Broadcaster Trevor Dann’s new biography of Nick Drake, Darker than the Deepest Sea, more than does justice to its sometimes delicate subject matter.

Darker Than the Deepest Sea: The Search for Nick Drake Trevor Dann

With the obvious support of the Drake estate — Gabrielle Drake and Joe Boyd — and all of the usual suspects, the ground is covered meticulously and dispassionately. Important elements in Nick’s life missed or ignored by Patrick Humphries are examined here, along with an intelligent reassessment of the familiar material. And not only is Dann’s research seemingly beyond reproach, his writing is a pleasure to read.

There are more books (and CDs) at the bottom of the page, as well as links to the US and Canadian Amazon sites.

Britain’s foremost champion of Nick Drake’s music, Keith James, has just released a new album. No. 1 Paradise Road contains nine original songs plus a smattering of ‘hand-picked’ covers, including Chime of a City Clock. The new disc nicely complements Keith’s earlier releases, among them Postcards (with bassist Rick Foot) and The Songs of Nick Drake. Click the top button for Keith’s CDs page. The lower one is for his tour dates.

Matthew Hirtes from UK Fusion had the brass neck to write in recommending his own review of Made to Love Magic, so here’s a link to it. (Nice site, Matthew. I’ve linked to that as well.)

It seems that Way to Blue has served its time and left the building. The disc that was my introduction to Nick has been replaced by a certain Nick Drake: A Treasury — a hybrid CD with a marginally different selection of tunes, and easy to overlook but for one thing: a new track, called Plaisir D’Amour. Snap it up — click the image if you want the UK Amazon, go to the bottom of the page for US and Canadian links.

Keith James is a highly respected acoustic musician who works hard to take his own atmospheric style of small-venue performance around the country, and I’ve been meaning for many months to give him a link on this page. Why? Because, apart from anything else, Keith is probably the leading British exponent of Nick Drake’s music. Dare I say it, with the passing of Scott Appel, he may well be the world’s leading exponent of it. Now there’s something to think about.

Well, Keith’s venue dates are on his web-site, and there’s a link to that down on the links table, so there’s no excuse for not turning out to see him if he comes your way. And I’m sorry it took me so long.

This little news piece is really for the uninitiated, because there has been such a fanfare attached to the new compilation Made to Love Magic that the Nick Drake diehards must surely know about it. It even has its own web-site, and there’s been a promotional documentary on the BBC narrated by — yes — Brad Pitt. What more could an album want?

The new CD is called Made to Love Magic, and it’s a compilation of rarities and remixes, plus a newly discovered late recording — the fifth of the quartet of 1974 recordings. This is definitely not simply a replacement for the earlier Time of No Reply compilation, and although there are some duplicate selections, these have been remastered. As Rykodisc seems to have junked Time of No Reply, the new CD will be this generation’s introduction to the ‘hidden’ Nick Drake.

Anyone who wants to buy Made to Love Magic can click on the cover pic above for Amazon.co.uk, or go to the bottom of the page for the US and Canadian Amazons.

A couple of unusual links have found their way onto the Amazon part of the page (right at the bottom, in case you’ve never been there).

First, on the US site Amazon.com there is Jeremy Flies: a tribute to Nick Drake. I’ve not heard it — comments please from anyone who has — but it comes from Australia and its two Amazon reviewers both gave it four stars. (I wonder what the urbane Jeremy Mason made of being in the title of a record? Maybe he doesn’t know.)

Anyhow, the second link is not to any kind of Amazon, but to Guitar9 Records in the US who are the distributors of Gilbert Isbin Plays Nick Drake. No, I haven’t heard that either (ahem), but the Belgian Isbin has quite a reputation as a guitarist.

Sadly, Scott Appel’s material on Amazon.com is all marked ‘limited availability’, which usually means ‘forget it’. Maybe our American visitors can go out and buy Scott’s CDs in the shops, but we’re not so lucky over here in Britain.

Incidentally, this site is now affiliated to the British, US and Canadian Amazon operations, so you can now search for stuff over most of the English-speaking world. But why is there no Amazon.com.au? Action that, someone.

Prompted by the popularity of old sessions from Tim Buckley, Captain Beefheart and others broadcast in the first half of 2001, John Peel and his ‘staff’ made an earnest effort to find the legendary Nick Drake session.

Well — they’ve failed. Responding on air to a question from me on 20 June, 2001, Peel explained that tapes only ever survived if an engineer at the time had made an illicit copy, or if someone had rooted through the crates in which the tapes were stored in the corridors of Broadcasting House and helped themselves to it. The BBC was contractually obliged to destroy or tape over sessions after an agreed period of time — invariably a matter of weeks. So unless an engineer did make a copy and hasn’t let on about it — which by now we must assume is extremely unlikely — then the session no longer exists. A terrible shame.

This page aims to bring together as many useful Nick Drake links as possible. If you find (or run) a site or page that we haven’t included here, please let us know using the e-mail button at the bottom of the button-bar.

There are many other Nick Drake sites or pages bobbing about on the cold ocean of the internet, but we’ve set out to limit this page to links which can genuinely be said to be informative or useful or especially creative.

But this page is also partly a labour of love, of course. Who, when they’ve bought a CD they

“Thinking what’s important about Nick Drake is his dark romanticism is like thinking what’s important about Brian Wilson is surfing” —Robin Frederick

think is the most wonderful thing they’ve ever heard, hasn’t become an evangelist in the name of their new discovery? Sometimes — rather often, perhaps — we lose interest after a few months. But Nick Drake is not an artist whose enthusiasts lose interest, either in his music or in his life and personality. Why should that be? If you don’t know already, switch this thing off and go out and buy Island’s Treasury compilation. You’ll be back.

It’s also true to say (and it’s terrible to have one’s less sophisticated motives exposed) that the aura of mystery and of tragedy which surrounds Nick fuels a quiet fascination for him among a great many people. It’s a fascination not for Nick Drake the exceptionally gifted musician, to whom we can listen any time we want to, but for Nick Drake the phenomenon. Because for us who never knew him, a quarter of a century after his death his life seems shadowy, his character elusive. That’s hardly surprising — it would be true of anyone. But Nick Drake isn’t just anyone: he’s a singer whose soft voice we hear intoning the strangest things, and a guitarist whose dizzying, transcendent playing has prompted comparison with Robert Johnson. What? Robert Johnson the shadowy, elusive figure around whose life countless legends have grown and who died at 26? Yes, that Robert Johnson.

It’s not too far wide of the mark to say that young women fall in love with him,

“It was a simple matter to envelop Nick in the dark halo of Baudelaire” —Robin Frederick

older women want to mother him, men want to buy him a pint and cheer him up, depressives want to offer him advice (or Prozac) and the goulish and mawkish want to ‘find him’, a process that possibly involves lighting candles and switching the lights off. But in a sense our thrill at a mystery, our love of the shadowy and the unattainable, is leading us away from the one place where we can still and always will find him: in our own rooms, playing to us from the stereo.

The box lets you search the Amazon catalogue in its entirety or by product group: type your key-words in the box, select your product group (or ‘all products’) then click the search button.

The second box gives you direct access to individual items in Amazon’s catalogue.