INTRO
JAKKO M JAKSZYK
Q & A
King Crimson’s vocalist and guitarist shares anecdotes from his revealing new autobiography, discusses his lost career as a footballer and reveals what he said when he met the former king of pop.
Words: Dave Everley
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 MJakszyk.’.
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.