Nick Drake

Nicholas Rodney Drake (19 June 1948 – 25 November 1974) was an English singer-songwriter and musician. An accomplished acoustic guitarist, Drake signed to Island Records at the age of twenty while still a student at the University of Cambridge. His debut album, Five Leaves Left, was released in 1969, and was followed by two more albums, Bryter Layter (1971) and Pink Moon (1972). While Drake did not reach a wide audience during his brief lifetime, his music found critical acclaim and he gradually received wider recognition following his death.

Drake suffered from depression and was reluctant to perform in front of live audiences. Upon completion of Pink Moon, he withdrew from both performance and recording, retreating to his parents' home in rural Warwickshire. On 25 November 1974, Drake was found dead at the age of 26 due to an overdose of antidepressants.

Drake's music remained available through the mid-1970s, but the 1979 release of the retrospective collection Fruit Tree allowed his back catalogue to be reassessed. Drake has come to be credited as an influence on numerous artists. The first Drake biography in English appeared in 1997; it was followed by the documentary films A Stranger Among Us in 1999 and A Skin Too Few: The Days of Nick Drake in 2000.

Drake was born in Rangoon, Burma, on 19 June 1948, a few months after the independence from the British Empire. Drake's father, Rodney Shuttleworth Drake, had moved to Rangoon in the early 1930s as an engineer with the Bombay Burmah Trading Corporation. In 1934 Rodney Drake met Molly Lloyd, the daughter of a senior member of the Indian Civil Service. He proposed marriage in 1936, but the couple had to wait a year until she turned 21 before her family allowed them to marry. In 1951, the Drake family returned to England to live in Warwickshire, at their home, Far Leys, in Tanworth-in-Arden. Rodney Drake worked from 1952 as the chairman and managing director of Wolseley Engineering.

Drake's older sister, Gabrielle Drake, became a successful screen actress. Both of Drake's parents wrote music. Recordings of Molly's songs, which have come to light since her death, are similar in tone and outlook to the later work of her son; they shared a similar fragile vocal delivery, and Gabrielle and biographer Trevor Dann noted a parallel foreboding and fatalism in their music. Encouraged by his mother, Drake learned to play piano at an early age and began to compose songs which he recorded on a reel-to-reel tape recorder that she kept in the family drawing-room. In 1957, Drake was sent to Eagle House School, a preparatory boarding school near Sandhurst, Berkshire. Five years later, he went to Marlborough College, a public school in Wiltshire which had also been attended by his father and grandfather. He developed an interest in sport, becoming an accomplished 100- and 200-yard sprinter, representing the school's Open Team in 1966. He played rugby for the C1 House team and was appointed a House Captain in his last two terms. School friends recall Drake as having been confident, often aloof, and "quietly authoritative". His father remembered: "In one of his reports [the headmaster] said that none of us seemed to know him very well. All the way through with Nick, people didn't know him very much."

Drake played piano and learned clarinet and saxophone. He formed a band, the Perfumed Gardeners, with four schoolmates in 1964 or 1965. With Drake on piano and occasional alto sax and vocals, the group performed Pye International R&B covers and jazz standards, as well as Yardbirds and Manfred Mann songs. Chris de Burgh asked to join the band, but was rejected as his taste was "too poppy". His attention to his studies deteriorated and, although he had accelerated a year in Eagle House, at Marlborough he neglected his studies in favour of music. In 1963 he attained seven GCE O-Levels, fewer than his teachers had been expecting, failing "Physics with Chemistry". In 1965, Drake paid £13 (equivalent to £318 in 2023) for his first acoustic guitar, a Levin, and was soon experimenting with open tuning and finger-picking techniques.

In 1966 Drake enrolled at a tutorial college in Five Ways, Birmingham, where he won a scholarship to study at Fitzwilliam College, Cambridge. As his place at Cambridge was offered for September 1967, he had ten months to fill, so he decided to spend six months at the University of Aix-Marseille, France, beginning in February 1967. There, he began to practise guitar in earnest. To earn money, he would busk with friends in the town centre. Drake began to smoke cannabis, and he travelled with friends to Morocco; according to travelling companion Richard Charkin, "that was where you got the best pot". There is some evidence that he began using LSD while in Aix, although this is debated.

Drake returned to England in 1967 and moved into his sister's flat in Hampstead, London. That October, he enrolled at Cambridge to begin his studies in English literature. His tutors found him bright but unenthusiastic and unwilling to apply himself. One of his biographers, Trevor Dann, notes that he had difficulty connecting with staff and fellow students, and that matriculation photographs from this time portray a sullen young man. Cambridge placed emphasis on its rugby and cricket teams, but Drake had lost interest in sport, preferring to stay in his college room smoking cannabis and playing music. According to fellow student Brian Wells, "They were the rugger buggers and we were the cool people smoking dope."