Not Fade Away 1970: Northern Sky, by Nick Drake

We’ve now reached the 1970s and I wonder if things aren’t about to get more interesting. The thing about the 1960s is that the history of pop in that time is now pretty settled. You could reduce it to the Beatles, the Stones and Dylan and most could live with that (I’d want Motown on the team myself).

But the seventies is more splintered terrain. Glam, prog, punk, funk, disco, easy listening, Laurel Canyon singer-songwriters, ska, reggae, post-punk, German motorik electronica, AOR; pop music atomised in those ten years.

You might argue that the same thing happened to some degree in the sixties too. But the legacy of that decade is less contested. In the seventies the music you liked was a more nuanced cultural marker. In the sixties the fault line was between young and old and pop music - all pop music - was the soundtrack. * That was no longer the case in the next decade when the optimism of the mid-sixties had burned off.

Music fractured. And the way it was received, followed, and consumed fractured too. That’s most obvious in the oppositionalism of punk, I guess. But you can see it, too, in the ridiculous “disco sucks” movement.

And the reconsiderations and rediscoveries have continued until the present day. The reputation of punk - a prime influence in the music of both the eighties and nineties - has probably never been at a lower ebb than it is now.

In short, fasten your seatbelts we’re in for a bumpy night over the next few weeks.

In some ways, you might argue, Nick Drake’s current reputation is itself an indicator of the fluid nature of attitudes towards the seventies. In his case, though, it has followed a simpler course. When Drake made the three albums on which his legacy is based no one was paying attention. For years - long after his death at the age of 26 from an overdose of antidepressants, possibly deliberate, possibly accidental - he was largely a forgotten man, remembered if at all as the subject of John Martyn’s song Solid Air. In the late seventies Island issued Fruit Tree, a box set of his work, but, like the original albums, it didn’t sell. Drake was lauded by musicians - U2, The Cure and R.E.M. were all fans - but few others were even aware of him.

And then a track, Pink Moon, turned up on a Volkswagen ad in 2000 and suddenly, posthumously, Drake started selling records. It’s said more Nick Drake records were sold in a month than in the previous 30 years. Soon Brad Pitt was narrating Radio 2 documentaries about him. Drake had been reclaimed from the shade of the seventies.

Of course the years of neglect only added to the doomy romanticism of his story. In his very fine history of modern British folk music, Electric Eden (Faber, 2010), Rob Young casts Drake as a modern Icarus, one who crashed to Earth “in a mess of melted wax and feathers”. All too often, in the accounts of those who knew him, Drake seems a walking ghost; silent, uncommunicative, withdrawn. “I think the man has always been pretty obscure,” his producer Joe Boyd admitted to me in 2010. “I don’t think anyone has any clear vision of who the man was. He is this terribly mysterious person, even to someone like myself who knew him very well.” 

It’s not hard to find that mystery, that diffidence, that psychological damage in the records he made too. “A black eyed dog called at my door/A black eyed dog he called out for more.”

At the same time there’s always a danger we retrospectively rewrite the life to fit its ending. Which brings us to this week’s song. Northern Sky appeared on Drake’s second album Bryter Later and is simply the most joyous song he ever recorded. It’s greatly helped by John Cale’s organ, celeste and piano playing which lifts it up, makes it bounce and dance.

And Drake was never more hopeful, more open than he was here. “I never felt magic crazy as this,” he sings, that gossamer voice juiced by love or something close. It’s a morning song, warming to the promise of a new day.

Who knows what might have happened if the album had been successful? What ifs are just that. Maybe the end of the story was already written into Drake’s DNA.

But for these few moments we can hear some hope. And we can wish he’d found more.

Brighten my northern sky.

* I realise I’m generalising here more than a little. You might point to mods and rockers fighting on Brighton beach as evidence that the sixties had its own fractures. I also have a memory of Danny Baker interviewing Loyd Grossman, who, in his days before Masterchef and cooking sauces, was a music journalist. In the interview it emerged that at the end of the sixties, when asked by an American magazine what he didn’t like, Grossman wrote “all soul music”.

Other Contenders

Get Up (I Feel Like Being a) Sex Machine, James Brown

Lola, The Kinks

Moondance, Van Morrison

Band of Gold, Freda Payne

Ball of Confusion, The Temptations

Move On Up, Curtis Mayfield

Up the Ladder to the Roof, The Supremes

The best-selling single of 1970:  The Wonder of You, Elvis Presley