A SUBTLE, TENTATIVE WHISPER IN A NOISY ROOM

THE LEGEND of Nick Drake, quietly putting forth leaves since his death at the age of 26 in 1974, represents one of the most remarkable critical revolutions in modern music, and is another demonstration, if one were needed, of humankind's ability to observe the flowering of genius with utter indifference. Just as a subtle, tentative whisper in a noisy room goes unheeded, the very simplicity and accessibility of his music probably worked against him. How odd and yet how heartening then, in these very different times, that his songs about princesses and sunrises, about the wind in the trees and the terror in the heart should still find an echo today.

I don't think genius, though it implies perhaps more depth and breadth than Nick Drake deserves, is too vast a word to describe someone who in a short life attained perfection of his art. This means an intricate patterning of music set against a voice whose soft yet thrilling timbre communicates intimacy but also unimaginable distance. Listen to a Nick Drake song and the fumblings of contemporary folksters such as Beth Orton are almost embarrassing in their gaucheness.

Some critics have carped that Drake's lyrics are not far beyond the moon- June-soon of cliche, but anyone who has ever tried to write poetry will relish the high strike rate of such apparently offhand phrases as "things behind the sun", "the way to blue" and "the time of no reply", or the mystery of stanzas such as: "Going to see the river man/Going to tell him all I can/About the plan/For lilac time ...". He combines the Yeatsian ("Nobody smiles/if I cross their stiles") with a sort of Belsize Park symbolism ("Sailing downstairs to the Northern Line/watching the shine of the shoes").

His three albums are not only in their different ways perfectly realised, but they have great titles too. A stunningly assured debut for a 20-year- old, Five Leaves Left got its name from a dopehead in-joke (printed on a Rizla, it warned that you were running out) but it was also a chilling prediction of spring withering too soon. Bryter Layter - what does that mean? - was followed by Drake's Ariel, his last, Pink Moon: a demon-haunted record, but not without an amused self-awareness.

Adding to his legend is the fact that no two of his quoted friends ever seem to agree about him. One friend, who was there, will say that his only gig at the Royal Festival Hall was a disaster - nobody listened to him; someone else, also there, will insist that it was a triumph of quiet intensity. The photographer Keith Morris, responsible for the most troubling and dark images of Nick Drake, actively resents what he sees as the romantic myth of the poete maudite and remembers a smiling, light-hearted youth who was constrained to look glum only because that was the fashion at the time. And they certainly can't agree on the causes of his catastrophic breakdown or whether he deliberately killed himself with an overdose of sleeping pills. A Brandenburg concerto lay on the record player beside him - fine music to die to - and, like many people bent on suicide, his spirits had appeared to lift momentarily before the end.

The sad truth is that, though he died at 26, creatively he had already long ceased to function. Whether this was because, like Keats, he was simply too ill to continue, or because, like Rimbaud, he stopped altogether in disgust that such beautiful work should be so totally ignored, is unclear - just one more of the mysteries surrounding this profoundly enigmatic artist. SF

'Nick Drake: The Biography' by Patrick Humphries is published by Bloomsbury, pounds 7.99. 'A Tribute to Nick Drake' with Bernard Butler, Nigel Kennedy and Robyn Hitchcock, Barbican, EC2, 25 Sept (0171 638 8891)