An open-top car cruises through the monolithic California night, its passengers gazing up at the star-filled sky.
He stops by a beach house where a wild party is going on.
Four young passengers in a convertible stop, exchange glances, quietly decide that this is simply not the place for them, and continue driving.
This Volkswagen ad from 1999 is 60 seconds long, but almost a quarter of a century after it was made, viewers are still sharing it on social media for its powerful impact, not because it's visually stylized, but because of the magical music that accompanies the ad - Pink moon Nika Drejka.
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The English author died in 1974, when he was only 26 years old.
He released three albums that did not resonate with the public at the time, but which gradually built a cult following for the author after his death.
This American commercial started a real avalanche of interest in his music.
And now, almost half a century after his death, Drake is being rediscovered.
The Endless Colored Ways, a 23-song collection featuring covers of his songs by artists such as David Gray, John Grant, Fontaines DC and Self Istim, was released a few weeks ago, and here's the latest and definitive biography Nick Drake: The Life of Richard Morton Jack which is already on sale.
The biography does not bring any new and shocking discoveries, there are no details in it that disprove everything we knew about Drake, but that is why it provides us with a detailed portrait of the man and a description of the environment in which he lived and worked through a series of fascinating details.
Also, the book is here to correct many misconceptions about Nick Drake.
Myths
"People like to mythologize iconic artists who die too soon, so there's a lot of speculation and conjecture in his case," Morton Jack told BBC Culture.
"Returning to that era and the unique attitude of many people who knew him in different ways was more than satisfying."
The author interviewed 200 people from different areas of Drake's life, and was also granted access to his family's private documents.
His research suggests that, despite popular opinion, the musician was not addicted to heroin.
He wasn't gay.
He was not bullied at school.
Finally, the conflict he had with his father was not at the core of his problems either.
"There's a lot of little details I've been able to pick up," says Morton Jack, who recently found more than 50 errors on Drake's Wikipedia page before losing patience and giving up on further searching.
"While I was talking to people, I didn't get the impression that some were talking about one thing and others another. There was a strong consensus not only about his personality, but also about his behavior. So, for example, one of the most common places about him is that he smoked incredible amounts of marijuana and that the drugs completely destroyed him. Well, none of those who knew him say that."
Although Drake has given a total of two interviews throughout his career, the basic facts about his life have long been known.
Nicholas Rodney Drake was born on June 19, 1948, and grew up in Warwickshire in a wonderful, musical family.
He first started playing the guitar when he was 16 years old at the prestigious Marborough College, and by the time he arrived in Cambridge in 1967 to study English, he had already started his musical career.
A gifted guitarist with a unique style, he wrote songs that leaned towards folk and were soulful, gentle, dreamy and very often, though not always, melancholic.
His first album Five Leaves Left was published on July 4, 1969, a few months before he left the university.
In those days, the music press was occupied with the news of the death of Brian Jones (July 3) and announcements for the Rolling Stones concert in Hyde Park, which was scheduled for two days later.
Album Five Leaves Left had no single, and no serious promotional action, apart from an appearance with John Peel on BBC Radio 2.
The album did not attract too much attention and sold poorly.
The same story was repeated with the next two albums; relatively more optimistic album Bryter Later from 1971 and with a completely different record Pink moon from 1972.
Publicity was modest, and it didn't help that Drake refused to perform live.
His last real live concert was in 1970, and during his entire career he performed no more than 30 times.
He just didn't enjoy it.
"There were maybe only two or three concerts that were good, something was wrong with the other performances," he said in one of those two interviews, for the magazine Sounds, 1971. years.
Joe Boyd and John Cale of the Velvet Underground were two celebrated producers who insisted on working with him, but even that wasn't enough.
Drake fell into a serious depression and returned to live with his parents.
He told his mother that he had not "succeeded in achieving any thing that he had tried in his life".
He went to a psychiatrist, spent five weeks in a psychiatric institution, and on one occasion was subjected to electroconvulsive therapy.
On the morning of November 25, 1974, he was found dead in his bedroom.
An empty bottle containing about 60 antidepressant pills was found next to him.
Pathologists found a "seriously excessive dose" of drugs.
And that could be the end of the Nick Drake story - about three albums that didn't even appear on the charts and a life that was full of potential ended too soon.
Continuation of his musical life
Morton Jack says that within a couple of years of his death, something unexpected began to happen.
The first sign of this was the appearance of a 21-year-old American woman who appeared at the entrance to Drake's house in March 1976.
She bought it in a record store in Houston, Texas Pink moon and wanted to find out as much as possible about the mysterious artist, so she even traveled to England for that reason.
Niko's parents invited her to come in and spend the night there.
She was just the first of many ardent fans who, as Drake's reputation grew, made a similar pilgrimage.
Compilation albums soon began to appear, and some big bands, such as REM, Everything But the Girl or Kate Bush, began to highlight the important influence he had on them.
After the advertisement for Volkswagen, according to the American music journalist Amanda Petrušić and the statements from her book Pink moon from 2007, album sales "increased by 500 percent in the first 10 weeks of 2000, when more than 4.700 copies of the album were sold Pink moon, compared to 815 units sold during 1999".
The New York Times then reported in 2001 that sales jumped from 6.000 copies to 74.000.
And so Drake went from relative obscurity to now appearing on the front pages of music magazines, becoming the subject of a BBC Radio 2 documentary narrated by Brad Pitt, his music starting to appear in mainstream Hollywood films as it is A wonderful day in the neighborhood with Tom Hanks and hit TV series such as Normal people.
Even a beer in a Californian brewery was named after one of his songs.
Musician Paul Weller, comedian Sue Perkins, microbiologist Sharon Peacock and award-winning Jamaican author Marlon James were among the guests who chose Nick Drake's songs on the show Desert island boards on BBC Radio 4.
James said that in 1993 he put a CD of Drake's music in his player and didn't take it out until 1998: "I played it every night...and every time I played it, his ghost would appear in the room."
Caption - The popular romantic drama Normal People is one of the TV shows or movies that uses Drake's music
Emeli Sande is one of the artists appearing on the new compilation and she covered the song One of These Things First.
She told BBC Culture that she believes Drake's popularity continues to grow "because of the purity and depth of his music."
"His lyrics are poetry. I think they're for all time. No matter how many times you go back to listen to them, you always find something new in them. There's not much about his interpretations (of his own songs) by the way, and that gives everyone a chance to they interpret them in their own way."
Compilation The Endless Colored Ways got its name from a verse from a song From the Morning from the album Pink moon which, unlike Drake's previous albums, is completely stripped down.
Some of his fans see the song from that album as grim evidence of his deteriorating mental health.
Fairport Convention's Richard Thompson, who played on several tracks on previous albums, says he was "disturbed" when he first heard this album.
"It sounded like an absolute cry and a call for help. The voice of a man on the brink of sanity," he wrote in a 2021 memoir titled beeswing.
Some think differently.
Group Let's Eat Grandma performs an exciting version of the song From the Morning on the new album.
,,Pink moon is Drake's record that influenced me the most and that I listened to during quarantine. It was the album that introduced me to Nick Drake's music," says Jenny Hollingworth from the group Let's Eat Grandma.
"At that time, I myself experienced a great misfortune when my boyfriend died. But I don't think it's a depressing record, just that those songs caught me in a special emotional state".
"Every time I finish listening to this album, I am seriously touched by the song From the Morning which is the last one on the board. Sounds like she's hopeful. It's certainly just my interpretation, but I feel like she represents and appreciates life itself. I really feel that song deeply".
On Drake's tombstone, in the doorway of the church of St. Mary Magdalene in the village of Tanworth in the Ardennes, lines from the poem are inscribed From the Morning: "We rise and we are everywhere".
The true meaning of these lyrics may be unfathomable, but they certainly ring true to his fans.
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