№ 79 of 100
Pink Moon
Pink Moon by Nick Drake (1972), № 79 in The Lead-In’s 100 greatest albums. Nick Drake alone at his parents' house with one microphone. Twenty-eight minutes, eleven songs, no overdubs. He was dead within two years.
Eleven tracks in twenty-eight minutes. Recorded across two days at Sound Techniques Studios in London in late October 1971 with John Wood engineering and Nick Drake performing solo. Nick Drake's third and final studio LP, recorded with no overdubs, no producer credit, no commercial promotion.
- Released
- February 25, 1972
- Label
- Island Records (UK, ILPS 9184)
- Producer(s)
- John Wood (engineer)
- Runtime
- 28:24 (11 tracks)
- Chart peak (US)
- Did not chart on initial release; #138 (1999, after VW commercial)
- Chart peak (UK)
- Did not chart on initial release
- Certifications
- Gold (BPI, 2014 retroactive)
- Awards & honours
- Ranked #321 on Rolling Stone's 500 Greatest Albums (2020)
Eleven tracks in twenty-eight minutes. Recorded across two days at Sound Techniques Studios in London in late October 1971 with John Wood engineering and Nick Drake performing solo. Nick Drake's third and final studio LP, recorded with no overdubs, no producer credit, no commercial promotion.
Nick Drake in autumn 1971 was twenty-three years old, the son of British colonial expatriates, and at a structural moment in his sustained depression. His first two LPs (Five Leaves Left 1969, Bryter Layter 1971) had been commercially modest.
Recording extended across two days in late October 1971 at Sound Techniques Studios in London. John Wood engineered; no producer was credited. Drake performed solo on acoustic guitar and vocals with no overdubs.
Pink Moon's deliberately-restrained approach (no producer, no overdubs, no commercial promotion) consolidated Drake's deliberately-controlled aesthetic. The album was widely cited as the canonical British folk-acoustic LP of the early 1970s. Drake's November 1974 suicide gave the album a deliberately-tragic biographical context that has shaped its reception ever since.
Island released February 25, 1972 with minimal promotion. Did not chart on initial release. Drake's November 1974 suicide brought the album back into critical consciousness. The 1999 Volkswagen Cabrio commercial featuring 'Pink Moon' brought the album to mainstream commercial attention; the album reached US #138 in 1999.
Pink Moon belongs at number seventy-nine because it consolidated Drake's deliberately-restrained acoustic aesthetic.
Pressing guide — the one to own
Original 1972 UK pressing on Island Records, catalog ILPS 9184, in a matt gatefold sleeve (green printed lyrics inside left, negative portrait inside right) — not a single sleeve. The first-press label is Island's 'pink rim' design (pink island/palm-tree logo, '1972' printed), pressed by The Gramophone Co. and printed by Tinsley Robor. A true earliest copy pairs the pink-rim label with the A-1U side-A runout; the final few hundred 'transitional' copies carry the later 'palm tree' label but retain the early runout. Clean originals are scarce and valuable, with a Discogs median around the high hundreds.
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