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The other Nick Drake

Given all of the obstacles, pitfalls, and harsh realities that face poets these days, it seems almost gratuitously cruel to also share the name of a famous singer-songwriter, especially a brilliant, delicate, and romantically doomed one who only recorded three albums and notoriously died young.

That’s exactly the burden carried by one Nick Drake, an English poet and novelist who is not the Nick Drake, the tragically shy one who died of a sleeping pill overdose in 1974.

In The Independent, Drake (the living one) outlines the love/hate relationship he’s had with his famous “doppelganger” and how he tried to finally deal with the whole thing by, yes, writing a poem about it:

“So I wrote a draft, playing with the ideas I thought were interesting and important; our doppelganger relationship, the strange adjacency of our middle-England lives, the possible existence of still other Nick Drakes — the Concorde pilot, the tennis pro, the Czech porn baron, the poet Nick Drake who was published by Faber and was best friends with Bjork…

And it was rubbish.”

But Drake got back on the horse and tried again. The column ends with the poem “Live Air,” Drake’s take on Drake.

Next week: first-time novelist Sammy Hagar on never being mistaken for anyone else.

Related links:
Read Nick Drake on that Nick Drake in The Independent

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