Nick Drake: The Life

Product Information

The 1999 Volkswagen advert is 60 seconds long but nearly a quarter of a century later, viewers are still posting online about its profound impact, not because of the stylish visuals but because of the haunting music accompanying them: Nick Drake’s Pink Moon.

Nick Drake: The Biography by Patrick Humphries | Goodreads Nick Drake: The Biography by Patrick Humphries | Goodreads

Now held to be a stone-cold classic, it is a spare, beautiful sequence of songs, many of which lay bare its 24-year-old author’s inner tumult. On the second aspect – what advantages unconnected with your career may you be throwing away – there is not a great deal to say except that it is a rounded personality which is most likely to lead its owner on a happy and full road though life. By now receiving treatment for depression and back living at home in rural Warwickshire with his parents Rodney – who kept a diary of his son’s final years – and Molly, Drake could be found chuckling away to Some Mothers Do ‘Ave ‘Em, The Two Ronnies and Monty Python. And, in the meantime, your creative powers will be developing, not stagnating, do please believe me. Richly melancholic but universally ignored, his songs and character became increasingly foreboding and isolated.

Nick Drake in February 1971, a few months before the two sessions that comprised recording Pink Moon. She was just the first of many ardent fans who would make the same pilgrimage as Drake's reputation grew and grew. Hoping to make contact with them, we went down to their hotel, the celebrated El Minzah,” he wrote home. there's also quite a bit of interesting information about the cultural/social/environmental climate surrounding nick's life - the political goings-on as well as a bit of history of rock for those interested. His upbringing was idyllic: a house, as Morton Jack puts it, that “reeked of happiness”; an affluent family and doting parents.

Nick Drake by Richard Morton Jack review – genius remembered

I think Nick’s sister Gabrielle gave permission and was willing to collaborate with me because a lot of the people who knew Nick are inevitably now in their 70s or older, and with them would die a lot of interesting and valid history,” he explains. Two years earlier, Rodney noted in his diary that his “despondent” son said “he’d finished his life’s work and had done more than many in a lifetime.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. The first two – Five Leaves Left and Bryter Layter – sold only modestly, around 5,000 copies each, making Drake, who had depression, retreat into himself even further. I did enjoy the detail and specifics that Humphries goes into about Drake’s songwriting and guitar playing though.

Nick Drake: The Life by Richard Morton Jack | Waterstones

The sadness inherent in the music had been veiled behind beautiful arrangements and an intriguing voice that drew you in.None of that is challenged but the cumulative impression I built of him was not as cut and dried as the one a lot of people have. In these exclusive extracts, we see the light and shade of Drake: his problems are laid bare, but so is his exquisite artistry. The product of a loving, creative family and a privileged background, he was not only a handsome and popular Cambridge undergraduate, but also a new signing to the UK’s hippest record label, Island.