Category: Entertainment

Yot was around 1999 when Neil Gaiman first heard someone else mention the name Jake Thackray. Growing up in East Grinstead, West Sussex, in the 60s and 70s, the British-born author and Sandman creator had perceived Thackray as a vague voice on the peripheries of childhood, this lugubrious wooly jumpered raptor of a man, his voice a foggy, owlish hoot steeped in dark Yorkshire bitter, who doled out droll topical songs on such lighthearted TV consumer affairs shows as Braden’s Week and That’s Life!.

“I was exactly the wrong age to like or appreciate him,” Gaiman told author and Thackray fan Paul Thompson in 2019. “Then, 20 years ago, I was talking to [singer-songwriter] Thea Gilmore about great songwriters and she just happened to mention [a song by Thackray called] The Castleford Ladies Magic Circle.” Gaiman ordered a Thackray CD from Amazon and, as he puts it, it was “all of a sudden in love”.

What Gaiman fell for was the utter uniqueness of Thackray’s voice. “The intelligence, the absolute naked emotion,” he continued. “That willingness both to be funny and sad. Once you’ve heard enough of his songs from him you realize there was nobody else like him.

Since his death in 2002, at the age of 64, his TV and singing career long since over, the cult of Jake Thackray has remained a small, steady and exclusive one. And while famous fans such as Gaiman, Gilmore, Alex Turner and Cerys Matthews have all been vocal in their praise for this northern balladeer and his soft-sung alliterative narratives of lovelorn boozers, lonely widows and spurned country girls, the man himself has remained something of an enigma.

That’s about to change with the publication of the first Thackray biography, Beware of the Bull: The Enigmatic Genius of Jake Thackray. Co-authored by committed fans Thompson and John Watterson, it’s a book that seeks to unravel the mysteries surrounding Thackray’s life. These range from his poor, Catholic upbringing in Kirkstall with a violent father to his formative years teaching in France and traveling Europe, his meteoric rise as a TV performer and recording artist in the 60s and 70s and, ultimately, his gradual rejection of it all. in the 80s.

“The ultimate problem was that Jake didn’t fit,” says Thompson. “He’d spent four years in a Catholic seminary and then from 1960, aged 22, he lived and worked in France and Algeria. He wrote poetry, fell in love, and was influenced by the French singer-poets, or chansonniers, most significantly Georges Brassens who wrote elegant songs about the outcast, the underdog and the poor. By the time Jake returned to England in 1963, he’d found his inspiration for him to become a poet-songwriter. But England in 1963 wasn’t really a home for a chansonnier.”

Instead, Jake became a teacher at the Intake county secondary school in Bramley, Leeds, where he taught himself to play a nylon-strung guitar (like Brassens), wrote musicals and started performing in the local pubs. It was there, in 1965, that he was spotted by BBC scout Pamela Howe. Within three months of his first radio recording, Thackray landed a slot on regional TV and, through the persistence of Howe and the BBC’s head of radio light entertainment, Roy Rich, scored an EMI recording contract and made his first national TV appearance, on the highbrow 1968 BBC sketch show Beryl Reid Says Good Evening.

“The first time I saw Jake was on TV,” says the singer Ralph McTell, who would befriend Thackray on the 70s folk circuit. “He was extraordinary looking. His appearance of him stopped you in your tracks before you even heard his voice of him. His playing of him, his punctuation, his timing of him, the way he phrased, had nothing to do with American or British folk music. He had his own way of doing everything. Anywhere else he might have been treasured for that. Here he was compared to Pam Ayres.”

McTell believes that, in another world, Thackray would have been celebrated in the cafes and concert halls of France and Belgium, where they understood his clever, poetic European wordplay: “Instead he became part of the 70s pub circuit, up next after a bunch of sea shanties. The audience wouldn’t always be able to absorb the nuance, the subtlety. Jake ended up liking that pub circuit world but intellectually he was miles ahead of it.”

“I genuinely regard him as one of the greatest songwriters this country has ever produced,” says friend and fellow folk singer Mike Harding. “He’s up there with Richard Thompson for me.” Harding singles out songs such as The Castleford Ladies Magic Circle (about a group of suburban witches “frantically dancing naked for Beelzebub” while “their husbands potter at snooker down the club”) and The Hair of the Widow of Bridlington (about a free- living woman punished by her neighbors “for she was wild as blackbirds are and they were in a cage”). “These could be feminist songs,” says Harding. The singer also cites another more contentious song, On Again! OnAgain! in which the song’s protagonist, a self-confessed misogynist, complains about certain women’s propensity to talk at length (“I love breasts and arms and ankles, elbows, knees / It’s the tongue, the tongue, the tongue on a woman that spoils the job for me”).

