69. ‘Tracy Jacks’

On ‘Parklife’. Produced by Stephen Street.

This song has become accepted as being about a civil servant who is a transvestite. But at no point is cross-dressing mentioned. There is, however, a pencil sketch by Graham) next to the lyric of ‘Tracy Jacks’ in the ‘Parklife’ CD booklet, showing a balding man in a floral dress preparing to hit a golf ball. Perhaps this sketch is the culprit.

‘Tracy Jacks’ came to Damon when he was trying to write a ‘name’ song like ‘Davis Watts’ by The Kinks (later covered by The Jam). The first lines he thought of were “he’s a golfing fanatic, but his putt is erratic”. Soon he arrived at the ambiguous name of Tracy Jacks (he spelt it ‘Tracey Jacks’ at the time). For the second verse, in which Jacks runs naked along the beach at Walton On The Naze on the Essex coast, Damon took inspiration from the opening credits of the ‘70s BBC comedy series The Fall And Rise Of Reginald Perrin, in which a bored businessman fakes his own death by leaving his clothes on a beach.

“They fascinate me, all those dead seaside towns on the East coast,” Damon explains. “Walton On The Naze. Frinton (On Sea). They have one guest-house and it’s boarded up. It’s a couple of council estates, a few old houses and the bleak, bleak North Sea. They’re half-places.”

Street adored Graham’s vocal harmonies on ‘Tracy Jacks’ and presumed it would be released as a single. Better still was Alex’s bassline, which everyone agrees is one of his finest. But ‘Tracy Jacks’ is not so much a great song as a compendium of magical, evanescent moments. The watery, ripping keyboard introduction is one, as is the bright guitar chord that follows. The military drumbeats on the “everyday he got closer” sections are ingenious, as is the formal string arrangement at 2.17 (“and then it happened…”) The master-stroke is Graham’s seagull guitar sound (2.29 onwards) expertly manipulating echo and feedback. Even at the fade of this terrific studio-derived track, unusual events are afoot. At 3.50 the Duke String Quartet sound as if they are beginning a different song.