#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

#1: Lah-Di-Dah

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