Nick Drake: The Life

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Well, the truth might not be as colourful, but it’s the truth and that’s what’s important: he actually delivered it personally to Chris Blackwell, who ran Island Records. They want to believe that Keith Moon drove a car into a swimming pool, even though that didn’t happen. He understood that putting musicians together could create magical results, and John Wood regards that as one of Joe’s greatest strengths as a producer: knowing who to bring onto which session to create the best result.

But to be the originator of Bryter Layter and not get that feedback immediately must have been tough. but he loved the Beatles and George Martin, and understood the difference between writing classical music and pop arrangements, and that you had to have a pop sensibility.View image in fullscreen Drake’s Cambridge application picture; he eventually dropped out nine months before graduation. And, in the meantime, your creative powers will be developing, not stagnating, do please believe me. AUDIENCE MEMBER 3: My father-in-law was at school with Nick at Marlborough and doesn’t remember a single thing about him.

Photograph: Tony Evans/Timelapse Library Ltd/Getty Images View image in fullscreen Folk lore … Nick Drake in February 1971. The _ga cookie, installed by Google Analytics, calculates visitor, session and campaign data and also keeps track of site usage for the site's analytics report. AUDIENCE MEMBER 6: It’s more a point about mental illness than Nick Drake himself: who knows whether he would have come out of it or not? Is it fair to assume, because Nick was there for three years after the last album, he went walking there, and if I walked there, I’d be sort of walking in his spirit?

Of course, what I wanted to know most from the biography was what is most important about Nick Drake, and that is his songs and his acoustic guitar playing. Best of all was a set of African drummers and dancers, who produced about the most infectious rhythms I have ever been infected by. I think the picture on the back cover, of Nick watching a car zooming past him on the Westway, speaks more of him in a symbolic sense than a picture of him holding a guitar does. I’m a big fan of his, but until relatively recently he has often been put down by ‘serious’ rock critics.