Taron Egerton on discovering the genius of Nick Drake: “I have been obsessed with him since”
Let’s start off by outlining a very important thing right from the off: If you like music, especially any kind of music that involves a guitar, which is probably about 60% of the art form, then you must know about Nick Drake.
In fact, you don’t just need to know about him, you need to go to Spotify, or Deezer, or a shop that sells vinyl, and immediately buy three albums: Five Leaves Left, Pink Moon and Bryter Later. Then play them all in a row. Then sit there and think, “Why have I never listened to Nick Drake before?” The actor Taron Egerton knows all this, and it’s probably why he’s so successful. OK, maybe not, but he is definitely a fan.
Egerton has proved his musical chops on several occasions, not just as a singing, piano-playing gorilla in the kids animated musical Sing, but also in his Golden Globe award-winning turn as Elton John in 2019’s Rocketman.
And when it comes to Nick Drake, who produced a body of work of unrivalled quality between 1969 and 1972, he knows just what he’s talking about. He told Pitchfork: “At some point in my teens, I picked up Nick Drake on my own, realised that he was a genius, and have been obsessed with him since. My mother was playing him for a long time before that. When I was a kid, I found it to be heavy and dark. But as you get a little bit older, you find a catharsis in those things. You begin to understand the complexity of the human experience a little more.”
Nick was impossibly young to be producing the kind of music he did; he was signed to Island Records at just 20, and his debut album Five Leaves Left was released just a year later. His soft singing voice was underpinned by a dazzling display of acoustic guitar playing, often using alternative tunings and some beautiful orchestration.
Critically acclaimed but never commercially successful, the singer-songwriter was ravaged by depression during his short life, withdrawing from the day-to-day almost completely once his third album was released in 1972. It’s that album that particularly resonates with Egerton, who noted, “My favorite is Pink Moon, the one he wrote just before he killed himself. It’s very odd, and it’s not terribly well produced. But I really hear something extraordinary in it, a sort of lost soul. He’s been slightly fetishised as a tragic figure; I don’t want to be a part of that. But his music makes me feel a great deal.”
Nick hated playing live, disappointed by people’s responses to his songs and his need to lengthily tune his guitar between them. He also suffered from album reviews in the press that missed the mark entirely, and Pink Moon is less than half an hour long, as though that was all he could manage.
But in 1973, he had reached out to his close friend and engineer John Wood to begin work on a fourth album, and the pair started some recordings. However, Nick was bitter at not having seen the success his talent should have resulted in, and his angry demeanour bled into the sessions. The following year, broke and disillusioned, he overdosed on antidepressants and was discovered dead by his mother.
This year saw the release of The Making of Five Years Left, a compilation of unreleased recordings that stretch back to his time as a recalcitrant student at Cambridge.
Egerton, meanwhile, has most recently been seen in the latest series, Smoke, resulting in his deal with Apple TV+, which follows a detective and a serial arson investigator as they track down two people setting major fires. He’ll also return in the role that made him famous, Eggsy, in the latest instalment in the Kingsman franchise helmed by Matthew Vaughn.
