I've got to admit - it wasn't love at first sight with me. I'd heard Drake on and off for years- the breathy vocal, the songs apparently about sod all, the ghastly string sections obscuring the barebones of the song, the hideous talentless production (yes I know it was the 1960's and 70's, but the Beatles and The stones and John Martyn and Paul Simon knew how to use compresion and EQ and get the important bits to the front of the mix) - all worked their subtle magic.

Then a couple of things happened. The scales were lifted from my eyes, and I suddenly saw everything I had missed.

1) i heard a German jazz orchestra play Riverman - and i realised what a great song it was.
2) I was a doing a gig in Salisbury - the sort of thing i can still manage. An outside craft market. people walking past - no pressure, no fee. Next to me was this bookstall - I got chatting with the bloke running it and more to do him a favour than anything I bought a scuffy version of patrick Humphies biog of Drake for £4. ( I found out afterwards I could have bought a brand new one on Amazon for £3).

Anyway. Drake was born a year before me. He had rich parents. mine were poor, but because I got an exhibition grant for about fifteen months I attended a public school - like Nick did (unlike Nick the posh kids used to call me Fred, because they thought it sounded working class and one or two used to tell me to get back in the gutter - where I came from).

However those posh kids taught me to love folk music - they had records, record players, tape recorders, and beautiful guitars and banjos that I never would have encountered at Boston Grammar School. I knew a lot of kids like Nick. Talented,intelligent, capable, confident - all the things English public schoolboys are supposed to be.

But I never met one like Nick who took their musical talents seriously and ran with it and saw what they could do with it. And when I really listened, then I undestood what this artist had wrought from the dull earth, and then I saw her face and I'm a believer!