Nick Drake’s ‘Five Leaves Left’ and its unlikely connection to the cult classic sci-fi TV show ‘UFO’
In April of 1969, Nick Drake—still a couple of months shy of his 21st birthday—was toiling away at Sound Techniques studio in London, wrapping up the final recording session for his debut album, Five Leaves Left. At the same time, about 15 miles away at the MGM film studios in Borehamwood, Nick’s older sister Gabrielle Drake, 25, had just started principal photography on the biggest acting gig of her career—a new live-action science fiction series called UFO, produced by the creators of the beloved marionette TV shows Thunderbirds and Stingray.
More than half a century later, Fives Leaves Left and UFO each have considerably more fans and cultural relevance than they ever did in their own time. Even the term “cult classic” might be underselling them at this point. Nick Drake, of course, posthumously became one of Britain’s most revered and influential singer/songwriters, while UFO—despite running for just one series between 1970 and ’71—has gradually built a devoted following nearly on par with that of other iconic TV hits of its era like The Avengers and The Prisoner.
This makes it all the more bizarre to realise that the Drake siblings likely came home for Christmas in 1969, believing that their big projects—one set in pastoral England and one in futuristic outer space—had both failed.
Nick’s debut folk album had disappointingly flopped in the summer after a head-scratching lack of promotion from his label, Island Records. Gabrielle, meanwhile, dropped out of her role on UFO before a single episode had even aired. MGM’s British studios had closed down in the middle of production, forcing a long filming hiatus that she felt would conflict too much with other opportunities.
Gabrielle did eventually opt to return and continue playing Lieutenant Gay Ellis for a few more shoots in 1970, but despite her prominent role in the show’s cast, she only wound up appearing in about half of UFO’s 26 episodes. Her character, a purple-wigged moonbase commander in a tight silver catsuit, hadn’t exactly felt like the role of a lifetime anyway. For better or worse, though, it’s probably the one she’s still best remembered for.
“In a funny way, I feel more pleased to have done it in retrospect than at the time,” Gabrielle Drake later acknowledged at a UFO fan convention in the year 2000, “Because I do think that it was actually a fairly innovative series and something which was perhaps a bit ahead of its time. It’s very good to look back and to have been associated with it.”
In the same way that her brother Nick had a capable hand at the wheel in the form of producer Joe Boyd, Gabrielle Drake also benefited from the guidance of UFO series producer Gerry Anderson, one of the legends of early sci-fi television. At the time, Anderson’s background was more in kids TV and marionettes than live-action work with full-size humans, but Gabrielle remembered him as “a very benevolent presence” and someone “you always felt that you could go up and see at any time. . . . And very easy to get on with, always.”
Despite Anderson’s credentials, though, Drake admitted that she never believed at the time, “not for one moment,” that the cheap space show she was making would still be remembered or talked about by anybody in the 21st century. “But then you never do think that in our business,” she added. “It is such a strange old business, too, because the one thing you think is going to be a surefire hit is bound to flop.”
Sadly, we don’t know if Nick Drake ever visited his sister on set or even if he ever bothered to watch a single episode of UFO (it’s strangely difficult to imagine him watching any TV show). As those episodes were finally airing on British televisions in 1970 and ‘71, Nick was mostly hard at work recording and releasing his second album, Bryter Layter, which he believed would be a surefire success, but once again flopped, not to be properly appreciated until decades later. Such is the strange old world of show business.
