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Wednesday 15 January 2025 at 7.00pm (90 mins approx.). Doors open at 6.30pm.
Our guests, the novelist James Wilson and Nick Drake’s authorised biographer Richard Morton Jack, will be talking to the writer Cathi Unsworth about Drake, the late 1960s British folk scene, and James Wilson’s Drake-inflected novel, The Pieces.
“This is the book we've been waiting for… It is a biography to be treasured.” (Joe Boyd)
In 1968 Nick Drake had everything to live for. The product of a loving, creative family and a privileged background, he was not only a handsome and popular Cambridge undergraduate, but also a new signing to the UK's hippest record label, Island.��Three years later, however—having made three well-reviewed but low-selling albums—Nick had been overwhelmed by a mysterious mental illness. He returned to live in his family home in rural Warwickshire in 1971, and died in obscurity in 1974, aged just twenty-six. ��In the decades since, Nick has become the subject of ever-growing fascination and speculation. Combined sales of his records now stand in the millions, his songs are frequently heard on TV and in films, and he has become one of the most widely known and admired singer-songwriters of his generation.�
“The Pieces brilliantly evokes the music scene of the 1960s on both sides of the Atlantic.” (Charles Palliser)
James Wilson is known for his ability to inhabit different times and lives. In this, his seventh work of fiction, he brings his unique gift to bear—with the ambition and breadth of a Victorian novelist—on the late 1960s, with all their anxiety, hope, recklessness, excess, energy, and idealism. The result is a vivid, hugely entertaining, portrait of England at a pivotal moment in its recent history, when British and American artists and musicians were together forging a revolutionary popular culture that continues to shape our world today.
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Event Venue & Nearby Stays
The Wheatsheaf 25 Rathbone Place W1T 1JB, 25 Rathbone Place, London, W1T 1JB, United Kingdom,London, United Kingdom
