Some artists create music that is as good as music can ever be. You might find music that's different to Kind of Blue or Bob Marley, but you'll not find music that's better. Music that is immensely personal and yet universal, clearly a kind of high-water mark against which other endeavours can be compared.
Nick Drake is one of those artists. His work is holy, haunting, enveloping, wise, mystical, graceful and complete. It can float over you on a balmy summer's evening making you feel like a petal spinning on a warm breeze, and yet be right in there with you articulating your thoughts on the darkest of lonely nights.
It goes right into you now and yet - and this is the real magic - it somehow feels just as much in you even when you change, it sort of becomes part of you and grows with you. It achieves what the greatest art achieves, it makes us feel understood, it shows us new ways to see, it informs and affirms.
Writing in last November's issue of the absolutely amazing Arthur magazine, occult elder statesman Genesis P-Orridge described Nick Drake's music;
The intensity of melancholia drenching the analog tape, the sheer PRESENCE of his voice is an honour to share, as is the raw intensity with which he describes turmoil, creating confusion in us by delicately flecking every edge of his words with guilty beauty
Among Nick's schoolmates at Marlborough was a lad called Chris Davison. This being the 1960s, there were a number of bands among the boys at the school.
The alarming element comes in the specific memory of Nick and Chris' Marlburian contemporary Simon Crocker. He clearly remembers Drake and Davison 'on the same stage together singing the old boys' song'. It's goosing because Davison is better known to us by his stage name. Chris de Burgh.
De Burgh is not just The Krankies to Drake's Bowie, cos it's not just a cover version it's a collaboration. This is the people who gave us Northern Sky and The Lady In Red singing as one. Imagine if there were some 1966 incidence of The Krankies and Bowie performing together.
In further weirdness, De Burgh was one of the fawning twats who gushed sappy saccharine sentimental shite on the day of Diana's funeral. His royal connections run deeper, as he was at school not only with Nick Drake but also Mark Phillips, who went on to marry Princess Anne.
Princess Anne is for some reason now known as the Princess Royal. Isn't royalty implicit in the term 'princess'? How could she, or anyone else, be a princess and not be royal? Doesn't this title cause consternation and/or confusion amongst other equally royal princesses? I'd look into it if only I could convince myself it possibly mattered in the least.
But anyway, if we take it as read that the royals are indeed a bunch of shapeshifting lizards bent on world domination, then we can clearly see De Burgh as some toady minion, polluting and corrupting the forces of light and humanity - such as Nick Drake and his ability to make some of the most beautiful music ever recorded - and preserving our subjugated torpor.
Why else was De Burgh so avid about getting in on Nick Drake's musical action? Fortunately Nick appears to have been aware of his mission to deliver to the world his great music, and consciously fought off the lizardly usurper De Burgh. As Simon Crocker remembered;
The thing was that Nick was absolutely the musical director. There was a bunch of us together, but Nick was the musical centre... [De Burgh] was very keen, always wanting to join in... I remember him as being quite pushy, and Nick wasn't pushy at all and didn't like pushy people
(source: 'Nick Drake' by Patrick Humphries)
De Burgh is obviously part of the Lizard scheme for ruling all humankind. Indeed, he says as much in his song A Spaceman Came Travelling. Whilst, on initial examination, it appears to be some space-age rewrite of the Christian nativity, when you read it through it seems to be more about aliens coming to dominate the planet under a guise of enlightenment.
Which, tellingly, is also the case with Starman by David Bowie, which is where we came in.
Shit - I think Bowie, De Burgh and The Krankies are all in it together.
If I suddenly die in mysterious circumstances you'll know it's because I knew too much.
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