Made To Love Magic - a tribute to Nick Drake

Criminally underrated, unknown and overlooked

In a tragically short four year career, Nick Drake produced undoubtedly three of the most poignant albums ever recorded, full of songs of aching melancholy and heartbreakingly bleak desolation. But his music transcended the niche of barren despondency into which he is too often pigeonholed. His three albums are a timeless record of one of the most gifted and underrated songwriters of all time. It may be music to cry to, but it is also music to fall in love to, to watch the sun rise to and to assuage cares as a made-to-measure accompaniment to the autumnal British countryside.
1969’s Five Leaves Left is as astonishing for the depth of its lyrical insight and ethereal vocal performance, as for its remarkably confident musical accomplishment. Here is a man who, at the age of just twenty one was already producing songs of such intense sadness and introspection with a profundity that would have belied an adversity-stricken man three times his age, let alone the privileged, middle-class, Cambridge-educated Drake.
The centre-piece of the album is the eerily haunting “River Man.” Drake’s gentle vocals weave in and out of the sumptuous orchestral arrangements and delicate finger-picked guitar, for four minutes of lingering and evocative redolence. Suggestions that the lyrics are based on the poetry of Wordsworth are probably unfounded, but the lyrical ingenuity and prosodic scansion inherent in many of Drake’s songs is perhaps a reminder of the student of literature he once was.
The album can be enjoyed at face value as a masterful example of a folk debut, but delve a little deeper, and many aspects of Drake’s life which were to prove his tragedy soon become apparent. “Man in a Shed” is ostensibly a whimsical love song, but the lyrics “Come into my shed, please stop the world raining through my head” are scarily prescient of the depression which was soon to cut his life short.
The dearth of any footage and limited recorded material has elevated Five Leaves Left to such heights that it is now considered one of the singularly most influential albums for aspiring singer-songwriters. If it was this album that showed his emerging promise as a musician, it is 1970’s Bryter Layter which has seen him gain cult status.
Although selling fewer than 3,000 copies on its release, Bryter Layter has subsequently gained huge plaudits, even being named Rolling Stone’s 245th best album ever. This may be in part due to the more accessible, jazzier sound; drums were introduced on more songs, in a conscious effort for commercial success. But the exquisite polish of Drake’s guitar playing, singing and arrangements still remained untarnished. The gorgeous lamentations and wavering sustained vocals of “One Of These Things First” and the lingering saxophone refrain of “At The Chime Of A City Clock” add to an album that is simultaneously sombre and grave, yet strangely uplifting.
With hindsight, Drake’s problems should have been becoming increasingly apparent, but his flawless output of captivating songs papered over his increasing mental disintegration and subsequent spiral into depression. Compared to his other albums, Bryter Layter sounds so confident, composed and assured; a hugely accomplished grounding from which we can only dream of future possibilities never reached.
By 1972 it was clear that Drake was in a hugely troubled state of mind. Pink Moon is an album so intimate that listening to it almost feels like an embarrassing infringement into his mind. It is a startling window onto the psyche of a man immersed in a stark world filled with nothing but bleak melancholy. The songs are short but hardly sweet – he simply had nothing more optimistic to write about than an introverted collection of dolorous and forlorn songs, accompanied by just an acoustic guitar and a single piano overdub. It almost seems disrespectful to listen to without sitting in a darkened room late at night in a barren state of mind. Pink Moon is an album of rare truth and insight into the mind of the man who made it; a desolate portrait of severe depression. Yet throughout, he never misses a note of his exquisite guitar patterns, never fails to wrap up the listener in his sad world, and never stops producing timeless and evocative music of such delicate complexity that it must be considered some of the most beautiful ever written.