Backlisted - Jake Thackray: The Unsung Writer by Paul Thompson

Episode Date: January 13, 2026

Biographer and singer-songwriter Paul Thompson joins us for a new episode of Backlisted devoted to the life and work of Jake Thackray, the so-called 'Yorkshire chansonnier' who died in 2002. Thackray was a man of many talents, as demonstrated by Jake Thackray: The Unsung Writer, a new anthology of his prose and poetry. We invited our friend and fellow fan Andrew Male to join us for a discussion of the teacher from Leeds who lionised Georges Brassens when few outside the French-speaking world had heard of him, and who became famous in the 1960s and 1970s for his numerous TV appearances on shows such as Braden's Week and That's Life, but who later in life sought and achieved near-total obscurity. *For £150 off any Serious Readers HD Light and free UK delivery use the discount code: BACK at seriousreaders.com/backlisted * To purchase any of the books mentioned in this episode please visit our bookshop at uk.bookshop.org/shop/backlisted where all profits help to sustain this podcast and UK independent bookshops. * For information about everything mentioned in this episode visit www.backlisted.fm *If you'd like to support the show and join in with the book chat, listen without adverts, receive the show early and get extra bonus fortnightly episodes and original writing, become a patron at www.patreon.com/backlisted *You can sign up to our free monthly newsletter here  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

From the creative team behind the Brutalist and starring Academy Award nominee Amanda Seifred in a career best performance, Searchlight Pictures presents The Testament of Anne Lee. With rave reviews from the Venice Film Festival, this bold and magnetic musical epic tells the story inspired by a true legend. Anne Lee, founder of the radical religious movement, The Shakers, The Testament of Anne Lee. Exclusive Toronto engagement January 16th in theaters everywhere January 23rd. On game day, pain can hit hard and fast, like the headache you get when your favorite team and your fantasy team both lose. When pain comes to play, call an audible with Advil plus acetaminopin and get long-lasting dual-action pain relief for up to eight hours. Tackle your tough pain two ways with Advil plus acetaminopin.

Advil, the official pain relief partner of the NFL. Ask your pharmacist at this product's rate for you. Always read and follow the label. Hello and welcome to Backlisted. which gives new life to old books. The book featured on today's show is Jake Thackeray, the unsung writer, edited by our guest today, Paul Thompson, and published in the UK by scratching shed books in August 2025.

I'm Andy Miller, author of the Year of Reading Dangerously, and Inventry, an Unreliable Guide to My Record Collection. And I'm Una McCormack, award-winning author. of speculative fictions, Associate Fellow of Homerton College, Cambridge, and regular attendee of the Cambridge Folk Festival. And also joining us today

in an uncertain role somewhere between guest, co-host, Jake Thackeray Fann and Apparition, is our dear friend, Andrew Mail. Hello, everybody. Good evening. It's lovely to be here. Good evening. Well, thanks for coming back.

We appreciate your Re-apparition. Refusal to stay away. Well, Paul Thompson is a writer, songwriter, a musician who taught classics for over 30 years. In his teens, he fell under Jake Thackeray's musical spell and saw him perform many times, usually in pubs or small clubs. Paul was usually too shy to speak to his hero, although he did prompt him once when Jake forgot the words. Over the last two decades, he's played a lead.

role in promoting Thackeray's work. Paul is co-author with John Watterson of Beware of the Bull, the enigmatic genius of Jake Thackeray, which was included by the Daily Telegraph in its pick of the best music biographies of 2022. Now, Andy Miller of the backlisted podcast, whose words are reprinted on the reverse of the paperback of Beware of the Bull, he said, quote,

if you're not a Jake Thackery fan when you start reading this book, you certainly will be by the end of it. That was very obliging of him, Paul, wasn't it? It was, it was. Good man. There was also, I believe there was also a very, a very positive review in Mojo magazine, wasn't there, Paul? I believe there was, yes.

And a nice feature in the Guardian as well. And a fantastic feature in the Guardian, which landed the day of publication of the War of the Bull. Oh, that must have helped with sales. It was fantastic. I cannot tell you how excited. that we were. I and John Watson were down at Cropody Festival

at the time and we said that was the target for the day of release. We were there and to see that land as well. It was a wonderful moment. Paul, I'd love to know which song it was. He prompted him on. Well, it was Leopold O'Cox and

by this time I'd seen him several times. I think I was about 15 or 16. I was once a nerd, always a nerd. And I'd spotted him on. occasions it usually would forget the words of a song somewhere and I could see this was about to happen he got to the line about drenching her jumpsuit and he couldn't remember drenching and he was going soaking and of course if it's not the right word it completely throws you so he was sort of floundering I thought I know

what to do here so I piped up with this he looked utterly astonished finished the song I'm pleased to say and very gently took the piss out of me for the rest of the evening. I'd like to think he was generous to hecklers. He was very generous. That's a pro at work, though, isn't it? Paul, that's someone who looks,

oh, I can have some fun with this for the rest of the audience, right? Yeah. He'll be saying, oh, I think this next song is, I think this is one of my best. You'll agree, won't you? Well, Ed, as we'll discover, he was a classroom teacher as well,

so well used to handling bright sparks in audiences, I should think. Well, Paul and John have recorded two albums together, the Lost Will and Testament of Jake Thackeray, for which Paul wrote tunes for some of Jake's rediscovered lyrics, and The Resurrection of Frederick Dubruhe, a collection of songs co-written by Paul and comic novelist Alex Marsh for a legendary and entirely fictional chansoniaire. In 2024, Paul released a solo album,

playing with Nadine, featuring his own satirical writing alongside some long-lost Thackeray material. R&R said of the album, The Comic Song is something of a lost art. However, Thompson encompasses the spirit of his hero, Jake Thackeray perfectly. Paul loves sharing Thackeray's life and music with audiences. He lives in Cheshire with Jane, his immensely patient wife. And Paul assumed that until a few weeks ago, I knew very the same. about Jake Thackeray, which is true. In a minute or less, who was he?

