Owen a little mean about a certain Guardian writer’s nomination of Nick Drake’s Northern Sky as amorous sonic correlative. If one were the subject of John Martyn’s Solid Air, Northern Sky might very well be the sound of what one imagined it might be like to be loved: the weary lassitude lifting like fog, the repeated “never…never…never” of the first verse signifying the world’s refusal to give way, an intransigence akin to the “‘No’ to the World” of Karl Barth’s God, repealed for a moment. Well, maybe. Oh, go on then.

It wouldn’t have hurt Drake to have smoked a bit less dope, or got his head round the commonplace performance techniques that might have won over the audiences that so affrighted him. Unless one somehow imagines that it takes less existential courage to get up and do what Green Gartside does on stage than to set muscle memory in motion and fingerpick one’s way through one of Drake’s mechanically-precise guitar parts. It seems equally impossible to imagine a less privileged performer taking on so. Drake’s ever-deepening notion that the world as it stands is a terrible let-down stems from an implacable sense of entitlement, of which “I was made to love magic” is perhaps the baldest statement.

Be that as it may, the desolation Drake felt was evidently real enough. Northern Sky is a song of self-consolation, the kind you might sing to a syringe full of smack. “What is love?” - Burroughs, this time - “Most natural painkiller what there is”. He was old and emotionally labile when he wrote that, although the same emotion in the same inchoate, unmanageable, protopathic form was there from the start: vide the desperate pleas to Ginsberg in the letters, the sudden hot tears that stain the pages of Queer. “Solid air” sounds more than a little like one of Burroughs’s sci-fi conceits. But Burroughs also wrote, in The Ticket That Exploded, one of the great debunkings of romantic love as a sick addiction, “a con put down by women”: that wasn’t the most charming way he could have put it, but he wasn’t out to charm. (One should note, nevertheless, that he was considerably more frequently and outrageously conned by rent boys than he ever was by women).

I am not, as it happens, “cynical about love” (in the words of the - sodding - Desiderata). “In the face of all aridity and disenchantment”, indeed; but aridity and disenchantment are equally among its prerequisites. This is why one smiles at young people in their happiness when it is quite apparent to anyone with an ounce of wit that it is doomed: such are the conditions that will, one day, make lovers of at least a few of them.