Nick Drake: The Life

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They were so dark and sad, and telling about the state of his mind: doom, gloom and despair, with apocalyptic elements. So it was gratifying for me to be able to contextualise Nick’s illness with the first, large part of his life and say that really the illness came down like a shutter on him, and doesn’t define how he always was. Best of all was a set of African drummers and dancers, who produced about the most infectious rhythms I have ever been infected by.

It was like a scene from The Decameron, with food everywhere, which they invited us to help ourselves to. I wondered why he’d bothered to record some of the tracks, and who had thought it was a good idea to let him go into the studio and do so. But this process happens, of course, and we end up with the things that resonate the most and that people identify with the most strongly. AUDIENCE MEMBER 3: My father-in-law was at school with Nick at Marlborough and doesn’t remember a single thing about him.Although a foreword by Gabrielle Drake maintains that this is not an authorised work, she provided Drake’s own papers, her father’s diary and gave her blessing for everyone around Drake to contribute. RU: For someone with such a brief career, who only did two known interviews, there are so many rumours and myths around Nick Drake, many of which are unfounded and unfortunately circulate online and in other places. But although much dope was smoked – and it remains plausible that the singer’s cannabis consumption might have precipitated a form of psychosis – Morton Jack concludes that he almost certainly wasn’t using anything harder. They want to believe that Keith Moon drove a car into a swimming pool, even though that didn’t happen. So I think those two factors combined to accelerate his low self-esteem and questioning of what he was doing with his life.

Here, in the late 1970s you could set your alarm clock radio to WHFS at night, in the Maryland suburbs or anywhere in the DMV, and wake around 6 am to gentle sounds of Bryter Layter (instrumental), or expect to hear it within the hour, getting ready for high school. Do you think it’s a reflection of the open-mindedness of that time that producers and artists were willing to bring in ingredients that might not have seemed sensible or logical on paper?I think it’s only in hindsight that we think how remarkable it was to have had avant-garde jazz musicians combining with pop musicians and so on and so forth. But by the summer of 1971, when that compilation album came out, Nick wasn’t in a position to perform, or even to travel, really. David Bowie was his great discovery, and the person whose name his is connected with for posterity, rather than Nick’s, but somehow he connected with Nick in 1967 and was supporting and encouraging him too. It was around double the length of the published version, and eliminating material from it was, I thought, going to be impossible because it was so intertwined.