#3: The Vicar’s Missus

It’s not because I am lubricious; I am religiously inclined

Despite the definite article of the title, this non-album track – first released on EMI’s posthumous Jake in a Box collection, and thus a late addition to the Thackray canon – doesn’t follow other pen portraits (‘The Kirkstall Road Girl‘; ‘The Hair of the Widow of Bridlington’) in describing one woman in particular. Instead, women in the song — as in the deeply ambiguous ‘Miss World‘ — are largely interchangeable: ‘any old vicar’s missus will do.’ Unlike that topical piece, however, male lechery is not the prime target of the comedy. The singer repeatedly stresses there is no sexual implication (‘One little peck, nothing improper’) to his desires, even as the threatening tone of ‘one within my clutches’ leads logically to the ensuing physical violence. As such, the song functions not as a character study not of the wife of a vicar, but of the kind of man who pursues an unusual predilection, with little apparent respect for female agency.

Sympathy for the figure comes across in the first-person telling, the delusive rationalisations (‘It’s not a thing I’d do again). As in my previous post, on ‘I Stayed Off Work Today‘, Jake pits a somewhat naive character in the grip of an erotic obsession (‘I can’t get it from my mind’) against the full force of judicial authority. Jake’s version of the violent ‘Isabella‘ marks the limits of the obsessive theme; among others, ‘The Brigadier‘ explores the exercise of petty power. Here, however, it would be hard to argue for the subject’s innocence, despite his plaintive – plaintiff, even – appeal.

The singer has been building a ‘collection’ of apparently chaste encounters with the spouses of men from ‘most professions’ (Jake commonly defines people in shorthand by their professional roles). ‘Grocers’ are anomalous – largely, the men targeted for this campaign of cuckolding serve as functionaries of the state or of the institutions of financial control: tax inspectors, rent collectors, sergeants, inspectors. There is therefore an element of class war enacted upon the female body. Though the character pleads that he would never deliberately damage the vicar’s ‘property’ (perhaps the greatest threat to a male participant in a capitalist social system), the ‘collection’ reference makes clear that these kisses are imagined as a form of theft, a demonstration of oneupmanship. Nameless female figures are similarly co-opted as collateral for an attack on wealthy men, in response to economic envy, in many of the songs of Thackray fan Jarvis Cocker:

You see you should take me seriously
Very seriously indeed
‘Cos I’ve been sleeping with your wife for the past sixteen weeks
Smoking your cigarettes
Drinking your brandy
Messing up the bed you chose together
And in all that time
I just wanted you to come home unexpectedly one afternoon
And catch us at it in the front room

You see I spy for a living
and I specialise in revenge
On taking the things I know will cause you pain

(I Spy)

The particularly sexual threat present in the above is nonetheless mostly absent from ‘The Vicar’s Missus’, whose singer maintains at least a facade of innocence under the cloak of being ‘religiously inclined’. Framing the desire for a kiss as a pursuit of ‘Holy Mother Church’ might suggest an impulse towards desecration. This would seem to underlie the curious treatment of the ‘bishop’s consort’ – elsewhere, Thackray frequently makes no moral distinction between marital and pre-marital sex, but the ’embrace’ described here is dismissed as irrelevant for not being extra-marital. If what is really desired is the sin of adultery, then this feels like either an attack on clerical institutions, or a willed act of self-damnation.

Again, Jake’s Catholicism complicates matters. ‘Holy Mother Church’ seems to be a markedly Roman formulation; Catholic priests, like the Jesuits by whom he was educated, do not marry. Furthermore, ‘all such vicars and their ladies’, in an astonishingly broad statement, are described as ending up in Hell: the Anglican Communion has its problems, but it’s rare for Jake Thackray to summon the rhetoric of the Spanish Inquisition. ‘Hell or Hades’, however, implies a fundamental uncertainty about what religious system is governing the moral universe of this song. The simplest response, perhaps, would be to see the character’s quest as an expression of essential fallenness: in his dogged attachment to earthly love, albeit in a very niche form, the singer will find ‘the answer to [his] prayer’ in an inevitable damnation from which not even the servants of God will escape. That’s pretty strong stuff!

The theologian St Augustine does chastise mankind for the improper ordering of love, for fixing ‘our love on the creature, instead of on thee, the Creator.’ In being ‘religiously inclined’, the singer might perhaps claim to be loving earthly beauty (though physical attraction is not even mentioned) as a conduit to the divine:

But that’s the most charitable sense I can make out of it, and wouldn’t account for why everyone in the song is condemned to the fiery furnace. Do you have any other theories – psychological or theological – about what’s driving this peculiar character? Or does he just want to kiss a vicar’s missus, after all?

Playlist

#2: I Stayed Off Work Today

“A chain about your feet,” he says, “Now do as others do.”

