Anthems from a doomed youth

Little is known about Nick Drake. Largely unappreciated during his lifetime, he made only three albums before his early death. Luckily, says Tim Cumming, a film and album drawing on rare material should give new insight into his life and work

Once known only by a select few, Nick Drake's music has never been more popular than today, over 25 years after his death. This most enigmatic of performers only ever played a handful of gigs in his lifetime, and released just three albums that drew adulatory reviews but scarcely any sales. Nick Drake as an artist and man remains a puzzle that no one – friends, family, fellow musicians, fans – can ever solve. But his music stays with you. His sister Gabrielle sums it upDrake's enigma: "Those who knew Nick say they never really knew him, but the people who never knew him, his fans, often say 'I feel like I really know him.'"

Which is why new listeners keep coming, long after his death. When Dutch director Jeroen Berkvens' film portrait A Skin Too Few had its first UK showing at the NFT in London, there was a queue for returns stretching out the door. This evocation of Nick Drake's life and music includes interviews with family and friends, and even home-movie footage of Nick as a baby. Berkvens reconstructed the singer's bedroom in an Amsterdam studio, right down to the Camus by his bed, and his guitar resting on the actual duvet on which he died. It is the kind of attention to detail that typifies the unblinking gaze of a Nick Drake obsessive. The film tours Britain as part of the Sheffield International Documentary Festival until the end of March, and Drake fans should do their best to catch it while they can.

And there is more good news for Drake completists. With its hand forced by the proliferation of sub-standard bootlegs over the years, Drake's estate is finally working through home recordings dating from 1967 to 1969 with an eye to an official CD release later this year. Drake recorded dozens of songs on his Beocord tape deck. As well as early versions of his own compositions, they range from blues covers to standards such as "Summertime" and the kind of traditional songs his mother may have sung at home. Tentatively called "Family Tree", the CD may include songs written by her, one of which we hear inA Skin Too Few. Gabrielle for one is convinced that their mother was a powerful musical influence. And it's true, the breathy, sighing vocals of mother and son are uncannily similar; it's as if they were drawing the same breath.

Recently, a tape long thought to be lost has come to light, containing what may be Nick's first ever recordings, from Aix in the South of France in February 1967. The 35-minute performance includes his first ever song, "Princess of the Sand", as well as covers of Bob Dylan, Bert Jansch and others, punctuated by Drake's commentary. Without an audience hungry for new material, these recordings would never have seen the light of day.

No one has been able to replicate Drake's sound. The secret is in his tunings, the gut-string alchemy that makes his songs unique. Listening to the home recordings of songs that we know in their studio arrangements shows how self-contained he was as a musician, summoning up an ensemble sound out of a single instrument. He spent hours tuning and retuning each string until he found the golden mean he was looking for. His last, deliberately unadorned style was the culmination and purification of his playing, the sounds of his fluid, open tuning stretched to breaking-point.

"He knew absolutely what he wanted," remembers his sister. "He was both a loner and a leader." After leaving Marlborough, the teenage Drake drove to the south of France with friends and guitar, playing only instrumentals then– hours and hours of fingerpicking. It was during those four months that his distinctive sound emerged. From France he travelled through Morocco, and Gabrielle remembers him coming home with his head full of Arabian and Indian music.

There are surely hints in his songs of the pulsing, trance-like music he must have heard in Marrakesh, Meknes, Fez, Rabat. They are most apparent on the last album, Pink Moon, and on the songs from 1974, his first recordings in three years and the last he ever made. The oud-like backing to "Black Eyed Dog", and the short, exquisite instrumental "Horn" could have been written a thousand years ago.

"Nick at college was catholic and eclectic in his taste," says his arranger, Robert Kirby. "Bach, the French Impressionists, Ravel, the Café de Paris period, Stephane Grappelli, Bob Dylan of course. When I met him for the Five Leaves Left sessions [his first album], he brought Pet Sounds and an album by the Fifth Dimension, very weird things that people don't really mention."

Five Leaves Left brought praise but little air play and no sales. And then Island sent him on a college tour which so traumatised him that he barely performed again. Perhaps something in him gave up the fight; his bedroom fantasies would never become an actuality beyond the recording studio.

His second album was Bryter Layter, nine months in the making and regarded by many as his masterpiece. But once again, it passed almost everybody by, and when Joe Boyd left for America, Drake felt abandoned. Embittered by feelings of failure, Drake left his bedsit on Haverstock Hill in London and returned to Tamworth in Arden. There he retreated into long silences. He cut off friends and family to escape a torment he could communicate only through music.

He returned to London late in 1971 to record his last album, Pink Moon, over the course of two nights, and delivered the tapes himself without uttering a word. Unadorned by strings or session players, it's music stripped back to essentials. Twenty-nine minutes of pure creative beauty, and then silence. Photographer Keith Morris remembers the final session for Pink Moon on Hampstead Heath, when Drake barely acknowledged his existence. "In the end I ran out of things to say and just clicked – it was like taking a still life." Drake returned to Tamworth, and though he tried many times, never left.

"I've got no more songs left," he despaired to a friend soon after Pink Moon's release. No one knows exactly what went wrong. But the music stopped. He took to more desperate escapes, disappearing in his car for days, travelling silently from one friend to another. Arriving unannounced, leaving without warning, driving until the petrol ran out, then calling for help. He never bought petrol, just as he couldn't answer the door or pay the rent, or even, at the end, wash, speak, or sing and play.

He had no survival skills. These things simply moved beyond him. His parents would phone friends to find out where he was. "But don't tell him we called," they'd say. "I don't like it here," he told his mother, "but I can't bear it anywhere else." Weeks could go by without Nick being able to utter another word.

"You remember me how I was. Tell me how I was," he appealed to friends in a Ladbroke Grove squat, three days before he died of an overdose of anti-depressants in 1974. The coroner recorded a verdict of suicide, but even his death is a mystery. Was it suicide, or an accident? What is the truth about Nick Drake?

Legends thrive on unanswered questions. But however many mysteries remain, there is no legend without the songs, and now that the best of his home recordings are to join his precious three albums on the shelves later this year, we can answer at least the musical questions about where he came from, how he got there, and what he left for us.

'A Skin Too Few' tours the UK to 28 March (www.sidf.co.uk/tour). 'Family Tree' is released later this year on Island Records. 'Five Leaves Left', 'Bryter Later' and 'Pink Moon' are all available on Island Records