Went to the launch of a new Nick Drake biography last week, and have been thinking again about characters like him. I'm like any male muso- look through my CD collection and you'll find stuff by loads of doomed characters who died young- Gram Parsons, Tim Buckley, Jim Morrison, Ian Curtis, etc ad nauseam. i like to think that I do take them on their merits, without the attendant mythology, and in most cases I think I do. Tim Buckley actually does very little for me, I haven't listened to Joy Division in years, Jim Morrison without the Doors was crap and vice-versa (take it from me, I've heard both the recordings he made without them and and them without him- they're dire.)

Nick Drake.............I have periods where I think he was over-rated and I should have grown out of it now. But he just creeps back in. Maybe because he's dead and never got the chance to soil his image with crap material- not that there isn't some crap on his albums (the instrumentals on Bryter Layter, drippy nonsense like Thoughts of Mary Jane and Way to Blue). His music has just drawn me in- he's one of the few people who I could tell you what I first heard, and where (sitting in my bedroom, proabably drawing, age 16,listening to a radio documentary about Island records- they gave a 5-minute life-story and played a snippet of "Fruit Tree"). When I listen to him now, it feels like I'm giving time to someone who's too honest and inscrutable to cope with usually, and who you feel a bit guilty about brushing aside. Does that somehow still romanticise his young death ? Don't know.