Nick Drake - Family Tree

First tentative steps towards a criminally short career

A precocious and ultimately fragile figure, the death of 26-year-old Nick Drake in 1974 has unfairly garnered as much public and critical attention as the music he made. It was inevitable that his early demise, and the question marks over what led to such a tragedy, would trigger detailed, almost academic consideration of the songs he left behind.

There’s a school of thought that argues such analysis belittles the art itself. Think not of Drake’s all too tiny output (three albums in four years) as a series of signposts to a sad end; let’s instead wallow in the elegance and simplicity of what he left behind. With the full and enthusiastic co-operation of family and friends, this compilation celebrates his intelligence, his articulacy and his understanding of a traditional form that remains as relevant today as at any time since his passing.

The 28 tracks collected here pre-date even his first album, 1969’s Five Leaves Left, and take the listener on an engrossing journey back in time to eavesdrop on the young Nick dabbling with melody lines and embryonic lyrical ideas at home, surrounded by domestic detritus and various members of the Drake clan. Mother Molly even steps up for two lead vocals (on Poor Mum and Try To Remember), while an aunt and uncle add viola and piano to their nephew’s clarinet on a brief passage from Mozart’s Keglestatt Trio.

Drake never had a classy home demo studio with which to try out his ideas. Although a handful of these tracks were committed to a standard cassette recorder deck, he would usually hook up a cumbersome reel-to-reel machine in varying rooms of the house, as the clearly audible clink of bottles midway through Tomorrow Is A Long Time shows. It’s those little human touches which truly put across the organic feel of his songs, as do his selfdeprecating remarks (presumably addressed to an audience of one) at the end of several numbers. The compilers should be applauded for leaving them intact. Those with a lesser appreciation or understanding of the music would have been tempted to excise them from the finished product.

Some of these recordings have turned up on bootlegs, but they’ve never been given the necessary, and extraordinarily delicate, polish to allow Drake’s strengths and original intentions to shine through. Two selections, Day Is Done and Way To Blue, would turn up on Five Leaves Left, but for the most part it’s a compendium of never-heard works in progress. Despite their subdued, sedentary nature, and the subtlety of their presentation, it’s hard to contain the leap-in-the-air excitement of hearing it all gathered in one place. Outtake albums are more often than not a cynical mopping-up exercise, not normally designed to be so important or uplifting.

That this music has endured down the decades, to the point where as diverse a roll call of musicians as Paul Weller, Robyn Hitchcock, Dave Gilmour and Kate Bush have cited its author as an influence, is a testament to Drake’s passion and talent. RC contributor Daryl Easlea once suggested that, although he never achieved huge fame in his lifetime, Drake’s work is today so embedded in the musical climate that it’s practically on the national curriculum. That may be stretching it a bit, but there are nonetheless a few overcrowded classrooms of scholars who will relish flipping through the young man’s early exercise books of doodles.

4 stars 4 stars 4 stars 4 stars

Universal/Fontana | 1734041

Reviewed by Terry Staunton
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