Born and raised in the Midwest USA and now resident in the South of France, Bob Drake was a founding member of avant-rock heroes Thinking Plague in the 1980s, has been a member of the 5uu’s, The Science Group, Vril, the Peter Blegvad Quintet and many others, but it is with his series of solo recordings between 1994 and the present that he has really found his voice as a pedlar of individual, avant-garde, but always highly melodic tales of anthropomorphic animals, hauntings, geology, holy wells, astronomy… the list goes on, all performed by himself. Aitch caught up with Bob in advance of his gig at the Samuel Worth Chapel in Sheffield on 2nd October 2025.
Aitch: I noticed a fair few patterns and themes when I read your biography: the big, the small, space, time, systems, transitional spaces, loads of animals, a ton of wild and interesting stuff. What were you hoping people would get out of reading it?
BD: With that biography, the thing just kept growing and growing, and I was thinking, “is this just pompous or absurd?” or something. I was hoping maybe it would help inspire other people, you know, maybe younger people, or people who are struggling to do their thing. Maybe their surroundings are repressive, or people around them are telling them they’re crazy, or whatever. I wanted to encourage them to just to keep at it…
Aitch: I wonder then, if you felt like you were contained, called crazy, or repressed, as a young person starting out in music?
BD: Yeah, in some ways it was like that. The place I grew up was very conservative, my way of getting through that was learning when to keep quiet, and when to say what I thought.
Aitch: When did you feel comfortable saying what you thought?
BD: It depended on the situation obviously, if it was something about music, or science fiction stories, or something interesting or weird in nature, but that’s a difficult topic to try to explain. But it was a strange mixture – Conservative Catholicism and my interest in weird & scary movies for example.
Aitch: You mention Catholicism in your bio – how you loved the mysticism, the performance…but not the religion.
BD: Yeah, yeah, this is still such a big thing for me. If you’re familiar at all with my music, you’ll know I love all that kind of thing. I was grateful for being brought up in that sort of world, because I loved all that mysterious stuff related to the church, even though I could never bring myself to believe it at all. But I loved the trappings of it – the candles, the statues, the echoey rooms, and the organ music, and the beautiful singing…
Aitch: So what drives you to make music?
BD: I guess the excitement of hearing it, really…I just love making and playing the songs. I didn’t start out doing solo albums or shows, that was much later in my life. One really good thing I’ve learned from doing solo shows is the value of playing songs live for a while before I record them. I think of the recorded version of a song as like a really good first sketch. But playing the same songs live, they constantly evolve and the little kinks I might not have even been aware of at first, get worked out.
And I love trying to figure out where a song’s gonna go, and suddenly discovering, “oh yeah, it could go here”. Most songwriters will tell you this – the excitement when you recall a little snippet of song or melody you had, which didn’t have a home, and realising it would be perfect as the bridge for the song you’re writing now. Maybe you have to change the key or a few notes…that’s all still exciting to me. And I just love all the “stuff” related to making music, to making the sounds: the pedals, the gear, the instruments themselves as objects, plugging them in… It’s exciting, wondering what things will sound like. I literally spend hours messing around with this stuff, because I enjoy it so much. Hopefully that comes through in the recordings, as well as the live performance. I want to entertain the audience, you know – it’s entertainment.
But I think it’s the excitement of it that drives me. Even just minutes before we started talking here, I was out in the garage, with the guitar, working on a new song. It’s just… it’s such fun.
Aitch: Is it something you have to do, do you think?
BD: I don’t know what else I would do, besides messing around in the garden or something. I like to draw pictures, too, but it’s not the same as making music. I’ve had an interest in making drawings, even when I was young, but somehow I always knew it would be music I focused on. I don’t know where it came from. I had a knack for understanding music. Learning to play instruments wasn’t so difficult, but trying to draw a chair or something that looks like what it’s supposed to be, forget it!
Aitch: What are you hoping your audience gets from your music, from your performances?
BD: I always have hoped…and this goes back to when I was in other bands, a million years ago – I always wanted to… I guess, lift people. Lift them up. And a lot of bands I was in didn’t seem interested in that, or thought that was a corny sort of thing to do. But to me, that lift is what it’s all about. Doing it here on my own, and hopefully in the performance, I want to give something fun, uplifting and exciting to the listeners, with a touch of mystery too. I mean, some of the music can be quite strange, or the lyrics even a kind of horror story, but comic at the same time.
I love telling stories in songs, making up stories about funny or fantastic or interesting things, trying to put that into a song. Which is a problem with the astronomical songs, you know, because the lyrics are out of date two weeks later.
