Wednesday, November 17, 2021
WHAT THE ALBUM MADE TO LOVE MAGIC BY NICK DRAKE IS LIKE
Like installing a lifesize cardboard cutout at the dining room table and pretending you're coming home to her.
Like cooking Marks and Spencer meals for two, eating it all yourself and pretending that you're having dinner together.
Like walking through Tate Modern or the Imperial War Museum on your own and thinking that it's the same thing.
Like taking out his Scalextric models and tracks and saying that you can see him now playing with them.
Like not having a care in the world.
Like not caring about what other people think.
Like doing a crappy Photoshop montage is going to change what we know about the life of a man's mind.
Like there being plenty of seats left for Freddie Garrity in The Jolson Story at the South Pier, Blackpool.
Like Freddie Starr changing the lyric of American Trilogy to sing "Hush, Lisa Marie, don't you cry."
Like Lisa Marie would cry.
Like overdubbing a John Lennon demo and pretending the Beatles are together again.
Like doing the right thing 36 years too late is going to bring anyone back.
Like someone's just received a large tax bill
Like getting to number 27 is more than he managed.
Like displaying his school ink exercise jotters on the coffee table, typing them up and calling it his debut novel.
Like Kid Creole whooping desperately throughout his dismal, cheap new album as if the bailiffs hadn't cleaned out the joint.
Like sitting on an upturned cardboard box after the bailiffs have visited and calling it a chair.
Like there isn't a difference between "tow" and "toe."
Like a graduate of Marlborough and Eng Lit student of Fitzwilliam wouldn't know the difference between "tow" and "toe."
Like he would have made any more music had he lived.
Like he lived.
Like he would have come through the pills and settled into a day job, seething internally for 30 years.
Like he wouldn't have ended up co-writing "The Lady In Red" with his Marlborough schoolmate Chris de Burgh.
Like he would have made it up with Joe Boyd.
Like this album has been made up.
Like people can't read sleevenotes.
Like they wouldn't notice that "Black Eyed Dog" was recorded five months before any of these other 1974 songs.
Like he might have been feeling up in July.
Like he might have been feeling equally up in November.
Like smelling her clothes, her perfume, still fragrant in her side of the wardrobe.
Like listening to her answering machine message, her voice still in existence, three months ago.
Like finding a boot floating in the Severn and pretending it's a missing Manic Street Preacher.
Like pretending you're happy when you're blue.
Like a woman from the Evening Standard making an exact replica of Tracey Emin's tent and it's supposed to be the same thing.
Like Kenny Ball and the Jazzmen playing "March Of The Siamese Children" and it's supposed to be the same thing as "West End Blues."
Like putting a photograph of her on the dressing table and it's supposed to be the same thing as coming home to her.
Like clubbing a few old rejects together, tarting a couple up a bit "the way he would have wanted it," and calling it a new Nick Drake album.
Like it's going to bring him back.
Like music can bring anyone back.
Oh wait a minute.
