Month: December 2024

By Matthew Dodd

On the 25^th of November 1974, at his family home in Warwickshire, the singer-songwriter Nick Drake passed away from a believed overdose of antidepressants at age 26. Drake, a Cambridge dropout, left behind him three studio albums: all of which were released to critical and commercial failure. Around fifty mourners attended his funeral and, by 1975, his record label Island had decided not to reissue any of his albums. Fifty years later, a fully orchestrated rendition of Drake’s music was performed to a packed out Royal Albert Hall as part of the BBC’s annual programme of Proms. Having died in obscurity, by the 21^st century Drake has far eclipsed more successful contemporaries like Donovan and Fairport Convention to become perhaps Britain’s most popular folk artist. But how did a career that lasted less than seven years and ended in unconscionable tragedy become such a defining chapter in folk history?

In youth as in adulthood, Drake was a guarded and often abrasive figure. His father recalled an old headmaster of Drake writing that ‘none of us seemed to know him very well. All the way through with Nick, people didn’t know him very much’. By the late 60s, Drake had won a scholarship to study English Literature at Fitzwilliam College, Cambridge. Once there, he immediately aligned himself with, in the words of fellow student Brian Wells, ‘the cool people smoking dope’. Having found himself drawn to folk artists such as Bob Dylan and Van Morrison, Drake began performing his own music around London in 1967. Apocryphal accounts describe Drake as an imposing performer, his gangly build and harsh features giving him even at the outset the look of a star. Fairport Convention’s Ashley Hutchings talks of how Drake performing at this stage ‘seemed to be seven feet.’ Still, Drake was uncomfortable performing, a fact that would persist throughout his career. For all the extended paraphernalia published on his short life, no actual live recording of Drake exists today. 

Drake skipped lectures to record his first album, 1969’s Five Leaves Left, and by 1969 had left Cambridge nine months before graduating to return to London and focus on his music. He expanded from the raw, Leonard Cohen inspired sound of his first album with his second, the fuller, jazz influenced Bryter Later in 1971. With the release of Bryter Layter, Drake began to withdraw further, refusing to promote the album publicly and delivering reserved performances. Across two nights in late 1971, Drake recorded what would prove to be both his masterpiece and his final album, Pink Moon. Unlike his previous two records, Pink Moon, features no instrumentation beyond Drake’s voice and guitar – save for a brief, revelatory moment of piano intrusion on the titular track. Island, Drake’s record label, had not expected a third album from him and only learnt of its production when Drake delivered it, completed, to producer Chris Brackwell. A popular story goes that Drake left the completed tape unannounced at the reception desk of Island Records, though this was not the case: just another piece of mythologising in Drake’s already developing legend. Despite the strength of Pink Moon, now considered amongst the greatest albums ever recorded, it won Drake no greater acclaim and his work remained on the fringes of the folk scene. By this point, all of Drake’s albums had collectively sold under 4000 copies, leading him to consider joining the army as an alternative career prospect. Nevertheless, despite mental deterioration, Drake returned to the studio in 1974 to work on an ultimately unrealised fourth album. Throughout the year, however, his mental state worsened and a few months after his 26^th birthday, Drake died in his childhood bedroom.

Drake’s posthumous fame came in no single wave but as a slow, rumbling ascension to the heights of folk’s musical hierarchy. Artists such as Robert Smith and Kate Bush cited him as an influence during the 80s and, throughout the decade, his status as a tragic figure began to brew. Documentaries and biographies began to appear in the 1990s and the somewhat un-Drakelike use of Pink Moon in a Volkswagen advertisement brought his music to a wider audience. By the 21^st century, Drake’s status among the emergent ‘indie’ crowd had been firmly established. The use of Fly in Wes Anderson’s 2004 film The Royal Tenenbaums, on whose soundtrack Drake appears alongside the similarly fated Elliott Smith, represented an early example of his newfound demographic base. 

In the decades following his untimely death, Drake has been transformed into the archetypal martyr of contemporary folk music. His guarded public persona, his staunchly un-traditional attitude to guitar playing, his introspective and often inscrutable lyrics find fresh ears with each generation of wayward rebels and dreamers. The model of his martyrdom and lifelong mental health struggles have drawn him into the massed tradition of ‘tortured artists’ – alongside Van Gogh, Rimbaud, Plath and countless others – whose respective mystiques have only ballooned in the wake of their early deaths. This tendency to cast Drake as a tragically doomed romantic hero does, as it does to those other artists who shared his fate, a disservice to both his artistry and his memory. There is, of course, a degree to which Drake’s reputation has been made by his tragedy, in the same way that Van Gogh’s paintings or Plath’s poetry is made all the more powerful by knowledge of their grim contexts. The brevity of his career, represented in three albums amounting to a little under two hours, certainly affords him a certain unassailability. Compare him, for instance, to his great friend and contemporary John Martyn, another legend of the British folk scene, whose forty year career has earned him enduring acclaim but failed to bring him to the mythic status of Drake. Death froze Drake as the brooding face of eternal tortured youth: clad in corduroy and woolly jumpers, unkempt hair pushed back by the wind as he wanders through England’s green and pleasant lands singing of the days and their endless coloured ways.

It is easy for every brooding adolescent to find some understanding in a figure like Drake – indeed, that’s the very way his music found me – but to define Drake by his death, to narrativize his mental illness as the climax of his hero’s journey, is a gross error. Poorly treated mental illness – whether he suffered from heavy depression or schizophrenia was a fact undiscerned in his lifetime and still not understood fully now – robbed the world of a lifetime of music and, more importantly, took a friend, a son and a brother from those around him. It’s easy to fall for the myth of Nick Drake, but for the sake of all those affected by issues of mental health, we cannot. Nick Drake didn’t die for our sins. As a culture, we are all too keen to fictionalise our heroes and reduce them to stepping stones on the path to our own self-actualisation. On this path, Drake becomes just another victim of a tendency to fetishise mental illness, to turn unbearable pain into an aesthetic choice and by extension alienate the suffering from their pain. Nick Drake’s music is a solace, a heartbreak, a tragedy but Nick Drake was also a man. Now 80 and with a successful career in acting of her own to her name, Drake’s sister Gabrielle has reflected at length on the way her brother’s cult of personality has affected her personally. She remembers candidly hearing of one fan gleefully taking a piece away from Drake’s gravestone. But, she claims, this mythologised Drake – the dreaming boy roaming Hampstead Heath – only bears slight resemblance to her actual brother, a man she found frequently obstinate and difficult. 

The temptation to project one’s own woes onto our idols is a dangerous one. To look into Nick Drake’s steely eyes and recognise, not the seismic melancholy attributed to him, but our own troubles is an understandable salve to the woes of the world. But we must understand our heroes as people as well as legends. Nick Drake’s body of work is unimpeachable, three near-perfect albums of consummate artistry, an unbridled marriage of poetry and music. Yet, his memory’s necessary entwinement with his tragedy bears attention beyond the ephemeral attachment to a romantic hero. Drake is baked into the ecosystem of contemporary music: his influences are felt throughout artists from Belle & Sebastian to R.E.M. But perhaps his most powerful legacy is his enduring ability to connect with and console generations of listeners, to draw out beauty from the heartache of the world. To find serenity in art is natural, and if serenity does have a soundtrack, it surely must be by Nick Drake.

And I was green, greener than the hill
Where flowers grow and the sun shone still
Now I’m darker than the deepest sea
Just hand me down, give me a place to be

Image credit: Songs From So Deep