Nick Drake, The Life: An inspired yet unworldly poet, destroyed by indifference

Nick Drake: poete maudlin of the ‘70s bedsitter folk-rock set, destined to become the posthumous subject of a thousand magazine retrospectives, eternally cast and recast as a damned-romantic man-child in the Tim Buckley/Tim Hardin tradition.

It’s impossible not to read any biography of Drake through the tinted lens of his end, an overdose on prescribed antidepressants at the age of 26 – a young man frozen in time as a seer-sensitive too delicate for this world.

The most extraordinary thing about Richard Morton Jack’s exhaustively researched new biography is the degree to which, at least for the first half, it debunks the Uncut/Mojo myth.

[ ‘It’s heartbreaking that I didn’t think of a way to make him happy’: Nick Drake’s producer on the doomed songwriter ]

The young Nick Drake was introverted and self-absorbed, yes, but also well-liked, tall, handsome (if somewhat asexual), wryly amused by the world and devoted to his art.

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There are no reports of youthful despondence or periods of mania, nothing beyond the softest drug use and a tendency towards passivity. Drake comes across as surprisingly sociable, not to mention driven enough to pursue music to the exclusion of college or career.

Similarly, there are no devils swinging in the family tree. His formative years were close to idyllic, his Warwickshire upbringing pastoral but not quite posh. Drake’s spirit was internally generated. There would be no blaming parents, poverty or penury here: he was loved and nurtured at every turn.

By 1972 Drake was showing signs of worrying decline, living in disorder, neglecting his appearance, forgetting to cut his nails or wash his hair

The scion of prosperous, decent, open-minded people, he seemed to spring from the womb as a fully formed musician and songwriter. By the age of 20, still at college in Cambridge, he’d signed to Island and recorded his first album, Five Leaves Left, one of those perfect debuts on a par with Van Morrison’s Astral Weeks or Nico’s Chelsea Girl. That velvet voice, those immaculate guitar voicings, impressionistic but haunting lyrics, all complemented by perfectly sympathetic string arrangements and A&R/production guidance from American folk-rock impresario Joe Boyd – the record has hardly aged a day.

[ This Album Changed My Life: Nick Drake – Pink Moon (1972) ]

But the critical response was initially underwhelming, and the lack of commercial impact wasn’t helped by the singer’s unpersuasive stage manner and general reluctance to engage with his public. By the time Drake began recording the follow-up, Bryter Layter, a fine set of songs rather spoiled by instrumental over-embellishments aimed at securing decent radio play, he’d already become more solitary and withdrawn, a flaccid figure drinking tea and smoking hash in his London flat.

If contemporaries such as John Martyn and Sandy Denny possessed personalities robust enough to contend with the rough-and-tumble of the pub and club circuit – the trains and taxis, the meeting new people, the B&Bs, the gritting-it-out over the din of students sinking pints of bitter – Drake was destroyed by their indifference, trying to perform gossamer songs in rooms where no one was listening. In short, he was the embodiment of the grievous angel caricature, unworldly and unsuited to the harsh realities of the music business.

[ The Unthanks put Nick Drake’s mum in the spotlight ]

When, in a blazing cameo, the fierce John Cale barges his way into the second album sessions to finish off a couple of troublesome tunes, the reader experiences a feeling of utter relief. But when Joe Boyd takes Drake to meet the divine Francoise Hardy in her Paris flat, and the singer declines to bring his guitar or engage the starlet in conversation, one can sympathise with those friends and family who must have wanted to shake him. “I think Nick both wanted to be left alone and at the same time desperately wanted to communicate and be recognised – but I have never known anyone do less about actually courting recognition,” said his sister Gabrielle, an established actor and author of her own memoir.

By 1972 Drake was showing signs of worrying decline, living in disorder, neglecting his appearance, forgetting to cut his nails or wash his hair. Photographers dispatched for album cover shoots found a haggard and destitute-looking subject. Worried sick, his parents enlisted the help of psychiatrists, who returned speculations of chronic depression and the beginnings of simple-type schizophrenia.

The last hundred pages of this book are as harrowing as Charles R Cross’s Kurt Cobain biography Heavier Than Heaven

Yet somehow, under these conditions, Drake produced the stunning Pink Moon, recorded with his long-time ally, engineer John Wood, over two nights – a minimal record that sounded paradoxically lush and inspired but whose lyrical content frightened many of his friends. This from Beverly Martyn, musical and personal partner of Nick’s frenemy John: “… Pink Moon is like the Book of Revelation. It doesn’t make any sense and it’s a manifestation of illness, of madness. When people are really ill they don’t know what they’re saying, they don’t hear what’s coming out of their own mouth. I thought those songs, those words, were the product of a sick person. I don’t think Nick himself knew what he was driving at.”

And yet From the Morning, the concluding song on the album, is almost Edenic, a blissful vision of a new heaven and a new earth, a dying and a rising up. It was Drake’s final flowering, save for a handful of final demo recordings, the most notable of which was the frail, terrifying Black Eyed Dog, as chilling as anything by Robert Johnson.

[ Review: Nick Drake: Remembered For A While, by Gabrielle Drake and Cally Callomon ]

The last hundred pages of this book are as harrowing as Charles R Cross’s Kurt Cobain biography Heavier Than Heaven, and also require a stiff whiskey to get through. In the slow, agonising decay, Nick’s father Rodney and his mother Molly, from whom he likely inherited much of his musical talent, prove themselves as nothing less than heroic in their sensitivity, strength and support. But nothing could have prevented his final going-under. A horrible latter-day image: Drake, utterly depleted by the waning of his creative faculties, weakened by his soul’s sickness, burns his guitars in a garden bonfire.

Almost immediately after his death, that smoke and ash reconstituted as ubiquitous spirit. Writers and musicians began tending his legacy. A Nick Kent retrospective in the NME in 1975. The Fruit Tree box set in 1979. Namechecks from Kate Bush, Paul Weller and Beck. Here in Ireland you could hear his echo in songs by Mic Christopher, Glen Hansard, Fionn Regan and The Man Whom. It all culminates in this, the most complete and authoritative study of Nick Drake’s life and work to date, an outstanding document of an extraordinary artist.

Peter Murphy is the author of the novels John the Revelator and Shall We Gather at the River. He performs and records with Cursed Murphy Versus the Resistance.