JAKKO M JAKSZYK

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.

- 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 M Jakszyk.’.

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.

Becoming a musician seemed to be third on the list of things you wanted to do, after football and acting.

They all seemed equally deluded, but being in King Crimson was the most ludicrous of all. I gave up on football after I stood at the side of the pitch for ages as a substitute and then they dragged me on for 10 minutes. Instead of going, “I’ll try for another team”, I just thought, “All right, that avenue’s closed.” And then I joined the National Youth Theatre, and we did all these amazing productions. But the final straw was when I got a lift to an audition from this girl I knew. She wasn’t going to audition, but they gave her a job and not me. I was unbelievably arrogant back then.