Richard Morton Jacks Nick Drake: The Life starting from the end. It was Monday, November 25, 1974, and, as the author describes in his exhaustive new biography, the “magnificently gifted and frustratingly unfathomable” singer-songwriter, Tanworth Decided to trade the Far Rays family home in In Arden for Oblivion. ”.
Drake was just 26 when he died (ruled a suicide by the autopsy) from an overdose of tripizole pills intended to treat the depression that entrenched his musical career and personal life. The Morton Jack book is the first of its kind written in collaboration with the Drake family, and promises to bring equal light and shadow to the British musical luminary in its own mythologization. want to be.
Nick Drake released three bucolic folk albums for Island Records between 1969 and 1972. Highly melancholic, but widely ignored, his songs and personality became increasingly eerie and detached. But the years that followed were followed by posthumous releases like 1979. fruit tree Box set and 1994 road to blue The compilation helped bring visible momentum alongside respect from the likes of Kate Bush, The Cure and Paul Weller. Further signs of his reassessment will emerge later this summer. Endless Road of Color: Nick Drake SongsFontaine DC, John Grant, and Feist.
Morton Jack’s intention, which opens with Drake’s suicide, is to get the reader quickly past the end of his desperate life, which “looms so large in people’s perception of him.” he says. In fact, the book, published to coincide with the 75th anniversary of Drake’s birth, not only glorifies and humanizes its subject, but it’s also a forensic book that corrects the unreliable biography that has pushed his mystery for half a century. .
“I think Nick’s sister Gabriel gave her permission and was willing to work with me because a lot of people who know Nick will inevitably be in their 70s and above, and with them there is a lot of interesting and valid history. Because you’re going to die,” he explains.
“There were so many misunderstandings and errors surrounding Nick that there was a realization that unless something was endorsed and supported by her and his estate, it would hold true.”
Morton Jack cited Drake’s Wikipedia 200 factual errors and conducted a similar number of interviews. Nick Drake: The Life. “Fundamentally, the image he always held was accurate. He was a mysterious, enigmatic, charismatic, gifted, and doomed young man. I have no objection to any of that, The cumulative impression I built of him was not as simple as many people have.”
What is exaggerated, he said, is “how blessed Nick’s career was.” Drake was not a “Cambridge Scholar”. He dropped out of Fitzwilliam College in the city in 1969 after the release of his debut album. 5 leaves left. In the 1971 follow-up he did not “retreat to a country estate”. switch layer, also failed to bring him the commercial success and critical acclaim he had craved. “Nick’s education was comfortable, but his parents weren’t millionaires.”
However, Morton-Jack believes that Drake’s famous apathy (often described as paralysis) could be explained by being raised in the “bottom one percent” against self-promotion. Despite recording with acclaimed producer Joe Boyd and playing alongside the likes of Fairport Convention, The Incredible String Band and John Martin, he played in just over 40 concerts. , only gave two interviews. “He found the idea of being interviewed and saying, ‘I’m great, look at me,’ to be instinctively problematic.”
While there is not a single video or photograph of Nick Drake performing live, Morton Jack played in various “cave auditoriums” including London’s Royal Festival Hall to kick-start his career. He points out that he was happy to play it. “He had the slightly unrealistic expectation that people would listen and applaud at the end of each piece, like they were watching a string quartet. The fact that it didn’t work out is where there was the most obvious clash between his career and his art.”
Morton Jack’s books are “detailed” based and give their subjects unparalleled focus. The author’s intense research provides insight into his trends during the “Summer of Love” era. He saw the Doors play at London’s Roundhouse in September 1968 and Bob Dylan at the Isle of Wight Festival a year later.
“Nick came home overjoyed and declared that the world would finally change and there would be peace. It was one of the few political statements he ever made,” Gabriel told the author.
The greatest revelation of his interest in the emerging rock and roll scene comes in a pre-Cambridge account of an unlikely audience with the Rolling Stones on a trip to Marrakech in March 1967. Fleeing the infamous Redlands drug bust, Mick Jagger and Keith Richards are staying in a French colonial hotel. Despite being “shocked and insane”, the group agreed to a friend’s request to have Nick perform.
“What’s interesting is that Nick’s drive to perform was right there. He knew he was good and he wanted to hustle.” He was an effortlessly accomplished guitarist.
“Playing for the Stones gives you an early glimpse of the fact that he wasn’t always crippled by self-doubt and embarrassment,” says Morton-Jack.
Elsewhere in the book, the more improbable events that followed Drake’s reclusive life following the release of his bleak, ghostly final album in 1972 are detailed. pink moon. Now undergoing treatment for depression, and returning to his country home in Warwickshire with his parents Rodney (who kept a diary of his son’s later years) and Molly, Drake laughs, seen. Some mothers do ‘Ave ‘Em’, two ronnies and Monty Python.apart from pink moonThough his influence was limited, Drake told his father, “He’s done the work of a lifetime, he’s done a lot in a lifetime. One day people will realize.”
It’s a comment that fits with the light-hearted aura of songs like “Time Has Told Me.” But it also depicts a deeply troubled, painfully withdrawn individual who is unable to exorcise the demons that undermine his mental health. Indecision and contradiction prevailed at this stage. There was talk of whether he would join the military or work at a bank. He also accepted an offer to train as a computer programmer for six months at Droiwich. This inevitably failed.
Also, my first suicide attempt with Valium was unsuccessful, followed by one session of ECT and countless visits and hospitalizations in various facilities. Drake wrote of his own “depression” in a letter included in this biography: “I didn’t understand the term at all, and I felt that ‘confusion’ would be a better term.” Morton Jack’s cautious view is that he “probably had some form of schizophrenia.” Rodney was a member of the Schizophrenia Society and Nick read a book on schizophrenia.
Morton Jack describes a man whose decay, in a devastating way, sometimes manifests itself rather than bursts of creative energy, destroying many of his guitars. When he left home, he would drive aimlessly, often to London and back soon. In 1973 he clocked an incredible 10,000 miles in the Austin 1100 in two months.
In March 1974, six months before his death, Drake’s anomalous behavior culminated in his completely unexpected proposal to his close but platonic female friend, Sophia Ride. “She told me it was all out of the blue and that she had no proof of their previous relationship,” says Morton-Jack. “Unfortunately, it was just a manifestation of his illness and he was desperately trying to find a solution.”
Since Nick Drake’s death, his legacy has been thoughtfully continued with a selection of reissues, an odd but captivating Volkswagen TV ad, and a lovely coffee table book from 2014. remembered for a while. As Morton Jack attests, he now revels in previously unthinkable territory alongside the likes of The Rolling Stones and Bob Dylan. Nick Drake: The Life It highlights his family’s decades of grief and his unwavering belief in his music. It also further emphasizes the words inscribed on his tombstone in the Church of St Mary Magdalene, Tanworth-in-Arden, “Now we rise and are everywhere”.
Nick Drake: The Life Published June 8 (John Murray, £30)
