Nick Drake wrote about a black-eyed dog calling for him. His words are so simple and so powerful that I can very rarely listen to the song. For anyone who has been there, they are too real.

Winston Churchill called it ‘the Black Dog’ and sought refuge in brandy and cocaine like many before him. Depression. Negativity. Mood swings. The Blues.

Nick Drake wrote about depression in ways that only a genuine sufferer could have done and like no-one else ever has. He was not working from imagination, he knew. Simple words that express the simplicity of not wanting to feel, not wanting to live, not feeling, shutting down into a simplicity of bleak pain.

‘Black-eyed dog knew my name’ – probably means nothing at all to many people but to anyone who experiences depressions or bi-polar mood swings it is that inevitability, the inescapable force that comes just for you, that chases you down, that savages you, that comes from inside, that is a part of you yet is so different from the person you are most of the time that you actually do become another person with different thoughts, a different voice, different actions. It’s weird.

It is not hard to understand why some people believe in possession by an alien spirit because the contrast, the personality change, is so great.

Sometimes it is bitter rage which is at least a sign of life, sometimes it is that black empty pit of passivity, of not caring about anything, where you look for meaning in your life, you look for answers but there are none. This is truly ‘the time of no reply’.

And yes it is enticing, ‘calling me to stay’. Such a few simple words but they convey so much to anyone who has ever felt that particular shard of reality.

Yet other songs speak of such joy, such intense joy, love of people, love of nature and the magic of life. Peak experiences, joy that is always too fragile and fleeting to last. But we cannot function for long with that intensity.

For years I could not listen to Nick Drake’s music because of the depths of truth in them. The playing is masterful and melodic, his voice so rich and warm, the words so calm so gentle…Yet so full of pain. I just had to turn them off before they dragged me back and down and held me under…

And after all it was so deep that in the end the depression killed him, whether by accident or intent. He didn’t just sing about depression, it killed him. It killed him.