On Again! On Again!

 

Discovering (and rediscovering) Jake Thackray

That’s Life! was regular viewing in our household. We’d been tuning in since its inception in 1973, so when a new series began on Sunday 2 January 1977, we were in front of the set at 10pm. 

The programme remains in my memory for a very specific reason, as it provided my first ever glimpse of an entertainer who had been established on television for almost a decade without ever impinging onto my consciousness. Jake Thackray, often misleadingly labelled as the ‘Yorkshire Nöel Coward’, had been a regular fixture on Braden’s Week from 1968-1972, a popular late-night entertainment which, like That’s Life!, had focused on consumer issues, alongside topical songs and sketches. In 1972, however, Braden had given the BBC pause for thought by appearing in a margarine commercial. The corporation deemed this unacceptable for a champion of consumer rights, and whilst Braden wasn’t directly sacked, his show was revamped to allow his co-presenter Esther Rantzen to take centre stage in his place. The rest is television history, as was Braden himself when That’s Life! launched without him in the early summer of 1973.

Esther Rantzen had been personally responsible for Thackray getting the gig on the Braden show in 1968, so it’s somewhat surprising he didn’t transfer to the new series. Like Braden’s Week, That’s Life! still featured a topical ‘song of the week’, but it would be nearly four years before the self-styled chansonnier was restored to his erstwhile position on the series. Now, two days into the new year of 1977, here he was at last, performing the title track of his new album, On Again! On Again!, his first release in five years.

I was immediately taken with this charismatic newcomer, but more than anything else, I liked the sound he created. Thackray was backed by a double bass player, Alan Williams, and session guitarist Ike Isaacs (who had previously accompanied him on Braden’s Week), and together they created a laid-back, jazzy sound reminiscent of the 1950s. The song itself was somewhat risqué, its opening line a paen to the hindquarters of the female anatomy. Let’s not bandy words: ‘I love a good bum on a woman, it makes my day’ he sang. In the next line, he used this observation as the basis for an extremely erudite bit of wordplay which I only fully understood many decades later: ‘to me it is palpable proof of God’s existence a posteriori’. The song was well-received, and although its sentiments were hardly in tune with the world view of a naive, uncynical 15-year-old like myself, I was instantly hooked. I began to note down Thackray’s appearances (and even non-appearances) in my diary. Fortunately for his fans, this series of That’s Life! remains intact in the BBC’s archives, and Jake’s performances were recently extracted for inclusion on a definitive DVD collection compiling all known surviving clips of the man during his BBC career, spanning the years 1968-1985. For fans, it is a revelation, for me, remarkable to see those old That’s Life! appearances again for the first time in 47 years.

Thackray was an intriguing, enimatic figure. Self-taught in both singing and guitar playing, and strongly influenced by the French chanson tradtion (as exemplified by Jacques Brel and, more pertinently, Georges Brassens), he had begun his career whilst working as a secondary school teacher in Leeds in the mid-1960s. Gravitating to local radio, his cause was championed by a BBC producer whose influence led to his being picked up on the national network and – almost unbelievably for an artist with no professional engagements to his credit – acquiring a recording contract with EMI. His first LP, The Last Will and Testament of Jake Thackray, was recorded at Abbey Road in 1967 while the Beatles were busy in the adjoining studio working on the soundtrack of their TV film Magical Mystery Tour. The fab four quickly picked up on Thackray’s quirky, humorous songs, and it’s reported that John Lennon took a tape of them with him to Rishikesh in 1968.

Thackray’s style of songwriting actually had more in common with the observational songs of Ray Davies, but it’s safe to say his approach was entirely his own. His primary influence was Georges Brassens, a major figure in his homeland of France but vitually unknown in the UK, and it was Brassens’s style of performance, accompanying himself on a nylon-string guitar, that Jake adopted, ending up with a unique hybrid of bluff northern gallic. Lyrically, his abilities outshone his contemporaries and remain unmatched to this day. A graduate in English language and literature, Thackray’s vocabulary went way beyond that of any other popular songwriter, and his ability to dovetail words together in perfect rhyme and metre remains unsurpassed. Stylistically, he was an acquired taste, with a curious singing voice that veered between bass/baritone in one line and a light near falsetto tenor the next. Words were often spat out or bitten off, in a half-singing-half-talking manner. He was not, technically, a great singer, but he had immense warmth and humanity, his pitching was always accurate and his style sounded like no one else on earth. Bernard Braden, in his sleeve notes for Jake’s second LP, reports that his initial appearances on the show led to a significant number of letters requesting his removal. Viewer reaction soon turned around, however, and within a matter of months, Jake Thackray was a household name. Just not in our household.

