Nick Drake
Nicholas Rodney Drake (born June 19, 1948 in Rangoon , Burma , † November 25, 1974 in Tanworth-in-Arden near Coventry ) was a British guitarist , singer and songwriter .
life and work
Nick Drake began writing songs and playing acoustic guitar as a private student at Marlborough College in Marlborough, Wiltshire . A little later he signed a record deal that was offered to him. Before he died at the age of 26, he recorded three albums now known as legendary.
In 1969 the debut Five Leaves Left was released . The album contains ten sparsely orchestrated, melancholy songs. Although critically acclaimed, it was commercially unsuccessful. The title of the album quotes the marker paper in cigarette paper boxes, but was also understood as a gloomy prophecy (Drake died five years after publication). 1970 Drake Bryter took on Layter . Producer Joe Boyd provided the album with an orchestral intro and Drake's songs with appropriate arrangements - but without being able to increase the success. Boyd called Bryter Layter Drake's one and only perfect album.
Drake became increasingly depressed . He dropped out in Cambridge before he recorded the album Pink Moon in just two nights in 1972 . On the no-frills album, which was not arranged at his own request, only his vocals, his guitar and a few piano notes he played himself can be heard.
His depression continued to worsen after the release of Pink Moon . Even hospitalization couldn't help Drake much. In February 1974, Drake recorded four final songs that were only released posthumously on Time of No Reply .
On November 25, 1974, Nick Drake was found dead in his bed. He died of an antidepressant overdose at the age of 26. His death has given rise to various speculations, ranging from wrong prescription dose by the doctor, accident to suicide.
Nick was the younger brother of Gabrielle Drake , the British actress who by the British science fiction - television series UFO became more widely known.
reception
Although Nick Drake was considered an insider tip of the folk scene throughout his life and remained unknown to a broader audience, musicians and bands as diverse as Elton John (who was present at Drake's test recordings as a young studio musician), REM and Norah Jones describe him as influential and significant for their own work. He inspired guitarists such as Jimmy Page , John Martyn and Rich Robinson through the use of a multitude of unusual scordatures that opened up new sound spaces for the instrument (which, however, became a problem with Drake's early appearances: he had to constantly retune his guitar, which made him reluctant to Public).
When Chris Blackwell sold Island Records to PolyGram in 1989 , one of the terms of the deal was that Nick Drake's albums must remain available without interruption. Twenty years after his death, the film industry discovered Nick Drake. It started with Noah Baumbach's Kicking and Screaming from 1995, which used Time of no reply , a song from Drake's estate. Since then, Drake songs have found frequent use in film productions.
It was only when the Volkswagen Group used the title Pink Moon as background for a commercial in 2000 that a larger audience began to be interested in his music. US actor Brad Pitt did the rest when he hosted a memorial broadcast in honor of Drake on the BBC radio in 2002. In the same year A Skin too few , a documentary about Drake's life, appeared. In 2004 - thirty years after his death - there were even two small hits in the British singles charts.
All three studio albums by Nick Drake were on the list of the 500 best albums of all time published by the music magazine Rolling Stone in 2003 , the 2012 edition of this list only mentions Pink Moon at number 321. The three studio albums are also included in the book 1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die .
In 2004 the Island Records label released the album Made to Love Magic . It was put together by his sister Gabrielle, sound engineer John Wood, and Robert Kirby. You can hear previously unreleased recordings from Drake's student days in Cambridge, outtakes for the album Five Leaves Left, Kirby's string arrangements for Magic and Time of No Reply , an old version of Three Hours with Rebop Kwaku Baah (Traffic, Can) on percussions and remixes the last depressing songs from July 1974 like Tow the Line . Also in 2004 was an album with cover versions under the title Poor Boy: Songs of Nick Drake , with contributions from Kate Hammett-Vaughan and Robin Holcomb , among others . On June 19, 2007, Tsunami released LG / Fontana Family Tree with previously unreleased recordings, including covers by Bob Dylan , Blind Boy Fuller, and Jackson C. Frank .
Nick Drake is also mentioned in Nick Hornby's books , including the novel A Long Way Down , which is about the story of four potential suicide candidates. One of the protagonists there said about Nick Drake: "But I feel the same way as him here, and they would never play something like that on the radio, because people who are so sad don't fit into the program."
