Nick Drake

Nick Drake

Nicholas Rodney "Nick" Drake (19 June 1948 – 25 November 1974) was an English singer-songwriter and musician, known for his acoustic guitar-based songs. He failed to find a wide audience during his lifetime but his work has gradually achieved wider notice and recognition. Drake suffered from depression, particularly during the latter part of his young life. This was often reflected in his lyrics. On completion of his third album, 1972's Pink Moon, he withdrew from both live performance and recording, retreating to his parents' home in rural Warwickshire. On 25 November 1974, Drake died from an overdose of amitriptyline, a prescribed antidepressant; he was 26 years old. Whether his death was an accident or suicide has never been resolved. (Read more at Wikipedia)

Links to Peel

Nick Drake was "discovered" when performing as an opening act on one of the "Circus Alpha Centauri" Christmas Festival concerts held at the Roundhouse in December 1967, with Peel favourites Country Joe & The Fish topping the bill and the DJ himself as compere on at least one of the nights. Drake didn't seem to have made any impression on Peel then, but, famously, Fairport Convention's Ashley Hutchings was very taken with the singer's music and stage presence[5], and put him in touch with producer Joe Boyd, who was equally impressed and became Nick Drake's manager and producer.

Based on the strength of Drake's debut album "Five Leaves Left", producer Pete Ritzema booked the singer for one Peel session, for the "son of Night Ride" show in 1969. Although he thought Drake's voice was "fantastic", the producer also recalled feeling slightly disappointed by the performance because the singer-songwriter insisted on playing the songs as they were on the album, leaving gaps in the arrangements where the strings should have been .

Former Radio 1 executive and sometime Peel producer Trevor Dann describes the session in his biography Darker Than The Deepest Sea: The Search For Nick Drake (London 2006, p.135), also with comments from Pete Ritzema, and adds; "In an interview between the session tracks, John Peel asked Nick what he had been up to recently. "Wasting my time in Cambridge" was the answer"[6].

For a long time, no complete tape of this session was known to exist: Ritzema denied having a copy and when the Strange Fruit label was given access to the BBC archives in order to release classic sessions, Drake's one was nowhere to be found. Radio 1 Archivist Phil Lawton later confirmed to Nick Drake's biographer Patrick Humphries that the tapes did not survive. The program in which it was aired, Night Ride's nameless successor, went out on medium wave only, was disliked by the Radio One hierarchy and was soon afterwards taken off the air), making the chances of a surviving copy slim. . Nonetheless, the session acquired a mythical status and became one of the most sought-after ones with many listeners asking Peel for a repeat. On 06 July 1999 the DJ replied to one of those inquiries:

"It's a difficult question. It was supposed to be an expiry date of I think about three or four months on sessions. Of course, it was very much the BBC's way at the time that there was no provision made for keeping popular music sessions because they were held to be pretty much valueless, and for a long time they just existed in boxes alongside of the corridor, and (John) Walters and myself gradually found places where we could hide them and keep them away from the people who wanted to destroy them, but it didn't go very well to begin with. It's one of those things where the BBC at the time, very much something like, Gardener's Question Time, episodes of that would be kept in a lead-lined case at the bottom of a mineshaft somewhere in the Home Counties for all of recorded time if possible, but something like a Pink Floyd session would be erased within weeks. You know, very strange business altogether. So I'm not sure whether that Nick Drake session still exists. cos a lot of sessions from that time, maybe one or two tracks are still around, the others have just disappeared over the years".

Eventually, a fragment of the session including two songs in an incomplete form ("Time of No Reply" and "Three Hours") surfaced and became available in trading circles. Finally, in summer 2014, it was announced that an upcoming box set of a Nick Drake biography would include the 1969 Peel session on 10" vinyl. Soon after that, the website for the British newspaper The Guardian, had received permission from the Drake estate to stream a track that wasn't available before: "Cello Song" . The official release of the session was taken from an off-air recording of good quality, thus confirming the claim that the original master tape is still nowhere to be found. With the surfacing of an existing complete tape of the session, it was also discovered that an extra track not listed on logs was recorded and aired: "Bryter Layter". 

Drake biographer Richard Morton Jack writes, in his Nick Drake: The Life (London 2023, p.252) that "There is no evidence that John Peel championed Nick's work during Nick's lifetime" and this seems to be borne out by the small number of show plays and the absence of references to Drake in Peel's columns for International Times, Disc & Music Echo and Sounds. However, it is likely that occasional plays of tracks from the singer's "Bryter Layter" and "Pink Moon" LPs will be found in playlists of shows from 1970-1972, which are as yet unavailable. These albums were produced by Joe Boyd, who also produced Peel show regulars Fairport Convention and the Incredible String Band, so the DJ would have listened to them with interest.

Nick Drake did make an impression on Peel's Night Ride colleague Jon Curle, after a session by him (probably the repeat of his Peel session) was broadcast on Curle's Night Ride show of 24 September 1969; Curle also played tracks from the "Five Leaves Left" album on his editions of the show. Perhaps because of this, the singer recorded a second BBC session in 1970; it went out on the Night Ride of 13 April 1970, presented by Colin Nicol, although the session tracklisting is not known at present.

In 2015, TheSpace website and John Peel Archive released details of a themed selection of discs from Peel's record collection telling the story of the music world of Nick Drake. (See Record Boxes: Pete Paphides). It includes many of the records which inspired or were inspired by Drake, with most appearing in Peel playlists at some point. Many are mentioned by his biographer Patrick Humphries, who relates that a favourite of the singer and his schoolfriends at Marlborough College was The Sound of '65 by the Graham Bond Organisation. Influenced by this and other British R&B bands of the time, Nick and his friends formed several bands at Marlborough, including one called the Perfumed Gardeners.

