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Pink Moon is the third and final studio album by the English folk musician Nick Drake, released on 25 February 1972 in the UK by Island Records.

By 1971 Drake had stopped playing live and had largely withdrawn from society. The decision of his producer and mentor Joe Boyd to leave the UK in January 1971 and take a job in the USA, and the commercial failure of his second album Bryter Layter, released in March of that year, accelerated Drake's feelings of isolation and decline into depression. Concerned for his health, in mid-1971 Drake's parents persuaded him to spend time in a psychiatric institution, where he was prescribed antidepressants to little effect, and Chris Blackwell, the head of Island Records, allowed Drake to spend some time at his villa in Spain.

Following his return from Spain to the UK, Drake called Boyd's engineer John Wood and asked to make an album with him. Recorded over two nights in late October 1971, Pink Moon differs from Drake's previous albums in that it was recorded without additional musicians, featuring just Drake on vocals and his acoustic guitar, and a brief piano riff overdubbed onto the title track. The album's short running time (just over twenty-eight minutes), sparse instrumentation, and lyrical content of Pink Moon has often been attributed to Drake's ongoing battle with depression.

Like Drake's previous studio albums, Pink Moon was largely ignored on release and sales were negligible during Drake's lifetime. After Drake's death in November 1974, his reputation and sales of all three albums began to steadily increase, with many subsequent musicians citing him as an influence. In 1999, a US television advertising campaign for the Volkswagen Cabrio used the title track of Pink Moon as its soundtrack, gaining Drake and his music wider recognition in the USA, and sales of the album increased sharply. Considered by many critics to be Drake's best album, Pink Moon has become widely acclaimed and regularly features in lists of the best albums ever, including Rolling Stone's list of the 500 greatest albums of all time.

Background

Nick Drake's first two albums with Island Records, Five Leaves Left (1969) and Bryter Layter (1971), had sold poorly, and combined with Drake's reluctance to perform live or engage in album promotion, Island was not confident of another album from Drake. In his autobiography Joe Boyd, the producer of Drake's first two albums, recalled that Drake was not entirely happy with the production on Bryter Layter, and after recording of the album was completed in mid-1970, Drake told him that he wanted to make his next record without any arrangements or other musicians. Drake restated this decision in his only known interview, published in Sounds magazine in March 1971, where he told journalist Jerry Gilbert that "for the next [album] I had the idea of just doing something with John Wood, the engineer at Sound Techniques".

By the end of 1970 Boyd's Witchseason label, under which he managed and produced several acts, was under financial pressure and Boyd himself was suffering from stress. Accepting an offer to manage the music department at Warner Bros. Pictures in Hollywood, he sold Witchseason and its acts to the parent label Island and left the UK in January 1971. Drake now found himself without a manager, producer and agent, and began to feel more isolated in London. In addition, he was now living in surroundings that accentuated his depression: since moving to London in 1969 he had been living in a ground-floor flat on Haverstock Hill in Belsize Park, but during 1971 he moved to a cheaper flat in Muswell Hill. His friend Robert Kirby, who had composed the string arrangements on Drake's first two albums, stated that the Muswell Hill flat was "horrible" and "looked like a tomb", with "no life in it at all". Concerned by their son's change in behaviour, Drake's parents persuaded him to visit a psychiatrist at St. Thomas' Hospital. Drake was prescribed three different medications, including antidepressants, but he was reluctant to take them due to the stigma associated with depression and his fears concerning the medication's interaction with marijuana, which he smoked regularly.< Critics often associate Drake's music, and especially the perceived melancholy of Pink Moon, with his depression: however, Cally Calloman of Bryter Music, which manages Drake's estate, emphatically denied this, saying, "Nick was incapable of writing and recording while he was suffering from periods of depression. He was not depressed during the writing or recording of Pink Moon and was immensely proud of the album."

The head of Drake's record label Island Records, Chris Blackwell, was also willing to help his artist, and offered Drake the use of his villa in Algeciras on the Spanish Costa del Sol to help Drake recover. Blackwell told Dann, "We were all about giving artists maximum freedom to develop at their own pace so we wanted Nick to take as much time and space as he needed to come up with his next album." Drake spent a few weeks at the villa during the European summer and then returned to London.

