Know (Nick Drake) (LP 92)

Nick Drake Pink Moon (CD - Island, 1972) ****

Genre: Folk

Places I remember:  Fives on the Broadway in Leigh on sea.

Fab, and all the other pimply hyperboles:  Pink Moon




Gear costume: The rest. 

Active compensatory factors: Nick Drake's story is impossibly sad - a talented guy wracked by depression and self doubt. He killed himself at age 26!

Never popular at the time, his three albums have gone on to find much wider audiences since his death.

This album is pretty stark, just Nick and his guitar, but it is beautiful and haunting at the same time. One listen to Pink Moon and you'll be hooked by that amazing voice and need to find more.

Where do they all belong? Sadly, this was his last album. Best place to head to after this is a compilation like Way To Blue: An Introduction to Nick Drake.  

I feel like letting my freak flag fly (CSNY)

Leading on from that weird Placibo cover - Sleeping With Ghosts - the next cover theme features similar freakily surreal worlds.

Pink Floyd - Division Bell

ELP - Brain Salad Surgery

Led Zeppelin - 4th album

Pink Floyd - Meddle

Pink Floyd - Piper At The Gates Of Dawn

Led Zeppelin - Houses Of The Holy

Paul McCartney

Have you never heard a way to find the sun (Nick Drake)

Regular readers will know I am steadily moving through the Greatest Hits compilations in my collection. I am up to the D's in the Rock/Pop genre and K in jazz (Stan Kenton has just left the room).

My first contact with Nick Drake was via an article in Mojo (the Feb 1997 edition). I loved the photos of Nick in that Mojo edition (an example is on the left) and had always been intrigued by the cover of his Pink Moon album which I'd noticed in the album cover books I have. Some months later I bought Way To Blue (an introduction to Nick Drake) to sample what Mojo was raving about, just in case it was rubbish. I had no time to listen to it before we had a family holiday in Taupo and so this album formed the soundtrack of that holiday. I think I played it every day. It was perfect!

The opener is Cello Song and I never tire of hearing it. His guitar style is refreshingly original. His easy vocal style suits the material perfectly and there is an abiding feeling, when you hear it, that no one else on the planet sounds like him. He was an extraordinary talent and although his suicide left behind a relatively small body of work it is of such startling depth and clarity of expression and execution that it glows ever more brightly as the years pass on by.