Ochs. Drake began performing in local clubs and coffee houses around London where he was discovered by Ashley Hutchings, bass player of the folk rock group Fairport Convention. Hutchings introduced Drake to the other members of Fairport Convention, was well as to the folk singer John Martyn and the producer Joe Boyd. It was these associates that later convinced Island Records to sign the young singer/songwriter to a three-album contract.

Career

File:Nick Drake.jpg

Nick Drake, photographed c. 1969. No moving images of Nick Drake exist, he was only ever captured standing still

In 1969, at the age of twenty, he recorded his first album Five Leaves Left, which featured a chamber music quartet on a number of songs and had a light, breezy sound. Production and printing set-backs led to the release being delayed several months, and the album was poorly marketed and supported when it finally arrived. Reviews in the music press were few and luke warm, and it recieved virtually no radio air play. Drake himself was reportedly unhappy with the cover art .

In August he recorded three songs, unaccompanied, for a session with BBC's John Peel show. In September Drake opened for Fairport Convention at the Royal Festival Hall in London, but his sparce, skeletal sound was lost in such a large venue.

Acutely shy, by this time he had begun to resent touring. The few concerts he did play were usually in support of other British folk acts of the time, such as Fairport Convention or John Martyn, and were often brief, awkward and poorly attended. Partially because of this, his work received little attention and sold poorly. Whilst in the recording studio, he was so shy that he would always play facing a wall, so as to avoid people's gazes.

His second album Bryter Layter (1970), agian produced by Boyd, introduced a more upbeat, jazzier tone, and like it's predecessor, featured several members of Fairport Convention.

Severely depressed and doubting his abilities as a musician, Drake recorded his final album, 1972's Pink Moon, in two two-hour sessions, both beginning at midnight. The songs of were short (the eleven track album lasts only 28 minutes) and emotionally bleak. Drake appears unaccompanied, and the recording took place with only sound engineer John Wood present (a piano overdub on the title track was recorded by Drake, alone). Upon completion, Drake dropped off the master tapes at the front desk of Island Records' office building, and then swore he was retiring from performing music, planning to train to be a computer programmer or possibly to write songs for others to perform. The master tapes lay on a secretary's desk over the weekend and were not noticed until later the next week.

Final Years

However, none of Drake's plans materialized. In the next few months, Drake grew more depressed and maintained relationships only with close friends such as John Martyn, who wrote the title song of his 1973 album Solid Air for and about Drake and French singer Françoise Hardy. Friends from that time have described how much his appearance had changed: his nails grown; his hair and frame long and thin.

In 1974, Drake felt well enough to write and record a few new songs. However, on November 25, he died of an overdose of the antidepressant Tryptizol. The coroner concluded that the cause of Drake's death was suicide, although this was disputed by friends and relatives. Antidepressants of that type (tricyclic) are lethal if ingested at doses higher than as typically prescribed. His mother recounts that he must have had difficulty sleeping and had got up in the night to have a bowl of cornflakes. It's unclear whether he took more pills to help him sleep or to take his own life.

His simple gravestone in the Tanworth churchyard ([1]) bears the line 'Now we rise and we are every where', taken from "From the Morning"—the last song on the last album Nick lived to complete— one of his mother's favorites and considered by many as one of the most beautiful songs on the album.

Nick Drake's final resting place in the village of Tanworth-in-Arden.

Posthumous popularity

None of Drake's albums sold more than 5,000 copies during his lifetime. When Joe Boyd sold his Witchseason label to Island Records in the early 1970s, he insisted that Drake’s back-catalog would never be deleted. Boyd’s shrewdness began to pay dividends as the popularity of Drake’s music grew steadily over the years.

Several modern musicians, including Lucinda Williams, Badly Drawn Boy, Robert Smith, Matthew Good, Lou Barlow and R.E.M. guitarist Peter Buck, consider Drake an important influence. The Dream Academy's 1985 hit single "Life in a Northern Town" was a tribute to Drake. In early 1999, BBC2 aired a 40-minute Nick Drake documentary, "A Stranger Among Us — In Search of Nick Drake", as part of its Picture This strand. The following year saw the release of a documentary by Dutch director Jeroen Berkvens, titled A Skin Too Few: The Days of Nick Drake and featuring interviews with Joe Boyd, Gabrielle Drake, audio engineer John Wood and arranger Robert Kirby. In 2004 Brad Pitt narrated a BBC radio documentary about the singer [2].

