When Joe Boyd answered the door of his London flat in 1979, he could hardly have expected to find two overseas visitors, intent on talking to someone who’d actually known Nick Drake, the barely-known songwriter he’d produced almost a decade before.

Drake’s posthumous climb from critically overlooked obscurity to one of the country’s most cherished artists has been related many times over in recent years, revealing a saddening lack of detail about his life before his untimely death at 26.

But as a new generation of listeners dwells on the mythology that surrounds Drake the man, his producer has put together a colourful, exuberant celebration of the songwriter’s most important legacy.

Following a similar event in Birmingham, Vashti Bunyan, Green Gartside of Scritti Politti and Drake’s own bass player and friend Danny Thompson will join many more in a concert of at Brighton Dome Concert Hall.

“We may do more in future, but it’s a tricky one because I don’t want to find myself in the nostalgia trade,” says the 67-year-old Boyd, who first came to Britain as a promoter in 1964.

“On the other hand, the concert in Birmingham was so wonderful, and it was just such a thrill to hear those songs performed so nicely.

“But right now all this is tinged with sadness because of the loss of Robert Kirby – he was one of the real sparks of life in Birmingham – he just enjoyed it so much and I felt that as long as Robert wanted to do it, we’d carry on.”

A friend of Drake’s from university, Kirby was due to appear in Brighton to conduct the orchestra through the gorgeous string arrangements he wrote for Drake’s recordings, but he died following heart surgery in October. Kirby was loyal to his friend’s memory, countering Drake’s reputation as a perpetually depressed romantic with his own stories about a real, three-dimensional young man as capable of laughing and joking in the pub as those around him.

Does Boyd – whose White Bicycles memoir is justly considered one of the best accounts of music in the 1960s ever written – recognise the Drake he reads about today?

“I haven’t read the books and articles, so I don’t know what they say exactly, but I have mixed feelings,” he says. “On the one hand, I’ve heard Robert talking about a very relaxed, normal person. But I feel sad because, around me and around the studio, Nick was very serious. It was his time to work, and he worked very hard.

“I was somewhat alarmed when Nick said he was going to leave Cambridge [Drake read English Literature at Fitzwilliam College before quitting to focus on his music]. I went to visit him, and met Robert when he was there, and there was this great atmosphere around him and the people down the hall from his room.

“I always felt in retrospect that my concern was well-placed. From a social point of view, he went from being surrounded by people his age, people who cared about him, to living alone in a bedsit in Hampstead, and I think that made it more difficult for him to be the person Robert describes.”

Introduced by Fairport bass player Ashley Hutchings, Boyd, then 25, and Drake, 20, formed an immediate bond. Impressed by both Drake’s fluid guitar style and quiet, husky singing voice, Boyd proved the ideal collaborator for Drake’s near-perfect debut Five Leaves Left. The American’s ear for rich, textured production found its apogee in Drake’s next album, the sumptuous Bryter Layter, the record the producer admits the most fondness for.

In contrast to some of the other artists Boyd has worked with, such as Richard Thompson of Fairport Convention or Pink Floyd’s Roger Waters, Drake comes over as an almost directionless “lost soul” in his biographies.

But Boyd says his experience of Drake in the studio was very different.

“Nick was always pretty clear about what he wanted. There’s been speculation that Bryter Layter wasn’t what Nick wanted and he reacted against that, but he and Robert were very prepared when we went into that record. He may have listened to it and thought, ‘We’ve overdone it’, but he was very much part of the process.

“I begged Nick to leave the three instrumental tracks off the record, but he was absolutely dogged in his determination. He was digging in his heels.”

For all of Drake’s skill as a guitarist, his huskily-rendered lyricism and Bryter Layter’s more radio-friendly sheen, he was unable to find an audience in his lifetime.

It didn’t help that his crippling shyness ruled out live dates at a time when concerts were one of the few ways to establish an emerging talent. Later, Drake refused to do interviews and promotional work, and Boyd was witness to a decline in Drake’s mental wellbeing that many felt was hastened by a lack of commercial success, his isolation and over-use of marijuana.

He decided to record what would be his final album, Pink Moon, with only engineer John Wood for company. Recorded over two nights with little more than a single guitar track and a vocal, the tapes for this hauntingly stark record were delivered to Island Records by Drake himself, who dropped them off without saying a word to anyone.

A brief return to the studio with Boyd lifted Drake’s spirits, but in 1974 he was found dead at his parents’ home in Tanworth-in-Arden following an overdose of prescribed anti-depressants. The coroner’s verdict was suicide, but Boyd has never been convinced, saying he prefers to “imagine Nick making a desperate lunge for life rather than a calculated surrender to death” in taking the pills.

But did he feel hurt when Drake turned his back on the lavish arrangements of Bryter Layter for the barren landscape of Pink Moon?

“I don’t think I felt hurt, I felt Nick was making an error from a career point of view,” he says. “Of course, the fact that Pink Moon now sells way more than Bryter Layter proves that Nick wasn’t the fool! In a way, the power of Pink Moon and those simple recordings show that Nick was on to something. He was an artist, and had ideas that, in retrospect, you can’t quarrel with.”

Years later, that unexpected arrival of overseas visitors gave Boyd his first indication that Drake’s music was undergoing a very subtle revival.

“I think there was one who came from Sweden and one from Ohio. Somehow they’d found me and they just wanted to come in and talk to somebody who’d known Nick about how much his music meant to them.”

In the ensuing years, the trickle of interest in fanzines and specialist music magazines began to translate into burgeoning record sales and reissues, before many thousands of new listeners were captivated by Drake’s music – not least a generation of bands and artists which includes REM and The Cure.

A clutch of those who’ve been inspired by Drake’s work will be in Brighton to perform their own takes on Drake’s songs for a concert named after one of his most enduring tracks.

“I’ve always liked the song,” says Boyd of Way To Blue.

“There are so many of Nick’s titles and phrases in his songs that are so evocative, but they can be very specifically about sad circumstances, fate or doom.

“Way To Blue is nicely ambiguous, but I like to think of it in an optimistic way – the way to a blue sky opening up to clear, positive things.”

* Doors 7pm. Tickets from £22.50 on 01273 709709.