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For me, it was all my mum’s fault. I guess I was thirteen or fourteen years old, had just started to learn to play the guitar, and she suggested I might like to have a go at songs by this clever, funny singer. So I bought the songbook without ever having heard any of his songs. Then I saw him on The Innes Book of Records, doing On Again, On Again, and I was hooked (and realised that I had no hope of playing his songs properly!). Soon after that I saw the TV series ‘And Songs’, which became required viewing. Round about the same time I managed to see him live for the first time, in Hereford. The occasion (in the rather formal setting of a proper theatre) was memorable because there was lots of interference through the P.A. system from taxi radios, something Jake made great fun of.
Malcy wrote:
On occasions I’ve done "The Remembrance" and a few people have laughed in places during the first verse, because they’re expecting something funny.
This was exactly what happened with both One of Them and The Remembrance on several occasions when I heard Jake performing these songs live: an uncomfortable moment each time for Jake, and for anyone who knew the songs already. Jake’s biggest problem was the expectation of some in the audience that he was always going to be funny.
nobby wrote:
I think the song is good but Jake does say "if you’re one of them you’re really not my kind" This bit doesn’t rest easy with me but then I’m not that clever so I’m probably missing the point?[/quote]I really don’t for one minute think that Jake is personally saying ‘if you are one of them you’re really not my kind’. I think this is him quoting the teller of racist jokes. His own views (I believe) come in ‘but they can wince and weep…’. Jake’s intros to the song always made clear how appalling he found the racism to be, and the song is indeed lampooning those who tell racist jokes. However, the song can easily be misinterpreted, which is why the right intro is always important.
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).
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.
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.
Malcy wrote:
A song like "Jolly Captain" is a good example – it’s a joke set to music but you can’t do the Fred Wedlock trick and shuffle the verses around as the story will make no sense.
Part of the challenge is in the fine detail: ‘Close your poor eyes,’ says the Captain to his wife, but when she is dead this becomes ‘he closed her wild eyes’. This is fine writing, full of humanity and insight into the human condition: using the right adjective in the right verse is absolutely vital if the song is to make sense. Elsewhere it has to be ‘hacking her way back again’ because of the rhyme, no word but ‘hacking’ will do. There is rarely any room for manouevre in Jake’s songs: change one word and something is lost. When singing one of Jake’s songs you change a word at your (and the song’s) peril.
Post edited by: Paul, at: 2006/10/17 19:11
bobhayne wrote:
Hi everyone!
Anyway, if there are Vids or DVDs available please would someone let me know:)
It is a meagre substitute, but there are of course a few video clips, both on this site and on YouTube.
The BBC4 ‘Have Your Say’ section now features ten highly positive comments about last week’s programmes, including some from familiar names. More lobbyists for a re-showing of these programmes on BBC2, or the re-showing of other Jake material, are encouraged to post comments on the BBC4 site. Let’s keep up the momentum, folks!
Coincidentally I have a recording of Jake performing Brassens’ Dans L’Eau (the full song in French), live on Radio 4, from the Ayckbourn theatre in Scarborough in 1986 (February, I think). Ayckbourn was on the same programme. Might this perhaps have been round about the same time as the show mentioned here?
I have a radio recording (date unknown, but probably November 1972 or 1973) in which Jake plays Country Boy with a double bass and second guitar accompaniment. He speaks fondly of the song, and jokes that he was asked by the BBC to write it as the British entry for the ‘European Hymn Contest’ (‘err..it lost!’). I have not been able to find out whether there is any substance at all to the commission.
This is not the only time Jake re-uses a melody: a substantial part of the dismal ‘Slowly Our Eyes’ (surely the weakest song on Jake in a Box?) metamorphosed into the more famous and successful ‘Isabel Makes Love’. I like ‘Girl With the Fragile Eyes’, although I do not feel I understand it nearly so well as Country Boy.
It is indeed sad. He was, quite simply, a brilliant double bassist whose sympathetic playing enhances and is indeed integral to many of Jake’s finest performances.
Alan Williams is, sadly, deceased, although I do not know when. I seem to recall that Jake mentions his death and how hard it hit him in the course of his Brassens interview (available for listening on this website).
Paul
I have just received a letter from BBC Worldwide stating that they must ‘confirm sadly there are no current plans to release a Jake Thackray DVD. From time to time, however, we do license material to third party record labels, such as EMI, and if there are any proposed releases including any specific archive material, we can of course keep you posted of developments (e-Mail: simon.gurney@bbc.co.uk).’
Six new CDs from EMI, rave reviews in The Guardian and Mojo, SJKTH in development, a BBC4 documentary imminent: when is the BBC going to wake up to what is happening?!
Mr Gurney must clearly be our next target for campaigning.
👿
