After last week’s post featuring Luke Jackson’s Goodbye London and the rather stunning video that accompanies it, my curiosity was piqued enough to seek him out and interrogate him.

Luke was kind enough to indulge me, so here are the results:




1. So Luke, word is you’re leaving London. Where are you going and why?

I started travelling to Canada in the early 90’s and fate took me back there again and again. I emigrated to Toronto unofficially in 1997 but wound up back in London for a spell in 2006. The song was written at the end of that period.

2. It’s probably quite a simplistic view, but I’ve always got the impression that Toronto was like the New York or London of Canada. What would you say are the most notable differences between Toronto and London?

Whenever I look for ways to contrast London with Toronto I always seem to come up short, like I’m comparing chocolate to chicken.

In the broadest terms the differences that strike me are as follows:

People per square mile. There’s so much more space in Toronto. In London I always felt surrounded by people in a way that I don’t here. Life is much more laid back in Toronto. I feel less pressure to work all the time, and perhaps because of that freedom I probably work a lot more. And we have actual seasons in Toronto…you know, really hot in Summer, really cold in Winter…

You can’t beat London for cultural diversity though. I was always spoiled as to what to do on any given evening. Not so here, although the Toronto Fringe is on right now which is brilliant. Also, the quality of the food here’s generally not as good as in London. Not so much the restaurants, but the stuff you buy in the supermarket.

3. And the biggest similarities?

Similarities? They both have an equal number of fantastic people and idiots, they both have beautiful green spaces for me to walk my dog, and you can’t get a decent bite to eat after 10pm in either town.

4. You must have played a lot of gigs while you were in London. What was the most memorable venue you played at?

This is going back almost twenty years…I would have to say the most memorable London venue I played at was the old Marquee club on Charing Cross Road. I was still in school doing my A-Levels but was having a lot of fun playing in a band called Vodka Rubber Legs and when we got booked into the Marquee I couldn’t believe it. It was a club I went to all the time to see my favourite bands. We were opening for a couple of well-known bands and the place was pretty packed. Incidentally we had a song called Hampstead Queen which was a lot of fun to play.

5. Unfortunately the Marquee, in that form at least, is long gone now, are there any other favourite London spots you particularly miss?

Last I looked the Marquee was a hip wine bar called The Moon Under Water. More than anything else I miss the record shops I used to go to. Almost all of them are gone now. The internet pulled the rug out from under them…it’s really sad. And Jade Boulangerie in South End Green. It’s changed hands and names…still looks the same but you can’t get the ham and cheese croissant any more. I cry.

6. Back to the music now. A lot of the lyrics in Goodbye London are very personal and illustrate the complex love/hate relationship most Londoners have with their city, what was the story behind them?

My wife Dora and I are were getting ready to leave London after spending an extended period of time there and I started to get nostalgic about the place. Pretty much everything in the song is just how it happened. I was running out of money, sick of playing in smoky clubs (this was pre-smoking ban) and Dora had insomnia.

I’d just been fined £100 because a CCTV camera had caught the back wheel of my car on the very edge of a zebra crossing when I stopped for one minute at midnight in South End Green to use a bank machine that turned out to be out of order. At least I got a good lyric out of it!

I had to balance the hate with the love though, because I do love the place and I can never stay away for long.

7. The song’s accompanied by a very striking video. Could you tell us a little about that?

I approached Murray with the idea of creating a video that highlighted the bitter-sweet sentiment of the lyric. The only animation reference I gave him was that I had in mind the very frenetic style of animation used in the Rhubarb And Custard cartoons when we were kids.

In terms of content I suggested that some of the video be very literal interpretation of the lyric, but that he should feel free to depart from that at will, which I think he did beautifully.

He came up with the photo/animation idea and drafted a rough storyboard, most of which wound up in the finished piece.

In terms of the techniques, let me quote Murray: “All the stop motion photos were taken around London, and I added the drawn 2-D animation using After Effects.”

8. You’ve gone to a lot of effort to ensure the album has high production values, seeking out Robert Kirby then going to all the way to Sweden to record in an analogue studio with a full backing band including a string section from the Malmo Opera Orchestra. The process must be a lot more involved and expensive than just doing everything digitally as so many artists do today. What made you so determined to do it this way and do you think it paid off?

The entire process of making this album was one of following my intuition.

