Thursday 27 August 2009

Nick Drake - Things Behind the Sun


Some people reside in Hampstead and assume it's akin to country living. Urbanites often buy organic vegetables or produce from a farmer's market and it makes them feel pastoral. They might also take delivery of a new Range Rover to heighten the bucolic-erotic pleasure. This is all ersatz.


Until you've awoken to a cold sun rising over the ossuary, rubbed a muddied boot over each and every stile, watched the crows pecking for seed and worms along the flatlands and been chased by a mentally disturbed farmer with a shotgun, you can't possibly consider yourself an authentic countryside dweller. That these Hampstead yummy-mummys have the audacity to rape and distort the country folk's lifestyle is the gravest of all insults.


The Arden, Nick Drake's birth and resting place, is an exquisite length of forest that connects the River Avon with the River Tame. Nick Drake is buried in the churchyard at Tanworth-in-Arden, a stone's throw from the family home of Far Leys. The inscription on his gravestone reads "Now we rise, and we are everywhere", a lyric from Drake's From the Morning.


Ironically, Drake spent a year in Hampstead, living in an appartment on Haverstock Hill. The iconic shots of Drake as human vapour, waiting for the black-eyed dog, were taken on the Parliament Hill side of Hampstead Heath.
Things Behind the Sun by Nick Drake at Spotify

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