Jake Thackray and Songs DVD reviews

[Paul]

If you come across a review of the new Jake Thackray and Songs DVD, please post details here.

[Paul]

This review appeared online in Fife Today:http://www.fifetoday.co.uk/news/columnists/meet-the-real-jake-1-3611037

Published on the 23 November 2014

John Murray on rediscovering a true wordsmith

I heard that imitation is best form of flattery so an artist who has a tribute act must take some comfort that somewhere a cheaper version of them is milking their fame.
Elvis Presley and Michael Jackson dominate the market but every other week there is a Bootleg Beatles or a Fake That and a credible Doors Alive.
Imagine the amusement then when I discovered Fake Thackray, a live touring tribute to master wordsmith Jake Thackray.
Sadly the original Thackray died in 2002 when almost immediately a reassessment of his work ensured that his original songs would be heard for generations to come.
This collective of fans have now released a DVD called Jake Thackray And Songs (BBC) having secured the original TV recordings from the BBC.
First broadcast in 1981 the DVD has the full series widely considered as Jake at his peak and with studio guests like Ralph McTell and the late Alex Glasgow.
Jake came to prominence performing one song a week on shows like Braden’s Week and That’s Life and even then took risks with his satire and irreverence.
His dour persona masked a talented observer, regularly not PC but lyrically both inventive and humorous with songs like the Bantam Cock (a fowl tale), Sister Josephine (a burglar dressed as a nun) and Lah-di-Dah (marriage and in-laws).

[Pam]

Great! It’s a nice review, especially the reference to “This collective of fans” – credit where it’s due for a change.

[Jamie]

Here’s one from the Albion Online Magazine:

Jake Thackray and Songs (The Jake Thackray Project, 2014)

This collection of Jake Thackray’s folk club performances is a precious record of the great Yorkshire singer at his best, in small, intimate venues, rather than his somewhat stagey (though also good) TV spots on Braden’s Week and That’s Life. (Incidentally, it is also a moving reminder of the warmth and vitality of folk club culture in the seventies and early eighties: some of the most interesting shots are of the audience’s reactions.) This footage, taken from six live shows, was filmed for BBC2 and shown late at night, necessarily after the watershed –the peculiar Thackray mix of cheerful, sometimes brutal vulgarity and religious devotion, most jarringly evident when The Bantam Cock segues into Joseph, would certainly not have been suitable for children.
Thackray disliked talking to the audience, but one of the most endearing aspects of these performances is in fact, his in-between-songs patter, as well as his strangely perfunctory but heartfelt goodbyes. This material offers some rare insights into the background that seems to have made him vulnerable to the alcoholism which led to his early demise in 2002. For example, he reminisces about a terrifying Jesuit teacher during his Leeds childhood who taught children “by frightening them.” Overall, the impression is of a deeply uneasy spirit. Other viewers may be equally surprised to find that the disturbing Ulysses –about an incapacity to accept love, leading to despair and suicide– was meant to be a children’s song. Thackray’s story about a little sheep-minder who had died, sixty years previously, on the moor (“that’s how they used to treat children, and give ’em a chance, the bastards still do”), explains the lyrics of Molly Metcalfe, with its haunting sheep-counting refrain.
Thackray was every bit as accomplished a guitarist live as he was on record, with his own unique Southern French/Spanish-influenced style, developed in homage to his great hero Brassens. It is displayed to especially beautiful effect here on the performance of his most famous song Lah-Di-Dah. He was ably supported by the brilliant jazz bassist Alan Williams, a taciturn but sympathetic stage presence. They duet delightfully on Scallywag and Worried Brown Eyes, while the bass produces a plangent twang in the chilling song One of Them, about the petty cruelty of a certain kind of joke, contrasted with the universality of human suffering. The verses have a partially familiar tune, and it took a long time to identify it –1969’s Melting Pot by Blue Mink. (It is not clear whether Thackray intended the similarity, either melodically, or in terms of the two songs’ preoccupations.) The fine anti-war song The Remembrance was new to this reviewer. One of the most striking aspects of this DVD is that it allows the viewer to compare and contrast the rather complicated and baffling attitudes to women that Thackray evinced –on the one hand he was responsible for the notorious On Again, On Again, which goes beyond good humour, as well as for a line in Family Tree which had to be changed, while on the other he attacked misogyny and sexual double standards on The Hair of the Widow of Bridlington. On a lighter and completely unrelated note, it was also striking that he referenced The Epilogue twice (in Ulysses, and The Castleford Ladies’ Magical Circle).
Most viewers would probably be completely satisfied with the superb main feature, but the DVD also contains a number of performances by other folk singers –Alex Glasgow, Pete Scott and Ralph McTell. These range in quality: Glasgow performs the maudlin Maggie Gee, but also his masterpiece, the powerful Close the Coalhouse Door. Ralph McTell is reliably lyrical and tender on Song for Martin, though his memorial song about Blair Peach, Water of Dreams, for some reason fails to evoke the right sort of atmosphere. The Pete Scott performances are, unfortunately, somewhat colourless in comparison with the others. However, the really transcendent moment in the extras is the beautiful singalong by the audience (on this occasion, mostly women) to Streets of London on the credits, which is sadly truncated.
This DVD is a treasure. For a tiny span, it resurrects Jake Thackray, a man haunted by ghosts and by God, with an extraordinary compassion for human frailty. Thackray was inimitable, and while he influenced many current performers, including Jarvis Cocker and the Arctic Monkeys’ Alex Turner, it is fair to say that his unique worldview will probably never be recaptured.–Isabel Taylor
Copyright © Isabel Taylor 2014.