Island responded to Drake’s popularity with several new releases, including 1986's Time of No Reply, an album of unreleased material, including previously unreleased songs recorded in 1974, 1994's Way to Blue, and 2004's Made to Love Magic, which featured some newly recorded orchestration for a previously released track.

In 2000, Volkswagen licensed the title track of Pink Moon for a particularly serene car commercial in the US. The advertisement caused a significant bounce in Drake’s popularity, bolstered by uses of Drake's music on a number of film soundtracks, including the single "River Man" in the 1997 film "Dream with the Fishes," 1998's Hideous Kinky and Practical Magic (featuring "Road" from Pink Moon and "Black Eyed Dog" from Time of No Reply, respectively). In 2001, two Bryter Layter tracks appeared in mainstream films: "Northern Sky" in Serendipity, and "Fly" in The Royal Tenenbaums. In the same year, "'Cello Song" from Five Leaves Left was featured in Me Without You. In 2004, "One of These Things First" appeared in Garden State and "Northern Sky" was featured again, this time in Fever Pitch. "Time Has Told Me" was also used in the television series My Name Is Earl, and, together with "Pink Moon", in the 2006 film The Lake House.

In 2004 Drake achieved his very first chart placings, nearly 30 years after his death, when two singles ("Magic" and "River Man", the only singles ever issued bearing his name), and a new compilation album ("Made to Love Magic"), made the middle reaches of the UK charts.

Most recently, Nick Drake has emerged as a key influence in the resurgence of 1960s and 1970s folk traditions known as the New Weird America. This label serves as an umbrella term for a variety of artists including Devendra Banhart, Joanna Newsom, and Six Organs of Admittance.

Music

Lyrics

Drake grew up in the leafy surroundings of a house called "Far Leys", and references to trees are frequent in his songs, up until the stark 'Pink Moon'. Rain was a common metaphor in early work, more especially in unpublished, pre Five Leaves Left songs, and again it is seen less frequently in later recordings, thought it appears again in his final published song "Voice From The Mountain lyrics".

Discography

Studio albums

Cover of Nick Drake's third album, Pink Moon (1972). Drake was unhappy about the graphic illustrations on each of his albums, which he felt was representive of the poor support he received generally

• Five Leaves Left (1969)
• Bryter Layter (1970)
• Pink Moon (1972)

Singles

• "Magic" (17 May 2004) — peaked at #32 in the singles chart
  • b/w "Northern Sky"
• "River Man" (13 September 2004) - peaked at #48 in the singles chart
  • b/w "Day Is Done" performed by the Charlie Hunter Quartet featuring Norah Jones

Compilations

• Tanworth-in-Arden (1967/1968) — bootleg recordings from Drake's home
• Second Grace (1968/1969) — bootleg recordings from Drake's home and in Hampstead.
• Time of No Reply (1986) — rarities, previously unreleased recordings
• Fruit Tree (1986) — four disc box set comprising Drake's three studio albums and Time of No Reply
• Heaven in a Wild Flower: An Exploration of Nick Drake (1986)
• Way to Blue: An Introduction to Nick Drake (1994)
• Made to Love Magic (2004) - peaked at #27 in the albums chart
• A Treasury (2004)

External links

• Bryter Music: The Estate of Nick Drake Official website
• NickDrake.com Unofficial website, featuring a guide to his music, tunings and finger picking techniques.
• Lost Boy — In Search of Nick Drake — BBC Radio documentary
• A Skin Too Few: The Days of Nick Drake — website for the Berkvens documentary
• Nick Drake Files features discography, lyrics, transcripts of interviews with Drake, accurate tab, etc.
• Exiled From Heaven Ian MacDonald's essay on Drake
• Picture of Drake's final resting place
• Volkswagen posthumously introduces Nick Drake Steve Caplan's article about Volkswagen's use of Nick Drake's music in a commercial. Originally published in The Gavin Report.