Jake Thackray

'The Yorkshire Noël Coward' - to French tunes

Jake Thackray, singer and songwriter: born 1938: married (three sons); died Monmouth 27 December 2002.

"Jake Thackray will be recognised as one of the greatest writers of all time," predicts his former recording producer, Norman Newell. "The magic of T.S. Eliot lives on for ever, and Jake's work is just as good. Maybe I am overdoing the praise, but I really mean it."

The singer/songwriter Jake Thackray, who was born in the West Riding of Yorkshire in 1938, was educated at a Roman Catholic school in Leeds and at Durham University. He spent four years working in France, which changed his life. "I missed out on rock and all my influences were French," he told me in one of many conversations:

Georges Brassens was stupendous. He very rarely left France but we persuaded him to sing in the very small university theatre in Cardiff. I did the first half, and it was the pinnacle of everything I ever achieved to be on the stage with him that night.

Thackray helped to introduce Brassens' songs to British audiences.

I did English lyrics for some of his songs and "Brother Gorilla" is the best. I added a couple of my own jokes and changed the chorus, but Georges said that was okay. I would like to do some more, but he's no longer here to pass judgement and I wouldn't like him to think I was mucking about with his songs.

This French influence gave Thackray a distinctive style:

I can see that I am in the English tradition, the music-hall tradition if you like, with songwriters like Flanders and Swann and Noël Coward, who are wordy, funny writers. The main difference is in my tunes, which are based on French music. I've been called "The Yorkshire Noël Coward", but that only reflects the poverty of journalists. They do it because my songs have lots of words in them and I have a clipped, abrupt delivery.

Whilst teaching in Leeds, Thackray wrote many musical plays for children including Harmonious Omnibus, which went on tour. His song for a children's nativity play, "Joseph", is often performed at Christmas – "I personally hate adults singing it," said Thackray,

because it is a very childlike song. I wrote songs for pupils with the intention of amusing them and educating them at the same time.

Thackray had one of the most distinctive faces on televison – a lugubrious expression with an enormous Adam's apple – that, to be honest, switched off as many people as it turned on. His first television appearance was on The Good Old Days from the City Palace Of Varieties in Leeds in 1966 and he made regular appearances on the regional Northcountryman programme. He became known through The Beryl Reid Show, The David Frost Show and then Bernard Braden's On the Braden Beat. Finally, he had a residency on That's Life with Esther Rantzen.

The programmes demanded a new song each week, often based on a news item:

It wasn't pressure, it was work, and it taught me how to write quickly to a deadline. Some of the songs were duff – absolutely bloody duff – and I blush to think about having sung them, but I could do with a few deadlines now to get me going. I was finding songs everywhere. I'm a Catholic and I remember being in church and thinking, "What's funny about being a Catholic?", and realising it was everything. That led to "Sister Josephine":

You Sister Josephine

You sit with your boots up on the altar

screen,

You smoke one last cigar,

What a bloody funny nun you are.

For some years, Thackray tried to maintain both teaching and entertaining. He used to sing at weekends and might disappear to the other side of the country:

If I'd been on television the night before, it would cause a stir in the staff room – they thought I should be correcting homework instead – but the children were terrific. I'd walk into the class and they would say, "You were rubbish last night, sir." It was an odd sort of existence but I did it for three years."

Norman Newell signed Thackray to EMI's Columbia label:

One of the best musicians and orchestrators in the country, Brian Fahey, told me that he had heard Jake Thackray on the radio and that I should go after him, which I did. Being a lyric writer myself, I was so impressed by his ideas and by his magic rhyming. He was a marvellous poet, whose words were brought to life by his music.

This led to the albums The Last Will and Testament of Jack Thackray (1967) and Jake's Progress (1969). "Lah-Di-Dah" was a painfully honest song about a marriage reception:

I'll be polite to your daddy,

Frightfully lah-di-dah,

Although he always bores me to my boots,

I love you very much.

I won't boo and hiss when he starts to

reminisce,

I won't drop up, I won't flare up,

The runs he used to score and how he

won the war,

Cross my heart,

But I'll have to grit me teeth

When he goes on about his rupture.

Thackray commented,

"Lah-Di-Dah" is like a lot of my songs in that it is based on some situation in life, but I don't write about real people. A lot of people have told me that they relate to that song – you marry someone and you realise that you can't get rid of the family.

Although the song was popular, it was not a chart hit:

It's not in the nature of the beast for me to have a hit record, but I would like more buggers to do my songs. It would save me going out of the house. Petula Clark and Rod McKuen did a duet of "Lah-Di-Dah" and Jasper Carrott did a couple, but there aren't many.

Thackray enjoyed performing in small folk clubs, but found little pleasure in larger theatres. "People come to see me because I'm on the telly. They would go and see Michael Fish the weatherman if he went on tour," he complained at the time:

My songs may not be to everybody's tastes, but sometimes they don't listen properly. Women have said "Sexist, sexist" when I sing "On Again, On Again", but it just so happened that I chose a woman to demonstrate the point I wanted to make.

He appeared at the London Palladium and on a Royal Variety Performance, but he was particularly uncomfortable with such prestigious appearances. He was staunchly left-wing and he could never appreciate why people should spend their earnings on hearing him play. This came to a head with a concert at the Queen Elizabeth Hall in London in 1971. There was a full audience, but, backstage, he felt he had no right to entertain them. Norman Newell persuaded him to perform and the resulting album, Live Performance!, is his best.

Thackray wrote many intriguing songs, such as "The Gypsy", "The Widow of Bridlington" and "Bantam Cock" and the author Laurie Lee allowed him to write a song around his book Cider With Rosie. They are excellent comedy songs but they are also full of savage satire:

I think it is best to take the piss out of things and then when they are laughing, lob in a hand grenade. Much as I would like, I can't write a straight love song. There are always twists and turns but I feel any song about love should cover the ironic side of it. My favourite writer is Randy Newman and I only wish I could write like that bugger.

In the 1980s, although he had moved to Monmouth, he wrote an amusing column for the Yorkshire Post, one being a wicked parody of the family newsletters which often accompany Christmas cards; he described how the whole family had been in and out of trouble with the law. In another, he told how his own children had begged him to write true children's songs:

Most children's songs are not meant to amuse sensible small people but to satisfy silly big people. My children would rather I taught them swear words than songs.

This led to songs like "Little Crunchy Pies".

A recent Radio 2 programme highlighted his work but claimed he was a recluse. He had become disaffected with performing but he was likely to return. He worked with his great friend Harvey Andrews, who described their relationship in his song, "Me and Jake":

He came round to our house and he got slaughtered on half a bottle of whisky – I had the other half, but it's very flattering to have a song written about you, especially from a super singer like Harv the Marv.

It goes:

Me and Jake and a bottle of whisky,

Wishing that we were French,

Living in the artists' quarters

With the fires that drink won't quench.

I could be Brel, he could be Brassens,

Life would be so fine,

Me and Jake and a bottle of whisky,

We'd trade for a bottle of wine.

Spencer Leigh