Nick Drake: The Life

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So I think that was a more specific area of conflict for Joe: ‘Why are these instrumentals on here when I know you’ve got another good song? It was reported for many years that when Pink Moon, Nick’s third and final album, was done, he went to Island Records and, without telling anybody, just put the tape at the reception and left. But for me certain popular musicians, Nick being one, deserve sober, sensible treatment, because I think posterity deserves eyewitness accounts that are reliable and properly verified. JAMES ORTON (Blackwell’s): Thank you for joining us this afternoon, and a huge thank you to our musicians.

And he knew that Things Behind The Sun belonged on that, not on Bryter Layter, with strings and drums and so on. There is something of Mark Lewisohn’s approach to the Beatles here: no childhood friend or university contemporary is left un-interviewed. 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. So there was a growing interest straight away – and this was before he was being revered as a James Dean-type figure.Nigel had no idea what he was on about, but clearly Nick had reverse-engineered some sort of meaning to it and was grateful for it. He did occasionally walk a neighbour’s dog, though, so that’s something, and I guess they would go down that path. So he was paying Nick a publishing advance every week because he was convinced that this was going to be where Nick was going to have his best shot at earning a decent amount of money. 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.

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. The sadness inherent in the music had been veiled behind beautiful arrangements and an intriguing voice that drew you in.And at boarding school, of course, boys would bring back records and share them and obsess over them. Richard Morton Jack's Nick Drake: The Life is a model of its kind - a biography that clears up dozens of mysteries and permits the reader to contemplate something larger: the lasting wonder and power of Drake's songs. In another letter he admitted: “The material on Pink Moon has always bewildered us a little (except From the Morning, which we love). Three years later, however - having made three well-reviewed but low-selling albums - Nick had been overwhelmed by a mysterious mental illness.