Jake Thackray - Revival in Interest

Revival in Interest

In May 2002 a group of fans formed the Jake Thackray Project with the intention of making more of Thackray's work available to the public. With Thackray's cooperation, the project team, led by record producer David Harris, received permission from EMI to produce a double CD of 42 songs not on any then-available release, limited to 200 copies, which was released in November 2002 with cover art by Bill Tidy. After Thackray's death the following month EMI consented to a further edition of 100 copies. This revival of interest led to the release of two mass market CDs the following year: The Very Best of Jake Thackray on EMI, and The Jake Thackray Collection on HMV. The Jake Thackray Project went on to release a series of remastered live recordings. A musical written by Barnsley-born poet Ian McMillan based on Thackray's songs and their characters, Sister Josephine Kicks the Habit, premiered in 2005 and toured the north of England. A rewrite by Alan Plater was due to tour the UK in 2007, but is on hold following the death of executive producer Ian Watson.

2006 saw a major retrospective. EMI released an expanded, 29-song double CD edition of Live Performance, and Jake in a Box, a 4-CD box set containing Thackray's four studio albums and six singles in their entirety, plus 25 unused tracks recorded in the Last Will and Testament sessions in 1967, eleven songs recorded for the abandoned album in 1970, and a handful of other rarities. Comedian and writer Victor Lewis-Smith produced a television documentary, Jake on the Box, for the BBC.

In an interview on the BBC's Culture Show (broadcast 8 August 2009), Alex Turner of Arctic Monkeys cited Thackray as an influence, and in another 2009 interview with XM Radio Turner cited Thackray when specifically discussing their song entitled "Cornerstone." Similarly the Courteeners' songwriter Liam Fray cites Thackray as influence on the group's MySpace page.