Nick Drake

Far Leys

Nicholas Rodney Drake was born in Rangoon on 19 June 1948, where his father, Rodney, was an engineer for a timber company. The family came home to England in 1951 and settled at Far Leys, a house in the Warwickshire village of Tanworth-in-Arden. His mother, Molly, wrote and recorded her own songs, which were only heard after her death; his sister, Gabrielle, became an actress. He boarded at Marlborough College, where he was a sprinter and played in a school band, the Perfumed Gardeners. His father remembered him as head boy at his prep school, and admitted that none of them seemed to know him very well.

In 1967 he spent six months in Aix-en-Provence, where he practised guitar seriously and began writing songs, and that October went up to Fitzwilliam College, Cambridge, to read English. He taught himself to play, using unusual open tunings that produced dense, ringing cluster chords, and sang in a soft, close baritone. He listed Dylan, Bert Jansch, Django Reinhardt and Miles Davis among his influences; to John Wood he named Randy Newman and the Beach Boys.

Joe Boyd and the first two albums

At a Christmas concert at the Roundhouse in December 1967, Fairport Convention's bassist Ashley Hutchings saw him play and thought he looked like a star. He introduced him to Fairport's producer Joe Boyd, who heard a demo made in Drake's college room and took him on as manager, publisher and producer. With the engineer John Wood at Sound Techniques in Chelsea, and arrangements by his Cambridge friend Robert Kirby, he made Five Leaves Left, released in July 1969, often recording live with the string players around him. That August he recorded a session for John Peel; in September he opened for Fairport Convention at the Royal Festival Hall.

He left Cambridge nine months short of a degree and moved to London. Bryter Layter (1971) dressed his songs in a fuller sound, with Fairport's rhythm section, Richard Thompson and, on two songs, the Velvet Underground's John Cale; Kirby said Drake wanted the arrangements to recall Pet Sounds. Wood said it was one of the rare records he would not change. Neither album sold. Drake gave one interview in his life, to Sounds in March 1971, and found live performance hard; he said the songs were written for records rather than for performing, and that only two or three concerts had felt right. His last shows were in 1970.

Pink Moon

Boyd sold his company to Island and moved to Los Angeles. Drake, increasingly withdrawn, saw a psychiatrist and was prescribed antidepressants. In October 1971 he went back to Sound Techniques with Wood and, over two late-night sessions, recorded Pink Moon: eleven songs, twenty-eight minutes, voice and guitar alone with one piano overdub. When Wood asked what he wanted to add, Drake said nothing. Wood said the record was probably more like Nick than the other two. Island released it in February 1972 with a press release admitting that his first two albums had not sold at all.

Early in 1972 he had a breakdown and spent five weeks in hospital, then went home to his parents. He returned to the studio with Wood in 1973 and 1974 and recorded four more songs, among them Black Eyed Dog and Hanging on a Star. On 25 November 1974 he died at Far Leys of an overdose of amitriptyline, an antidepressant. The coroner recorded suicide; his sister has said she believes it was not premeditated. He was twenty-six. His ashes are buried under an oak in the churchyard at Tanworth-in-Arden, and his headstone carries a line from From the Morning, the last song on his last album.

The long revival

His three albums sold only a few thousand copies in his lifetime. The revival came slowly: Nick Kent's NME piece in 1975, the 1979 box set Fruit Tree, the Dream Academy's 1985 hit Life in a Northern Town, written for him, then a BBC radio documentary and a television film in 1998 and 1999. In November 1999 Volkswagen used Pink Moon in a television advertisement, and American sales of the album rose from around six thousand to more than three hundred thousand within five years. His songs have since been used in The Royal Tenenbaums, Serendipity and Garden State.

Kate Bush, Paul Weller, Robert Smith, Peter Buck, Bon Iver, Iron & Wine and José González are among those who cite him; John Martyn wrote Solid Air for him. Five Leaves Left first entered the British album chart in 2025, fifty-six years after its release, following a box set of its sessions. Richard Morton Jack's authorized biography appeared in 2023, and in 2024 the BBC Proms gave him a full orchestral concert.

In a way, maybe the fact that Nick wasn't popular at the time made him not of the time.

Joe Boyd, 2000