IT seems that everyone has a story to tell about the first time they heard Nick Drake. A quick trawl through the archives shows that people like REM, Kate Bush, David Sylvian, Paul Weller, Norah Jones and Oasis have all spoken out about his influence on their work.

Elton John even recorded four of Drake's compositions before he became famous, for what would become the rarest of all Drake-related memorabilia, the Whichseason sampler.

This album, along with an autographed Beatles' White Album, were the only two Elton decided to hang on to when he sold off his vast collection of records.

Drake's album Pink Moon is a stunning piece of work which can leave you breathless.

Clocking in at just under 30 minutes and consisting of 10 songs - plus one instrumental - it's an exercise in such tenderness, grace and depth, it carries with it a strength of clarity that floors you every time it is played.

It relies on a simple equation - one voice, one guitar (and, OK, many different tunings) and one delicate piano over-dub.

It's that unfettered - close your eyes and he's sitting under a fruit tree next to you, or lying in a grassy knoll in some sunny country hideaway, perhaps in the same room, singing and literally wringing his heart out before your very eyes.

From his first tentative steps at recording some of his songs at home - such as traditional blues standards, Bob Dylan cover versions and his own compositions - to the last album of 1974, Drake's music and breadth of sheer musicality showed a remarkable insight into the world around him - or, rather, his skewed idea of the place he occupied in it.

As a young man starting out, his music was filled with a relative sense of hope and wonder at the beauty of nature and the as yet unexplored possibilities of life; he talked of the "wind in the long, green grass, the frost on a broken tree" in Made To Love Magic and how "summer was gone and the heat died down and autumn reached for her golden crown" which fills Time Of No Reply.

His music was very much of the time in which it was made but known only to a few including Wales' own dark troubadour John Cale, a member of a group which was also barely known during its actual lifespan, the legendary Velvet Underground. While visiting the UK from New York, Cale heard some of Drake's sketches for songs and demanded to meet up with their illusive creator.

So impressed was Cale, he ended up playing viola, piano and celeste on Fly and the beautiful Northern Sky on Bryter Layter, Drake's second studio album in 1970.

The idea of self promotion was an alien concept to the painfully shy Drake. During his short lifetime - he died from an overdose in 1974, aged 26 - he only played a handful of live gigs and gave just one interview to the British press.

Promotion of his final album, the elite Pink Moon, merely consisted of one advert in the NME written in the form of a letter by a keen publicist at Island Records basically asking people to buy it.

Three decades on, the music is so powerful it does all the marketing and talking for him.

The subject of a few speculative documentaries which try to pin down the enigma, many retrospective press features have also been written in a bid to tell the world about the musical majesty that is Nick Drake.

Mojo has given him a cover and there's also been a biography by Patrick Humphries, not to mention a sell-out London concert where people like David Gray and Bernard Butler gave their interpretations of his songs.

People, you see, are starting to notice what all the fuss should have been about back in the day.

But, despite the imitators and fans, there is still only one Nick Drake.