Beware of the Bull: The Enigmatic Genius of Jake Thackray

Product Information

Alongside this comedic gem with its zinger of a punchline, songs such as Go Little Swale and Old Molly Metcalfe showcase Thackray’s endearing talent for evoking the beautiful Yorkshire landscape and the people who inhabit it. Unbegrenzter Zugriff auf enthaltene Hörbücher und Audible Originals von deinen Lieblingsstars sowie neuen Talenten. From this point onwards Thackray became, in earnest, a peripatetic folk singer (for want of a better phrase) who travelled extensively around the British Isles performing his songs in a multitude of clubs, pubs, and other types of venues. My family and I really appreciate your approach to Dad's work and hugely enjoy watching your performances, which, whilst in your own entertaining stage style, are very reminiscent of Jake - particularly in your timing and rhythm.

His playing, his punctuation, his timing, the way he phrased, had nothing to do with American or British folk music. Ralph McTell said of Thackray’s increasingly frequent performance absences, “I think it was a sign of things coming to a head. He’d spent four years in a Catholic seminary and then from 1960, aged 22, he lived and worked in France and Algeria. His disarming honesty in this respect caused him to steal the show on one episode of Braden’s Week when, having twice fluffed his guitar intro, he announced, “…and that is a cock-up,” at which the audience roared with laughter. Increasingly, it seems, he grew tired of having to yet again perform his greatest hits at venues considerable distances away.The first time I saw Jake was on TV,” says the singer Ralph McTell, who would befriend Thackray on the 70s folk circuit. Curiously enough, it was written around the time of punk rock, but its message is more genuinely anarchistic than anything the Sex Pistols ever came up with. It’s one of the dominant themes in Paul Thompson and John Watterson’s Beware of the Bull, an excellent new biography of the Yorkshire chansonnier. Ultimately Brassens’ influence would, as the authors put it, make Thackray into “a Yorkshire chansonnier, creating and performing a body of work rooted in the north country of England, and yet whose poetic approach and musical style were recognisable to anyone familiar with the Frenchman.

That man would have swum a river on fire to get to a gig before, because he had made a promise to do it . Thankfully, as Thackray would have preferred (being surely embarrassed at the very notion of a biography), there are no weighty codas or unnecessary prologues that describe the state of the nation or Thackray’s far-reaching impact on musicians today.On 14 November 2017, on the same stage, John Watterson, along with bass player extraordinaire Hugh Bradley, plus special guests Rudolf Rocker, celebrate that concert which took place 44 years ago. A book leaves our collection of over seven million titles and begins a new chapter every two seconds, enabling more goods to be reused. Two rarities graced the performance at the NCEM, The Ferryboat, extolling the charms of a public house, and a scabrous number about National Service that was aired, reluctantly, once in 1986. He first came to national attention in Britain through popular television programmes like Braden’s Weekly and That’s Life and it’s strange now to think of such an idiosyncratic talent in such a mainstream context.