Well, Jake Thackeray was a Yorkshireman. He was born in Leeds in the late 30s, and he became famous in the late 60s performing mainly on television songs which were satirical, which were comic, which were poignant, which were full of stories. And he was in the late 60s through probably to the late 70s, something of a minor television star because he would pop up doing guest spots on

programs left right and center and on news programs. He could write to order as well. And the program that was most famous, or we made him the household name was a program called Braden's Week, which was the predecessor of That's Life. And he became a, you know, somebody who up and down the country performed hundreds of concerts every year for the best part of 20 to 30 years. But his fame was so, shame was so linked to television and he so hated being on television that he withdrew from the spotlight. And as he withdrew, sadly, we lost sight of him, which was a great shame because I think he's truly one of our greatest songwriters. You know, the reason we wanted to make this particular episode of Batlist is my feeling is, and I know it's shared by others here and out there in the world, that Jake Thackeray was a really great.

writer and songwriter yes but writer and this new collection that paul has put together of jake's prose writings makes that case um undeniable i think so it seemed like the perfect pretext to bring paul on and have this this conversation today now paul you have brought your guitar with you i know you take you bring it for moral support everywhere you go and you mentioned nadine in the title of your album um is that you have you brought your guitar with you um is that you take you bring it you bring it for moral support everywhere you go um Is that your guitar? It's now, but it was originally Jake's guitar. And he bought Nadine in about 1971.

And he named her, because apparently he named, I've had it on good authority from his family, he named all his guitars. And he was terribly clumsy with instruments. And he was probably dyspraxic. And he would drop guitars, break them, break their necks. And after Nadine had done several years of Valiant service on the live circuit and on television.

Eventually he wrecked her. And being, I suppose this is an insight into the man, he realised he no longer had any value for him as an instrument. So he gave her to a charity to auction off on the grounds that his celebrity, which he despised, might be of some value to the charity. So doing that, he provided for them a letter of authenticity as proof that it was a Jake Thackeray's guitar.

and I have the letter with me here and it's a wonderful letter because and you can tell it's a genuine Jake Thackeray letter because it's full of a fantasy history of the guitar. It's complete nonsense and beautifully written. In fact, I'm sort of regretting now

that it didn't go into the book. Yeah. But it is in my album. We're not permitted to have full songs on the wide version of the show. Could you, however, us a couple of chords on Nadine, which

contextually are merely for demonstration, not for performance purposes. Thank you, Paul. Let me briefly introduce Andrew Mell. Because we haven't actually done that. Andrew Mail is still doing the stuff he was doing the last time he came on to the same exemplary standards,

by the way, except now he is a writer, critic, and newlywed. Congratulations to you, Andrew. And you could, you could, you could tell the backlisted listeners who I'm married to because she is a previous backlisted guest. That's right.

He is married to Tessa Hadley. No, that's a joke. He's not. Marie Phillips has married Andrew Mail and the same is true in reverse. Andrew Mail has married Marie Phillips. And we are both incredibly happy and I would like to, if only, I would love to say it. like to thank backlisted for bringing us together. But we brought ourselves together.

But backlisted, you know, obviously was... Backlisted did not hinder. Thank you. You did not object to the wedding on the day. You did not shout out and say that we can't marry. If anyone knows any reason why. Well, they weren't on the show together. That would be a suitably self-obsessed objection, wouldn't it?

Anyway, one of the things about Jake Thackeray, which I've been very interested by. When I've talked about Jake on Backlisted before, I've recited portions of the lyrics because unlike many song lyrics, they work incredibly well as separate pieces of verse. I wonder whether you could give us just the first verse of Lardie Da.

So listeners who aren't familiar with Jake's work can get a sense of his writing style. Now we're agreed that we're in love. We'll have to face the Lardie Daar, the eyewash. All of the fancy pantomime. I love you very much. I'll try, love.

I'll Bill and Coo with your gruesome Auntie Susan. I'll stay calm. I'll play it cool. I'll let your tetchy uncles get me back up across my heart. And I shan't get shirty when they say I look peculiar. How's that? That's wonderful. I tell you, hearing them.

brings out all sorts of different rhymes. I hadn't heard the half rhyme with gruesome and Susan before, which is absolutely brilliant. It's so good on like half rhymes and alliteration and anonymatapeia and just beautiful internal rhymes. And I think that's the one of the things about

why you keep coming back to him. Maybe when you initially hear a Jake Thackeray song, you hear the humour, you hear the wit. But then you come back and you hear the word play and the way in which the words or the verses fit into each other, almost like a bit of sort of parquet flooring or something, you know, and that's a lovely... Well, I think Jake, who I believe was an admirer of Stephen Sondheim,

has a Sondheim-like fascination with the crossword puzzle-like element of finding the right word at the right moment in the right song. and what I thought when you were reciting that, Paul, is almost like he has that, he set, he'll set himself a little lexicographical challenge to say, I can't think of a song with the word shirty in it, I better write one. Yeah. And I think that point is exactly right, that he picks exactly the right word. And sometimes when I, I mean, there are lots of people out there performing Jake's songs. And sometimes you hear somebody slip in a word or use a word, possibly because they've half-remembered the song or misremembered it.

And almost with that exception, it's to the detriment of the song. And it might be one tiny little thing, but it loses something. It's always made me appreciate just how carefully thought through every single word is. And that is exactly like Sondheim. Yes. I don't think you could deliver them in RP either. you need the Yorkshire accent or a northern accent at the very least. We will come on to northernness is one of the on one of the cue cards being held up in front of me.

Ladies and gentlemen, good evening to you. You're to be my guest this evening to listen to some of my music. A bit of biography is obligatory on these occasions, I suppose. I was born in 1950 in Twickenham. was a racing driver and my mother was married to him. I was educated at the little sisters of the Blessed Sacrament exposed, but after quarreling with my father, who was a senior airline pilot, I left home at 28 and became by turns a lumberjack, a surgeon,

a scene shifted in a pantomime and a university don. and these days I spend most of my time voting conservative and telling lies to you Oh dear, that's funny. Paul, where does that come from? What show is that from? That's from a 1970 radio specially had

a little to 15 minute programme called Be My Guest in 1970 Radio 2 I think. And in fact, it's just that clip is the thing that we start the new Lost Archive CD with because I thought it's such a lovely introduction to him. And the fact that he quite unashamedly would, yeah, it was the blend of fantasy and reality,

but so much fantasy in what he says about himself and what he sings in his songs, of course. Well, we'll come on to his skills as a performer in a moment. And I've wanted us to hear his, voice. Paul, no disrespect to your excellent voice relating Jake's words, but Jake was a one-off and knew how to write for Jake Thackeray. And I think you can hear his very idiosyncratic delivery right there. So, Una, do you want to ask the traditional launch question? Yeah, we should. Paul, you should probably tell us when you first became aware of Jake Thackeray. Well, my mother is the person to

blame. I started playing the guitar and at about 30, I think I've been 13 or 14 and she said, you know what, there's this guy called Jake Thackeray and I think that you might, I think he might be right up your street. And my memory is I then went and ordered a sheet music book, which was one, which had, and the first lyrics I read were on again, on again, which I couldn't, which I couldn't understand. I hadn't heard the songs at that point. But then I think within in about a year, I saw Jake on, I saw the Inest Book of Records. And Jake, Jake's on it,

singing on again, on again in a pub. And I was transfixed. And then it was the Jake Thackeray and Songs TV series he had in 1980, where they filmed him in small clubs. And he was just at the height of his powers. And I'd watch that on a Monday night on BBC 2 and go into Latin lessons next day and talk to my teacher who it turned out,

he had a good nose for a great song and he sort of said oh the bull was very good wasn't it and so it started there when I was in school and then I was lucky enough to see him a few times before I went to university because he was living in Monmouth and I was just down the road

so it was quite easy to find him at that stage yeah so it was a start so it's all to blame on my mother really and a teacher very fitting that a teacher's involved in this I think yes yes Andrew, why are we gathered here today? Why are we still talking about Jake Thackeray all these years later? The reason why we're still talking about him now,

I think, is beneath that kind of Donald McGill, maybe sort of first impression, there's that sort of ruddy northern working class quality. There's a grit and there's a poetry, you know, there's a kind of the, I think I'm right in thinking, Paul, that the first song he ever, performed on TV was this one called the Black Swan, you know, and that's got a kind of, you know, dark waltzing glimpse of sort of doomed pub habituays. You know, there's a, there's a, there's a, there's a level, there's a bright first level that you catch the song on. And then there's a level beneath that where you kind of, you see the poetry and you see the punctuation, you see the time,

and you hear the beautiful guitar playing. And I mean, when I did the, wrote the Guardian piece, and I spoke to Ralph McTell about him, you know, he said, you know, he said, you know, he said, you know, Jake should be treasured. He would be in any of the European country. And here in the UK, we compared him to Pam Ayres. I mean, no disrespect to Pam Ayers, but there is so much more to him than the comic lyric. And I think that's why he has endured

and why we're doing a show like this, because you realize that beneath that, I don't know, a way in which he might be compared with, you know, Richard Dijens or Jasper Carrot, people who came in his wake doing the comedy folk song, You realise he's actually a creative genius. He's an artist in the true sense. There's such depth.

So in amongst the humour, there's such humanity and emotion locked in there. It's a very unusual mix where, I say it goes back to that what you said about, yeah, comedy isn't taken seriously. There's much, much, much more than comedy and he got pigeonholed as comic. Yeah. And limited by that.

I was reading a review, a live review from the 1960. and which made a reference to the kind of Saturday night and Sunday morning, subject matter of some of Jake's material, Saturday night and Sunday morning being an early 60s kitchen, black and white kitchen sink film starring Albert Finney. And it did occur to me that Jake Thackeray was one of those artists for whom the 60s was both their making and unmaking. Because this window of opportunity opens to working class people,

to people from the north to eccentrics. Suddenly there's an opportunity for people like him or Vivstantial or either Cutler and then that window closes again about 10 years later and those people are out in the cold or I'll find it much harder to get. Yeah. And I think also hit up against the sort of the sheer blank wall

of the class system if you try and make your way at the BBC or at all of those institutions. where the hierarchy isn't maybe amenable to you or recognisable to you, which perhaps you don't respect that much once you come in touch with it. So it's a kind of double bind. Because he didn't fit, people tried to make him fit in certain areas. So he gets placed within the folk scene and the sort of the touring pubs circuit

and the TV comedy song. And as those trends start to fade, you know, as the kind of that northern folk scene starts to vanish, as the TV comedy song thing starts to vanish. There's no place left for Jake because there was, he didn't belong in those places in the first place and then those places were seed. And he knew that, right? It seems to me a lot of his unease

is because he's almost become more famous than he wants to be without quite having signed up for it. And then he's trapped. Paul, what do you think? I think that's exactly right. And you can see it. I mean, we started where of the bull with a story of him in 1977

