On this day in 1972: Nick Drake released Pink Moon

Originally published in Hot Press in 2022:

A very young Nick Drake came to see Chris Blackwell at Island Records in 1967, possibly at the prompting of his friend, John Martyn. Blackwell told him to come back in six months.

“I was right in the middle of Spencer Davis Group turning into Traffic and Spooky Tooth," he explains. “It was more sort of hard rock. Nick’s music was fantastic, no question about it, but I didn’t feel I could devote the time to guide him. He came back but unfortunately everything was pretty much the same. If I felt I could have brought something to the table, I would have done that in a second.”

Joe Boyd, an American folk music savant who had tried and failed to get his former employees, Elektra Records, to sign Syd Barrett’s Pink Floyd, had a management and production company called Witchseason which signed a deal with Island, leading to the release of such masterpieces as Fairport Convention’s Liege & Lief in 1967 and, later on, the likes of Richard and Linda Thompson’s I Want To See The Bright Lights. Drake was part of Witchseason so his debut Five Leaves Left came out on Island in 1967.

In the book, Blackwell lovingly describes how Drake recorded ‘River Man’ live with Harry Robinson’s strings, an arrangement Blackwell considers to be even better than ‘Eleanor Rigby’. Despite this, the record didn’t sell. At all.

“I liked Nick’s music a lot but how are you going to market it, where do you promote it? I was doing a lot of things, too many things. I don’t know if it had the attention it should have had.”

The last time Blackwell met Drake, who died in 1974, was when the singer delivered his final album Pink Moon, to the Island offices.

“I remember it clear as a bell,” says Blackwell now. “They said Drake was downstairs, he was just sitting on a chair, looking down, with a small little tape reel. I sat next to him. ‘Hi Nick, how are you?’ There wasn’t much coming from him. I told him I was looking forward to hearing the new album, then he left and that was the last I saw of him.”

Boyd stipulated in the contract when he sold Witchseason to Island that Drake’s recordings must never be deleted from the catalogue. As Blackwell relates on the page, sales remained non-existent until Volkswagen used ‘Pink Moon’ in an advertisement in 1999, boosting the numbers literally overnight.

“That’s how this business works. Something can come up suddenly. You think, how is he connected to a Volkswagen but they felt it was a piece of music that would work. That was what he deserved, from day one. I felt he had magic.”

Revisit Pink Moon below: