I suppose the other major area that really came through strongly for me, from all people I spoke to, is that until late 1969 – so, shall we say, for the first 21 full years of Nick’s life – he was a happy, outgoing, productive, popular, forward-facing person. The following morning Mike [Hill, usually the driver on the trip] whisked them the 370 miles to Marrakech. There are a few which have been kept, including copies of his own albums and one or two John Martyn albums and the Brandenburg Concertos and so on. The family’s housekeeper, Naw Ma Naw, died in 1988 and so could not have been consulted by Morton Jack.

A mixture of extreme shyness and difficulties with mental health meant that his beautiful, meditative and deeply melancholic take on mystical English folk slipped through the commercial cracks during his lifetime. Obviously it is a step which we have to consider carefully, because it is an irrevocable one,” he began, going on to pose two vital questions: “Are you more or less likely to succeed at your chosen career if you leave now? I think some people were perhaps hoping I’d find evidence that he was a heroin addict, that he was gay, whatever the big stories would be. You see these made-up figures – ‘a combined total of 5000 sales during his lifetime’ – but no one knows what his records sold in his lifetime.The suggestion that the Pink Moon advert is where Nick’s story suddenly changed is, as far as I’m concerned, inaccurate because his records were freely available all over England in the 1990s when I was a teenager. Essential reading for anyone with even a passing interest in this troubled man of extraordinary talent. I think that was a particularly important year in Nick’s life because he had ten months to fill between getting into Cambridge and actually going there, so he went to University in France in February, he travelled around Morocco, he came back to England in May, then he went back to Paris for a few weeks on his own, and then he was in London for August and September. After I had been turned down very politely, Bob [Drake’s friend Rick Charkin, so nicknamed because he was thought to resemble Bob Dylan], whose nerves seem to stop at nothing, proceeded to ring up the Stones’ suite and ask if they might be wanting a little musical entertainment!

He understood that putting musicians together could create magical results, and John Wood regards that as one of Joe’s greatest strengths as a producer: knowing who to bring onto which session to create the best result. One of the few utterances that we actually have from Nick about his songwriting is that it was only when he went to France that he had the time and space to think about his own personal reaction to the world around him, and how he wanted to frame it. If Nick Drake was at a point where he could take his own life, I think one would have to say that may have been a situation which could have been turned around, just by chance. RU: Another one – which appeared in the most unlikely place, a teen-oriented magazine, and contained some useful information.Born in Rangoon, he lived a life of genteel privilege in Warwickshire from the age of two where his parents, “old Burma hands” in the colonial parlance, doted on him and his sister. Drake handed over a recording of Pink Moon to Island Records’ bewildered boss Chris Blackwell, who had not been expecting it, before going dark again. RMJ: I think the most important assumption or rumour about Nick that I wanted to clarify is the extent to which he took drugs. Is it fair to assume, because Nick was there for three years after the last album, he went walking there, and if I walked there, I’d be sort of walking in his spirit? That’s the kind of thing I tried to avoid in writing the book – trying to think myself into Nick’s head and read all the books and Romantic poems and reverse-engineer theories about where his songs came from.

Not only did Nick’s illness rob him of certain aspects of his sanity, it also robbed him of his creativity. RMJ to his credit does not delve into amateur mental illness diagnostics but faithfully relates the facts. After interviewing them all I didn’t have to work out who to believe and how to navigate different versions of events. I knew exactly what Nick was doing for much of the time – what he was watching on TV, what he was eating. I can only imagine how frustrating it must be to see obviously inferior artists, as you might perceive them, doing a great deal better than you are, attracting that attention.

I think that’s a separate and perfectly valid exercise, but for someone to do from a different perspective. Drawing on the diary Rodney Drake kept when his son moved back to the family home at Far Leys in Warwickshire, Morton Jack bears witness to Drake’s alarming unravelling: all the psychiatric interventions, all the missed pills, all the false dawns. Three years later, however – having made three well-reviewed but low-selling albums – Nick had been overwhelmed by a mysterious mental illness.

My last question, which is another hindsight question, is: had Nick experienced enough success, even if it was on a cult level or making number thirty, as you say, do you think that might have offset his growing psychological difficulties enough for him to produce more music? RU: Although Boyd and Drake worked really well together, it was like most producer-artist relationships, they had some disagreements which might have led to better results. But in a moving letter to Rodney, one of the doctors who saw Drake implored his devoted parents not to blame themselves. In fact, though always quiet and introverted, he was funny, intelligent, seriously cool, deeply loved by a wide circle of often talented and eclectic friends and his wonderful and compassionate parents and sister.And, in the meantime, your creative powers will be developing, not stagnating, do please believe me. That made sure that awareness could continue to build (unlike with some artists, like Skip Spence, where you couldn’t get the record for many years). Allow me to assure you it is not – but it is a terribly important time in the development of you as a person into something that you are going to start to be at about the age of 23. At the same time Bryter Layter was being made, Joe Boyd and John Wood were working on Nico’s Desertshore, where John Cale was the arranger. Morton Jack's book is the first of its kind to be written in tandem with Drake's family and seeks to bring an equal measure of light and shade to an English musical figurehead who has become uniquely mythologised .