trying to do a runner from the Fairfield Hall from an audience of 2,000 people and it was that you know the fact he did loathe the idea of being on a pedestal loathed the idea of a lack of connection

even though he could make a connection in a huge hall he had this peculiar charisma he could achieve that and therefore all that was to feel comfortable on stage because he had stage fright he was playing the smaller houses

but you've got to play an awful lot of those and I think he really did end up on a treadmill. As you say, I think he ended up trapped. And in a sense, the TV and the radio, which could provide the way out of it, he didn't trust anybody in the establishment there either. So, yeah, he found himself painted into a corner, I think. Yeah. I love that he did a runner from the Fairfield Halls,

because, of course, the Fairfield Halls is in Croydon. We like to mention Croydon as often as we can on this podcast. I could have seen Jake Thackeray at the Fairfield Halls in 1970, I was old enough. I seen the Wambles after all I could see, and I didn't go and see Craftwerk, and I didn't go and see Jake Thackeray. But I did see Jake Thackeray in 1985

at St James's Art Centre, a former church on Guernsey. And in fact, long-time listeners will recall that when we recorded an episode in that very venue, I took the liberty of playing some of Jake's music into the show because I wanted the psychogeographical memory from 30 years earlier

of having been there with my mother, in fact. And Andrew and Una and Paul, the thing is my mum didn't enjoy it at all. My mum was not at home to muckiness. And it was just too irreverent for her. I was absolutely enraptured, as you can imagine, at the age of 16 or 17 or whatever it was. And that was in 1985.

So his recording career is to all intents and purposes over, but he's still, as you said, Paul, kind of at the peak of his performing powers then. Yes, and although I think he was disillusioned with it and was starting to get bored even in the 70s by the treadmill, he still, you wouldn't, as an audience member, you never spotted. And you went, you came, out of one of his shows, just feeling that it was better to be alive.

Because he had this incredible ability to create this, weave, this fantasy world. It was very clear he didn't really want to be on stage. And he would deal out a lot of fantasy, but you'd also feel you were getting a real sense of him as a person. Yeah. We're going to hear another little clip of Jake actually on stage in a moment. but I must ask Una McCormack in keeping with scenes from all our childhoods,

it turns out that you do have a Jake Thackeray origin story going back way earlier than you thought. I do. I thought that the first I'd heard was the DVD you sent me for this and the first song that came on was on again, on again and I thought, good God, Andy, what have you... Is this a trap? Is this a trap?

I realised I had a much earlier origin story. I was watching the footage from Cambridge Folk Festival and he starts singing Bantamcock and I had a flashback and realised that I must have seen Jasper Carrots perform it in Beat the Carrot in 1981. So that was the first Jake Thackeray song that I heard was Bantamcock when I was nine.

And what did you make of that? Bantamcock. When I was nine, I think it frightened me. I think I was afraid. What did you make of the clips of Jake on TV? Because I was very keen that you see Jake at the same time that you first hear him. What did you make of his presence? I thought he was very, very handsome.

I thought he was very, very intent that he had a great deal of magnetism and that he was very, very, very unhappy to be there, was my impression, yeah, that he was not at ease being there, but the material was terrific. It is just terrific. And Andrew, we were talking about how he uses the camera and what a quick study he is.

It's very difficult to believe, isn't it, that these are his first, certainly the one, black and white ones are his first TV appearance. You wonder sort of where he, pick that up from and you imagine it's from you know interacting with school kids in school but one of the things that I love when he says things like see what you think you know it's basically like he's asking your opinion of the song and so that was a cock up yes that Braden's week clip of him making a complete balls up of the introduction to Bantamcock in front of 15 million people and then

riding it and you can see that everybody on the yeah must have been panicking because suddenly this is a tightly recorded spot. Yeah, absolutely. He's just takes everyone with him because he's so honest. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I love Paul how he, just as when he delivers a song, he is terribly good at not only choosing the right word in the writing of the song, but how then to put that word across in performance.

There'll be a little break or a look. So imagine my delight when your DVD came out and we could see those early clips. He's already learned to do it. on camera. So as he performs a song, he tends to look off to the left or the right of the camera, and then when he wants to land a line, or even a word within a line, he goes straight down the lens and then breaks again. Now, how's he, where did he learn to do that? Because I think that he was, I think he was a very quick learn. I think whatever he set his mind to do, he would do it and master it.

I remember talking to one of his school teacher friends and she said, oh, when he first started playing his songs to them, the guitar work wasn't quite as good as the song. But he said, but it was Jake. He just, yeah, within a very short time, he just got there. And I think he really studied things with and listened and he was obviously a very bright man, but had a laser focus on whatever he was doing.

and that aspect of his performance he developed the first few things on television he's got there's a bit of the cheeky element to the performance he's been told to smile I suspect and then he's gone and realises actually if you go deadpant

like his hero George Brassans it works all the better and what's working is his eyes it's all being conveyed through these little just that the slightest hint of his eyes telling you what's really going on in the song it's amazing

to, I mean, impossible to copy, I think, because it's so wired into him as a human being. We might say now that there is a neurodivergent thing going on with Jake Thackeray. He certainly has some of the characteristics of, for instance, ADHD in so far that he is able to focus intensely on something he's interested in, learn to play the guitar in a matter of weeks apparently or months write lyrics which are with a level of perfectionism which is unimaginable on a weekly basis, more than weekly basis.

And yet as soon as his focus begins to wane because his interest begins to wane, then he starts getting very frustrated and then he wants to walk out of things and then he, as we know, terribly disorganized, right? You know, utterly chaotic. Couldn't be bothered to do anything he didn't want to do. Utterly chaotic.

Utterly chaotic. Accident prone and, yeah. I remember talking to his brother-in-law who said when they went up to London, and the brother-in-law was of 1718 and would go to Abbey Road with him and so on. And he said it'd be exciting because part of the thing would be what you'd encounter, but also the unpredictability as to there's always something would happen. If Jake was involved, something peculiar or extraordinary would happen. So there was a large element of chaos, I think.

Is this the source of Leopold Olcox, do we think? Certainly. I think Leopold O'Cost is self-knowledge. I think that, I mean, in his prose writing and in what he would say on stage, he would tell these long anecdotes about a teacher called Reginald Sedgewick, who Leopold O'Ockx is supposedly inspired by. and he's changed the name to hide the identity of his friend. But the reality is Reginal Sedgwick and Leopold O'Cox,

I'm convinced both Jake. Leopold O'Cox is a sort of comic song about a relative who visits, who is just a disaster zone and the kind of chaos accumulates. Also contains my favourite rhyme in Jake Thackeray, which is Febri and Debris. It's a great punchline. Yeah. Una, given that you have...

of you blanched when, on the opening lines of on again, on again. Would you talk to us a little bit and maybe Paul will recite a little for us of a song you felt much warmer towards from the off? Yeah, and I'll put a little, I'll just do a little bit of revisionism on again, on again, because I think it's, you've got to remember it's a character, the character self-describes as a misogynist. this character is complaining about women who won't shut up. But by the end of the song, it turns out that not even the Blessed Virgin Mary herself

would meet his expectations of womanhood. So the joke is on the narrator. I'm not sure the... Also, who won't shut up, right? The narrator won't shut up, yeah. I'm not sure the audiences ever got past the casual misogyny that the character sort of, that's a different matter.

But the song itself is a lot more nuanced than that. But the song that I really liked, because I think it was a real folk song, and it spoke to the menopoles of woman in me. It's a song called The Hair of the Widow of Bridlington, which is about a woman of a certain age who decides she just doesn't give a stuff anymore. And it's about what happens to her, which is not always fun, but largely is fun. So this is the hair of the widow of Bridlington. She was a widow in Bridlington, she was the widow of Brid. Small and Bonnie at 42, with eyes of a very unsettling blue, and what she thought she ought to do, she did, she did, she did. Whatever she thought she ought to do, she did did the widow of Brid. My only darling's dead, he is, and all my children groan. The house has emptied, all the lovebirds flown. In place of widow's weeds, I'll let my cold black hair grow long, as glossy as a blackbird's wing,

as cocky as his song. Could we just draw attention to phrases like stomping on the copper top and cankerous rancor? Yeah. Cancarus rankers, perfect. There's just such beauty in there as well. It's like it's a dark song, it's a comic song, and then there's lines like, you know,

for she was wild as blackbirds are and they were in a cage. You know, it's gorgeous. And I think it's a fantastic song to focus on because it covers in a way all the. aspects of his genius. It's comic. It's rhyme schemes are beautiful. It's dark. It's serious. I mean, I'd love to know what kind of Una thinks about people taking that as a, you know, as a feminist anthem, you know, from someone who in another song had written, you know, the tongue, the tongue, the tongue, the tongue and a woman that spoils the job for me.

You know, he contains multitudes. Yeah. Well, he's on, he's on the side of the widow of bread. And he's not on the side of the guy who says that. about the tongue of a woman. I don't believe. But he's on the widow of Bride's side. He's also on the side of the Castleford Ladies' Magic Circle, you know, which is a song about a group of suburban witches

frantically dancing naked for Beelzebub. Very lolly willows. Yes, it is exactly what I was going to say. It's Lottie Willows. On again, on again, and the heir of the widow of Bridlington are on the same album. 1996, 76, he's writing these songs at the same time. And he peaks, I mean, he writes very little afterwards.

but these are songs of stupendous quality and the poetry and the storytelling and the humor and I think there was a restlessness in Jake but as time went on he was dismissive of songs like Sister Josephine and Bantamcock he felt obliged to play them for audiences because audiences loved them but he was dismissive because they were

as he would put it merely comic whereas the hair of the wood of Burlington is comic and has got something to say It's the golden moment. Triumph on the podium, golden hand. But with Corona Serro, golden moments go beyond the Winter Olympics. They're enjoying sunsets, time outside, reconnecting with nature, and laughs shared with friends. For every golden moment at the Winter Olympic Games, enjoy your own with Corona Serro,

0% alcohol and a source of vitamin D. Corona Serro, the official non-alcoholic beer of Milano Cortina, 2026. I think Jake Thackeray is a fantastic example of any writer or artist, doesn't have to be a songwriter, could be a novelist, could be a painter, for whom perfectionism becomes the reason to stop ultimately. The last few songs that we know Jake wrote, The Bull, one of them, my personal favourite, The Remembrance, they are. are amongst his best songs, most serious songs. They aren't patter songs. They aren't reliant on you knowing who Jake Thackeray is. They are top tier magnificent pieces of writing, which he then performs. Andrew, what I was going to ask you was, if you can do this in like a whistle-stop tour. Now, we know that Jake Thackeray was widely referred to as the Yorkshire Chonsonnier. And we know that

He was a, his great musical hero was George Brasson, the French singer-songwriter, that he loved Brel, the Belgian performer. But Andrew, who else do you hear in there, in those songs? Well, I think Mike Harding said, you know, that he genuinely thinks that Jake is one of the greatest songwriters this country's ever produced. And he compared him to Richard Thompson and thinks that if he'd have carried on, they're the kind of songs that he, he, he, he would have written.

