
Almost 50 years after his death, Nick Drake is more popular than ever. With a new biography and covers album of his songs out, Neil Armstrong sifts truth from fiction.
An open-top car glides through the moonlit Californian night, its passengers gazing out at the star-filled sky. It pulls up at a beach house where a rowdy party is being thrown. The four young people in the convertible look at each other and, silently agreeing that it’s just not their scene, drive on.
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.
The English singer-songwriter died in 1974 at the age of just 26. He had released three albums which didn’t make much of a splash during his lifetime, but which gradually gathered a cult following after his death. The US commercial sparked a major upsurge of interest in his work.
And now, almost half a century after his death, Drake is being rediscovered all over again. The Endless Coloured Ways, a collection of 23 of his songs by artists such as David Gray, Fontaines DC, Self Esteem and John Grant, is released this Friday, and a definitive new biography, Nick Drake: The Life, by Richard Morton Jack, has just been published.
The biography contains no shocking new revelation, no discovery that turns on its head everything we thought we knew about Drake, but rather provides an absorbing portrait of the man and his milieu through the accumulation of fascinating detail. It also serves to correct many misconceptions.
The myths about him
“Quite a lot of assumptions have arisen because people tend to mythologise these iconic entertainment figures who die young,” Morton Jack tells BBC Culture. “And actually, peeling that back and getting a really good consensus from a large spread of people who knew him in different ways was very satisfying.”