A Volkswagen Golf Mk3 Cabrio advert in 1999 sent people hunting the name of the song driving a top-down night drive—only for them to discover it was Nick Drake’s “Pink Moon” (and, within it, “River Man”), recorded decades earlier and created when Drake was sti
In 1999, Volkswagen aired a television commercial for the Golf Mk3 Cabrio. Soon, dealerships were flooded with calls—not from people asking about the car. They were desperate for the song in the background of the ad’s footage: a top-down night drive to a house party.
For the callers. the music felt like a fresh single from a new. acoustic guitar–toting young man—sensitivity sharp enough to cut through the sound and fury of turn-of-the-millennium pop. But the truth was stranger. and it landed like a delayed punchline: the song had come out 27 years earlier. and the artist had been dead for 25 of them. That was the start of Nick Drake’s belated ascent to star-stardom.
The track attached to the Volkswagen spot was “Pink Moon.” It was the title cut from Drake’s third and final album. an album that closed a recording career that lasted not even three years. “Pink Moon” arrived after the debut Five Leaves Left in 1969. and after the later. quieter accumulation of a reputation that most listeners only reached long after it had already formed.
If the late nineties listeners who searched the song—either by tracking it down or, as it had just become possible, by downloading it from file-sharing networks—couldn’t have been disappointed by what they heard, they still weren’t prepared for what came next: “River Man,” the song’s second track.
Ian MacDonald described “River Man” as “one of the sky-high classics of post-war English popular music.” The song pulls its power from a specific collision: Drake’s hauntingly evocative lyricism and unconventional guitar tuning. set against a rich layer of orchestrated strings that stop just short of becoming cloying. all carried in jazzy 5/4 time.
Music YouTuber Charles Cornell points out in the video at the top of the post that listeners might recognize that time signature from Dave Brubeck’s “Take Five. ” making the rhythm feel natural. “River Man” does the same, even if you don’t have the musical vocabulary to explain why. What’s harder to unhear, once you start listening closely, is how musically daring it sounds.
There’s no chorus. There’s also a somber. reflective mood—two details that couldn’t have helped its odds with radio airplay at the time. MacDonald writes that “the counter-culture was carnivalesque. its optimism compulsory. ” and that “Drake saw deeper.” The tension between those worlds is one reason the song can keep sounding contemporary even when it refuses to chase contemporary formats.
It’s easy, too, to hear “River Man” as a Blakean and Buddhist allegory: an individual confronted with a choice between the concrete, cyclical reality of human affairs and unknown realms beyond.
Drake composed “River Man” during his brief time at Cambridge. Books written about him quote acquaintances from that period describing the song as a remarkable step forward in his artistic evolution.
During the Five Leaves Left sessions, Drake sang and played guitar live with the orchestral arrangement. The arrangements—by the bandleader Harry Robinson. who was then known on British TV for his novelty band Lord Rockingham’s XI—filled space Drake had deliberately left in the composition. The strings weren’t an attempt to sweeten the song from the outside. Phil Spector would later do something different. performing strings as he would the following year on the Beatles’ “The Long and Winding Road.” For “River Man. ” the strings were integral.
Drake’s solo performance of the song on BBC Radio 2’s Night Ride—hosted by John Peel—sounds captivating, but incomplete. The Five Leaves Left version, by contrast, is where every element works together to make “River Man” enduring, and in every sense, transcendent.
The years between those first Cambridge notes and the 1999 Volkswagen ad didn’t erase the song’s odd beauty. They just delayed who would hear it, and when. That delay is part of the story now: a track with no chorus. anchored in 5/4 time. and built with orchestral strings that never feel decorative—capturing people at a house party. then capturing them again decades later. one download at a time.
Nick Drake River Man Pink Moon Volkswagen Golf Mk3 Cabrio Five Leaves Left Ian MacDonald Charles Cornell Take Five Dave Brubeck Harry Robinson Lord Rockingham’s XI BBC Radio 2 Night Ride John Peel 5/4 time orchestral strings