You can read the review in situ at:
http://www.zyworld.com/albionmagazineonline/2014_music_jake_thackray_and_songs_dvd_and_matt_berrys_musical_career.htm

[Jamie]

Here’s a five-star review by Allan Wilkinson for the on-line ‘Northern Sky’ magazine

http://www.northernskymag.com/reviews/other-reviews/jake-thackray-and-songs-bbc-dvd-2014

Having arrived on the maternity ward of Doncaster Royal Infirmary in 1981 – the year the BBC gave Jake Thackray his own six-part series – it’s little wonder that I don’t recall this masterpiece of musical television. For the last thirty-three years, Jake Thackray has existed only, for me, inside the sleeves of my dad’s LP collection and the plastic boxes of reissues from the 1990s. Indeed, having grown up in the world of Grunge and Brit Pop, I feel extremely fortunate to have noticed Jake at all.

Thankfully, his complex tangle of percussive lyrics, his melancholy classical guitar chords and delicately hilarious subject matter has been upholstering my ears for many years and, thanks to the fan-fuelled Jake Thackray Project and the BBC, I’m now able to further illustrate my love for the late Thackray’s genius with this DVD release.

Presenting the entire BBC series, complete with thirty performances from the much missed Leeds chansonnier, JAKE THACKRAY AND SONGS is not just a must for all Thackray fans, but a compulsory item for any self-respecting music collector.

If you’re looking for the upper hand in any argument about filming live musical performances, here’s your ammo. Without the presence of cameras at this series of performances in places such as Birmingham, Nailsea and Newbury, we would be deprived of the chance to broaden our enjoyment of such classic songs as Bantam Cock, Lah Di Dah and Fine Bay Pony. Each song is enhanced by the enigmatic facial expressions of its author, as well as equally eloquent and comical intros from the man who says “perversely enough, if you’re a singer you have to talk!”.