Recording

On his return from Spain, Drake called Wood and said that he was ready to record another album. Aware of Drake's mental state, Wood was keen to record the new songs as soon as possible, but due to his busy schedule, he and the studio were only available after 11 pm each night.

The songs for Pink Moon were recorded over just two nights, 30 and 31 October 1971, with just Drake and Wood present throughout. Wood placed a chair in the centre of the recording studio for Drake to sit on, and arranged microphones around the room, recording Drake's guitar and voice together, as he had done for the previous albums. On the second night a second take was recorded for a few of the songs, and Drake added a few simple piano chords to the album's title track, played on the studio's Steinway grand piano: this is the only other instrument that features on the record apart from Drake's guitar and voice.

Wood noted that Drake barely spoke to him throughout the recording. Linda Peters, who had had a brief relationship with Drake during 1971 and who would marry Richard Thompson the following year, visited the studio on one of the nights of recording and also spoke of Drake's refusal to speak.

Once recording had been completed, Drake made clear to Wood his desire that the songs should stay as simple as possible. Wood said, "Afterwards, when we sat in the control room and listened to the tapes, I asked Nick how much of the material he thought we should keep. 'All of it,' Nick replied. I was surprised; we had never worked like that before. I realised that he had no more songs. It would be a short album – and an unusually intense one. 'How would you like to have the songs arranged?' I asked. 'I don't want them arranged,' Nick said. 'I want them to stand naked. No frills!'"

Wood mixed the album quickly and Drake then took the master tapes to Island Records' offices. A popular myth states that Drake dropped the tapes of the album off in a bag at the label's reception desk and then left without anyone realising that it was him. However, in an interview for the Nick Drake fanzine Pynk Moon in 1996, Island's press officer David Sandison refuted this story, stating that although there had been no expectation that he was delivering them a new album, Drake's arrival at the record company had certainly not gone unnoticed:

"I saw him in reception after I came back from lunch and I was talking to somebody and I saw a figure in the corner on the bench, and I suddenly realized it was Nick. He had this big, 15 ips [inches per second] master tape box under his arm, and I said 'Have you had a cup of tea?' and he said 'Erm, yes', and I said 'Do you want to come upstairs?' and he said 'Yes, okay'. So we went upstairs into my office, which was on top of the landing, it was a landing that went into the big office with a huge round table where Chris and everybody else worked – very democratic – and there was a big Reevox [sic] and sound system there, and he just sat in my office area for about half an hour ... After about half an hour he said 'I'd better be going', and I said 'Okay, nice to see you', and he left. Now, he went down the stairs and he still had the tapes under his arm, and about an hour later the girl who worked behind the front desk called up and said 'Nick's left his tapes behind'. So I went down and it was the big sixteen-track master tape and it said NICK DRAKE PINK MOON, and I thought 'that's not an album I know'. The first thing to do was get it in the studio to make a seven and a half inch safety copy, because that was the master. So we ran off a safety copy to actually play, and I think twenty four hours later or so, it was put on the Reevox in the main room and we heard Pink Moon."

Blackwell also stated that he had seen Drake that day, and asked Drake what the cost of the album had been. When Drake told him it had been £500, Blackwell reimbursed him immediately.

The tapes of the Pink Moon session also included Drake's recording of "Plaisir d'amour" (translated from French as "The Pleasure of Love"), a classical French love song written in 1784 by Jean-Paul-Égide Martini. Although "Plaisir d'amour" was on the track listing of the Pink Moon master tape box as the first track of side two, when the tapes were presented they included a note in reference to the song which read "Spare title – Do not use", so the song was not included on the album. The recording was less than a minute long, featured guitar with no vocals, and was eventually included as a hidden track on UK editions of the Nick Drake compilation A Treasury (2004).

