One of Japan's greatest classic murder mysteries, introducing their best loved detective, translated into English for the first time. Thackray would finally turn up at the respective venue weeks later, full of apologies, and offer to perform for free. That’s about to change with the publication of the first Thackray biography, Beware of the Bull: The Enigmatic Genius of Jake Thackray. The man who conjured the glorious and total “unrepenting, undeterred” independence of a widow, gave a voice to elderly women and single women, and even wrote tenderly of the infant breastfeeding “as on an endless sea” is also he who penned the series of unsightly blottings in that bulging lyrical copybook.

The set list includes several Thackray classics performed at the 1973 concert along with a number of ‘lost’ songs written by Thackray but never released. This playfully eerie song describes how, in a candlelit upstairs room, with broomsticks from Woolworth's and unbeknownst to their husbands, various respectable ladies engage in pagan rituals. His life revolved around Monmouth and its pubs, where he could still have the locals in fits of laughter with his tall tales. Friends and admirers in the media tried to contact him about new projects, but he proved impossible to get hold of or didn’t turn up for meetings, in spite of signs in the early 2000s that his work was being rediscovered by a whole new generation of fans.The book covers his whole life from his Catholic upbringing, university days, his years living and teaching in France where he became aware of George Brassens and other French singers of chansons, to his days as a performer in folk clubs and on television, and is generously supplied with photographs. a reportedly unloving father; the roots put down in Leeds then Monmouth vs the fly-by-night hurly-burly of being a “performing dick”, as he so loved to describe himself; the desire to play for free to fifteen people in a pub vs trying every possible excuse to avoid playing a well-paying 1,500-seat venue; the songs that he characterised as “the holy and the horrid”; the way he was so of his time, yet also so far removed. From the dwindling audience numbers, to those accusations of being stuck in the past, to the growing stage fright (“scared, scared, scared”), to his alcoholism, it is from these sources that a grim augury starts to percolate. Poet, artist, visionary and author of the unofficial English national anthem 'Jerusalem', William Blake is an archetypal misunderstood genius.

The story of Jake’s own life is a truly fascinating one, and the first ever biography, ‘Beware of the Bull – The enigmatic genius of Jake Thackray’ has been written with the full support of the Thackray family and has been received with critical acclaim.

Ernest was a ‘stern and unemotional’ policeman who could be violent when drunk, whilst Molly was a devout Catholic blessed with a dry humour that her son inherited. A fine bundle of paradoxes, Thackray was a man in denial of his own genius and in flight from success: a performer who could command large fees in large theatres but preferred playing in tiny folk clubs or pubs for next to nothing.

The 103 third parties who use cookies on this service do so for their purposes of displaying and measuring personalized ads, generating audience insights, and developing and improving products. His TV breakthrough came in March 1968 on the wonderfully named Beryl Reid Says ‘Good Evening,’ a comedy sketch show vehicle for the celebrated actress, which featured him performing one of his songs each week. And, as any good biography of an artist should, it sent me straight back to the work: that deliciously lugubrious baritone with its impeccably clipped enunciation and those warm, wayward, ribald, humane, touching, irreverent and life-enhancing vignettes replete with the absurd joy of being alive.Though in a performance at the Cambridge Folk Festival he looks magnificent - giant, chiselled, veins popping out of brawny forearms from the exertion of those quicksilver guitar parts - he’s also pouring with sweat, voice occasionally cracking, his fear occasionally revealed by equine whites of eyes. 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. Eventually his financial situation suffered, and with bills unpaid, his house had to be re-mortgaged –although he had been offered fifteen thousand pounds to film a thirty-second commercial for a paint manufacturer, an opportunity that he turned down because of his socialist principles. The footage, most of which hasn’t seen the light of day for half a century, includes rare and previously unreleased songs, and everything that is known to survive in the BBC archives.