JAKKO M JAKSZYK

If Jakko Jakszyk’s music career ever ended, he’d make a great impressionist. An hour-long conversation about his fantastic new autobiography, Who’s The Boy With The Lovely Hair?, sees him mimicking everyone from Sir Richard Attenborough to Michael Jackson, both of whom are among the dozens of gobsmacking cameos in the book. It tells the twin stories of his journey from teenage prog fan to latterday member of King Crimson, as well as the moving, sometimes frustrating saga of his attempt to track down the woman who gave him up for adoption as a child. Not for nothing is it subtitled ‘The Unlikely Memoir Of Jakko M Jakszyk.’.
What made you want to write an autobiography?
I think it was finally discovering my father after 60-odd years of thinking about it, and this mad journey to get there. The musical story and the family story are bizarrely connected: it’s the whole sliding doors thing. Had my mother not had me adopted, would I have ended up in King Crimson? I might have ended up in America in some fucking country and western band.
Becoming a musician seemed to be third on the list of things you wanted to do, after football and acting.
They all seemed equally deluded, but being in King Crimson was the most ludicrous of all. I gave up on football after I stood at the side of the pitch for ages as a substitute and then they dragged me on for 10 minutes. Instead of going, “I’ll try for another team”, I just thought, “All right, that avenue’s closed.” And then I joined the National Youth Theatre, and we did all these amazing productions. But the final straw was when I got a lift to an audition from this girl I knew. She wasn’t going to audition, but they gave her a job and not me. I was unbelievably arrogant back then.
Whether it was with your late-70s art-rock band, 64 Spoons, or as a solo artist in the 80s, mainstream success seemed out of reach. How frustrating was that?
Chiswick Records thought, “We need to sign something that’s going to be commercial”, and they foolishly thought it was me. But they gave me free rein to experiment and do loads of mad stuff, which you just wouldn’t be able to do these days. I did once get a rave review in NME for a single I did called Dangerous Dreams [released in 1983 on Stiff]. Dave Robinson [famously mouthy Stiff founder] said, “The trouble with you, Jakko, is that you’re unfashionably heterosexual. Maybe you could hang out in [London gay club] Heaven. You don’t have to get off with anybody, just be seen there.”
There’s a fantastic anecdote about meeting Michael Jackson in a studio in LA in the late 80s while he was recording Bad…
I’d become friends with [musician/producer] Larry Williams and he invited me down. Michael Jackson was there, and he was being very quiet and deferential. At one point, I was sitting in this alcove at the back of the control room and he came over and started asking about my shoes. I ended up explaining what winklepickers were, which was surreal. He asked me where I got them from and I said, “Shellys on Oxford Street.” And then I said, “The best thing is, they’re really cheap.” Which is the stupidest fucking thing you could say to someone who has sold 57 million records!
The book’s parallel story sees you tracking down your birth parents. How hard was it to revisit that aspect of your life?
I grew up knowing that I was adopted. The house I grew up in was empty, there were no siblings, my dad beat me quite severely, I heard him talking about me as if he wished I wasn’t there. There were moments...