The record company, unsure of how the public would respond to Thackray's lugubrious voice accompanied only by his guitar, added orchestral arrangements by Roger Webb and Geoff Love to many of the songs.

They include unreleased solo (vocal and guitar) versions of all the songs that are recorded with orchestral arrangements on the album, with the exception of "The Black Swan".

However, they write that other songs lose the “charming intimacy” of Thackray's original demos, and call "Jumble Sale" a “brash and busy rumba”.

The rich accompaniment meant that Thackray had to overdub his vocals, which felt unnatural to him as a solo folk singer who would commonly use a flexible tempo in his songs for dramatic or comedic effect.

Future albums would feature only Thackray's voice with little more than upright bass and guitar accompaniment, allowing him a less metrically rigid and more expressive vocal approach.