Composition and songs

In his essay for the book Remembered for a While, Peter Paphides suggested that the songs on Pink Moon were probably written in Drake's flat on Haverstock Hill, but there is no definite information about when or where the songs were written. At least three of the songs on the album date back to 1969 or earlier: early versions of "Place to Be" and "Parasite" appear on the 1969 work tape recorded by Drake in his bedroom at his parents' home in Tanworth-in-Arden, and he played "Things Behind the Sun" at Fairport Convention's concert at the Royal Festival Hall in September 1969, where Drake performed as one of the support acts. His producer Boyd heard the song at the concert, and pressed Drake to record it for inclusion on Bryter Layter, but Drake refused, saying that the song was not finished. Robert Kirby stated that he had recorded Drake playing a demo version of "Things Behind the Sun" in his room at Cambridge University in 1968, and Australian folk musician Russ Grainger, who played several gigs with Drake during 1969, told Dann that Drake's set at the time had included many of the songs that ended up on Pink Moon.

Artwork

Island again commissioned Keith Morris to take the photographs for the cover of Pink Moon, following his work with Drake for the previous two albums. In the last few weeks of 1971, Island's creative director Annie Sullivan took Drake and Morris to Hampstead in north London, where Morris first took some shots of Drake walking down the footpath between house numbers 94 and 96 South Hill Park, followed by pictures of Drake walking and sitting on a bench near one of the Hampstead Heath ponds behind the houses. Morris was taken aback by the change in Drake's demeanour since their last meeting, and recalled that although Drake was cooperative, he remained uncommunicative throughout the shoot, which lasted barely an hour. Sullivan confirmed that Drake said little throughout.

It was felt that Drake's downcast expressions and the bleak winter landscape in the photos would not help to sell the record, and in the end only one of Morris' photos, a close-up of Drake's face in negative, was used for the inner sleeve. Sullivan recalled the difficulty in making a decision around the cover of the LP: "I remember going to talk to [Nick], and he just sat there, hunched up, and even though he didn't speak, I knew the album was called Pink Moon, and I can't remember how he conveyed it, whether he wrote it down ... he wanted a pink moon. He couldn't tell me what he wanted, but I had 'pink moon' to go on." In the end, Island chose a surrealist Dalí-esque painting by Michael Trevithick, the partner of Drake's sister Gabrielle at the time. Although Drake was not outspoken in his opinion on the cover art of Pink Moon, many close to him felt that he approved.

Sandison stated that he found the original framed artwork for Pink Moon in among the debris of the basement room that Island later allocated to him as his office, and he took it home and hung it on the wall of his house for several years, before eventually presenting it to Drake's parents. An undated photo of Drake's music room at his parents' house, reproduced in Humphries' biography, shows the artwork hanging on the wall of the room.

Promotion and release

With Drake no longer playing live gigs, and refusing to conduct interviews with the music press, Island Records decided to spend the entire promotional budget for Pink Moon on full-page advertisements in all the major music magazines. The advertisements consisted of a photograph of Drake, accompanied by a letter from Sandison.

It was the only one of Drake's studio albums to be released in North America during his lifetime: the only previous release there had been a 1971 compilation simply entitled Nick Drake featuring tracks from his first two albums, which were not released in North America in their original formats until 1976.

The release of the Volkswagen campaign had a major effect on the sales of Drake's records in the US, in particular for Pink Moon. According to figures from Nielsen SoundScan, the album sold more than 4,700 copies in the first three months of 2000, compared with just 815 during the first three months of 1999. In March 2001, The New York Times reported that sales of Pink Moon had risen from 6,000 copies per year to 74,000.

References

Bibliography

• Humphries, Patrick (1998). Nick Drake: The Biography. London, England: Bloomsbury. ISBN 978-0-7475-3503-4.
• Dann, Trevor (2007). Darker than the Deepest Sea: The Search for Nick Drake. London, England: Piatkus. ISBN 978-0-7499-5133-7.
• Rasmussen, Gorm Henrik (2012) [first published 1986 in Danish]. Pink Moon: A Story About Nick Drake. Translated by Sørensen, Bent. London, England: Rocket 88. ISBN 978-1-9066-1529-1.