Whereas I spoke to Ralph McTell and Ralph basically said after one of their London gigs that they played together, they sat up late and Ralph got out his Randy Newman albums for Jake. And he said that, you know, Jake sat there with his jaw on his knees, each song that he heard and was particularly in love with the album Good Old Boys. And he could, you know, and he could see. It was like, and Ralph said it was such a delight to see how instantly these two writers connected in this album. And he sort of right, quite rightly says, beneath their exquisite observations, you, you have this deep love of humanity and its frailties. And I think

kind of those two are kind of who I think we should compare Jake Thackeray to. I mean, obviously, we, um, you, we were talking, um, yesterday about how John Lennon was a huge fan. And, you know, and Jake Thackeray put together a tape for him that they, he took to Rishi Keshe and that basically Paul McCartney said that, oh my God, which is the song that is happiness is a warm gun. Happiness is a warm gun. Yeah,

that he, you know, and that is John Lennon's Jake Thackeray song, you know. And it's kind of, it's astonishing when you actually kind of realize those points of connection. And I think it's odd growing up at a time when he was compared to,

you know, As I say, no disrespect to Pamirs and Jasper Carrot. But when you realise he actually is closer to someone like Richard Thompson or Randy Newman. This sounds like such a performer could not exist. But if I were to say to you, Jake Thackeray is a cross between John Cooper Clark, Andrew, which is somebody you mentioned. On the one hand and on the other, Noel Coward, to whom he was often compared. Yes. Imagine such a thing.

A cross between Noel Coward. and John Cooper Clark. But wait a minute, that's Jake Thackeray. With a susson of Joyce Grenfell there. Joyce Grenfell and Brasson. Yeah, John Cooper Clarks, you never see a nipple in the Daily Express. Is a Jake Thackerayson, isn't it? It is.

And, you know, and you can, and, you know, vice versa, you can see kind of how Johnny Clark could deliver that sort of fast patter, alliterative lyric of Jake's. I love Paul in your wonderful book Beware of the Bull you make a very carefully worded point that Jake liked playing

universities. Could you expand on that for us? Why did he like playing universities? I think it's because there was the connection with an audience which would get what his songs were about and there is that

it's that connection because these are he's immensely literary songwriter, isn't he? That he ever got a songwriter who never patronizes his audience. If you need to use a dictionary to understand a Jake Thackeru song, you use a dictionary.

It's where I met the word apoplexy for the first time. Who else would... But he uses these words for comic effect, for precision effect as well. So I think it was that that it was a student audience, it was young,

able to, intellectual that's not meant to connect with what he was doing. Well, needless to say as well, he was a fierce and passionate reader, Jake Thackeray. And when he himself wrote his personal statement to apply to read English at Hatfield College at the University of Durham, you reproduce it here, Paul, and Beware of the Bull. I'll just read you. This is a 17-year-old writing this. I take great pleasure in contemporary novels.

Evelyn Waugh, Ronald Knox, E. Forster, and H.E. B. and find the American humorists Thurber, Runyon and Benchley delightful. Jane Austen and Dickens, I value highly. Keats, Dunn and Dylan Thomas are in the main my poetical preferences. His reading of

French literature includes Flaubert, Victor Hugo, Paul Valen and Merrimet. The impression given is of a serious-minded and well-read young man. You know, that's pretty good for 17. It's pretty good, particularly for somebody who wasn't

studying French in the sixth form as well. Wow. Is that true? Wow, that's incredible. See, a quick study, a quick study. I'd like to counterpoint that, if I may, with a letter from the Daily Mail in 1977, which may go some way to explaining why Jake, despite being on television, national television, found it hard to connect with a bigger audience. And I'm going to let listeners into a secret here. Paul's never heard this letter. So I'm actually thrilled beyond measure to watch his face while I read this out loud. So this was in the letter section of TV mail in 1977. I wonder how many viewers find that's life a wonderfully entertaining program until Jake Thackeray starts to perform. He never smiles and just drones miserably. Why let him ruin an

excellent program. There you go. Brilliant. Someone on a different planet. Yeah. Or just the Lancashire divide, it might have been. Yeah. The northernness

is important, isn't it? As you said earlier, Andy, you know, and it's sort of, he is devoutly northern, devoutly Yorkshire. And it is a barrier for some people, or certainly was then. It's for my mum. And Jake's attitude to it to television

is akin to that of his great friend, Alex Glasgow, another great songwriter from the North East. And Alex Glasgow once had an argument with a makeup girl, or they were trying to trim his hair to make him look like his photo in the Radio

Times. And he said, I am not a commodity. And I think Jake's refusal to to grin and be the, you know, as he would put it, the performing dick. The performing dick, yes, he, well, he, we don't, we can't say, can we, the extent to which he aspired to be an artist, but we can say that he felt he had become a turn and therefore that, that was very difficult for him to sustain as a career, presumably. I think it was, and I think it, I think he felt,

utterly uncomfortable in being in that particular role. And on the one hand, Jake was a fantasist, but at the same time he despised sham and he's despised control and managed situations. So I think he, which is why, of course, the freewheeling style of his stage show and going into small clubs and connecting with audiences and the whole thing being a genuine connection with people,

he loathed being in a TV studio where it was controlled and managed. It also results, I think, into when he's no longer performing and he gets the chance to take some advertising money from due looks and refuses to do it, refuses to bow to capitalism as a kind of staunch socialist. At a point where it would have saved the family home, am I right in thinking? That's right. So, yes, and the family were begging him to, and he, of course, in his writing and his prose writing in the Yorkshire Post, he writes a piece. about this. And here we have his lived experience.

