Nick Drake
Subtitle: dreaming England
By: Nathan Wiseman-Trowse
Series: Reverb series; Reverb series
Publisher: Reaktion Books
Published: 2013
Language: eng
Number of pages: 172
ISBN-13: 9781780231761
Subjects: Rock musicians; English National characteristics; Biography; Folk-rock music; History and criticism
Other titles: Dreaming England
Description: Since his untimely death in 1974 at the age of twenty six, Nick Drake has not only gained a huge international audience, which eluded him during his lifetime, but has also come to represent the epitome of English romanticism. Drake's small but much-loved body of work has evoked comparisons with Blake, Keats, Vaughan Williams and Delius, placing him within a long line of English mystical romanticism. Yet upon closer inspection Drake's work betrays a myriad of international, cosmopolitan influences and approaches that seem to confound his status as archetypal English troubadour. Nathan Wiseman-Trowse unravels the myths surrounding Nick Drake's music to show how audiences have come to think of his work as representing the very idea of Englishness itself. The music itself provides clues, hinting at a specific English landscape that Drake would have wandered through during his lifetime. Yet Drake's interest in blues, jazz, and eastern mysticism hint at a broader conception of English national identity in the late 1960s, far removed from mere parochial nostalgia. Similarly, the framing of Drake's music after his death has done much to situate him as a particular kind of English artist, integrating American counterculture, the English class system and a nostalgic re-imagining of the hippy era for contemporary audiences. Nick Drake: Dreaming England explores how ideas of Englishness have come to be so intimately associated with the cult singer songwriter.
Notes: "Chronology": pages 135-142.

Includes bibliographical references (pages 153-155), discography (pages 157-159), and index.
Table of contents: title: Dreaming England; title: Listening to the land; title: The country and the city; title: Melancholia and loss; title: Drake's legacy.