New Jake Thackray book to be published in August

 

 

I have just learnt from Paul Thompson, cowriter of the excellent Jake Thackray biography Beware of the Bull, that a collection of Thackray's prose will be published by Scratching Shed on 1st August.

 

As the title, The Unsung Writer, suggests, this will offer readers a chance to explore the full scope of his writing and perhaps get a deeper sense of his character than is possible through those artfully constructed songs - or another side of his character, at least.

Skylark

When I think of the Hoagy Carmichael-Johnny Mercer song Skylark it's an unlikely recording which first springs to mind. 

Memory had insisted that it was acapella, which turned out to be wrong when I heard it again recently after a gap of about fifty years.

Either I hadn't known the identity of the group at the time or had forgotten it, even though they were part of the furniture on BBC Radio 2 in the 1980s, cropping up on Benny Green's show or Brian Matthew's Round Midnight, singing softly but not really forcing themselves upon the listener.