Aitch: I feel like there are small and big subjects in your music – like the Theory of Everything from physics, but in musical form. Like on the Planets and Animals album, I think…maybe others…
BD: What usually happens, when an album is forming, I get a couple of song ideas that seem promising. I work out their basic forms and then put them aside, a collection of candidates for the new album. At that stage I don’t necessarily think about what they might sound like, or the instrumentation, I just write them on guitar and then some lyrics come along, and then I’ll do another song with maybe some slightly related lyrics, and then notice a rough thematic idea forming. For example, I came up with a song I called Isola dei Lupi, and thought that could be a good theme for a whole album. Not that every song has to literally be about the topic, but even just as a road to start on. Or as my friend Chris Cutler says, “something to hang it all on”. That’s a way I love to work.
Aitch: Bottom up processing then? Get the songs, find the themes, build on that.
BD: I have come up with a theme first rather than songs first for several albums. One was an “overproduced album”, which became Lawn Ornaments. The idea for that was inspired by having made the previous album, Bob’s Drive-In, with a deliberately stripped-down production. Even before I’d finished that one, I was thinking the next album would go the other way, over the top with everything. Another time I started with a theme was Skull Mailbox and Other Horrors. I wanted to do an album of songs that each tell a weird little rural horror story, with a dusty, rickety production.
Aitch: I feel like there’s something about balance and contradiction in your work – like going from paired back to full on, from discordant to structured, and it feels a bit like what you described with your upbringing – part conservative, part creative.
BD: Yeah, that’s interesting, yeah. I don’t want the technology or the complication to get in the way of the music. And every time I worked with a band – because I used to record bands here –I always tried to make sure the music comes across. That’s what I care about, not whether the sound is “good” or “bad”, or if you played it technically correctly or not. If you laugh when you hear it, or get that chill up the spine, on the back of your neck, that’s it. I say “Don’t change anything!”
Aitch: That chill up the spine – like the elusiveness of a musical orgasm. A skin orgasm. I can’t remember the word for it, ( Ed: it’s frisson)…
BD: Oh I love that in music. I don’t know how often I’ve achieved it, but a few times. I think the album L’Isola dei Lupi has one of my most orgasmic songs on it. It’s called The Ascension of Grayfoot Badger. Actually, how I discovered the world of Cardiacs relates to that song.
Around 2010 or so, a year or two before I had ever heard Cardiacs, I was putting a band together for a tour. I had the drummer, bassist and myself and needed a second guitarist. I had no idea who to ask. I was at one of the Rock In Opposition festivals in France with my friend Maggie Thomas. She saw how stuck I was trying to think of someone, and said, “Why don’t you ask Kavus (Torabi)?”. One of his bands, I think it was Guapo, were playing. Kavus and I had bumped into each other a couple of times at that festival, over the years, and there was a good vibe between us. I was sure he wouldn’t want to be in the band – he’s such a busy guy. But Maggie kept pressing me, so I asked him, and he said “Yeah! Yeah!”, with that enthusiasm he has…
So the band was complete. The tour didn’t work out, so we decided to do a live album here at my place. I’d written a whole album’s worth of new songs and I’d already recorded my solo versions. I didn’t let them hear my versions – I wanted everyone to do it their own way. We did a concert here at the house with an audience of local friends. And that’s the album called Bob’s Drive-In – the first half are my solo versions of the songs, the second half are live versions with the band.
Anyway, that’s how I got to know Kavus, and from then on, whenever I’d go to the UK, I’d stay at his place, or we’d do gigs together. One of those times he gave me a bunch of CDRs of music he thought I might like. I put them in my bag, and I forgot about them. Years later, I was tiling the garage. I like to listen to music while I’m doing things like that, because that part of my brain is free, I can do the work while still enjoying the music. So one day I was all set to get to work, and I thought, “Oh, maybe I’ll listen to some of those CDRs Kavus gave me”. So I went and found one; it had Sea Nymphs scrawled on it with a marker. I had not a clue what it might be like or who they were. I put it in the CD player. The music started, and I stood there actually frozen in place, transfixed. I stood there without moving and listened to the whole CD. When it finished, I played the whole thing again. The tile cement had hardened in the tub.
I don’t remember playing an album from start to finish twice in a row since I first heard, Hopes and Fears by the Art Bears. I was completely transfixed. Clearly this was a group of people who know how to write songs. And the vocal stuff – that’s what I’ve always loved – the vocal harmony bands – the Beatles, YES… Anyhow, I had to find out about these people, because this was something else. This was something I’m trying to do, and they were already doing it. So I looked up Cardiacs and Tim Smith, and the first Cardiacs song I stumbled upon was Dog Like Sparky.
I understood instantly that Tim had that thing I love to do in recordings, that not many people know how to do; knowing where to put a voice in a mix – like a little creature, singing out into the universe. It’s not that you just put some reverb and echo on it…
Well I loved this Sea Nymphs album so much, I wanted to try to write a song like that. Whenever you try to do that sort of thing, it never ends up quite like the music you’re trying to emulate. Which is a good thing… So I wrote a song, which is on Lawn Ornaments – The Lonely Manor.