Despite the singer’s protest that he was writing about “the folly of incontinence in conversation … not a generalization about women”, this lyrical, fluid masterclass in the Thackray style drew accusations of misogyny that stuck. One of the theories that Thompson puts forward in the book is that Thackray was writing in character, in the manner of an English Randy Newman. It’s a theory strengthened by a story of McTell’s: “After one London gig we sat up late and I dug out my Randy Newman albums. Jake sat there with his jaw dropping at each song. I particularly remember the effect [1974 deep south concept album] Good Old Boys had. It was such a buzz to see how instantly these two writers connected. Beneath [their] exquisite observations lie a deep love of humanity and its frailties.”

One question Thompson set himself to solve while writing the book is why, when Thackray was writing at his absolute peak and most Newmanesque in the late 70s and early 80s, did his output and live appearances start to diminish?

“His greatest studio album was his swan song,” Thompson says of 1977’s On Again! OnAgain! “TV work dried up because formats were changing but also his audience was getting smaller because that 70s folk era was in a process of change. He also found himself trapped by a job he didn’t enjoy any more.”

Thompson also cites Thackray’s increasing lack of self-esteem, which, he believes, could relate to his violent upbringing or his faith. Towards the end of his life the singer grew increasingly reliant on drink to banish anxiety.

“I was drinking with him one night and he talked about how his father was a fucking awful bully,” says Harding. “Then he told me: ‘I’m an alcoholic.’ I said: ‘You’re fucking joking.’ We were all fairly heavy drinkers but it turns out when Jake went to go to the bar to get a round in he’d also have two large ones off the top shelf. So if you’re drinking five pints, he’s up to 10 vodkas. I hid drink all over the house. I was poleaxed.”

Gradually, Thackray stopped turning up to gigs, and bookings started to dry up, along with the money. “He was hopeless with money,” says McTell. “I sometimes wonder if it was the recklessness of a lifestyle he was denied, breaking out from that religious encumbrance.”

“Jake was also an ardent socialist, anti-capitalist,” says Thompson. “He refused point blank to do a commercial for Dulux paint, even in the depths of his financial problems when his family were begging him to do it.”

By the 90s, Thackray had separated from his wife, Sheila, and lost the family home. I have moved into rented accommodation in a small flat above a greengrocer’s on Monmouth high street.

In the hands of other biographers, these final years might read like tragedy, but it is to Thompson and Watterson’s credit that they focus on the positives, including the columns Thackray wrote for the Yorkshire Post and The Catholic Herald, his involvement with a group of committed fans planning a Jake Thackray musical, Sister Josephine Kicks the Habit, and the discovery of a cache of never publicly performed Thackray lyrics. Regardless, the final few chapters, up to his death from him from a heart attack on Christmas Eve, 2002, make for difficult reading.

“There was undoubtedly a sadness writing the book,” says Thompson, “but it’s a life that deserves to be celebrated without denying the sadness, and a chance to shine a light on a remarkable songwriter.”

The light-shining continues later in the year with the November release of a two-disc DVD, Jake Thackray at the BBC, plus a “Jakefest” in Scarborough in October, and the reissue of his long-deleted 1981 live album, Jake Thackray and Songs.

“I think Jake would find it amusing and intriguing that his songs are being valued and enjoyed again,” says McTell. “You always wanted to tell him, ‘They’re brilliant. You know they’re good. I know how hard you’ve worked on them. They’re little treasures, all of them!’ But he wouldn’t have any of that.”

yesSome people are so famous for so long that they become meshed in all our lives. Raymond Briggs, who died on Tuesday, was one of those people. Briggs illustrated his first book by him, Ruth Manning-Sanders’s Peter and the Piskies: Cornish Folk and Fairy Tales, 64 years ago, and quickly set about creating a string of classic books, many shot through with his trademark melancholy by him. Fungus the Bogeyman reveled in a quiet British worldliness; When the Wind Blows was terrifying enough to scar an entire generation emotionally, and Ethel & Ernest managed to convey the small hopes and thwarted ambitions of mid-20th century life in a way that would put to shame many important authors covering the same period.

And yet, despite this breathtaking output, The Snowman looks set to be Briggs’s defining work. First published in 1978, The Snowman was a wordless picture book that Briggs saw as a counterpoint to the murk of Fungus, something he designed as “clean, pleasant, fresh and wordless and quick”.

However, when you think of The Snowman, you probably don’t think of the book. This is because the animated TV adaptation instantly became an indelible part of British culture. The Snowman was first shown by Channel 4 on Boxing Day 1982, and was such a success that it was nominated for an Oscar. It is a testament to the power of the film that this fact – one that most animated shorts would brag about loudly – ​​has been largely forgotten. Instead, we collectively clutched The Snowman to our hearts with such intensity that it is almost impossible to imagine life without it.