This was not a reference to the Perfumed Garden, Peel's late night Radio London show - the DJ was still living in the USA at the time - but may have indicated that the erotic manual of the same name was circulating among public schoolboys, something which would be unsurprising in the mid-1960s. But it does raise the possibility that Nick Drake might have been a Perfumed Gardener in the sense Peel used it - to describe listeners to his programme. Patrick Humphries mentions in his biography that Nick spent several months in London in 1967 before going up to Cambridge University in October. Artists and records that the singer liked were featured on the PG, and later on Top Gear - but it is hard to establish where he heard them first. In spite of all the interest shown by fans and biographers in Nick Drake's life, no information has emerged as to whether he was a radio listener. In his final years, when he lived alone reclusively and then moved back to his parents' home, he continued to listen to music, so may well have owned a radio.

Festive Fifty Entries

• 2000 Festive Fifty: Northern Sky (LP-Bryter Layter)' (Island) #43

Sessions

Nick Drake - Peel Session 1969

One session. Time of No Reply / River Man / Three Hours released on a 10" vinyl included in the deluxe edition of Nick Drake's first authorized biography "Remembered for a While" and digitally as "The John Peel Session".

1. Recording date: 1969-08-05. First broadcast: 06 August 1969

• Time of No Reply / Cello Song / River Man / Three Hours

According to Richard Morton Jack's biography Nick Drake: The Life a second Peel session (and 3rd BBC session) was recorded. "Nick was invited to play a third BBC session, in support of Bryter Layter....It appears that Nick was in fact prevailed upon to do the session, as Anthea Joseph vividly recalled: 'It was in the Paris Studios, in [Lower] Regent Street. I got Nick there, took him out, gave him dinner, and we went down there and he said, ‘I don’t want to do this. I’m not playing.’ It was just in the studio, there wasn’t an audience … [John Peel and his producer John Walters] were wonderful, endless patience and kindness – and every now and again Nick would get up and say, ‘I’m going now,’ and head for the door, and I was like a whipper-in. I’d crack the whip on the door, going ‘Back, back!’ and he went back. We did actually finish it, but it was absolutely exhausting'

The results, however, were not broadcast and appear neither to have been documented nor kept. The footnote to this quote also says

"Nick’s 1970 session (featuring Iain Cameron) was repeated on Night Ride on Tuesday, 6 April 1971, and John Peel played ‘Hazey Jane I’ on his show on 18 May. When asked about Nick in later years John Peel did not mention the session described by Anthea, and did not mention having met him." (Which seems to be contradicted by the quote from Trevor Dann's biography of Drake given above.)

Also, from the same source: "The next day (March 23rd 1970) Nick presented himself at Studio 2 in the sub-basement of Broadcasting House. ‘I remember looking at Nick through the glass as he sat with his hair over his face, playing his guitar,’ says Alec Reid. ‘He was very quiet and didn’t give much out. My abiding memory is that the session was rather dull, if anything. There was no interview and Colin Nichol, who presented it, never met him.’

Nick and Iain recorded eight songs. Five were relatively old: ‘’Cello Song’, ‘River Man’, ‘Saturday Sun’ (with Nick on celeste), ‘Time Of No Reply’ and ‘The Thoughts Of Mary Jane’. Nick had recorded three of them for his previous Night Ride session. The others were newer: ‘Brighter Later’ (as the BBC spelled it), ‘Green Sunday’ (Nick’s working title for ‘Sunday’) and the otherwise undocumented ‘Hillside’ (lasting 3 minutes and 35 seconds).fn5 Perhaps it was the fourth instrumental Joe remembers Nick having mooted. Two of the songs have surfaced as off-air recordings. Following an apparently extemporised guitar opening, ‘’Cello Song’ (which might as well have been retitled ‘Flute Song’ here) is faithful to the rendition on Five Leaves Left, and ‘Bryter Layter’ is almost identical to the version he’d recently recorded in Sound Techniques (for the LP)."

This means that the last two tracks on the "Peel Session" 10" https://www.discogs.com/release/6101900-Nick-Drake-The-John-Peel-Session are actually from the 1970 Colin Nichol session and not the 1969 Peel Session as originally thought.

Other Shows Played

• 31 August 1969: Time Has Told Me (LP - Five Leaves Left) Island
• 05 August 1986: The Thoughts Of Mary Jane (LP - Time Of No Reply) Hannibal
• 05 January 2000: Northern Sky (LP-Bryter Layter)' (Island) 'Festive Fifty ''''#43 '''(JP: 'And I often wonder what poor Nick would make of the respect in which his music's held now)
• 21 October 2004: Time Has Told Me (Robert Smith)

Covered

(The list below was compiled only from the Cover Versions page of this site. Please add more information if known.)

Artist | Track | First Known Play

• Graham Coxon: Been Smoking Too Long (Peel session) 01 September 2004
• Tír na nÓg: Free Ride (session) 01 February 1973

See Also

• Record Boxes: Joe Boyd
• Record Boxes: Pete Paphides
• Record Collection: V&A LPs
• Record Collection: Auction
• Gigography 1968

External Links

• Wikipedia
• Official website
• Nick Drake - An Authorised Biography
• Teenage Kicks, No Sea Shanties Or Singalongs

Footnotes