My philosophy was that so long as I could afford to do something, if an option was there I would explore it.

I was invited to record at the studio in Sweden by my friends there. That was an incredible opportunity. Some of the ballads called for string arrangements and I’d had some contact with Robert Kirby before (when I mounted an ambitious Nick Drake tribute night a few years earlier), so the option to get in touch with him to write the string parts was there, and I took it. I never thought he’d say yes, but I’m an “if you don’t ask you don’t get” kind of person, so I asked. Robert’s string parts called for nine players, and Christoffer (my producer) frequently uses the young players from Malmo’s Opera Orchestra.

So yes, I went to a lot of trouble to make a great-sounding record, but it wasn’t as expensive as you might imagine, and the result was a record I could never have produced working at home with a digital set-up.

Do I think it paid off? Absolutely. I set out to make a great record that would reflect who I was as an artist at that moment, that would present my songs in the best possible way and that would stand the test of time. I’m pretty certain I accomplished that.

I had no commercial goals when I made this record. I knew I’d probably wind up releasing it on my own label with no support, and considering I’ve done everything on my own, I’ve reached a lot of people. The music industry is imploding on itself right now. It’s like a slow-motion train wreck. People have stopped buying music. It’s not the time to be putting out independent records, and it’s certainly not the time to be judging your self-worth as an artist by how much money your music generates.

About Luke Jackson…and then some

A seven-year email correspondence between Magnus Börjeson and Luke Jackson, a long time fan of two of the Swede’s former bands: Beagle and Favorita, culminated in their meeting in Paris in 2006 where Magnus was playing with The Cardigans. By the end of the weekend they were firm friends and Luke accepted an invitation to Sweden for the Midsummer holiday. These celebrations were taking place at producer, multi-instrumentalist, former member of Roxette and founding member of Brainpool Christoffer Lundquist’s all-analogue Aerosol Grey Machine recording studio outside Malmö.

As Luke boarded his flight back to London after a great, music-filled, long weekend in Sweden he considered the open invitation to come back and record. It was six years since the release of his last album, ‘Momentum’, and Luke knew that his new songs were the best he’d ever written.

‘WHY NOT make an album with my favourite musicians on the planet?’ he thought.

He returned to Sweden in 2008 and set to work in the studio with Magnus on bass and Christoffer’s Brainpool band mate Jens Jansson on drums. The four musicians worked quickly and spontaneously to record half a dozen songs, including ‘Come Tomorrow’ which Luke had begun writing the day before leaving for Sweden. An excited Luke returned to London and speculatively sent rough mixes of the songs to renowned London-based string arranger Robert Kirby (Nick Drake, Elvis Costello, John Cale etc). To Luke’s delight and surprise, Kirby loved the songs and offered to write orchestrations for the album and accompany Luke to Sweden to conduct the recording sessions with players from Malmö’s Opera Orchestra.

Luke managed to bring together two of his most beloved musical worlds: the pop sensibilities of his friends in Sweden, and the distinctive eloquence of Robert Kirby’s string arrangements. It is the collision of these two worlds which makes ‘…And Then Some’ so compelling. Densely layered guitars and vocal harmonies fuse with sweeping string lines, none of which ever draw the ear too far from what lies at the heart of Luke’s music…gorgeous, expressive, unpretentious songs born of the trials and tribulations of a life lived to the fullest.

…And Then Some also comes in an audiophile LP edition, half-speed mastered by the legendary Stan Ricker (Joe’s Garage, Brothers In Arms, and the mobile fidelity edition of Dark Side Of The Moon), pressed on 180-gram vinyl in a beautiful gate fold sleeve.

There is also a 45rpm 7″ featuring Come Tomorrow b/w A Little Voice which comes with a hidden download and a DVD featuring the video for Come Tomorrow and studio footage of the sessions for A Little Voice.

For more details visit http://www.lukejackson.com or http://www.myspace.com/luke_jackson

You can get downloads from http://lukejackson.bandcamp.com/ or http://tinyurl.com/lukeitunes

Or buy the CD from http://cdbaby.com/cd/lukejackson2 (US), http://tinyurl.com/lukeatpopsicle, (Canada) or http://tinyurl.com/lukefastcut (Japan)

Related posts:

1. Goodbye London, I won’t forget that you were always good to me