Drake's father, Rodney Shuttleworth Drake (1908-1988), had moved to Rangoon, Burma, in the early 1930s to work as an engineer with the Bombay Burmah Trading Corporation. There, in 1934, his father met the daughter of a senior member of the Indian Civil Service, Mary Lloyd (1916-1993), known to her family as "Molly". Rodney Drake proposed to her in 1936, though they had to wait a year until she turned 21 before her family allowed them to marry. In 1950 they returned to England to live in Warwickshire at their home, "Far Leys", in Tanworth-in-Arden, south of Birmingham, the city where Rodney Drake worked from 1952 as the Chairman and Managing Director of Wolseley Engineering.

In the months following Pink Moon's release, Drake became increasingly asocial and distant from those close to him. He returned to live at his parents' home in Tanworth-in-Arden, and while he resented the regression, he accepted that his illness made it necessary. "I don't like it at home," he told his mother, "but I can't bear it anywhere else."  His return was often difficult for his family; as his sister Gabrielle explained, "good days in my parents' home were good days for Nick, and bad days were bad days for Nick. And that was what their life revolved around, really."  He lived a frugal existence, his only source of income being a PS20-a-week retainer he received from Island Records (equivalent to PS222 in 2016). At one point he could not afford a new pair of shoes. He would often disappear for days, sometimes turning up unannounced at friends' houses, uncommunicative and withdrawn. Robert Kirby described a typical visit: "He would arrive and not talk, sit down, listen to music, have a smoke, have a drink, sleep there the night, and two or three days later he wasn't there, he'd be gone. And three months later he'd be back." Nick's supervision partner at Cambridge, John Venning, once saw him on a tube train in London and felt he was seriously clinically depressed. "There was something about him which suggested that he would have looked straight through me and not registered me at all. So I turned around."  Referring to this period, John Martyn (who in 1973 wrote the title song of his album Solid Air for and about Drake) described him as the most withdrawn person he had ever met. He would borrow his mother's car and drive for hours without purpose on occasion, until he ran out of petrol and had to ring his parents to ask to be collected. Friends have recalled the extent to which his appearance had changed. During particularly bleak periods of his illness, he refused to wash his hair or cut his nails. Early in 1972, Drake had a nervous breakdown, and was hospitalized for five weeks.  In February 1974, Drake contacted John Wood, stating he was ready to begin work on a fourth album. Boyd was in England at the time, and agreed to attend the recordings. The initial session was followed by further recordings in July. In his 2006 autobiography, the producer recalled being taken aback at Drake's anger and bitterness: "[He said that] I had told him he was a genius, and others had concurred. Why wasn't he famous and rich? This rage must have festered beneath that inexpressive exterior for years." Both Boyd and Wood noticed a discernible deterioration in Drake's performance, requiring him to overdub his voice separately over the guitar. However, the return to Sound Techniques' studio raised Drake's spirits; his mother later recalled, "We were so absolutely thrilled to think that Nick was happy because there hadn't been any happiness in Nick's life for years."

what was the reatiner for?
equivalent to PS222 in 2016