(Credits: Far Out / Keith Morris)
Sat 29 November 2025 1:30, UK
The tale of Nick Drake is among the most tragic in musical history.
Perhaps the greatest folk talent the United Kingdom has ever produced, with a songwriting prowess which has remained largely unmatched, snuffed out well before his time, and certainly before he had achieved the degree of success and acclaim he so richly deserved.
Folk music was in the throes of a global renaissance back in 1969, when Drake unveiled his masterful debut, Five Leaves Left, and Britain certainly played a part. Nevertheless, audiences never seemed to catch on to the genius of that album or, indeed, Drake’s following two records. Although he amassed a select few high-profile supporters in his time, the complete lack of mainstream attention, coupled with an increasing dependence on drugs, spelt the beginning of the songwriter’s downfall.
With Drake’s tragic death in 1974, two years after the release of his final album, Pink Moon, had gone virtually unnoticed by the music mainstream, the songwriter left the world with a multitude of unanswered questions. Now, with Drake’s music having long since been rediscovered and praised for its clear genius, the music world is left worshipping a songwriter that they never really got the chance to know.
One person who did know Drake, however, was his engineer, John Wood. Working on all three of the songwriter’s albums, Wood was given a front row seat to the musical mastery and the tragic downfall of Nick Drake, along with the ignorance of the music industry to this unbelievable talent presented to them.
“I have to say that I was disappointed. I could not see why Five Leaves Left didn’t do better,” he told The Guardian in 2022. “People just didn’t get it. It wasn’t immediately accessible.”
Perhaps it was as simple as Drake being ahead of his time. After all, there were certainly other folk artists of a similar ilk – the likes of Vashti Bunyan or Bridget St John, and they received a similarly tragic lack of attention from the powers that be. Either way, an audience for Drake’s music must have been out there back in 1969, but it wasn’t in the folk clubs or arts centres of London or Cambridge.
Regardless, Wood – like anybody who was close to Drake during that time – became an invaluable resource for folk devotees digging for information about their fallen hero. Namely, the engineer boasts an unparalleled knowledge of the artists and songwriters who inspired Nick Drake down his path of musical greatness. “The second time I was ever with Nick,” he recalled. “I asked him what his influences were, and he said, ‘Randy Newman and The Beach Boys.’”
If there’s one thing you should never underestimate, particularly within the musical realm, it is the power of both Randy Newman and The Beach Boys. Although Drake was hardly going to write a song like ‘Surfin’ Safari’ or ‘You’ve Got A Friend In Me’, Brian Wilson and Newman, respectively, represent two of the greatest and most prolific songwriters the United States has ever produced.
You might have expected Nick Drake to pluck out two impossibly obscure names from the back pages of the 1960s folk directory, but you have to remember that the songwriter never intended his work to appeal to only a cult audience. Drake, like every other budding songwriter, was hoping for his work to reach the masses in the same vein as somebody like Wilson or Newman. Now, decades later, it appears as though he got his wish.
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