f58 Handsome Molly
The fascination with all things Nick Drake eventually turned to the songs of his late mother, Molly Drake – who turned out to be more than worthy of the attention. Colin Irwin is a convert.
the ready and denouncers crouching round every corner waiting to pounce on anything bold, positive, imaginative or, worse, popular.
C
I know… I was that soldier. I can’t begin to count the damning judgements I’ve made about Nick Drake based almost exclu- sively on the industry that’s exploded around his Byronesque tale of tragedy and failure rather than artistic reasoning… the books, the tribute concerts, the radio and TV documentaries, films, reissues, endless
ynicism is the curse of modern life. You wonder why anyone attempts to do anything when there’s an army of keyboard warriors with poison quills at
retrospectives, the VW TV ad, the awed rev- erence with which his name is relentlessly spoken and the passionate fascination perennially accorded his mysterious legend.
After meeting the queen at some function or other, Richard Thompson was asked what Her Maj had said to him and, with characteristic wryness, his reply was “She wanted to know what Nick Drake was really like.”
Drake was one of myriad singer-song- writers around at the same time – most of whom I considered vastly superior – and I was cross because I just didn’t get it. Not until I happened to be poring through some old Punch annuals one day at the wondrous Barter Books emporium in
Alnwick, Northumberland and an amazing track suddenly swamped the air. It sounded so brilliant, I dashed to the front desk to dis- cover what it was… and was rather taken aback when it turned out to be Riverman. I immediately marched off to delete every cynical word I’d ever written about Nick Drake. Obtuse lyrics do not a hopeless case make. Critics, eh? We’re all tossers.
So what do we make of this latest unexpected turn of events whereby the seemingly inexhaustible obsession with all things Nick has now turned the spotlight on his mother, Molly Drake? The Drake industry gone even madder? A protest against barren modernity? A natural yearning glance towards a very different world of nostalgic innocence? A genuine desire to unravel the beguiling mysteries surrounding her son?
In a musical sense Molly Drake didn’t
even get off the starting blocks. She was never recorded commercially in her own lifetime – and had little inclination to do so. Only one of her poems – Nasim Bagh, writ- ten for British emigres – was ever published, and that in an Indian newspaper. But she wrote plenty of poems and songs, which she would sit and play on her piano at the family home – Far Leys, Tanworth-in-Arden in the West Midlands of England, the same place where her son died in 1974. Molly’s husband Rodney, a successful mechanical engineer, took to recording her on primi- tive reel-to-reel tape machines throughout the 1950s and ‘60s; you presume, for no other reason than as family keepsakes, self- expression and personal pride.
But as the search intensified for the events and environment that shaped Nick’s music and character, the focus inevitably began to concentrate on his mother. Molly died in 1993 at the age of seventy-seven and her first proper exposure to the big wide world didn’t occur until 2000, when she was featured in the Jeroen Berkvens film A Skin Too Few: The Days Of Nick Drake and two of her tracks – Poor Mummy and Do You Ever Remember? – were subse- quently included on Family Tree, a 2007 compilation of demos and home record- ings. As the Drake obsessives recognised a discernible bloodline in her songs and style, it led, inexorably, to the Molly Drake album in 2011 and that’s when interest seriously began to accelerate.
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