Folk’s new star? Nick Drake’s gifted mum
The poignant parallels between Molly Drake and her tragic son are only now being fully appreciated. Neil Mccormick reports
Nick Drake will be posthumously inducted into the Hall of Fame at the BBC Folk Awards next week. His is one of the strangest stories in popular music: a shy, sensitive singersongwriter whose three albums of beautiful, desolate acoustic songs failed to find an audience in the Seventies but have gone on to sell in their millions. Frustrated and overlooked, Nick plunged into profound depression and committed suicide, aged 26, in 1974. A cult reputation quietly bubbled under for decades but it wasn’t until a gorgeous ditty, Pink Moon, was used to soundtrack a VW car ad in 1999 that his popularity suddenly exploded.
Nick was acclaimed as a lost genius, and those three albums now regularly feature in lists of the greatest recordings ever made. Four decades after his lonely demise, Nick Drake is world famous.
Yet the story of Nick’s mother, Molly Drake, may be even stranger. As the cult of Nick Drake grew, it emerged that his late mother had herself been a very private poet and songwriter, creating philosophical, charming, highly personal vignettes never intended to be heard by the public. When two lovely home recordings featuring Molly singing softly at the piano were included on a Nick Drake compilation, Family Tree, in 2007, interest was piqued. An album of her songs, Molly Drake, was released in 2011, to critical acclaim, illuminating the parallels between mother and son’s feather-light, gently sorrowful material. It was clear that this very private housewife, who had never performed publicly in her lifetime, had influenced, shaped and nurtured one of the most brilliant singer-songwriters of our times. “Listen to Nick’s music and you hear the songs of his mother,” observed his producer and mentor Joe Boyd. “Those complicated tunings seemed to me a reflection of his desire to recreate on the guitar the kind of harmonic voicings his mother played on the piano, these unusual, very English popular cabaret parlour songs, with a very particular Molly Drake twist.” Molly, he says, is the “missing link in Nick Drake’s story”.
Last year, British folk sisters The Unthanks released The Songs & Poems
of Molly Drake, their wonderfully harmonised interpretations illustrated how unique Molly’s material really is. “As folk singers, it’s about passing on songs and messages,” explains Becky Unthank. “We didn’t expect to be so captured by Molly’s songs. You can hear that both Nick and Molly dealt with emotional struggle and used music therapeutically. There is so much empathy and wisdom in Molly’s words. We thought we would learn one song but just got carried away.”
Now, all of Molly’s poetry and songs have been brought together in one elegant hardback and two-cd collection, The Tide’s Magnificence. It reveals someone acutely engaged with the mysteries of life and death. “She was very gentle and introspective,” recalls her daughter, Gabrielle Drake. “She could be suddenly overwhelmed with emotion, sometimes for no reason. But she had a delightful sense of humour. I don’t think she was always happy but she certainly believed in happiness. It is only if you really perceive the shadow of death that you know how to live properly.”
Born in 1915 in Rangoon, Burma (where her father, Sir Idwal Geoffrey Lloyd, worked in the Indian Civil Service), Molly married civil engineer Rodney Drake at 21. They returned to England after the war, where life was focused on keeping home and raising two children, Gabrielle (born 1944) and Nick (born 1948).
Only those closest to her knew that she also wrote poetry and composed songs. “Music was part of the fabric of life,” recalls Gabrielle. “I grew up thinking it was a perfectly normal for mothers to write songs for their children.” Molly would perform at social gatherings, sometimes accompanied by Nick and Gabrielle on recorder. “I thought her songs were wonderful. But I never felt she was a frustrated musician. She belonged to a generation for whom a profession in the arts would have seemed beyond them. But the fact that our parents supported Nick and I in artistic careers shows where their hearts lay.”
