'Whatever acceptance and acclaim his music gets now is simply what it always deserved'

WHEN Nick Drake died in November 1974 he was, at least to the public at large, little more than a minor folk musician with three unsuccessful albums to his barely recognised name.

Throughout the decades that followed, though, hipster musicians gradually began citing him as an influence and a posthumous fan-base duly blossomed from the shadows. Today he is widely regarded as one of the most cherished singer-songwriters of his or any other era.

None of Drake's albums sold more than 5,000 copies while he was alive. But a quarter of a century after his death from an overdose at 26, Volkswagen of all people used the title track from his brittle swansong, Pink Moon, in a television commercial. The album sold more within the following month than Drake's entire catalogue managed in the preceding 30 years.

I prefer to think of that less as an egregious instance of cultural thievery, and more as a strangely satisfying way of bringing Drake's music to an audience he was denied during his short lifetime.

Today he can be heard everywhere from Starbucks to Heartbeat to Radio 2 tributes solemnly narrated by Brad Pitt. Although thigh-slapping irony isn't something one readily associates with this introspective bard of autumnal melancholy, even he might have seen the funny side.

Drake's enduring appeal is celebrated next week at Way to Blue: Songs of Nick Drake, in which artists such as Robyn Hitchcock, Vashti Bunyan (a cult contemporary of Drake's), Danny Thompson (Drake's bassist of choice), and Stuart Murdoch of Belle and Sebastian perform selections from his sainted songbook.

This much-anticipated Celtic Connections concert is curated by Drake's erstwhile manager, mentor and producer Joe Boyd who, like Woody Allen's Zelig, has consistently displayed an uncanny knack for turning up at culturally significant hot-points. He plugged in Bob Dylan's guitar when he notoriously went electric at the Newport Festival in 1965; tour-managed blues leviathan Muddy Waters; ran London's legendary UFO club during the psychedelic epoch and produced Arnold Layne for Pink Floyd; and he discovered the shy yet uniquely gifted Nick Drake, who in 1969 he added to his seminal Island records imprint, Witchseason, alongside progressive folk darlings Fairport Convention and the Incredible String Band.

"He came in and dropped off a tape and I just kept listening and listening to it," recalls Boyd of the fateful day when Drake ambled into his life. "I was just really stunned. But one of the problems was that I thought, this is so great everyone's going to love it, and we put the record out and it didn't sell. And I didn't really have a plan B."

The Cambridge-educated son of upper middle-class parents, Drake was hardly typical rock fodder. But his unique voice, peerless musicianship and unusual songwriting chops clearly marked him out as something special.

"Nick is a one-off, his songs are very hard to categorise," says Boyd. "They're now a lot easier to fit into the spectrum of popular music simply because they've been so influential, if only in the sense that there are a lot of people who sing very quietly into the microphone, perform a sad song, and say, 'I was influenced by Nick Drake.' Which doesn't always mean that they were particularly."

And what was he like to work with? "He was as advertised, he was very shy, he was very quiet, he didn't say a lot. But I liked working with him. If you prodded him he would tell you what he thought, and he was so good to work with in the studio because he almost never made a mistake. He played everything perfectly and sang in key, so you didn't have to worry about him."

Sadly, Drake's lack of success contributed to the severe depression which plagued him towards the end of his life. "It was very disheartening to him that the records didn't sell. We all told him he was great, and in a way that's the lyric of Hanging on a Star: 'Why leave me hanging on a star when you deem me so high.' What am I supposed to do with this, you know? It was crushing for him that people didn't get it."

What would he have made of this posthumous veneration? "He would have loved it," beams Boyd. "I think he would have loved everything, even the Volkswagen ad. But my feeling is that whatever acceptance and acclaim his music gets now is simply what it always deserved. And it's significant that because the music was not popular at the time it was recorded it doesn't have the association with that era. So in a way it is cut loose from a specific temporal context. It's free for subsequent generations to make it their own. It has this strangely timeless or even contemporary feeling."

Way to Blue: Songs of Nick Drake is performed on 20 January at Glasgow Royal Concert Hall, as part of Celtic Connections. www.celticconnections.com