Nick Drake - Posthumous Popularity

Posthumous Popularity

During the early Eighties, I drifted away from the music scene. When I returned, I was surprised to find that Nick Drake was becoming famous. —Ian MacDonald

There were no documentaries or compilation albums in the wake of Drake's death. His public profile remained low throughout the mid and late 1970s, although occasional mentions of his name appeared in the music press. By this time, his parents were receiving an increasing number of fans and admirers as visitors to the family home in Far Leys. Island Records, following a 1975 NME article written by Nick Kent, stated "we have no intention of repackaging Nick's three albums (which remained available), either now or at anytime in the foreseeable future", but in 1979 Rob Partridge joined Island Records as press officer and commissioned the release of the Fruit Tree box set. Partridge was a fan of Drake's, and had seen him perform early in 1969: "The first thing I did when I got to Island was suggest we put together a retrospective—the studio albums plus whatever else was there. I wasn't necessarily expecting massive vaults with millions of tunes, live recordings or whatever, but there was very little". The release brought together the three studio albums as well as the four tracks recorded with Wood in 1974 and was accompanied by an extensive biography written by the American journalist Arthur Lubow. However, sales were poor and the album received little press notice, and in 1983 Island deleted Fruit Tree from its catalogue.

By the mid-1980s Drake was being cited as an influence by musicians such as R.E.M.'s Peter Buck and Robert Smith of The Cure. Smith credited the origin of his band's name to a lyric from Drake's song "Time Has Told Me" ("a troubled cure for a troubled mind"). Drake gained further exposure in 1985 with the release of The Dream Academy's hit single "Life in a Northern Town", which included an on-sleeve dedication to Drake. In 1986 the first biography of Drake was published, in Danish—it was eventually translated, updated with new interviews, and published in English in February 2012. His reputation continued to grow, and by the end of the 1980s, his name was appearing regularly in newspapers and music magazines in the United Kingdom; he had to many come to represent a "doomed romantic hero", and an "enigma wrapped inside a mystery". The first step in translating that reputation into record sales came with the release of the compilation album Way to Blue: An Introduction to Nick Drake in May 1994. Although the album never charted in the UK, it sold consistently over the next few years, gaining a gold disc certification in September 1999 for sales of 100,000 copies in the UK.

On 20 June 1998 BBC Radio 2 broadcast a documentary entitled Fruit Tree: The Nick Drake Story, featuring interviews with Joe Boyd, John Wood, Gabrielle and Molly Drake, Paul Wheeler, Robert Kirby and Ashley Hutchings, and narrated by Danny Thompson. To tie in with the release of the compilation album Made to Love Magic, an updated version of the documentary was broadcast on 22 May 2004 on Radio 2, retitled Lost Boy: In Search of Nick Drake and featuring the same interview clips but with Thompson's narration replaced by that of Brad Pitt, a self-confessed Nick Drake fan. In early 1999, BBC2 aired a 40-minute documentary, A Stranger Among Us—In Search of Nick Drake. The following year, Dutch director Jeroen Berkvens released the documentary A Skin Too Few: The Days of Nick Drake, featuring interviews with Boyd, Gabrielle Drake, Wood and Kirby. Later that year, The Guardian placed Bryter Layter at number 1 in its "Alternative top 100 albums ever" list.

In 1999, "Pink Moon" was used in "Milky Way", a Volkswagen Cabrio commercial, leading to a large increase in record sales. The US telecommunications company AT&T used "From the Morning" in one of their advertisements as part of their "Rethink Possible" campaign in North America in 2010.

In recent years several musicians, including Lucinda Williams, Badly Drawn Boy, Lou Barlow and Mikael Åkerfeldt have cited Drake as an influence. In 2004, nearly 30 years after his death, Drake gained his first chart placing when two singles, "Magic" and "River Man", were released to coincide with the Made to Love Magic album.

On 16 May 2009 Joe Boyd curated a concert at the Birmingham Town Hall, with Robert Kirby as musical arranger and a variety of singers and musicians performing Drake's songs. Among the featured artists were Robyn Hitchcock, Camille O'Sullivan, Martha Wainwright, Graham Coxon, Beth Orton, Harper Simon, Kate St John, Stuart Murdoch and Vashti Bunyan. Following this concert's success, Boyd staged a short concert tour of the UK in January 2010, following the same format: artists on the tour included Vashti Bunyan, Green Gartside, Lisa Hannigan, Scott Matthews, Teddy Thompson, Krystle Warren, Robyn Hitchcock, Kirsty Almeida and Harper Simon. The concert at the London Barbican Centre was filmed and broadcast on BBC Four in April 2010.