Rab Noakes: A Fife Folk Hero

As the daylight hours dwindle and St Andrews confronts the dim, dreary months of another long Scottish winter, we need an artist who can lead us through the darkness. One who knows the feeling of a cloudy, damp November and an unjustly early sunset to ease the pain of our Vitamin D deficiency. For St Andrews, there is no better artist than the town’s own Rab Noakes.

Born in St Andrews in 1947 and raised in Cupar, Robert ‘Rab’ Noakes was a prolific singer-songwriter at the heart of Scottish folk for over 50 years. He was a founding member of the band Stealers Wheel (best known for their song ‘Stuck in the Middle with You’, famously featured in the film Reservoir Dogs), but sadly left the band before their first record. He was close friends with fellow co-founder Gerry Rafferty, with whom Noakes recorded many of his best songs. His own career, which spanned over twenty albums, saw frequent collaborations with some of the era’s most renowned producers, from ‘60s Dylan producer Bob Johnston to Neil Young’s Elliot Mazer, to The Byrds’ Terry Melcher. Yet despite the big name producing credits and popular ties, Noakes never saw the expected commercial success. In time, he shifted to radio work for BBC Scotland and became a senior music producer before starting his own production company and record label with his wife, Neon Records. Through Neon, he returned to releasing music and began performing again, championing the role of the elder statesman in Scottish folk before passing away in 2022.

Noakes’ music has a way of staying with you; his gentle voice and wistful acoustic harmonies grab hold of you and don’t easily let go, nor do you ever want them to. In Demos and Rarities Vol. 2, songs like ‘Restless’, ‘Waiting Here for You’, and ‘Long Dark Night’ display a timeless quality to his songwriting, their sombre chord progressions and tender lyricism resembling Elliott Smith or Nick Drake. The album features a magical rendition of Rafferty’s ‘Moonlight and Gold’, recorded at a memorial concert for the artist Noakes organised in 2012, in which a mournful Noakes and his guitar transform the tune into perhaps the most beautiful tribute song ever performed.

On the opposite end, his third album Red Pump Special is like a Scottish Nashville Skyline (and was even recorded in Nashville), where Noakes explores a country-infused sound featuring a banjo, fiddle, and horn section. “Once I nearly drowned in a flood / by leaning on goodbyes,” he sings in ‘As Big as His Size’, one of many songs that sees the perfect blend of Noakes’s songwriting and brilliant supporting instrumentation along with ‘Branch’ and ‘Wait Down Here’.

The best of Rab Noakes, however, is present at every stage of his career, in a range of styles and moods, from the adrenalin-fuelled ‘I’ve Hardly Started Yet’, to an embittered ‘When This Bloody War is Over’, to the ragged yet unyielding eloquence of ‘Too Old to Die’. He’s an artist who never lost his touch, and who continued to create and grow throughout his lifetime.

Unfortunately, the tragedy of Noakes’s limited success continues to reverberate today, as many of his albums (including the record with Bob Johnston) are nowhere to be found on streaming platforms, severely limiting his accessibility to modern audiences. What we can stream today is largely thanks to Noakes’s label itself, as he re-released many of his previous records. But for the others not re-released, they merely sit buried in old collections and record stores likely not far from our shores, waiting to be rediscovered.

In our shrinking world, we have the entire spectrum of global music available at all times — you can walk down South Street listening to Ethiopian jazz or Australian alternative, and jump from one to the other in an instant. Whilst that power is remarkable and certainly has its own merits, there is also something uniquely special and grounding in listening locally, to the sounds and voices that have walked the same streets, rode the same buses, and lacked the same sunshine, inhabiting the world through which that music emerged. Rab Noakes is that voice for us, an artist who, according to his own lyrics “will keep you from all danger / till the long night is through.”

Illustration by Isabelle Holloway