Nick Drake: The Life

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RMJ: Frustratingly, Nick’s record collection – although really it was more of an accumulation, as he wasn’t a ‘collector’ in any serious way, and I understand he treated his records quite casually – has been dispersed, partly given away by his parents, or pinched by fans, left lying around and eventually chucked, I don’t know. Cambridge has been quite pleasant this term, but here I am, becoming increasingly sure that I want to leave soon.

He bought it in Paris as a birthday present to his mother in November 1974 and posted it to her, but sadly it didn’t arrive because of postal strikes.But this process happens, of course, and we end up with the things that resonate the most and that people identify with the most strongly. But speaking about Nick, I think it’s interesting to speculate, as a fantasy: had he been willing to play a concert in September, October 1974 and a promoter had said, ‘Yeah, sure’, what would the take-up have been?

The family’s housekeeper, Naw Ma Naw, died in 1988 and so could not have been consulted by Morton Jack. They want to believe that Keith Moon drove a car into a swimming pool, even though that didn’t happen. A mixture of extreme shyness and difficulties with mental health meant that his beautiful, meditative and deeply melancholic take on mystical English folk slipped through the commercial cracks during his lifetime. In an interview with Uncut magazine, Morton Jack makes plain there are no shocking revelations in his work. Over the course of 1970, the year that Bryter Layter was recorded, he completed, I think, sixteen albums – an awful lot.I would go so far as to say that you will surprise yourself in the next two years by the changes and development that will occur in your personality, your understanding and your outlook.