Despite the singer’s protest that he was writing about “the folly of incontinence in conversation … not a generalisation about women”, this lyrical, fluid masterclass in the Thackray style drew accusations of misogyny that stuck. 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. What is written throughout the book like a message in a stick of Brighton rock is Thackray’s total unsuitability for fame.

Jake Thackray at the BBC makes available on DVD, for the first time, fifty-six performances , covering Jake’s career from 1968 to 1985. Ernest Thackray’s run-in with a local big-wig over a traffic incident during the course of his duties led to his demotion (according to family legend), which had a financial impact on the family and seemingly forever made Jake resentful of establishment figures blinded by their self-importance -- hence Thackray`s later warning to his audience to beware the nonsense (he used a less polite word) spouted by figures whom he describes only by their honorific titles. His songs, with all their verbal wit, are about puncturing pomposity in all its forms; hence the title.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. This biography doesn't shirk the unbelievable sadness of the ending, but it makes damn sure that we learn about the triumphs on the way. A book that made me feel sadness whilst also being uplifted because this book is the tribute he deserved. More television and radio work followed alongside his live appearances until, in 1972, a third studio album appeared entitled Bantam Cock.

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. 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.As the author Neil Gaiman said of this latter composition, “One of the things I love most in the song is the incredible approval of these Women’s Institute types going off and consorting with Satan, and it’s beautiful and hilarious, but it’s also human, because it’s not about beautiful young women in the forest, having sex, it’s about lovely retired ladies. With regards to ‘One Of Them’ I think you can hold the two ideas in your head at the same time: that he can be applauded for attempting a progressive take on the grisly prejudice-based humour prevalent in the 1970s and that a firmer line between a denotative content and the manner in which it's expressed could have been drawn. As a regular on Tickertape, a children’s TV show, Thackray was once more expected to perform songs every week, although ones more or less related to the content of each programme, so that his ability to come up with a steady stream of bespoke compositions was tested to the limit.

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. It’s the story of a charismatic, complex and self-effacing man who remained an enigma even to his friends. Regardless, the final few chapters, up to his death from a heart attack on Christmas Eve, 2002, make for difficult reading.Ralph McTell said of Thackray’s increasingly frequent performance absences, “I think it was a sign of things coming to a head. By 1999 Thackray had vanished from public view, not least because he had slipped on a muddy bank whilst out walking and, in the process, broken both wrists, putting paid to guitar-playing for the foreseeable future. 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.

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. With Thackray's star firmly in the ascendant, by 1969 it was time for another album of songs, this time entitled Jake’s Progress. I would have loved to know more about why he did what he did, or more accurately why he didn’t do what he could have done, but then that is what he didn’t let on.Thackray was uncomfortable with the fame that had been thrust upon him almost accidentally; it was the wrong sort of success. Above all, the book makes a very convincing case that the high-stakes use of the word 'genius' in the title is fully justified.