1977 was something of a career renaissance for Jake, with the That’s Life! spots cannily lined up ahead of a new record release. After three studio albums and a live collection for EMI, Jake’s career had turned back to performance in the early 70s, although even in this arena, he was a reluctant star, who would baulk at the idea of appearing at a 500-seater venue, preferring the intimacy of small folk clubs and pubs. I soon located the new LP in record shops, along with a couple of others from his rapidly disappearing back catalogue. At my birthday in March ‘77, I was bought the new album, and with birthday money purchased EMI’s Very Best of Jake Thackray compilation, which afforded a useful overview of his career to date. Or, to put it another way, his career in full – very nearly.

During the 1977 run of That’s Life!, Jake appeared more than a dozen times, singing carefully chosen numbers from the new album (not all were suitable for broadcast), alongside some old favourites. Although his songs were frequently intended to amuse, I seldom found them laugh out loud funny (some of the humour went way over my head at the time), but his storytelling was unmatched, and his compositions could just as easily be lyrical and melancholic. I found I liked these songs as much as (if not better) than the more overtly comic numbers. Another aspect of Thackray’s performance that interested me was his guitar technique, a simplified variation of the standard folkie ‘clawhammer’ style, focusing heavily on bass notes. I began to practise playing in this manner, and learned some of his songs. My diary for 31 December 1977 includes the entry: ‘did Jake Thackray impression at party’. At a month or so shy of 17 I was far too young to have carried this off convincingly, and my voice nowhere near deep enough to have been as accurate as it sounded in my head, but I’d discovered a new influence. Over forty years later, the voice is still there, but has matured: I open my mouth, and out comes Thackray. It’s a little unnerving…

Back in 1978 I’m sure I fully expected Jake to be back in harness when That’s Life! returned for a new series on 14 May, but I was disappointed. He would not return to television for another three years when the BBC finally gave him his own short-lived series, Jake Thackray and Songs. It was not for want of asking. Television may have made him a star, but Jake detested appearing on the ‘flickering rectangle’, denouncing TV production types on his final album sleeve as being characterised by headphones, cheesecloth and ‘frig’, qualities which, he was happy to report, had not been present during the filming of this low-key series, shot in the intimate atmosphere of a small club.

I could have seen Jake Thackray perform live many times during the coming decade, but never did: I often spotted his name in the listings for folk clubs not far from where I was living. But by this time in his career, seeing Jake’s name on a concert bill was no guarantee of seeing the man himself, and he was beginning to acquire a reputation as a no-show. Two agents washed their hands of him, tired of the endless (if imaginative) excuses with which he explained his all too frequent non-appearances. His career was self-destructing. The recently published biography ‘Beware of the Bull’ makes for quite harrowing reading in its latter stages. A staunch Catholic, Thackray seems to have been troubled by the idea of taking pride in himself and his work, and since his Jesuit schooldays had signed off all written work with the initials ‘AMDG’: ‘Ad maiorem Dei Gloriam’ (to the Glory of God). Towards the end of his life, when approached by fans enthusing about his work, he insisted that many of his songs were, in his opinion, worthless, citing some particular concert favourites as examples. He was also a committed socialist, and his lyrics often took devastating aim at those in society who lord it over others through entitlement and privilege. His late classic song ‘the Bull’ reads almost like his manifesto as it undermines those who set themselves up in authority only to use their privileged positions to drop ‘bullshite’ on the poor ‘bleeders below’.

Jake’s final years were spent in a council flat in Monmouth, estranged from his wife, suffering from alcoholism and surviving on hand-outs from friends and well-wishers. The last photographs of him, taken close to the end of his life in 2002, depict a man unrecognisable as the chisel-featured Byronic figure of the late 60s and early 70s. In a late flowering of enthusiasm, he had been fired up with the idea of a musical production based on his works when it was put to him late the same year. Tragically, he was found dead in his flat on Christmas Eve, aged only 64.

Since then, his legacy has been kept alive by a dedicated fan network whose efforts culimated last year in the release of the aforementioned DVD. Although TV rarely showed Jake at his best (his nervousness is quite obvious at times), this is a superb overview of his career, beginning with his very first TV spot (Beryl Reid Says Good Evening, 1968) and taking in all known surviving clips from the BBC’s archive until his disappearance from the medium in the mid 1980s.

There are few artists in the world of popular music who are genuine one-offs, but Jake Thackray is one of them. He was nothing less than a genius, extradorinarily original and utterly unrepeatable.