Gabrielle (now 73) gravitated towards acting and went on to enjoy a rewarding career, with serious theatrical roles interspersed with recurring parts in such affectionately remembered TV series as UFO, The Brothers and Crossroads. Nick played in a school orchestra and teenage band, learning piano, clarinet and saxophone. He took up guitar in 1965, aged 17. “He would practise for hours on end. We took it as perfectly natural that Nick should be a singer-songwriter, though I don’t think anyone used the term in those days. It was a normal thing in our house. My dad composed songs. Even I had a go. But Nick and mummy’s songs were of a different order.”
Nick studied English literature at Cambridge but dropped out, in 1969, when he released his first album, Five Leaves Left, on Island. He was much admired by contemporaries on the folk scene, including Richard Thompson of Fairport Convention, who played on Nick’s albums.
“Nick liked songs that told stories, that had a surface interpretation you could grasp, but his roots were definitely more complex than that,” said Thompson. “If he got a style from anywhere, it’s from his mum. Her take is very sophisticated, influenced by the great standards of the Thirties and Forties.” The connection between mother and son is illustrated by Molly’s song Poor Mum, a gentle riposte to Nick’s self-pitying Poor Boy (from his second, 1971 album, Bryter Layter). “Poor mum, poor mum, where did you take a wrong turning?” teases Molly.
An introverted, uncommunicative performer, Nick became despondent about his lack of success, sinking into a clinical depression from which he never recovered. After the commercial failure of his third album, Pink Moon, in 1971 (now regarded as his masterpiece), he returned to his parents’ house in Tanworth-in-arden. “He was always quiet and introspective but that is not the whole picture,” insists Gabrielle. “He was good at sports, popular at school, people enjoyed being with him. He had a wry sense of humour and his laugh was one of the most infectious I’ve ever come across. It was lovely.” The last years of his life, though, “were a frustrating, dark time for all of us. You wanted to do anything to help him get out of his despair. I am not sure how much mummy wrote after Nick died. It was an absolutely cataclysmic event in her life. It was a long time before she was able to go back to the piano again.”
Molly had made a smattering of home recordings on reel-to-reel tape. Her poems survived in a precious handwritten notebook. Only a few were annotated with dates, and Gabrielle is uncertain if any pertain to her son’s death, though preoccupations with death, grief, recovery and the numinous, transcendent aspects of nature means many will be read in this light. The Shell is a portrait of someone whose skin is too brittle and thin “to shut away the outer desolation”, leaving them to “stare out across the cinders of the world / With naked eyes: they look both out and in / Knowing themselves and too much else beside.”
“Outwardly, she recovered,” says Gabrielle. “But you never completely recover when you are struck by tragedy and grief. It’s like learning to live without a limb: you do it because you have to. Life goes on and you are forever changed.”
Molly died, aged 77, in 1993. On her tombstone is carved a quote from one of Nick’s songs, From the Morning: “And now we rise, and we are everywhere.” She did not live to see the phenomenal posthumous rise in her son’s fame, and would certainly never have anticipated her own. “I don’t think she would have enjoyed fame,” Gabrielle says. “She was too private a person. But I think she would have been secretly pleased that the work has been recognised. She called these songs her children.”
Nick’s tragic tale has made him a romantic icon of doomed youth. But Molly’s belated discovery represents something very different. “She was a woman of her time,” says Unthank. “Like a lot of women, her art was private, because she might not have had the facility or opportunity to take it out into the world. She represents those invisible women in a way.”
Molly once scribbled her own playful epitaph in her poetry book, evoking a sense of non-achievement: “Here lies one who was felled at a touch / Who purposing many a many thing / Almost did so much and so much / And never quite did anything.” It has turned out rather differently. “I specialise in a family that becomes famous years after death,” says Gabrielle, custodian of their music. “I think her songs have an extraordinary truth and simplicity about them. Her work is very spare and that I admire deeply. If you’ve got something to say and you can distil it to the essence, it has a greater impact. So I’m not surprised that other people recognise her talent. But I am gratified.”
The BBC Folk Awards will be broadcast on BBC Radio 2 and BBC Radio Ulster, 7.30-9pm on April 4. The Tide’s Magnificence: The Poems and Songs of Molly Drake is available now from Bryter Music (brytermusic.com)