Back in England he began teaching at the Intake School in Leeds, spicing his lessons with songs. Some of these he sang on a programme called The North Countryman, broadcast from Leeds on BBC local radio. By 1967 he had been taken up by Bernard Braden’s TV series, and the following year he left teaching to concentrate full time on writing and performing.
The remarkable thing was that Thackray had never picked up a guitar until he was well into his twenties. Yet the playing, and the construction of the melodies, was deceptively complex, full of jazz chords and odd progressions. In full bloom his talent was such that he could make that French café style coalesce with any number of the traditions that he had absorbed: brass band, classical, music hall, Latin, George Formby, protest, Flanders & Swann, rural folk.
Beneath the ear-catching comedy of The Ladies Basic Freedoms Polka or Family Tree, a more reflective and poetic line of work was being rolled out, full of farmers in cold kitchens, crouching stone villages, a disappointed labourer as “poor as the shivering bird”. It was a loving but unsentimental take on an England that can both tolerate incomers and yet pick on the misfit or individualist, like his Widow of Brid(lington), with animal savagery.
The music magazine Mojo recently published a review of Jake in a Box. The band featured on the cover of the issue was none other than the Beatles, who of course were in their prime at the same time as Thackray. The reviewer, Andrew Male, made the point that Thackray, working in the next-door studio at Abbey Road while the band was recording the Sergeant Pepper LP, came across as a figure entirely untouched by the Swinging Sixties, with his neat side parting, tweed jacket, V-neck jumper and narrow tie. One day in the corridor he bumped into John Lennon, who said to him: “I like your gear, man.” As is abundantly evident from the songs, Thackray was his own man — indeed a champion of own men — and would have viewed a style revolution with much the same scepticism as he viewed authority.
I got to know him reasonably well in the last 15 years of his life. The reason was that I had written to him, via his agent, in the late 1980s. I had done this partly to find out what had happened to him and partly in the unrealistic hope of getting an interview. To my surprise I got a reply from him. It came about three years later, but this was not unusual. He was living in Monmouth in South Wales with his wife and their three sons. He hadn’t retired there, as is often said, but had been living there for nearly 20 years.
His response to my request for an interview was that I should go down to Monmouth, but not to see him; he had a close friend, Peter Carpenter, who lived near by, whom I should write about instead. I did. Carpenter was, and is, a quite fascinating man; also a former teacher, the founder of a thriving field studies centre in the hills above the town and the designer and builder of a zero-energy “Berm House” with a 6ft (2m) deep garden as roof insulation.
Thackray introduced him to me with the pride of someone unveiling an important discovery. After this I went back to Monmouth many times to see both of them. The original pretext, an interview with Jake, fell away and rarely disturbed the conversation again. Once or twice he apologised and said that he would do it some time, but his self-effacement was so strong that I had the feeling the only time I would write about him would be after he had died.
By this time Thackray had scaled his appearances right down — hence the assumption that he had disappeared, an easy one to make in the days before the internet. Never at ease in the TV studios and big venues, he was doing the little clubs again. He had stopped writing songs, although there was a very rude one about a historically ubiquitous figure called ’Kinnell. He seemed to have been working on this for years. Still, he was gainfully employed as a weekly columnist on the Yorkshire Post. In the end he wrote about 200 pieces, the best of them small triumphs of wit and observation, just like the songs. It was not hard to see why Tyne-Tees TV once took him on for a stint as a reporter.
While the hunt goes on for yet more unreleased Thackray recordings, I can reveal the existence of a song that virtually no one else has heard about, let alone heard. Only a handful of copies exist. It was written and recorded in the early 1990s for the British Earth Sheltering Association, of which Peter Carpenter was the secretary. It’s a good one, full of rhythms and randy innuendo.
Thackray’s life went ragged in the last years. There were stories of missed appointments, rows, despairing agents, tumbles and injuries. Then rumours of estrangement from his wife, and bankruptcy. Both true. A convivial drinker from the start of his adult life, he was now in deep trouble with alcohol. It was ageing and depressing him and he seemed unwilling or unable to do anything about it. He had ample self-knowledge to know what was happening, but ample pride to stop him getting help.
Ian Watson, a friend and supporter from the Leeds days, went to Monmouth and found him thin-voiced and jaundiced. This was in October 2002. There was a disconcerting sound on the greeting tape of his answering machine, which was nothing but laboured breathing followed by the tone. On Christmas Eve, after no one had been able to contact him, his eldest son went round to his flat and found him dead.
There may have been some tutting about him, as there is in Thackray’s songs, but this was no sad or wasted life. He had done what he wanted to do, and more, and left a legacy of about 100 inimitable songs. He had even performed with his hero Brassens in 1973 when the French singer made one of just three forays from France to play at the Sherman Theatre in Cardiff.
The funeral on January 6 was a packed affair, sad for sure, but boisterous, too. He had remained a committed Catholic — “keeping in training” was how he put it — so he had the church crowd as well as the old showbusiness one and innumerable friends. What’s more, he had given everyone a very public set of instructions some 35 years earlier about how they were to behave in the event of his death. “Go and get the priest, and then go get the booze, boys,” he had sung in The Last Will and Testament of Jake Thackray.
As the congregation was doing his bidding, out came the song itself from the church loudspeakers, swamped by the lush, ludicrous orchestrations that had been added to this and other numbers in an effort to commercialise them. Everyone clapped lustily, then walked over to the Gatehouse pub, Jake’s local, shuttling between the sacred and profane with the oddest mixture of joy and sorrow. Just like the songs, and the man who wrote them.
Jake in a Box: The EMI Recordings 1967-1976 is out now; Jakefest (www.jakethackray.com) takes place in Scarborough, Aug 26-27