This thing was disaster, turning down the money, the opportunity of doing this commissioned work. And the family did lose the home, but he was not going to compromise. Artists say, everybody, that's been the lesson of these 10 years of backlisted. They're poor agents, in fact, as Andrew once minted. So Paul, why don't you read us something from the unsung-royal?

which is this collection of Jake's prose writing. The songwriting dried up, but he got a column in the Catholic Herald, is that right? And the Yorkshire Post in the late 80s, early 90s? Yes, at 1989, he got the gig with the Yorkshire Post, and he carried on with them for five years, and then went to the Catholic Herald for a couple of years after that. And his writing, one of the revelations for me doing the research for the biography,

was I have all of Jake's Yorkshire Post columns and it was, I hadn't seen them before and it was a revelation to see what a great writer he was and it was the same, yeah, you get a real flavour of him as a person from his writing and it was as though he saw, it was clear that he was determined to master this form, having mastered the song form. So perhaps this is, if I share with you,

this is from a piece he did in 1992 about I'm called memories of the leader of the pack. The remembrance of things passed. The sudden flooding of the mind with overpowering memories of childhood. Most people get this one time or other. I got it last Friday morning as I was rootling through an old drawer, looking for the pair of dude pearl cufflinks that Auntie Betty bought me for my 21st. And there, under an ancient hanky, after all these,

years was the old boy, a lone group of plated leather thong, fast asleep in a corner. In total, vivid, instant detail, a piece of living childhood whooshed through me. It is always a trivial thing that turns on the powerful tap. With Marcel Proust, it was a Madeleine. With me, it was a woggle. I was instantly an entirely enveloped by the forgotten sound. Tounds, tastes emotions of Monday nights in our house in the 50s. The thump on the ironing board as the red kerchief and the green jersey were immaculately uncreased. The spitting on the polish for the mirror-like boots. The soaping and toothpaste, the chink of six penny worth of subs in the pocket of the short grey trousers.

The grip of the braces, the nip of the garters on the long wool socks. Then there was the last minute search for the elusive woggle. Allah rescher do woggle per do. Marvelous. Thank you so much. Can we just praise the grip of the braces, the nip of the garters? Beautiful. It is. I've got to interview his editor at the Yorkshire Post, Robert Cockcroft,

whose name regularly appears as fantasy characters in Jake's writing. Robert had a music degree, and he said what he loved about Jake's prose was it was so musical is you can hear that, can't you, in those words? Yeah. I can also hear, though, the cadences of chanson in there as well. You know, the phrase you just used, Una, you know, Thackeray builds up his, not just his performance style, but his style of writing lyrics from listening to chanson, post-war French chanson, brasse, brel, etc.

And you can sort of hear that kind of delight in the running on of a line. You hear it in the songs, you hear it in the half rhymes that break up the songs, you hear it in the extra beats that are put in. And you could hear it right there. It's like, it's like, as you say, Paul, the musicality of the prose is the equal of the prose within the music. It's a great example of it's all one song. You know, it's coming from the same well of creating.

Yes, and he goes on, if I may, in this piece, he then talks about archaels. and she was a big bonnie prop forward of a girl and to us gleaming chaps she was the mystery of women she was the fragrance of puberty and I caught a whiff of it again last Friday morning from the old sock drawer and so it goes on but it's just this joy of language

and of creating this image of this woman and all these boys lining up in a game supposedly to get past Arceola, but actually they want to hurl themselves at her. And of course, she's wise to young Wolverines and chucks them off and throws them back and knocks them out. It's a great piece of a... Prop forward to sex critics, yeah.

Okay, I would just like to read the words of my favourite Jake Thackeray song. It's one of the last songs he wrote, I think, Paul. It's called The Remembrance. And every year, since I went on social media, like a fool, about 15 years. years ago. On November the 11th, I always post this song and it always receives a terrific reception from people who either remember it or have never heard it before. And in fact, Una, you thought you recognised it, as it turned out, from me relentlessly posting it on social

media. Yeah, I thought I'd heard a cover maybe from Chumbabwamber or somebody like that, but it turned out to be me stalking you on social media. Yeah, just me banging on about it. Yeah. Anyway, I won't sing it. Anything like that, I just want to read the words because I would just like to emphasize the extent to which I think this is amongst the greatest, saddest, anti-war lyrics ever written.

If you hear it with the melody, it's even more poignant. But just as a standalone piece of work, there's only four stand-down. of this. But I think it's a really remarkable song. Anyway, here we go. The Remembrance, Jake Thackeray. Remember the bands and the grand parades, the flags, the banners, the fine cockades, and how we all looked up to see the king upon the balcony, who told us we were young and brave, we'd never become the foreigner's slave. If the foreigner comes off best, he said, you'll be better off dead. This was a couple of weeks before we got killed in the war. Remember the drums and the trumpets played when we set sail on the Great Crusade,

and how we all looked up to see the clergyman on the key, who told us we were grand and good to fight for God as good men should. If the enemy comes off best, he said, you'll be better off dead, and this was a couple of days before we got killed in the war. Remember the night before the raid, when the guns began the cannonade, and how we all looked up to see the captain of the company who told us we were bold and strong, let fame and glory spur us on.

If the enemy comes off best, he said, you'll be better off dead. This was a couple of hours before we were killed in the war. Remember the shock of the ambuscade, remember the terrible fusillade, and how we all looked up to see the curious face of the enemy, who was young and shabby and seemed to be about as foreign as you or me.

I never did catch what the poor sod said when he made sure we were dead. This was a couple of shakes before. We got killed in the war. Goodness me. No, I'm not supposed to move myself. I have moved myself. That's a remarkable lyric.

