There's not too much that Nicks Cave and Drake have in common besides their name (which can get an awful lot of folk confused) - one is Aussie, the other Brit, one alive, the other dead, one survived multiple overdoses of a drug considered damaging and evil, the other was finished off by just one overdose of a drug intended to be helpful, one has a voice like thunder, the other a voice like a gentle breeze, one is a piano man, the other a guitar man, one is a man infused with monotheology, the other's vision is pantheistic, paganistic almost, one has a huge body of work over three decades, one has just three albums and a few bits and bobs.
What of the three Nick Drake albums? All are considered classics but 'Pink Moon' is by far my favourite. His debut, 'Five Leaves Left' is warm and wise, pastoral, dopey, beautifully orchestrated. There's no real despair on it, far from it. There's a lot to love about it, but it lacks great songs. I think. It has many fine songs.
'Bryter Layter', the second one, has great songs. Like 'Five Leaves Left' it is beaufully orchestrated and accompanied by several greats of British music from Richard Thompson to John Cale. It was, really, the big attempt to "break" Nick Drake. It's poppy - with 'Poor Boy', 'Hazey Jane II', 'One of These Things First' and the classic 'Northern Sky' (the 4th greatest song of all time, of course).
There are 10 songs, of which three are instrumentals - they're very pretty instrumentals but they do sound a little like they could be theme tunes to mid-afternoon art shows on Channel 4. They bring the album down, I think. Again, there is no overt despair on this album. There's wry humour, and self-mockery on the likes of 'Poor Boy' and 'One of these Things First'. These are wonderful tunes, as are 'Fly' and 'At the Chime of a City Clock'.
It flopped, totally, to Nick Drake's apparent despair.
No one expected any more from him, he disappeared from view. It's all terribly sad, and for whatever reason, his last few years were a gradual deterioration. But, there was more. Without anyone knowing, just with one sound engineer, he recorded another album and delivered it to Island Records. 'Pink Moon'. Just him and his guitar, apart from one piano line on the album's title track.
15 years after I first heard it, Nick Drake's music still has the power to make me stop and regather my equilibrium while listening to it on my headphones in the supermarket. Stop and take my breath, stop myself from crumpling. In this case, in this aisled place, it was the song 'Place to Be', though there are others on this album. This is a blues album, an English blues album. The instrumental track on this album 'Horn' could not be further from the florid instrumentals of 'Bryter Layter'. I'm not really a man who often hears emotion coming through an instrument's tone, but 'Horn' is painful to listen to, the rawest, simplest piece of guitar playing you'll ever hear.
At this stage, there are numerous competitors for the position of being the most devastatingly sad Nick Drake song. One of them is not on this album. 'Black Eyed Dog' was recorded in some aborted sessions in the year of Drake's death, 1974. Now, if you want an extra dose of unbearably, eerily sad, how about this - a music video made by another tall handsome brilliant performer who slipped away far far too soon through prescription drugs, a man so obsessed with Nick Drake he made a video for 'Black Eyed Dog' which he also starred in. The full video is not, I think, in the public view, but this is cut together from what people do have. Make sure you have the haiku-like perfection of a strong cup of tea while watching Black Eyed Dog - Nick Drake (directed by Heath Ledger)
If 'Pink Moon' contained 'Black Eyed Dog', it would be a very different album, for, despite all I've said, the mood is not entirely bleak. This album is more than that, better than that, despite running to less than half an hour.
'Pink Moon', the song, is a little beauty, both ominous and enticing. 'Road' is defiant, 'Things Behind the Sun' is one of the best melodies he wrote, and the album closes with 'From the Morning'. My favourite. When all is obliterated by nuclear cataclysm or whatever else should choose to obliterate all, 'From the Morning' will remain. "A day once dawned and it was beautiful ..."
Nick Drake's tombstone in his home village of Tanworth-in-Arden, where he died in November 1974, is inscribed with the epitaph "Now we rise/and we are everywhere" another line from this song. People have written pages and pages about Nick Drake's vision of the world, the best I've read being Ian McDonald's article 'Exiled from Heaven' in his book 'The People's Music'. You can get too hung up on all this stuff if you're young and impressionable or old and impressionable and it's not healthy - Nick Drake wasn't a prophet, just a talented posh boy that didn't get any of the breaks. In death, he's sold hundreds of thousands of records, and that's excellent. People have come to Nick Drake at different times through different things - for some people, it's a butter ad, and that's fine. For me, it was Paul Weller, funnily enough, whose (best) solo album 'Wild Wood' has a lot of the spirit of Nick Drake in it.
As with Joni Mitchell's 'Blue', when an artist's currency is albums of cup of tea-like perfection (see, that works!), it's a bit daft to do a compilation, but here we go anyway ...
Northern Sky
Saturday Sun
Place to Be
One of these things First
Things Behind the Sun
I Was Made to Love Magic
River Man
At the Chime of a City Clock
Hazy Jane II
Hanging on a Star
Time has Told Me
Pink Moon
Horn
Black Eyed Dog
Fly
Parasite
Cello Song
From the Morning
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