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Hi
This is such an interesting topic – the unmentioned dark side. And how appropriate that "The Black Swan" is the last posting on this topic. I too am deeply affected by this song (who wouldn’t be) and for me it is the serious side of Jake that underpins and gives gravitas to his oeuvre. Irrespective of whether it appears he is just doing humourous rhyme or not.
Perhaps the Yorkshire post writings or people who knew the guy in the 80’s can shed some light. Were there demons and trouble or did Jake just decide he’d done his bit or felt he had dried up?
I have only just discovered Jake Thackray thanks to the TV programme and am experiencing the same deep response to Jake’s music as I did to say, Nick Drake as a teenager. I’ve had Jake in the Box on constantly since then (a week or two ago and it feels like he’s always been there!)
It is the bittersweet edge and the pathos in his songs that really works so well for me. It seems in his TV heyday that he was celebrated for his comic and topical "point song" skills but (whilst not to underestimate these skills) I feel that the genius of this work lies in the power of his spirituality, emotion (anger, even) and physicality. And it is all so moving for that – in the playing, artistry and voice. So, did this emotive path to lead to somewhere now considered taboo? Is anyone from the cognisenti allowed to speak about this? Or are we just inventing a load of post mortum guff?
i quite agree ‘claresdad’. those organisers need sorting – i not only know who they are, i know where they live and where they drink. let’s arrange a meet some day and get it sorted. they should have shown a lot more of that transvestite nun for a start – i thought he was brill and deserved a lot more exposure. too much jake not enough transvestite nun – that’s what i think.
on second thoughts did the organisers have jack s***e to do with the editing of victor lewis smith’s prog?Pretty damn cryptic there – are you saying Jake was a TV???
I keep checking back on my posting re "The Black Swan" and the dark undertow in Mr. Thackray’s work but no comment. I guess his stuff is damn jolly almost all of the time but I stick by what I said about the gravitas underpinnimg this great work. (The Blacksmith and the toffeemaker comes to mind – what a beautiful piece)
No comment?
Hi Richard
I find Black Swan to be an annoying song some days (though not everyday, other days I thing its a very good song). What annoys me is the narrator going down the boozer to get drunk and lament the loss of his squeeze – along with all the other blokes down the boozer getting drunk because their squeezes have left them too.
Of course they don’t have the wit to consider that had they spent less time down the boozer drinking there is a chance that things might have been different….
Mind you its a lovely tune and great one to play and sing if you get it right.
Ian
RICHARD RHYS DAVIES wrote:
Pretty damn cryptic there – are you saying Jake was a TV???
I keep checking back on my posting re "The Black Swan" and the dark undertow in Mr. Thackray’s work but no comment. I guess his stuff is damn jolly almost all of the time but I stick by what I said about the gravitas underpinnimg this great work. (The Blacksmith and the toffeemaker comes to mind – what a beautiful piece)
No comment?
What the old curmudgeon is refering to was his performance at the Jock fest that was held in Sept 2005. There was a camera man who took quite a lot of footage and interviewed several of the performers. Unfortunately most of this was not used.
I know that the prog was about Jake but I feel that there ought to have been a section showing those who are keeping the music alive. A lot has been achieved since a lot of met in York in April 2003. Who would have thought that there was enough interest to get a prog on the telly, never mind the various cd releases.
Fair point on Black Swan .Perhaps it is so strong because it highlights the blindnes of solace and / or grief. When you’re stuck in it (always amplified by being drunk) you cant see anything. And worse you don’t want to (which the song gets too). That all said if Jake’s work all had this heavy heady exterior I’d probably find it too much. (Like Scott Walker)
I’ve always found this such a powerful and tragic song for exactly this reason. You have to assume the "Go to bed early, girl" verse is directed at the lost lover, but that isn’t really clear. It’s a different part of speech in that verse, as in "Go to bed", "Your life is your own", rather than the universal third person "She’s gone" of the rest of the song. If it wasn’t for the second verse mentioning a girl who seems to be still alive, you could easily construe the song as being sung by someone bereaved, the grief is so all-encompassing and final.
