Nobody would have been more amused by the notion of death as a brilliant career move than the late Jake Thackray. It is just the sort of thing that he used to write songs about in his comic but passionate style; except that what is happening now, nearly four years after his death at the age of 64, would have outrun even his satirical imagination.

EMI has just released Jake in a Box, a four-CD set of recordings from the prime of his career between 1967 and 1976; Jakefest is to be held over the Bank Holiday weekend in Scarborough, with about 20 musicians performing his songs; and a major programme for the BBC on Thackray’s life by the writer and critic Victor Lewis-Smith is due out this autumn. Meanwhile, no less a dramatist than Alan Plater, a great admirer of Thackray, is planning a play based on his work.

None of these things would be happening if Thackray were still alive; the relative obscurity in which he lived his final years was hard won. It was almost as if his great fame at the end of the 1960s as a fixture on Braden’s Week and That’s Life had been some kind of accident that he was happy to forget.

Yet the archive footage remains and there he is, lugubrious but smouldering, singing songs that somehow managed to be both familiar and exotic. They seemed to be tackling a cosy English gallery of blacksmiths, maidens, farmyard animals, ladies’ circles and local dignitaries. But if you took a closer look behind the deflecting wit, the bull turned into a monster of human tyranny, the brigadier into an emblem of stultifying class deference. Here was a young man subverting the very heritage that had influenced him.

Some people couldn’t stand him, particularly those of otherwise liberal tastes who felt that they were having Northern comic songs foisted on them. Words, even verses, were banned. (It’s easy to forget how delicate the BBC’s sensibilities remained all those years after Ken Tynan and the F-word.) He was damned as a misogynist for writing the song On Again, whose opening lines were: “I love a good bum on a woman, it makes my day/ It is palpable proof of God’s existence, a posteriori . . ./ It’s the tongue, the tongue, the tongue on a woman that spoils the job for me.”

From some detractors he could never expect rehabilitation after these and other lines — perhaps it didn’t occur to them, whether male or female, that the object of the satire on this occasion was none other than the man singing the song. Nor were they to be assuaged by his tender ballads of love.

In his sleeve notes for the EMI box set, Lewis-Smith, a former producer of Radio 4’s Start the Week, recalls that Thackray “fell foul of the dangly-earring brigade in the late 1970s and early 1980s, many of whom were in powerful positions at the BBC and effectively removed him from the airwaves.”

Still, during those years between the World Cup victory and Harold Wilson’s resignation, he was packing the Queen Elizabeth Hall in London for his solo concerts and influencing all sorts to stay home of a Saturday night and catch his songs on the Esther Rantzen show.

While his contemporaries, Billy Connolly, Mike Harding and Jasper Carrrott, were developing into comedians via the folk clubs by expanding the introductions until there was more patter than music, Thackray stuck to his trade as a songmaker, splicing words and tunes with such dexterity that the description of him as a Yorkshire Noël Coward was not extravagant praise.

Athough he disliked the comparison, there was substance in it. Both men were masters of the catchy but skewed melody, and both sang with percussive enunciation to get their fiendishly difficult words heard. Whatever you thought of him, there is a strong case to be made for Thackray as the finest chansonnier England has produced. That foreign word is the only one to describe his vocation accurately, for the greatest influence on his development was the legendary French songwriter and performer Georges Brassens, who died in 1980. Listen to Brassens’s sardonic humour sung against the snap and oompah of a nylon-strung guitar and some of the mystery about the origins of Thackray’s strange style is explained.

Going in search of Thackray was an unpredictable exercise, even when he was alive. He was not inclined to give away much information about himself, and when he did he warned his listeners that it might be lies and they were better off with the songs.

Together with that privacy went a huge and generous fascination with the minutiae of other lives. What is known is that he was born in 1938, the son of a Yorkshire village policeman and a Catholic mother so devout that she would scribble “to the greater glory of God” on his early lyric sheets. He was taught by the Jesuits at St Michael’s College in Leeds and then went to Durham University to study English.

After that there were five years in France, some of it spent teaching, some playing professional rugby — and allegedly receiving a ban for biting an opponent. It seems that he also found time to become engaged to five women. For six months of this period he was in Algeria at the height of the struggle for independence.