I first met Jakko in the late 1970s when he fronted a band with the enigmatic name 64 Spoons. Who’s The Boy With The Lovely Hair? The Unlikely Memoir Of Jakko M. Jakszyk (Kingmaker Publishing) tells the story of his childhood, his quest for his birth parents, his musical journey and how he met and worked with his musical heroes – up to and including (spoiler alert) Robert Fripp and joining King Crimson as vocalist and second guitarist. I have to declare an interest. I have Jakko’s solo albums, the 64 Spoons album, and the King Crimson triple CD collection Live in Vienna on which he sings. The narrative takes some unexpected twists and opens with a conversation with his American stepbrother, which I read twice with incredulity before moving into the book itself. Having said all that, there is some social commentary about growing up in the Watford area in the 1960s and having adoptive parents neither of whom had English as their first language. His father was Polish and his mother French. The revelation close to the end of the book reveals the source of its title and I won’t spoil that for you. The book was published in late 2024 and I read it over four days between Christmas and New Year. Jakko is a fine storyteller, he makes you smile, he makes you laugh out loud, he makes your eyebrows raise in surprise and in passages, brings a lump to your throat. There is an impending CD to accompany the book called Son Of Glen with music that I believe that Jakko was inspired to write while researching and writing the book. Ian Ashleigh (Jun 2025)
Heartbreak Is The National Anthem: How Taylor Swift Reinvented Pop Music by Rob Sheffield (Harper Collins) in which the long-time Rolling Stone staffer provides a droll, spirited fan’s eye view of Taylor’s dizzying rise to global supremacy. And what a ride it is. In Heartbreak Is The National Anthem we follow her career from preternaturally assured adolescent, personally delivering home demos to the country music bigwigs along Nashville’s renowned Music Row, via feuds, mass fandom and eventually the gargantuan success – or “Taypocalypse” – of the world-conquering Eras Tour. Memorably encapsulating her appeal to legions of young admirers (think, Sheffield tells us, “The Beatles times Motown times Bruce Springsteen times Britney times strawberry ice cream …”), he deploys an Anglophile 80s pop prism – there are namechecks for Morrissey, Paul Morley and the first Depeche Mode LP – to frame Swift’s work, reminding us of the mind-blowingly high standards that she’s maintained throughout an Imperial Phase that’s now, remarkably, approaching a full two decades. Matt Tomiak (May 2025)