RICHARD RHYS DAVIES wrote:
That all said if Jake’s work all had this heavy heady exterior I’d probably find it too much. (Like Scott Walker)
Whilst Jake justly gained renown for the humour in so many of his songs, he certainly seems not to have rated the likes of The Lodger (which he dismissed as ‘rubbish’ to one friend), and was embarrassed by Sister Josephine and Bantam Cock (‘silly, silly’), often saying that he wanted to get them out of the way when he was performing. Jake had a much deeper, more serious side to his songwriting (One of Them, Side by Side, The Remembrance etc. etc.), and one has the sense of a man who felt increasingly imprisoned by the expectations of the audience that knew him from the telly. Some of his more serious songs certainly can make one feel uncomfortable: One of Them caused Jake problems when audiences misunderstood his point and thought that he was being racist, while The Prisoner (‘have you seen dead children?’) is very unsettling. What I think is remarkable about Jake’s writing is that the range of it defies easy pigeonholing.
RICHARD RHYS DAVIES wrote:
Perhaps the Yorkshire post writings or people who knew the guy in the 80’s can shed some light. Were there demons and trouble or did Jake just decide he’d done his bit or felt he had dried up?
Surprised no one else has responded to this, Richard. Maybe I’ll say something wrong here and so prompt a correction from Ian W or someone.
Jake seems to have always lacked self-belief. He didn’t seem to feel he deserved the plaudits, the applause, the adulation. He often dismissed his songs, as Paul notes. He was always a nervous performer, hated large audiences and was happiest performing to a small group with whom he could chat and feel at home – become more a member of the group, less the exalted performer "on the poster outside" full of bullshit. He also had something of a drink problem, possibly in response to those self-doubts, possibly not; and, while it didn’t often interfere that much with his performing, it didn’t help.
Anyway, it seems that he just got to the point where the terrors of performing outweighed the pleasure, and he just stopped. He never came back. He also seems to have stopped writing at the same time, as no treasury of unperformed songs has surfaced. He seems to have just stopped being Jake the singer/guitarist/songwriter and become a different Jake, one he was happier being.
Now over to those who knew him.
Post edited by: KeithD, at: 2006/11/01 14:20
Harping back to my recent post, the "Go to bed early, girl" verse, after using the second person about her all the verse ("Your life is your own", "Don’t come and find me"), still ends with "Now that she’s gone" in the third person, as if they may (or may not be) different people, the book-reading girl and the "gone" one. May have to think about this a bit more. Is it about the grief that comes with the end of a relationship or something more permanent ?
I had always taken it that it is one and the same girl throughout, and an unhappy lover flitting between second and third person as his thoughts turned from the girl to his own feelings of self pity and loss.
KeithD wrote:
He also seems to have stopped writing at the same time, as no treasury of unperformed songs has surfaced.
in the Guitar Magazine article on this site (published in 1979), Jake refers to his songwriting drying up, partly perhaps because he abandoned the discipline of writing topical songs to order. Whether what he says is true we simply do not know – Jake often made things up for interviewers. 1979 is well over a decade before he stopped performing, and yet I saw him a number of times in the early eighties, never doing any new songs (at least, nothing which had not already been released). I had a friend who interviewed in Jake in the mid-eighties; in the interview Jake claims he has recorded a whole batch of new songs, many of which people might find shocking; once again, this may all be fiction. It is interesting to note that a few ‘new’ songs do emerge in the late eighties (?): Lullaby My Daddio, Tortoise, our Dog, Side by Side. Certainly two of these Jake described as songs written for his family (Tortoise and Our Dog), and they have a different feel to much of his published material. Lullaby My Daddio might also be a family joke. On this website, I think, someone posted a tantalising message last year about having been given by Jake a tape of new songs, but I don’t think this has ever been tracked down. Finally, in a recent newspaper piece there was reference to a recording of a song Jake wrote about energy efficient, ‘green’ houses (or the society which promotes them).
Paul wrote:
On this website, I think, someone posted a tantalising message last year about having been given by Jake a tape of new songs, but I don’t think this has ever been tracked down. Finally, in a recent newspaper piece there was reference to a recording of a song Jake wrote about energy efficient, ‘green’ houses (or the society which promotes them).
Should anyone feel tempted to track down Paul’s reference, the mention of the tape of new songs was by me in a private eMail and Paul is correct – it hasn’t emerged and my source for the reference has gone quiet.
Ian
Post edited by: aliasmacalias, at: 2006/11/01 22:27
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