On the fiftieth anniversary of Nick Drake’s death, Rob Chapman argues that his legacy has been let down by a culture that allows his mental health struggles to overshadow his art, and that turns his songs into fodder for wellness-adjacent twee whimsy
By Bob Chapman
50 years ago, in the early hours of 25 November 1974, Nick Drake died by suicide, a sad anniversary will no doubt be commemorated extensively in media new and old. Those who knew Drake and musicians who were touched or influenced by his music will be solicited for a quote. Drake ‘experts’ will file their 1,500 words and they will all say pretty much the same thing. It will be by and large a tick box exercise in repeating what by now is a well-established party line in which his reclusiveness will cast an all-encompassing pall over his life and work. Someone will mention how they were once in a room with Drake, and he said nothing. There will be general agreement about the beauty of those three Island albums. And that will be it. No new light will be cast. There will be no fresh insight into the music.
That’s the trouble with the Drake story. Everything written about him has become predictable and terribly on message. Devotees seem to have settled for a fixed narrative which freeze frames the legacy and preserves the musical output in aspic. With Drake, the received wisdom now comes wrapped in a certain ‘don’t touch’ preciousness that does him, the flesh and blood artist, a considerable disservice. It leaves little room for critical manoeuvre or original interpretation.
When I read these set in stone eulogies I ask myself, where is any sense of the ambitious young artist who honed his guitar skills to perfection, not by osmosis but by sheer perseverance and graft? Where is the shrewdly career-minded musician who actively sought out record company attention and approval? Where is the proactive young man who offered John Cale guidance on what to play on ‘Northern Sky’ and ‘Fly’? Where is the innovator who, as Joe Boyd once observed, sat in the studio prior to recording ‘Cello Song’ on his debut album and ran obsessively through the drone tones of that instrument until he heard what he wanted, something that Boyd always regretted not taping? Where is the fledgling songwriter who took as lyrical inspiration for Bryter Layter’s ‘One of These Things First’, not some wistful folkie epistle about self-identity but Smokey Robinson’s ‘The Way You Do The Things You Do’? And where is the normal young man who, as Richard Morton Jack’s 2023 Drake biography notes, wrote dreadful and earnest teenage poetry like the rest of us. (Sample line. “Forced, jerked rhythms and sweating eyes/Hysterical enjoyment and unnatural benevolence/How can man so delude himself?”)
I quite like this version of Nick Drake.
