Now we’re agreed that we’re in love…
The first song on his first album, ‘Lah-Di-Dah‘ remains one of Jake Thackray’s best-known compositions. From its opening lines, it establishes a relationship held together by genuine affection: after the singer insists on the couple’s mutual consent, ‘I love you very much’ is the only phrase in the song that’s truly in the present tense. Everything else follows on from this (‘Now … we’ll have to’), is a pledge staked on that initial agreement. The rest of the grammar is either weary or tentative, a response to numbing past experience (‘he always bores me to my boots’) or a promise aimed into a tentative future (‘I’ll try, love’).
Love offers the dream of an escape from performance (‘We won’t have time for such, / Such fancy pantomimes’) – but first, it leads inexorably into it. Before the backstage solitude, the singer has to face the music, embodied literally on the Last Will and Testament recording in the form of the somewhat chintzy Roger Webb Orchestra. Love, then, requires submission, the tamping down not only of rage (‘I’ll stay calm, I’ll play it cool … I won’t flare up’), but of a kind of recalcitrant masculinity, seen elsewhere in ‘Bantam Cock‘, which threatens to tip into the animal: ‘I won’t run amuck when the females chuck / Confetti in my ears’. [NB: Links are to lyrics – recordings of all songs mentioned are in the playlist at the bottom.] Something about this anarchic impulse seems to call for implicit celebration — the song repeatedly teases us with the comic explosion which could, but will not, happen — but even at the start of Thackray’s career we see a virtue in finding external factors to control the baser instincts: ‘cross me heart, love, I’ll keep off the pale ale.’
The performance of social ritual is imagined partly as theatrical display for a middle-class audience to whom the singer feels himself alien, though not inferior, despite their insinuations. This polished exterior is, after all, a mask that keeps slipping: beneath it lie the ‘tetchy uncles’ and the clearly much-mentioned ‘rupture’. A distaste at the ‘fancy-pants’ trappings of bourgeois respectability perhaps lurks behind the voicing of ‘fancy pantomime’. And yet pantomime is a traditionally working-class form of entertainment, praised by Jake’s near-contemporary, Tony Harrison (born in Leeds in 1937), as offering his first introduction to the world of theatre; it is in some ways a homely comparison to reach for, in this world of cricket clubs and forced politeness. Surrounded by superficial ‘eyewash’, in the sense given below by the OED, the singer is also forced to surrender his objections to it, joining in with the bull (as Thackray refuses to do in the song of the same name.)
‘Lah-Di-Dah’ is the first in a long line of Thackray songs where interfering relatives pose problems for young lovers: see ‘The Kiss‘, ‘The Cactus‘ and ‘The Little Black Foal‘, the latter two of which feature on the same album. ‘The Little Black Foal’ also features the older generation talking ‘a load of clap-trap’, and the casual denigration of older women, who are criticised, as here, for talking volubly (‘witters’) and for physical ugliness (‘your gruesome Auntie Susan’, ‘the crabby old batface’) – see here, at the bottom of the page, for a note on gender in Thackray’s work. There are also spades of middle class snootiness, and in ‘Tra-La-La‘, Jake’s French translation of ‘Lah-Di-Dah’ with the aid of Boris Bergman (I believe), the father is even – as in ‘Foal’ – a former Mayor.
Formal features familiar throughout his work are also already present: there is an abrupt juxtaposition of registers (‘I shan’t get shirty when they say I look peculiar’; ‘acquiesce … scabby’), a high density of internal rhyme and sound patterning (‘coo/Susan/cool’, ‘let/tetchy/get’, ‘I’ll smile/invites’, ‘sit/knits/witters’), and a lovely progression of rhymes from ‘esce’ to ‘isce’. The bride’s father’s tediously insists on ‘how he won the war’, and indeed the commemoration of conflict will remain a vexed and contested subject (‘The Remembrance‘, ‘The Cenotaph‘). But for these lovers, at least, when the door closes on this fine-china world it seems that some kind of peace is possible.
Playlist
Gather a Bud or Two for Jake 