As well as one of his loveliest guitar lines, ‘I Stayed Off Work Today‘ is constructed around a formal trick distinctive of Jake Thackray. Each verse and chorus sees a comic incident or situation escalated up the chain of command, climbing the echelons of mid-century British culture from a pilfering butcher to a devious angel. In each case, the higher authority, civil or religious, from whom answers or succour are sought is seen to be just as hollow and exploitative as the one beneath them. Let down by all social classes and estates (these pen portraits of roles inadequately fulfilled are in Jake’s most Chaucerian vein), the singer repeats the simple fact of love as a mantra of transcendent resistance. Or in the late Leonard Cohen’s words, ‘the only engine of survival‘.

Similar formal patterns appear in ‘The Statues‘ — where the speaker is disbelieved by first a constable, then an inspector, then a judge — and the song which is to some extent its mirror image, ‘Scallywag‘, with its final turn to ‘the local countess’. ‘The Remembrance‘ seems to offer the same treatment in reverse, narrowing its focus from a royal send-off down to an intimate confrontation with a young foreign soldier. I’d welcome suggestions, both of other examples and of where this strategy might come from: traditional English ballads? Or are there songs by Brassens and Brel which work the same way?

‘I Stayed Off Work Today’ begins with an act of truancy: the relationship it traces thus begins and ends in a rejection of social norms (‘I do not do as others do’). The singer is frank about premarital sex, and woke enough to do the shopping, but soon manifests a notable naivety. In each verse, he is equally capable of being surprised by the general mendacity of the world – ‘I’ll be blowed! … I was done’. Whether by temperament or by choice, he is never able to ‘Open up [his] eyes’ and be more alert next time; instead, he takes all his setbacks with an acquiescent grace. He is in fact, so focused on his relationship to the detriment of his physical and mental wellbeing as to inspire laughter from each of his tormentors (‘if he knew’), all of whom clearly understand their place in the social hierarchy far better than our hapless hero.

Two of the three following punishments also spring directly from the singer’s attempts to get back to his sweetheart: he tries to buy a flower, risks his life by escaping military service, and finally accepts death seemingly without a second thought. This could, I suppose, read as a sexist snicker at the lengths to which men will go for women; in a song as tender as this, I think it’s more of a political assault on the folly of putting trust in any of our flawed institutions. These institutions are inherently hostile (‘they can do me … as they do’) and encourage conformity even if it leads to killing:

“With a rifle in your hand,” he says,
“You’ll do as everyone would.”

The impossible demands they place on ordinary people lead to absurdity, a catch-22 situation which exposes the limits of this loaded system:

“With a chain about your feet,” he says,
“You’ll do as others do.
A chain about your feet,” he says,
“Now do as others do.”

If the singer’s heroic escape over the barracks wall is one token of his unbroken spirit, some of his diction suggests other forms of resistance: ‘poxy’, ‘ginnel’, ‘piffling’ and grammatical variance (‘I signs an I.O.U.’) rub up against the standardising practices of ‘the tricky old juridical’ with his ‘pettifoggery’ and ‘the rascally episcopal’. The length of many of the lines, the sheer wordiness of the song, might also suggest a kind of creative bucking of their strictures. The alternation between short and long lines is another beautiful touch, and Jake’s assonance – ‘pussyfooting butcherman’, ‘dangerous old angelface’ – is, as ever, in full force. There is much more to be said about this song – why, for instance, does the angel take the singer’s beloved ‘up the stairs’? When did she die? Is this an act of celestial sexual violence, or is it implied that she has been in some way complicit all along? – but I’ll conclude today with some brief thoughts on the religious context.

Although we might expect Jake to rail against the hypocrisies of civic life, it’s perhaps more striking to see this lifelong Catholic so systematically critique the church. One might imagine ‘I’ll be damned’ to carry more weight from the lips of a believer, but here even the apparent salvation of holy water inspires blasphemy: the fate of his soul is caught up in this zero-sum game. The bishop is a rascal, offering yet another false token (after the ‘dud’ shilling and the cheap meat passed off as prime cuts), and the conversion experience leads only to further subjugation: “Now a proper Christian, so down upon your knees.” If holy water is a trick and hell is only a boilerhouse for gullible fools, subject to the whim of capricious cherubs with no apparent theological justification, then this is a fearsomely critical view of faith, or at least its agents. Many other Thackray songs conclude with a turn towards heaven as the ultimate arbiter (‘Our Dog‘, to pick one, covered here by John Watterson), but there is no such comfort here. Instead, there is only venality that goes (almost) all the way to the top, and as in ‘Lah-di-Dah‘, earthly love – however fragile – is the only belief worth counting on.

PS: Something I didn’t discuss as much in the post is the economic side – the character precipitates this series of terrible events by refusing, for a single day, to sell his labour. He is scammed into paying over the odds for false goods, joins the army because of his desperate poverty (and does so using a coin which is later revealed to be invalid), and is dependent on the bishop visiting him in prison to have his most basic needs met. As much as anything else, the singer is kept in a state of complete financial subjugation, which leads him into situations of physical risk, with no form of social safety net. He could, of course, have saved himself by joining the side of the financial exploiters (‘Learn to do as I did’), but his refusal to do so means he is always on the losing side of the system. In this, and the series of picaresque mishaps it entails (most of them including jail time) he bears some similarity to the Little Fellow in Charlie Chaplin’s workplace satire, ‘Modern Times’. 

Playlist