On his frequently updated Red Hand Files website, Nick Cave has shared an eerie anecdote about Velvet Underground's Nico, involving Nick Drake.

The singer-songwriter was asked a pair of questions from two different fans, and decided to answer them as one.

"I’ve always felt some sort of relation between you and Nick Drake,” a fan named Raghav from India wrote. “If you haven’t heard of him he was an artist from England who wrote only about 60 songs about love, regret, happiness and some emotions I can’t really describe. He sadly suffered from depression and died from an overdose only 4 years into his career. I may be very wrong in thinking so but do you feel that you share more than your first name with Drake?”

Pamela from Los Angeles asked the Bad Seeds singer: “Have you ever met a hero that didn’t disappoint?”

"Whenever I have heard Nick Drake’s music over the years I have enjoyed it, but that’s not the reason for replying to your letter, Raghav," Cave responded. "I want to tell you a story, a sort of Nick Drake story, and try to answer your question, Pamela, in the process."

On London's Portobello Road in the early eighties, Cave was approached by someone asking to take his photograph. "He said that I looked ‘interesting’," Cave recalls. "He gave me his address and told me to come to his flat the next day. This is before I had developed an acute dislike of having my photograph taken, and when I was dumb enough to think that going to a stranger’s flat to have my photo taken might be a good idea. Anyway, the next day I went to his place, somewhere in Ladbroke Grove.

"Inside the flat, the photographer told me he had to set up his camera and asked me to sit and wait on a little sofa in the middle of his rather dark living room. I remember that there was an unsettling atmosphere in the room, heavy and strange, but I sat down anyway."

Cave said he felt a presence behind him, and Nico entered the room "slowly", sitting down beside him. "Now, Pamela, at that time in my young life, Nico, who had sung with The Velvet Underground and made some classic solo albums herself, was, by any measure, a hero, and she was there beside me, sitting very still, and wearing green rubber, knee-high wellingtons. She didn’t speak for a long time. Then she turned slowly toward me, and said, very deliberately, in her thick German accent –

“'I knew a boy who was just like you. He was a singer and his name was Nick'.

"And I said, 'Well, that’s strange, because I am a singer and my name is Nick.'

"And she said, very slowly, “I know.”

"Then she said nothing for a while and my mind rushed all over the place, and I’m thinking, 'Fuck, I’m sitting next to Nico. Fuck, I’m sitting next to Nico.'

"Eventually she said, 'He died.'

"And I said, 'Oh, you mean Nick Drake?'

"And she said, 'Killed by his own hand.'

"And I said, 'Well, that’s where we diverge.'

"She turned to me and after the longest time said, 'Really? That’s what you think.'

Nico then, apparently, stood "in slow motion" and exited the room, leaving Cave to think "What the fuck?"

"The photographer’s way of taking pictures was to have you look in a mirror, in this case, his bathroom mirror, and he would photograph your reflection. As I was arranging my face, there in the mirror, from the end of the hall behind me, Nico appeared, like an apparition, standing very still and looking into the mirror. The photographer took the photo and I said, 'I want that one.'

Cave goes on to say that he can't remember what happened to the photos, or if he's ever seen them.

"That was the day that Nico, who famously sang ‘I’ll be Your Mirror’, became ‘my mirror’, the day she wore green rubber wellington boots and moved very slowly, the day she prophesied wrongly my self-destruction, and the day she did in no way disappoint. I send the fullest version of my love to her, wherever she may be, and Nick Drake too, all of it."

Read the full account here.