As with Tickertape, but this time for the benefit of an adult audience, Thackray was expected to come up with a new song each week, with the added complication that it should be a topical musing on the week’s news, with the occasional selection from his own back catalogue thrown in. He had comic flights of the imagination and dressed them up in lop-sided tunes and song structures and with hilarious world-class word-bending. He was in his mid-twenties before he first picked up a guitar, inspired by hearing French chansonnier Georges Brassens, and a succession of remarkable songs flowed mysteriously out of the aether.

It’s as though a private party is in progress and Jake has been persuaded to sing a couple of songs. His lack of confidence and increasing need of alcohol to keep going would ultimately exclude some of those closest to him. Not, however, that the man himself would have felt at ease with such eulogies or wanted to be mourned as a legendary performer who died too soon, as the defiant lyrics of his first album's title song, The Last Will and Testament of Jake Thackray, demonstrate.The Bull, with mesmerising and exhilarating satirical poetic aplomb, mercilessly skewers authority, the powerful, the church, false idols and celebrity. This was unusual at a time when most musicians first established a local reputation through live appearances before moving on to a larger stage.

Read more about the condition New: A new, unread, unused book in perfect condition with no missing or damaged pages. 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. 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.He had audiences eating out of his hand but was genuinely puzzled why anyone would pay ‘good money’ to see him.

Chronological biographies don't always work, but the fascinating arc of Jake Thackray's life suits the format perfectly, and the parallel insights into changing fashions at the BBC and in the record industry provide constant wider interest.Thackray was uncomfortable with the fame that had been thrust upon him almost accidentally; it was the wrong sort of success. With exclusive access to his personal papers, it includes a wealth of previously unpublished letters, poetry and lyrics, and is illustrated with rare and never-before-seen photographs.

Meanwhile The Hair of the Widow of Bridlington is a tale at once charming, defiant, and edged with melancholy. Beware of the Bull does a good job of showing what would happen if you put a no-bullshit working class Catholic Yorkshireman into a well-heeled, Aqua Velva-d world populated with “rascals”.It was on one of these occasions that Thackray was spotted by a BBC scout who offered him the chance to appear on local radio singing his own compositions.