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ull of charm and yearning, the opening track Happiness proved to be a startling eye-opener. It sounded like something from another age entirely; her


clipped tones and accentuated vowels harked back to a rarefied age of parlour rooms, wind-up gramophones, prim man- ners and cut-glass accents. A time when Britannia most definitely ruled the waves. Happiness certainly caught the imagina- tion of Eliza Carthy, who turned it into a real tour de force, a veritable live show- stopper as well as one of the stand-out tracks on The Moral Of The Elephant, her 2014 album with dad Martin.


It was somewhat comforting to discov- er that Eliza had never been a particular fan of Nick Drake until being captivated by the Molly album, waxing lyrical about the romance she drew from works in which she recognised an “old Englishness, of musing and reminiscences, childhood, picnics in the wood, and emotional and humorous intel- ligence beautifully expressed to a piano I can't help but see in a drawing room, bathed in afternoon light.”


That same year Tracey Thorn – she of the Marine Girls and Everything But The Girl – also recorded a couple of Molly’s songs, the bleak How Wild The Wind Blows and the even bleaker Night Is My Friend.


And, having long championed the work of Nick Drake (Becky Unthank deliv- ers an affecting version of Riverman on sis- ter Rachel’s debut album Cruel Sister), The Unthanks, too, were soon hooked on Molly’s alluring melodies, perceptive observations and enchanting choruses, last year devoting a whole album The Songs & Poems Of Molly Drake to her work. Molly’s daughter, the actress Gabrielle Drake, was also fully on board, interspersing the music with readings of her poems.


Rachel Unthank talked of Molly’s “astounding articulation, perception, wit, humour and warmth” while exploring the darkest corridors of life, loss, fragility and fear. “In Molly we get a clearer sense of how those who understand the depths of despair can do so only by understanding happiness and joy, too,” said Rachel.


Unthank pianist/arranger/producer Adrian McNally reckons the Molly Drake album was one of the biggest challenges the band had ever undertaken… and pos- sibly their greatest achievement.


“We didn’t expect to be so stretched


by Molly’s work but her songs are more complicated than they sound. Because they are from a 1940s styling the assump- tion is that they are simple, but inside that Ivor Novello, Noel Coward-esque parlour room vernacular there is a woman who is a total musical deviant. She was up to all sorts musically.”


“Her songs are among the best songs I’ve ever heard. Really brave and danger- ous in her melodies and accompaniment. As soon as we started listening to the songs I was thinking of ways we could do them. As with most things we do we stripped them down and sang them unac- companied first and took it from there. Given how tricky it all was I think it may be our best record.”


All this and now something wondrous has arrived in our midst: a beautifully pack- aged 196-page book, full of evocative pho- tographs, including 79 of her poems writ- ten between 1935 and 1993, published by Bryter Music in collaboration with Fledg’ling Records under the title The Tide’s Magnificence: Songs & Poems Of Molly Drake. It also contains two CDs – twenty-six tracks – of Rodney Drake’s recordings which, the notes emphasise, other than being digitally transferred, reflect the origi- nal recording conditions, hisses and all.


According to Joe Boyd it is “the miss- ing link in the Nick Drake story,” but the more revelatory point surely is a lovingly constructed showcase of a cultured writer, whose work – often melancholy and poignant, occasionally obtuse, yet also wry, philosophical and insightful – merits con- siderable respect and admiration, whoever her son may have been. Even in the song Happiness, which she sings with guileless purity, there’s a palpable yearning of some- one in search of the unattainable.


One of her most telling songs Do You Ever Remember? has many connotations (“Time is ever a vagabond/ Time was always a thief/ Time can steal away happi- ness/ But time can take away grief”) and there is vivid imagery aplenty in reflective songs like Breakfast At Bradenham Woods and Never Pine For The Old Love (“I see flowers and candlelight and a tablecloth checked in red/ And we sit holding hands in our own world/ And never a word is said”). That’s a whole Terence Rattigan play waiting to happen, right there.


And, whatever else, it’s impossible not to share her delight as, you fondly imag- ine, she discovers love in the delicious Laugh Of The Year (“I never thought I was glamorous/ Nor dreamed I could inspire/ Feelings that were amorous/ Red-hot flames of desire…”)


There are even a couple of unexpect- ed inclusions: a musical setting for Robert Browning’s poem Oh To Be In England and even one unaccompanied traditional song, The Oak & The Ash, sung in harmony with her sister Nancy McDowall.


And yet, despite the plethora of fami- ly photographs of an elegant, refined woman with a pleasing smile ever close, she remains an elusive character through- out it all. Indeed, Gabrielle Drake describes her at one point as “an enigma” and somewhere else as “reclusive”. “There was always part of my mother,” writes Gabrielle, “that remained unknowable, unattainable and her own.”


Molly Lloyd was born in Rangoon, Burma in 1915, though even this isn’t con- clusive (“my mother belonged to a genera- tion that believed it was discourteous to ask a woman her age” – Gabrielle), when Burma was under British rule. She was the daughter of Sir Idwal Lloyd, who served in the Indian Civil Service, but colonial life was not considered appropriate for young girls and Molly and her two sisters were dispatched to learn the ways of the world back in Blighty, going to boarding school at Wycombe Abbey.


Extracts of her diaries dating back to when she was thirteen leave no doubt of


her hatred of school, returning to Rangoon as soon as she left in 1933, and almost immediately meeting her husband Rodney Drake, marrying him at Rangoon Cathedral in 1937 when she was just twenty-one.


War split them up for a time as Rod- ney fought in the Burma campaign and her diaries recount her enforced flight to India to escape the Japanese invasion of Burma, while fretting about the fate of Rodney…”Rangoon has fallen, oh hell and damnation,” she wrote, “I got a surge of awful sick dread when I was in bed… I get most frightened and worried when I’m lying down.”


She and her sister Nancy took to singing together, performing the popular songs of the day as the Lloyd Sisters, and worked for a time for All India Radio, though no recordings remain. Reunited with Rodney, they returned to Rangoon after the war and then moved on to Bom- bay, before Rodney got a new post in Birmingham and, rather regretfully, they moved to England and bought Far Leys.


A


nd that’s when and where her music really began to take shape and The Tide’s Magnifi- cence was formulated on a grand piano they’d had trans-


ported back from Bombay. To all intents and purposes she was an English rose, a conventional middle-class wife devoted to her husband and children; but her thoughts ran deep and her musical pas- sion is now clear to see. It’s also where the songwriting talents of Nick – and sur- rounding mental issues – began to mani- fest themselves.


None of this is directly alluded to in


Molly’s poems or songs, though there are certainly tantalising clues. A surprising number of her poems reference death but you quickly discover that the most likely reactions to Nick’s problems were mostly written long before he was even con- ceived, let alone passed away.


The posthumous fascination with all things Nick Drake was only beginning to gain momentum when Molly died in June 1993, but she expressed great pride in his work and, by Gabrielle’s account, took some solace, too, from the fans who traipsed to Tanworth-in-Arden to pay homage.


It’s pure conjecture what she would now make of the fuss surrounding her music and poetry. For her, the music was such a private matter that Rodney would merely set up the tape machines and then vacate the room so as not to distract her while she was playing.


Gabrielle suggests she might have been quite tickled by the idea that her work was, belatedly, so admired. “Ambi- tion was not unknown to Molly, but it was fairly low down on her list of priorities. I think she realised but somewhat deprecat- ed this in herself. It certainly led her to undervalue herself. Which is perhaps why her songs and poems have for so long lain hidden… she never thought of herself as anything other than an ‘amateur’…”


Be gone cynics and be thankful they lay hidden no longer.


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