Cardiacs music keeps on inspiring my own work. To me, that’s like the whole blues and rock and roll tradition; you pick things up from other people, who picked it up from someone else, who picked it up from someone else, and everyone gives it their own little twist.
Aitch: There are a lot of references to animals in your work – and you really connect to the Furry world, you often play in a Furry suit. How would you describe your relationship with animals?
BD: I would describe it as just an element of my life which I have always been aware of, from the youngest age, and it’s still just as strong, or even stronger, now. It’s a part of me. A very inspiring and uplifting part. Like endless excitement, and for some mysterious reason…and it is a bit mysterious, this animal thing…it’s just an endless source of fun and excitement and inspiration for me.
Aitch: Do you feel like you embody the animal, when you wear the suit, or does the animal embody you?
BD: A bit of both, for sure. I used to draw these creatures, all my life, a couple hours every day, and it was very much a mystical or magical, ritualistic even. It wasn’t until I discovered the furry community that I found there was this instant, appreciative audience for my drawings. I think now, after so many decades drawing these things, it’s so much a part of me, I don’t need to draw them anymore. I think something kind of finally…well, I don’t really need to put them on the paper, the creatures. Because they all are so here with me all the time…
Aitch: You’ve incorporated your parts.
BD: Absolutely, yeah. The separated bits have come together. And another thing I will never agree with, is the people who consider it some kind of childish thing; a longing for one’s inner child whatever that is. It’s not that at all. It’s very much a magical experience, and that’s what I want in my music, too.
Aitch: I kind of get that from some Cardiacs music – an indefinable, magical playfulness.
BD: Yeah, Dog Like Sparky has those sort of cosmic moments in it. The second song of theirs I heard was Bellyeye, with all those beautiful, choruses, and almost Motown guitar. It brings that cosmic feeling in way that’s absorbable for people. As does Dirty Boy. Which brings me back to the song I was telling you about, The Ascension of Grayfoot Badger.
I’d written the song, and I knew I wanted a big special ending – I wanted it to be something like the way Dirty Boy ends, where there’s that one sustained note, over three repeating chords – you can’t get much simpler. And that’s the genius – so simple, but done in a way that lifts the listener to the astral plane.
I tried a few things and stumbled upon something that worked really well – the ending seems even bigger when it arrives because I’d deliberately recorded the whole first part of the song with a sort of narrow, almost mono, thin sound. It’s kind of small. And you get used to that. And then, when the ending comes, it suddenly opens up, into this gigantic space.
I also think the sequence of songs on an album is so important. The way one song sets up the next, putting the whole thing together in a way that isn’t just creating a playlist or something. It’s really thought out. There’s a reason this song comes here and this song comes here.
Aitch: Kavus said something similar about where to put Untethered on his album The Banishing. Do you think we’ll lose that concept album format, with platforms like Spotify, that are so track-based?
BD: I really don’t have any idea. I’d listen to an album so often I’d know every noise and detail and click and pop – I’d have it absolutely memorized. An album was like a story. But whether that will end because of track-based platforms, I don’t know. That’s not my…well, I actually don’t care. I’ll just carry on doing music and albums the way I want to and if people want to listen to from the first to the last track, as was intended, there it is. I still think of albums as a body, as a thing that starts at the beginning, and goes to the end, and there’s a reason it all happens like that. Or you can make up your own reason, whatever is good.
Aitch: So you’re going to play live for us in Sheffield, alongside Arch Garrison and VÄLVE, at The Samuel Worth Chapel on the 2nd October.
BD: Yeah, I’m so happy with that – a Victorian chapel in a graveyard – sounds right up my street. And playing with Craig (Fortnam, aka Arch Garrison) and Chloe (Herington of VÄLVE).
I have a very positive, happy way for us to end this interview. Maybe the first time I met Craig (Fortnam), I’d been invited to play at Emily’s Jones‘ cottage, and Tim Smith was there, watching me play. I’d never met him, so I didn’t know what he was like. I played my songs, then went over to say hello. And he said to me, “I didn’t know what you were gonna look like. I thought you’d look like a surfer dude”. And then he said
“Your songs… The wings they grow are so beautiful.”
He understood, you know, and he said to me, “The chord progressions are right up my street – play them all again if you wanna”. So of course, I played them all again. And that was my first experience of meeting Tim.
More about Bob Drake:
Website: https://www.bdrak.com/
Bandcamp: https://bdstudio.bandcamp.com/
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@bob-drac
Bob Drake, Arch Garrison and VÄLVĒ play at the Samuel Worth Chapel on Thursday 2nd October 2025. Doors open at 7pm with performances starting from 7:30pm.
Tickets are £12 standard or £6 low / no waged.
Free carer tickets available on request, please contact info@budsandspawn.co.uk or samuelworthchapel@gencem.org