Interest in Nick Drake began to bubble up a few years after his death with the release of a compilation album of his work. In 1978 Arthur Lubow wrote the sleeve notes for ‘Fruit Tree’ and, unlike many commissioned to write such pieces, he did a good job. Rather than attempting to recreate his work, I’ve taken the liberty of quoting some passages from his essay in this post. Arthur, if you’re reading this, thank you for your moving words.
Arthur on Nick Drake’s authenticity:
“If he won any battles in his short life, Nick Drake mastered the challenge of authenticity. He was of one piece. His songs, like his clothes, were melancholy to the point of morbidity. Yet somehow he escaped self-indulgence. Elton John, who as a young studio musician cut a demo tape of Drake’s songs, recalls their “beautiful haunting quality.” There is something disturbingly pure and unspoiled about those songs. Musically, they have the chilling loveliness of a boy’s choir singing Fauré’s Requiem. Culturally, they resonate with the fragile innocence of the Sixties counter-culture. Although it is not in the nature of flowers to leave monuments, the music of Nick Drake is the hippie vision made permanent on plastic. Listening to music so beautiful, you are shamed by the ugliness of the world.”
On Nick’s transformation at university:
“He became the poet in black, … his songs were of moons and seas, landscapes borrowed from French Symbolists. Sometimes he would drive a friend to the Suffolk coast at night. In the blackness they would hear the sound of the pounding waves. At eighteen he thought the world was leaving him behind. Refusing to buy new clothes or brush his hair, he behaved like a visitor in his own body: why settle in if you’re moving on?”
On Nick’s place in the English romantic tradition:
“Drake’s songs are sad even in celebration, for what they celebrate is lost or fading. Repelled by the imposition of petty, commercial structures on unspoiled natural landscapes. Nick took as his mission William Blake’s challenge: "To see a World in a Grain of Sand/And a Heaven in a Wild Flower/Hold infinity in the palm of your hand/And Eternity in an hour.” The vision makes ‘Bryter Layter’ magical, childlike. “I’ve never felt magic crazy as this,” Nick sings in his most beautiful song, “Northern Sky.” We feel it: it is the magic of innocence. The songs are so sad because we know their spell must be broken.”
On Nick at the end:
“No one will ever know if Nick meant to take his life. He left no note. When he returned the last time from Paris, he brought his mother a copy of Camus’ ‘Le Mythe de Sisyphe’. It still lies on a small table in her living room. After Nick died she tried to read it. "I thought he might have been trying to tell me something,” she says. The book is about suicide. But it is hardly a suicide note: it is the existentialist argument against taking one’s life in an absurd world. For Camus, the myth of Sisyphus was a parable for life: the endless pushing of a boulder up a hill, only to have the rock fall to the bottom just as you approach the top. It wasn’t the top that mattered, Camus said. It was the pushing.”
Let us all push on in honour of Nick - “ … beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”
Tracklist:-
Fruit tree, Nick Drake
Between the bars, Elliott Smith
Ringing in my ear, Adem
Way to blue, Nick Drake
The fox in the snow, Belle and Sebastian
If you need someone, The Field Mice
River man, Nick Drake
Round the bend, Beck
Do you ever remember, Molly Drake
Guiding light, Television
Which will, Nick Drake
Which will, Lucinda Williams
Homesick, Kings of Convenience
Northern Sky, Nick Drake