Extract
Nick Kent
Nick Drake
The noun ‘enigma’ can be defined as an ‘unknown thing’ or ‘mystery’. In the desperate quasi-esperanto of contemporary rock literati, the term has been used with joyous abandon to describe the careers and lifestyles of all too many musicians and all-purpose rock personalities. In the vast majority of cases the term is ill conceived.
Nick Drake, however, was, and will forever more be, rightfully considered an enigma; a private, painfully shy individual who, between the years 1968 and 1972 created a volume of work so peerlessly self-contained, so slender on the one hand and yet so complete when judged in retrospect, that he carved out a musical niche so totally his own and one, moreover, that beyond its shimmering sensuousness and brooding mellifluousness is totally unfettered by the era of its creation. Drake’s music is as timeless as it is irrepressibly beguiling in its distant seductiveness.
To refer to Drake as an enigmatic figure is most decidedly accurate, but the connotations of ‘glamour’ that have somehow become entangled within the word’s true meaning find only cold comfort when trying to piece together the mystery of Nick Drake, his motivation (or lack of same), his existentialist melancholia – above all, the portrait one captures in sustained glimpses of a man lost within himself, an outcast and an outsider, all too painfully resigned to a confused and harsh destiny with no quarter left to belong in.
Even in his earliest compositions the overwhelming sense of resignation to a cruel mortality with no easy answers was overtly evident. The shimmering incandescence of Harry Robinson’s arrangement to ‘Riverman’ from Drake’s first album, at first obscures the essence of melancholia until the awesome intertwining strings and acoustic guitar blend together to reinforce the clinching stanza:
Going to see the riverman
Going to tell him all I can
About the ban
On feeling free.
If he tells me all he knows
About the way his river flows
I don’t suppose
It’s meant for me.
Glimpses, glimpses. Sometimes sustained for a while, sometimes as fleeting and transitory as the unidentified pedestrian darting past Nick Drake, still as stone on the back cover of the aforementioned first album Five Leaves Left. But then there are facts and it’s those facts that one should first document before darting into more uncharted terrain.
– The rest of this article is printed in Loops Issue 01, available to buy from these Stockists.
Nick Drake, however, was, and will forever more be, rightfully considered an enigma; a private, painfully shy individual who, between the years 1968 and 1972 created a volume of work so peerlessly self-contained, so slender on the one hand and yet so complete when judged in retrospect, that he carved out a musical niche so totally his own and one, moreover, that beyond its shimmering sensuousness and brooding mellifluousness is totally unfettered by the era of its creation. Drake’s music is as timeless as it is irrepressibly beguiling in its distant seductiveness.
To refer to Drake as an enigmatic figure is most decidedly accurate, but the connotations of ‘glamour’ that have somehow become entangled within the word’s true meaning find only cold comfort when trying to piece together the mystery of Nick Drake, his motivation (or lack of same), his existentialist melancholia – above all, the portrait one captures in sustained glimpses of a man lost within himself, an outcast and an outsider, all too painfully resigned to a confused and harsh destiny with no quarter left to belong in.
Even in his earliest compositions the overwhelming sense of resignation to a cruel mortality with no easy answers was overtly evident. The shimmering incandescence of Harry Robinson’s arrangement to ‘Riverman’ from Drake’s first album, at first obscures the essence of melancholia until the awesome intertwining strings and acoustic guitar blend together to reinforce the clinching stanza:
Going to see the riverman
Going to tell him all I can
About the ban
On feeling free.
If he tells me all he knows
About the way his river flows
I don’t suppose
It’s meant for me.
Glimpses, glimpses. Sometimes sustained for a while, sometimes as fleeting and transitory as the unidentified pedestrian darting past Nick Drake, still as stone on the back cover of the aforementioned first album Five Leaves Left. But then there are facts and it’s those facts that one should first document before darting into more uncharted terrain.
– The rest of this article is printed in Loops Issue 01, available to buy from these Stockists.
