Essays

The Sons of Pink Moon: Who Inherited Nick Drake's Hush

In 1999 a Volkswagen advert gave Nick Drake his only hit, twenty-six years after his death. This is the lineage that followed — guitarists, near-strangers to each other, who inherited not his sound but his economy of hush.

On 11 November 1999, an advertising agency in Boston aired a sixty-second spot for the Volkswagen Cabriolet: four young people driving under a night sky, top down, to a chord pattern nobody in America had heard on television before.

The agency had planned to license The Church's "Under the Milky Way." Someone in the office brought a different record in from home at the last minute — Pink Moon, by a musician twenty-six years dead, three albums behind him, all of them commercial failures in his lifetime. Sales of the album of the same name rose by roughly five hundred percent in the first ten weeks of 2000; annual sales climbed from six thousand copies a year to over seventy thousand. Nick Drake, who never had a hit while alive to have one, had his first hit posthumously, sold to people buying a convertible.

That is one way a private thing becomes a public one. It is not the only way, and the men who follow here got there by different roads — some through the same rooms Drake walked through, some through tape left in a drawer, some through nothing more than an old record bought used and taken apart, chord by chord, to see how the quiet was built. What they share is not a sound so much as a method: the guitar carrying the harmony almost alone, the voice kept just above a murmur, the landscape treated as a character rather than a backdrop, and a writing so pared down it risks disappearing.

I. The Same Room

Bert Jansch was not a contemporary who happened to resemble Drake. He was closer to a source. Drake studied Jansch’s arrangements directly — the “Blackwaterside” tuning is the clearest case — and later entered the Soho folk-club world over which Jansch already cast a considerable shadow. Rosemary Lane (1971) is that circuit worn down to its studs: recorded not in a studio but on a portable machine that engineer Bill Leader carried out to Jansch's cottage in Ticehurst, Sussex, taped over months, only when the mood allowed it. If this lineage has a true point of origin, it sits closer to Jansch than to Drake himself.

Bridget St John shared the circuit too, if not the direct lineage — she and Drake played the same rooms in the last years of his life, alongside John Martyn. Ask Me No Questions (1969) was the first release on John Peel's Dandelion label, produced by Peel himself in nine or ten hours, with Martyn on second guitar on the title track. It reads less like influence than like several people breathing the same London air in the years just before Drake stopped being able to.

Linda Perhacs breathed different air entirely. A dental hygienist in Beverly Hills, she had no contact with any of it — Parallelograms (1970) came out of a chance encounter with a patient who turned out to be the film composer Leonard Rosenman, and Kapp Records mixed it so badly for radio that Perhacs herself threw away her first copy of the finished pressing. Jansch and St John shared Drake's rooms; Perhacs shared only his year.

A fourth figure belongs in this room, though he never set foot in it. Ben Watt was eight years old when Pink Moon was recorded and twenty when he wrote, sang, and played almost all of North Marine Drive (Cherry Red, 1983) himself — acoustic and semi-acoustic guitar, piano, voice, with only Peter King's alto saxophone for company on some tracks, closing on a cover of Dylan's "You're Gonna Make Me Lonesome When You Go." Watt has never hidden the debt: the picking sits somewhere between Drake and Vini Reilly of the Durutti Column, the voice pitched just above a whisper, belonging to a record whose emotional pressure never requires volume. His record is the odd one out here for a different reason than Perhacs's. He arrived nine years after Drake's death and sixteen years before the Volkswagen advertisement that would eventually make Drake's name mean something to people who had never heard of Les Cousins. The economy this piece keeps describing — guitar, hush, a landscape doing the work of a second instrument — did not wait for a car commercial to survive. It had already survived, quietly, in a London bedroom, years before anyone thought to sell it back.

II. The Return

The 2000s didn't rediscover this vein so much as re-enter it on purpose. James Yorkston, emerging from the Fife-based Fence Collective alongside King Creosote and Lone Pigeon, released Moving Up Country in 2002 — co-produced by Simon Raymonde of the Cocteau Twins, with John Peel among its early champions — and it became Rough Trade's own Album of the Year. A year later José González released Veneer, which included a cover of "Heartbeats," written by the Swedish duo the Knife; in 2005 Sony licensed it for a Bravia commercial, 250,000 superballs bouncing down a San Francisco street with no computer effects involved. The mechanism was the same one that had resurrected Drake six years earlier: a private, murmured recording sold back to the public through an advertisement for a consumer object.