The jazz pianist Brad Mehldau recorded many of Drake's pieces, e.g. B. River Man , Day is Done and Things behind the Sun in his repertoire and played them in trio or solo as an instrumental version, which made them famous among a very diverse audience. Nick Smart submitted a tribute album.
The a cappella group Swingle Singers arranged the song River Man for the album Ferris Wheels in 2009 .
Discography
Albums
| year | title |
Top ranking, total weeks, awardChartsChart placements (Year, title, rankings, weeks, awards, notes) |
Remarks |
|---|---|---|---|
 UK
|
|||
| 1969 | Five Leaves Left |
UK-  |
First release: 1969
First studio album |
| 1970 | Bryter Layter |
UK- |
First release: 1970
Second studio album |
| 1971 | Nick Drake | - |
First published: 1971
compilation |
| 1972 | Pink moon |
UK- |
First release: 1972
Third and final studio album |
| 1979 | Fruit Tree | - |
First published: 1979
compilation; First posthumous publication, expanded new editions in 1986 and 2007 |
| 1985 | Heaven in a Wild Flower | - |
First published: 1985
compilation |
| 1986 | Time of No Reply | - |
First published: 1986
compilation |
| 1994 | Way to Blue - Intro To |
UK- |
First published: 1994
compilation |
| 2004 | A treasury |
UK-  |
First published: 1994
compilation |
| Made to Love Magic |
UK27 (3 weeks) UK |
First published: 2004
compilation |
|
| 2005 | Time Has Told Me | - |
First published: 2005
compilation |
| 2007 | Family tree | - |
First published: 2007
compilation |
| Under review | - |
First published: 2007
compilation |
|
| 2013 | Tuck box | - |
First published: 2013
compilation |
| 2014 | A day gone by | - |
First published: 2014
compilation |
Singles
| year | Title album |
Top ranking, total weeks, awardChartsChart placements (Year, title, album , rankings, weeks, awards, notes) |
Remarks |
|---|---|---|---|
|
UK
|
|||
| 2004 | Magic Made to Love Magic |
UK32 (2 weeks) UK |
First published: 2004
|
| River Man Made to Love Magic |
UK48 (2 weeks) UK |
First published: 2004
|
literature
- Joe Boyd: White Bicycles: Making Music in the 1960s . Serpent's Tail, 2006, ISBN 1-85242-910-0 .
- Trevor Dann: Darker Than the Deepest Sea: The Search for Nick Drake . Da Capo Press, 2006, ISBN 0-306-81520-6 .
- Patrick Humphries: Nick Drake: The Biography . Bloomsbury USA, 1997, ISBN 1-58234-035-8 .
- Henry Chartier, Nick Drake: L'Abécédaire . Le Bord de l'eau, Paris, 2008, ISBN 978-2-35687-002-5 .
- Nick Drake, Gabrielle Drake: Remembered For A While . John Murray Publishers, 2014, ISBN 978-1-44479-259-1 .
Web links
- Literature by and about Nick Drake in the catalog of the German National Library
- Bryter Music - The Estate of Nick Drake (English)
- nickdrake.com (English)
- The Nick Drake Files , Memento of the homepage in the Internet Archive (English)
- AllMusicGuide Biography (English)
Individual evidence
- ↑ A summary of the possible circumstances of his death (also taking into account the biographies of Drake) is provided on the website The Death of Nick Drake (last accessed February 13, 2012).
- ↑ See archived copy ( Memento from April 9, 2009 in the Internet Archive )
- ↑ http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0236979/?ref_=nmbio_bio_nm
- ↑ http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0264013/?ref_=ttpl_pl_tt
- ↑ 1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die
- ↑ Dusted Reviews: Nick Drake - Family Tree
- ↑ Nick Hornby: A long way down . Droemer Knaur, Munich 2006, p. 232.
- ↑ a b Chart sources: UK
- ↑ Music Sales Awards: UK
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Drake, Nick |
| ALTERNATIVE NAMES | Drake, Nicholas Rodney (full name) |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | British guitarist, singer and songwriter |
| DATE OF BIRTH | June 19, 1948 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Rangoon , Burma |
| DATE OF DEATH | November 25, 1974 |
| Place of death | Tanworth-in-Arden near Coventry |