I think if he had never written anything else, his reputation would sit on that one. It's just extraordinary. But also look, Paul and Andrew, cannonade, ambuscade, fuselade. There's that crossword puzzle solving things still at work, right? He manages him to encapsulate homozyliad in the space of four stanzas.

That idea of being joined by the common humanity at the very end. It's Iliad book 24 and it's just, yeah, I think it's an utterly extraordinary piece of writing. And I had the curious experience when I saw him performing live, you would get audiences because they had been pre-programmed to laugh, who would laugh on the first verse. And then there's this moment of, oh, gosh, that, yeah, and clearly it was not intended for that.

But it's, I mean, Jake wouldn't give people a warning. He wouldn't say, don't laugh at this one. It's not a funny. It's just get to see what you think. But it's at the heart of so much. much of his writing, that idea of humanity, his love of humanity and common humanity of the poor sods. There's that song that he performs.

It's not on one of the LPs, but he performed it on Braden's week, maybe on TV. It's on one of the DVDs you put out. The prisoner, oh, yes. You can feel both audience and performer, for that matter, become overwhelmed by the intensity of the song. That's a, that's a dark, dark song. Do you know who he reminds me? Or this just occurred to me while we're talking, reminds me of Philip Lovkin for all sorts of reasons. Yeah. You know, social realist from the north, has a bit of a drink problem, becomes a perfectionist, decides that there's not much point carrying on.

But also, begins with the comic line, ends with the majestic euphoric line, you know, ends with a, Enter the line that just is, is nobody could reach that line. And yet the opening line is something throwaway, crude and comic. You're absolutely right. It's totally Philip Larkin. It's Larkin meets Coulard, meets Thompson, meets Cooper Clark, meets Brassons, yeah. Yeah, just the particularity of the couple of shakes at the end, you know? Yeah.

It could have been a couple of breaths. It could have been a couple of sex, but it's not. a couple of shakes. It's vernacular. It's that beautiful intersection between the universality of the Iliad and this man from that background in this moment. And that's perfect.

Paul, Paul, how would Jake, who wrote a song about a dog called Ulysses, how would he feel about being compared to the classics? What would he say to you now, if he could hear you say that? Oh, he would say, oh, don't be ridiculous. No, I just write. I just write dog rule.

He had, he was utterly, I think he took pride in some of his songs. We know from his wife Sheila that he was proud of the bull, but he was dismissive of so much of the writing. There was this very, the unease he felt about being successful and being lauded in front of an audience was one thing. And an unease with taking pride in what he wrote. So, yeah, he would.

I mean, there might be a little bit of him that would be pleased, but he certainly wouldn't say that. No, he would dismiss it. And Jake, remember, it's all for the greater glory of God. Well, that's right. Admajoram. There, gratia. Why couldn't he find a niche, this Yorkshire-Sonsigné Jesuits and poets?

Why couldn't? Why couldn't? It's incredible he got on that's life in the first place. Anyway, listen, that's where we must. leave things. This has been a wonderful, deeply enjoyable conversation. Many thanks to Paul and to Nadine and to Andrew for joining us for this whistle-stop tour of Jake Thackeray's life and work and to our producer Nikki Birch for gesticulating wildly but encouragingly from the gallery. Paul's books, CDs and DVDs are available from the usual places, but most easily and profitably

via paulthompsonmusic.com.uk. If you want backlisted show notes with clips, links and suggestions for further reading for this episode and the previous 255, please visit our website at backlisted.fm. If you want to buy the books discussed on this or any of our other shows, visit our shop at bookshop.org and choose backlisted as your bookshop. and a huge thank you to our patrons. We couldn't do this without you. Yes, thank you so much for your support and for sticking with us.

But before we go, Paul, is there anything you would like to add about Jake Thackeray that we didn't get a chance to get to in the show? I think I would simply say to encourage people to go out and tread on a path that not that many people tread these days. seek out his music, seek out his prose writing as well. I think that Jake Thackeray is a lost national treasure, and I think that we should celebrate his songs and his writing as a part of our cultural tradition that we cherish,

and that's all I would have to say. Here, here. Here, sir. Here, Andrew, is there anything you would like to add that we didn't get to, the show. I tried to interview Jake for Mojo in 2000. And I got a phone number for a pub. And the call was directed to the pub.

And apparently Jake was in the pub. But Jake refused to come to the phone and would not count that's an interview with Mojo. But one of my favorite songs is a song about the pub. It's called The Black Swan. and there's always been a melancholy that ran through Jake's songs, a beautiful poetic melancholy. And because his, you know, his later years, many of his later years were lived out in that pub.

I'd just like to read a little bit from the lyrics about the pub, the Black Swan, if that's okay. And this can I before? Yes, absolutely. And Paul, is this one of his earlier songs? Yes, he wrote it about 66, 67, so yeah. Yeah. Incredible. He decides he's going to start writing songs.

And this is what he comes up with. Down at the Black Swan, we'll go sing our love song. We'll sit, we'll booze, we've got nothing to lose. We've lost it all. Lost it all. Down at the Black Swan, we'll drink hard, we'll drink strong, drink deep, drink long, drink our heads off, drink on. Now that she's gone, now she's gone.

Give us another pint, one more pint, landlord of your very, very best bitter beer. We'll be here all night. We're on a bender, we're tanking up, we don't care, we don't go home tonight. There's nobody there. Oh, bravo. Well, he's the Leeds Betchaemen as well. There we are. Listen, thanks very much for listening, everybody.

Thank you, Una, Andrew Paul. as Paul says, hunt down, seek out, look for and listen to Jake Thackeray. And we'll see you next time. Thanks, everybody. Bye. Bye. Bye. Wait a minute, patrons.