Beware of the Bull: The Enigmatic Genius of Jake Thackray

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From this point onwards Thackray became, in earnest, a peripatetic folk singer (for want of a better phrase) who travelled extensively around the British Isles performing his songs in a multitude of clubs, pubs, and other types of venues. That’s about to change with the publication of the first Thackray biography, Beware of the Bull: The Enigmatic Genius of Jake Thackray. Despising the falsity of the encore ritual he would drily announce ‘that was my last song and now I’m going to sing four more’. Two rarities graced the performance at the NCEM, The Ferryboat, extolling the charms of a public house, and a scabrous number about National Service that was aired, reluctantly, once in 1986.

Sadly, for Thackray, his dislike for those on pedestals meant that he made sure that his own success would be punctured too. Watterson’s Fake Thackray project is much more than a tribute turn, also breathing life into songs unheard in decades or putting new music to works never completed.Moons, planets, the very stars themselves, faced destruction, cold-blooded, brutal, and worse, random.

As the author Neil Gaiman said of this latter composition, “One of the things I love most in the song is the incredible approval of these Women’s Institute types going off and consorting with Satan, and it’s beautiful and hilarious, but it’s also human, because it’s not about beautiful young women in the forest, having sex, it’s about lovely retired ladies. In his first full-length autobiography, comedy legend and national treasure Billy Connolly reveals the truth behind his windswept and interesting life. The light-shining continues later in the year with the November release of a two-disc DVD, Jake Thackray at the BBC, plus a “Jakefest” in Scarborough in October, and the reissue of his long-deleted 1981 live album, Jake Thackray and Songs. It’s as though a private party is in progress and Jake has been persuaded to sing a couple of songs. Equal weight is given to the different forms his songs took: the bawdy humour and dazzling wordplay found in ‘Sister Josephine’ and ‘The Lodger’; the rustic beauty of ‘Go Little Swale’ and ‘The Little Black Foal’; the quotidian surrealism of ‘Bantam Cock’ and ‘The Cactus’; and darker, more involute material like ‘The Bull’ and ‘The Remembrance’.Watterson and Thompson performed ten songs, and 50 years after Thackray’s heyday, crowds continue to laugh and admire his singular dexterity with words. Having grown up in a heavy drinking culture Thackray had, over the years, developed an alcohol dependency which, up until his later life, he had more or less been able to disguise as social conviviality. These range from his poor, Catholic upbringing in Kirkstall with a violent father to his formative years teaching in France and travelling Europe, his meteoric rise as a TV performer and recording artist in the 60s and 70s and, ultimately, his gradual rejection of it all in the 80s. Be that as it may, these appearances on the “flickering rectangle,” as he described the telly, have proven an invaluable fund of performances for posterity. Beware of the Bull does a good job of showing what would happen if you put a no-bullshit working class Catholic Yorkshireman into a well-heeled, Aqua Velva-d world populated with “rascals”.

The diary entries are hilarious and ominous often in equal measures: see “Forgot ‘Cactus’ and apologised winningly. Perhaps in those final years in Monmouth living alone in his council flat, attending the church and the pub, he finally found the anonymity he seemed to have been looking for. But, perversely enough, you can’t be a singer without having to talk…I’d just prefer to sing the songs one after the other; I sing, you go clap, I sing, you go clap…or not as the case may be.

In October 1973 he appeared at the Sherman Theatre in Cardiff on the same bill as his hero Georges Brassens, the only time that the chansonnier ever sang on a British stage. Thackray took Bressons’ anti-establishment spirit and storytelling style and relocated it to the North of England but the voice that emerged from his songs was singularly his own. as well as some references to women as little more than body parts, can be counted as deploying grisly vernacular and that other songs he wrote were timely, perceptive, and even progressive portrayals of women. Though in a performance at the Cambridge Folk Festival he looks magnificent - giant, chiselled, veins popping out of brawny forearms from the exertion of those quicksilver guitar parts - he’s also pouring with sweat, voice occasionally cracking, his fear occasionally revealed by equine whites of eyes. Increasingly, it seems, he grew tired of having to yet again perform his greatest hits at venues considerable distances away.