It’s a work of incredible beauty, hand-drawn and animated in such a way that it feels as if it could slip through your fingers at any moment. Lines blur and shapes shift. The textures of the characters’ clothes dance slowly. During a motorbike sequence, trees fly at the camera so quickly they become abstract. At times, it can feel hallucinogenic.

And then there is the song. Howard Blake’s Walking in the Air is a pure and weightless daydream. It’s the only point in the film where we hear a human voice, and it accompanies a spectacular sequence where a snowman and a boy fly to the north pole.

I’m old enough to remember The Snowman from the start, in the early 1980s when my mum invariably made a big deal about the family watching it together. Over the years, it became a Christmas tradition, holding steady through the weird phases when it was introduced by David Bowie and Mel Smith. And with repeated viewing comes familiarity and then, sadly, boredom. Something I’ve noticed about people my age is that The Snowman became such a part of our culture that it was easy to mock. The sincerity of Walking in the Air, especially, made it an easy target for ridicule.

Everyone comes back to it at the end, however. This is down to The Snowman’s secret weapon: the precision with which it nails the low-humming sadness of Christmas. The snowman and boy have the adventure of a lifetime but, the next morning, the snowman has melted. In the final shot, the boy stands over a mound of slush, attempting to process his grief from him. There’s no reassurance, no promise of a return. Everything you love will one day leave you. merry christmas

This element of The Snowman gives it the unerring ability to change with you as you age. Watching it with my children now, with my mum no longer with us, The Snowman somehow means even more to me than when I was a child. This why we’ll still be watching it 50 years from now.

The Snowman changed Christmas television, too. Every year we are inundated with animated picture-book adaptations where the melancholy is ramped up. Sometimes they work (Julia Donaldson’s Stick Man, about a stick who aches with loneliness), and sometimes less so (Michael Rosen’s We’re Going on a Bear Hunt, which was overlaid with a truckload of imported faux-sincerity), but they can all be traced directly back to The Snowman.

We might be in the grip of a scorching hot August, but don’t be surprised if Channel 4 screens The Snowman in the next few days to commemorate all of Raymond Briggs’s remarkable achievements. And don’t be surprised if a ton of people watch it.

A Victorian family is facing homelessness in a matter of weeks after the rental property they’ve called home for the past 17 years was sold out from under them.

Janelle Bruce has developed scabs across her face from stress-picking at it and her daughter Mackenzie may be forced to drop out of school instead of preparing for her high school finals exams.

“We feel terrible. Like, the stress level is just unbelievable,” Janelle told Today.

READMORE: Richard Wilkins breaks down remembering Olivia Newton-John

“We’ve been looking at houses for a couple of months and we’ve applied for over a hundred.”

Janelle said Mackenzie is in the middle of Year 12 and the stress is affecting her as she misses classes and breaks down in tears at work.

“We’re not sleeping. It’s affecting our health,” she said.

“I have scabs on my face because when I stress, I pick and my doctor said my blood pressure has gone up even though I’m on medication. It’s just horrible.”

Mackenzie told Today she is lucky her mum tries to shield her from the pressure and stress of having to find a new rental and pack their home up, but a conversation with one of her teachers made her realize how dire the family’s situation is.

READMORE: ‘How on Earth have we reached this point?’

“I realized it was really bad when I was talking to one of my teachers and they said to me ‘I have a tent in my shed that we don’t use anymore and if you need it we can just give it to you’ and that’s when it really hit home,” she said.

The Bruce family are not the first Today has reported on who are facing homelessness or moving into a tent in winter – but the reality of this happening for them is sinking in.

“The thought of going into a tent, we don’t even know where to go. Where are you allowed to pitch a tent?” Janelle said.

“We don’t have heating and it gets to sometimes minus 5C here overnight. What do you do with yourself during the day, where do you shower? Things like this, we have no idea to be honest.”

Salvation Army Major Brendan Nottle told Today it isn’t just on state or federal governments to help the many families who are in trouble.

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“Secure, safe, affordable housing should be a fundamental human right for all Australians and yet we’re hearing time and time and time again that people not only can’t afford the housing but there’s no housing available for them to access,” he said.

“We can sit back and say governments aren’t doing enough but the reality is – we cannot spend our way out of this issue.

“This has to be a priority and as a community, as a society – it needs to be top of mind for all of us.

“As a community, all of us have a contribution to make – businesses, small and large, not for profits, unions.”

If you too are struggling with the national rental crisis, you can get helpful information from the Salvation Army

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