Swathed in curious north country mythology and clouds of cigarette smoke from the audience, Jake’s delivery is paradoxically blunt yet soft, his double entendres shocking yet gentle. Some songs are delightfully silly whilst others would manage to move even the most modern audience with their political message, especially The Bull with its evergreen observations of authority and hierarchies and The Remembrance with its smartly observed anti-war message and the sharply resounding refrain “this was a couple of weeks before we got killed in the war”. And then there’s the blissfully daft poetry of On Again! On Again! and Sister Josephine – songs that leave the works of other comedic songwriters trodden into the mud.

The DVD also includes footage from the show’s guest stars such as Pete Scott, Alex Glasgow and Ralph McTell – just a few other reasons to add this treat of a disc to your collection.

Liam Wilkinson
Northern Sky

– See more at: http://www.northernskymag.com/reviews/other-reviews/jake-thackray-and-songs-bbc-dvd-2014#sthash.MDzTqCHK.dpuf

[Jamie]

And another, by Kev Boyd, from the ‘Fatea’ online magazine

http://www.fatea-records.co.uk/magazine/2014/JakeThackray.html

I think it’s fair to say I was never Jake Thackray’s biggest fan. By the time I first became aware of him in the late 1980s his approach was already starting to feel somewhat anachronistic. My cultural upbringing – catching the arse-end of the punk movement; learning to appreciate (though never fully embracing) the alternative comedy boom; fully immersing myself in the necessary tropes of mid-80s post-punk/indie (the bad haircut; the dodgy cardie; the righteous indignation!) – had taught me to be suspicious of anything with even the faintest whiff of the establishment about it. Thackray seemed to fall squarely into this category, especially given that it was his comic songs that I first encountered – I probably thought of him as a musical version of that 70s TV comedy graveyard The Comedians. He had, after all, featured regularly on That’s Life, which placed him on a par with the likes of Pam Ayres and Doc Cox (aka the excruciating Ivor Biggun!). Hardly the types to spearhead the cultural revolution!

It soon became clear there was something different about Jake however, and although I never fully immersed myself in his world, I certainly came to appreciate his particular mix of humour and pathos. There was – and still is – much to appreciate about Jake, as this DVD of his 1981 BBC TV series will attest. With 30 complete performances filmed in front of modest-sized audiences (plus bonus performances from series guests Pete Scott, Alex Glasgow and Ralph McTell) this collection could rightfully be considered the ultimate greatest hits collection. It represents perhaps his artistic peak and his last great hurrah – he would rarely work in TV again, increasingly withdrew himself from live performance from the late-1980s and would die virtually penniless in 2002.

The blurb accompanying the DVD would have us believe Jake was a nervous live performer, and there is some evidence of this in his occasionally bumbled spoken introductions, but the confidence and coolness with which he approaches the songs themselves gives the lie to that description. The songs are clever, wordy and often surreal and he approaches them here with a confidence and audacity that never runs over into arrogance but indicates that he is fully aware of their deftness. He moves with little fuss from, say, the insightful yet foul-mouthed The Bull to the daftly surreal Sister Josephine to the deeply poignant The Remembrance but the shifts in mood never jar.

The DVD is released by arrangement with the BBC through The Jake Thackray Project, a collective of fans working to promote awareness of Jake’s work and arrange for its release. It’s a labour of love and clocks in at over two hours (more if you include the guest performers) so might best be experienced in instalments. The material has been a target for the project for over a decade and as you might imagine given it’s source, the sound and picture quality are excellent throughout. My only issue with the entire package is the somewhat dull sleeve artwork featuring a less than flattering still from the series, but this is a minor gripe.

Having only encountered Jake’s music sporadically over the last couple of decades I wondered how I would feel listening to something like On Again! On Again! after all these years. If elements of Jake’s approach already felt outmoded by the 1980s was there still a place for such apparently self-satisfied sexism – however cleverly expressed – in a post-feminist 21st century cultural landscape? My 1980s self might have tutted in only partially-feigned scorn but the truth is that like much of the content here, it is funny, clever and irreverent and surely only the terminally prudish could possibly be offended? I’d like to think my 1980s self would have agreed.

Kev Boyd

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