In the last years of his life the elegiac and melancholic air that had threaded through his music had come to manifest itself firstly as depression and then in the debilitating symptoms of what a psychiatrist, in a time when such things were less understood, diagnosed as possible schizophrenia. What kind of irritated me was the talk about "myth" and "cult" about Nick Drake and the question why his music is still so popular.

Nick Drake by Richard Morton Jack review – genius remembered

This was unfortunately refused in a similar fashion, and it was decided that my fortune should be made elsewhere. My brother once said to my mother, ‘If only I could feel that my music had helped anyone at all …’ and I just wish he would have known how many people have said to us over the years how his music had helped them. He was wearing a beautiful tweed jacket, which had a slightly high waistband and he looked so beautiful. They tentatively diagnosed “simple schizophrenia” but conceded that this catch-all term had little meaning.Since his death, Nick Drake’s legacy has been thoughtfully shepherded, with selected reissues, an incongruous but beguiling Volkswagen TV advert and 2014’s handsome coffee table book, Remembered For A While. Morton Jack’s intention in opening with Drake’s suicide was to immediately take readers beyond the desperate end of his life, which “looms so large in people’s perception of him”, he tells me. It was at Sound Techniques, an 18th-century former dairy in London’s Chelsea, that Wood and his co-conspirator, Geoff Frost, set up their “English Arcadia”, building their own recording equipment.

Nick Drake: The Biography by Patrick Humphries | Goodreads Nick Drake: The Biography by Patrick Humphries | Goodreads

I think Nick’s sister Gabrielle gave permission and was willing to collaborate with me because a lot of the people who knew Nick are inevitably now in their 70s or older, and with them would die a lot of interesting and valid history,” he explains. Journeying through his life story was both revealing yet not, in that his life was exactly what you would expect of a middle class English boy born in 1948.The four young people in the convertible look at each other and, silently agreeing that it's just not their scene, drive on. He had champions in the celebrated producer Joe Boyd and in the Velvet Underground's John Cale, who had insisted on working with him, but it wasn't enough.

Nick Drake: The life by Richard Morton Jack | Book review

Nick came home elated and declared that now, finally, the world would change and peace would prevail. But fortunately Patrick Humphries doesn't concentrate only on those dark days in the last years of his short life, which were undeniably there.Both parents admired their son’s work, she says: “In the letters my father says, ‘Take courage, take heart, you’ve really got it. My brother once said to my mother, “If only I could feel that my music had helped anyone at all …” and I just wish he could have known how many people his music has helped. And I guess that was part of the tragedy of Nick's life for me - nothing really went all that wrong, yet somehow he still fell apart. At the end of the encounter Mick said to him: ‘You must come and see us when you’re back in London,’ which I doubt he said to everyone.