Life in a Northern Town Lyrics

Lyric discussion by ctlizyrd 

Cover art for Life in a Northern Town lyrics by Dream Academy, The

This song is - pure and simple - about Nick Drake, a songwriter who died in 1974 (possible suicide on anti-depressants of all things!)

If you haven't listened to Drake's work, and you like Dream Academy, you should give a listen. It may not be as polished, but it's got 'the stuff'. Other artists directly influenced and affected by Drake's work include, The Cure (their very name comes from a Drake song!), Duncan Sheik, Howard Jones, and American Music Club.

Nick had is own small following - and it was small enough that he would often play out in the open of his small Northern England town of Tanworth-in-Arden. Here, Nick Laid-Clowes of the Dream Academy imagines what it must have been like to have sat down and listened to him.

Nick Drake never 'waved goodbye', and he never knew how successful he'd be some 30 years later, but he influenced a LOT of musicians and here the Academy pays homage to his memory.

Although I'm well aware that the song was written as a tribute to Nick Drake, as someone who is a huge fan of both Nick and Dream Academy, I really can't see where Nick Drake is referenced in this song. Maybe the "he" was intended to be Nick in the eyes of Gilbert Gabriel and Nick Laird-Clowes but that's really as far as it goes in my opinion. Tanworth-in-Arden can by no stretch of the imagination be described as a northern town, either geographically (it's in the English Midlands) or in the context of the song. Tanworth in fact is...