11. Jackson C. FrankJackson C. Frank
I was through doing a session at the BBC in Edinburgh and afterwards the engineer there said, have you heard this guy before? And I hadn’t, so I went home and listened to him. I had an immediate affinity with this record. It doesn’t sound like anything else that came out at the time, the mid-1960s. It hasn’t aged at all. It opened doors for me in terms of getting into stuff like Davey Graham, Wizz Jones, John Renbourn, and for a while that was all I was listening to. I can’t pick it apart, I’m not musical enough, but I’ve learnt some of his songs by looking at tabs online.
Jackson C Frank’s songs sound intricate but they’re not really. His playing style had quite a big influence on me, because I don’t really stretch that far when I play, I don’t move my hands much up and down the fretboard. The title track’s great – even though I have an aversion to the blues and songs that mention the blues – and the songs just get better from there in. I covered one of them, ‘Just Like Anything’, on Sleight Of Heart, but my favourite is ‘My Name is Carnival’.
Like I said before, I’m not a huge lyric fan. I like lyrics to poke out, to be part of the music, in a poetic way that triggers thoughts and feelings within you, without necessarily reading lines or having stories. And I think this album does that amazingly well. You’ve got no idea what he’s talking about. The guy’s obviously very poetic, and has had a really hard time, and he changes the bad experience into something quite beautiful.
