I’ve got to tell the kids who Hendrix was!
What drives gravel voiced Jack L today?
When I spoke to Jack Lukeman last week he was ‘under the weather, I sound a bit Darth Vader today’. He spoke in a voice even deeper than the one that has made his name. Subsequently the sickness that struck down the Athy man meant he had to re-schedule some dates promoting his excellent new album, Magic Days.
In a 25-year career characterised by high quality control, the latest release is among his very best. Songs such as Diamond Daze and the tender Till I Saw You best display his trademark sonorous vocal style while Sky News Blues has a political undertow.
He says: ‘Sky News Blues is based on a lot of things but I was thinking of that old joke by the comedian Bill Hicks who talks about listening to the news and then looks out of the window at a beautiful world and wonders where all this bad stuff is happening. Statistically, we live in safer times than we’ve ever done.
‘Anyway, I don’t think the human brain is biologically capable of hearing about all the woes of the world every minute of the day. What is there… seven billion people in the world? We instantaneously hear the horrific things that are happening to many of them and it is a constant shock to our systems.
‘But as that Chinese blessing that sounds like a curse says: “May you live in interesting times.”’
The 43-year-old singer first came to prominence in the 1990s and simplified his name to Jack L in partial homage to one of his musical idols Jacques Brel. Like the brilliant Belgian songwriter, Lukeman knows how to tell a good story in the form of a song. The album’s opening track, The King Of Soho is a case in point.
‘It’s about a guy who went to prison rather than squealing to the police about the other guys in the gang who he had done a robbery with,’ he says.
‘As he is tunnelling out of the jail, he is recalling how they called him the King of Soho. The money that he has hidden away is down by the river, which is always a good metaphor in a song. This is going to be his Shangri-La.
‘When I wrote it, I had Mack The Knife and Jacques Brel’s Jackie in my mind. He’s one of those braggadocious guys. I could have made it in to a rap really.’
Another track, Deeper Down The Rabbit Hole has also become a live favourite. The track is by his own admission one of the most up tempo songs he has ever recorded. He describes it as like ‘the Sugar Plum Fairy on speed’.
‘I’m a country boy at heart,’ he says. ‘There is a magical beauty to a misty morning in the country. When I was writing that song, I was thinking of being up and about early around Athy when it is lovely but eerie and I’d think to myself, “I might not drift too near the fairy rings out in the fields this morning… never know what I might see.”’
Jack received some of the best reviews of his recent career for his last album, The 27 Club, and its resultant tour in 2012. He recorded a selection of songs made famous by artists who died at the age of 27 including Jim Morrison, Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix and of course Amy Winehouse and Kurt Cobain.
‘It wasn’t in any sense glorifying people for dying young,’ he insists. ‘When I thought about all those artists from Robert Johnson who died in 1938 right up to Amy Winehouse, I got to thinking these are some of my favourite artists and the songs they left behind are now immortal like them. It’s bit like a history of popular music of the past 80 years; those songs that are like our classical music for this era. There are kids walking around now who don’t know The Doors, who don’t know Hendrix so we’ve got to teach them.’
I suggest to him that sadly he could make a sort of a sequel called Black 16 reflecting the large number of artists lost to us last year alone.
He says. ‘There was just so many… I was a massive Leonard Cohen fan and Bowie, but Prince… he was like an alien from another planet. He could, write, produce, dance. He was just born to be a legend. Prince dying was like Han Solo dying in the Phantom Menace. Oh, in case you haven’t seen it, I’m sorry for the spoiler.’
Jack L is on tour until April. See www.jacklukeman.com
‘I might not drift too near the fairy rings out in the field... never know what I may find’