Sibylle Baier's route was stranger still. She recorded Colour Green at home in Stuttgart between 1970 and 1973, voice and guitar and nothing else, then put the tapes away. In 2006 her son Robby pulled them out to make a CD as a birthday gift, handed round at a party in Massachusetts; one copy reached J Mascis of Dinosaur Jr, who passed it on to Orange Twin. Thirty-three years separate the recording from the release — the longest gap in this piece by some distance, and a case, unlike Drake's, where nobody had heard the record the first time at all. It is worth being exact about what that means for where she sits here: by the date on the tape, Baier is Jansch and St John's contemporary, not this section's; she belongs among the returners only because the world took thirty-three years to be given the chance to return to her. The category is organized by encounter, not by birth, and Baier is the clearest proof of it.

That same year, Fionn Regan released The End of History, recorded in an empty barn in Ireland with a clarity so exposed that every syllable carries; it earned a Mercury Prize nomination and briefly made him, in the Guardian's phrase, folk's "new Pied Piper."

III. The Moderns

By the 2010s the lineage had stopped being a rediscovery and become a discipline, practiced in the open. Gareth Dickson, who toured as a guitarist in Vashti Bunyan's band, has said in interviews, unprompted, that the fingerpicking on Quite A Way Away (2012, released on Taylor Deupree's ambient imprint 12k) is indebted to Drake and Jansch by name.

Lucy Roleff, classically trained and based in Melbourne, recorded This Paradise (2016) with producer Tony Dupé in a hundred-year-old church in South Gippsland; the vinyl edition ran to a hundred and fifty copies, black, and is close to impossible to find today.

Joan Shelley recorded her self-titled Joan Shelley (2017) in five days at Wilco's Loft in Chicago, produced by Jeff Tweedy with his son Spencer on drums, the tape left running throughout — a method opposite to Baier's, immediate rather than accumulated, though the record it produced sounds just as bare.

The inheritance turns literal, for once, in Raoul Vignal's The Silver Veil (2017), recorded in Berlin with his own father, Bernard, playing transverse flute on several of its tracks — the rare case here where the debt runs through blood as well as through technique.

American strings enter the lineage with Danny Paul Grody, a former member of the San Francisco drone group Tarentel, whose Fountain (January 2010, Root Strata) owes as much to West African kora technique and to John Fahey's Takoma-school fingerpicking as to anything English.

Leeds has its own steward in Chris Brain, who runs two folk clubs and a festival of his own when he isn't recording; Steady Away (2023) was made inside a converted church he calls the Nave, in the same spirit as the rest of his work for the scene.

The furthest-flung outpost belongs to River Crombie, based in northern Germany, who self-released Light Trails in 2014 straight to Bandcamp because, by his own account, there was never enough money for a proper pressing — no label campaign behind it, no thirty-year wait for rediscovery, nothing but the record itself.

None of them sound like Drake, exactly. What they inherited was not his voice but his economy — the sense that a guitar and a landscape can hold more than an orchestra, and that a quiet record, given enough time, tends to find the room it was always meant for.

Pink Moon: The Meaning Nick Drake Left Behind

Nick Drake :: Pink Moon

Editorial Note

The word inheritance is used here with caution. Resemblance does not in itself establish influence, and shared quietness is not evidence of a continuous musical bloodline. The artists gathered in this essay occupy different relations to Nick Drake: Bert Jansch belongs partly to the technical and social world from which Drake learned; Bridget St John inhabited an adjacent performance ecology; Linda Perhacs developed a comparable economy at a geographical and cultural remove; Sibylle Baier entered the public history of this music decades after her recordings were made. Later musicians encountered Drake through records, reissues, advertising, touring networks and an already established critical afterlife.

The title’s “sons” should therefore be understood less as a literal genealogy than as a historical question. What survives from Pink Moon is rarely a complete sound. It may be a tuning, a scale of arrangement, a manner of recording, a relation between voice and room, or the belief that landscape can carry part of a song’s emotional argument. This essay distinguishes documented transmission from proximity, analogy and delayed reception wherever the surviving evidence allows.

Last revised: July 2026