I was first drawn to this book as It cronicaled the short, brilliant, yet often over looked life of Bristish Singer/songwriter Nick Drake who tragically died aged just 23 in the mid-seventies. Since his death Drake has achieved a level of cult popularity on a par with that surrounding Syd Bartrett or Peter Green, and one imagines that a lot of people will have been drawn to the book to try and discover Nick as an icon rather than an artist. While it does satisfy this to some extent, overall Patrick Humphreys trys to avoid writing a book about Nicks personality and rather concentrates on his lyrical and poetic genius.
Introduciton of the book explains a little about the author and summerises what drew him to write this biography. Humphrey's father actually delivered the baby Nick into the world, and one suspects from this point onwards that rather a lot is going to be made of this (incidently there isn't another mention of this in the book, much to Humphrey's credit). The rest of the introduction is altogether a most irrelevent and tedious affair - including a rather bizairre few pages in which Humphrey's try's to link the Drake family with the sinking of the titanic!
Having finished the Introduction rather bemused I was glad to get into the biography. The book starts by describing nicks childhood in the idillic warwickshire village of Tamwork-in-Arden. This is a nice passage and Humphrey's writes well about Nick's childhood, notinh his musical influences and role models.
The bulk of the book describes Nicks time at Malborough college and Cambridge University, illistrating a young man whi is sociable and outgoing, perhaps, I suspect, to emphisise his later withdrawl from the world. Some rather Tenuous links are drawn here between the life of Nick and that of Fellow pupils in the Frist world war!
The actual description of nicks carrear is rather to long and drawn out - after all he only recorded three albums! lots of name dropping and little focus on the actual music here.
Despite some obvious faults, well worth a read if only to discover the talents on nick drake.
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