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Jack Jones: From Pete Doherty’s guitarist to star of the spoken word




Swansea-born Jack Jones’ considerable talent as a poet/spoken word artist was given the seal of approval by one Pete Doherty, who ‘discovered’ him online – and the rest is history.

Having also established himself as a guitar slinger of note fronting Welsh alternative rockers Trampolene and performing in Doherty’s band the Puta Madres, Jones released his debut, self-titled spoken word solo album on 20 September.

Jack Jones. Picture: Daniel Quesada
Jack Jones. Picture: Daniel Quesada

He will be bringing his headline solo tour to Cambridge in early November.

Jack’s well-written lyrics tackle many of today’s burning issues: mental health, drug addiction, mortality, and the demands of technology. There’s also plenty of joy and hope on there.

The man himself spoke to the Cambridge Independent from Croydon, where he was in the middle of a tour of record stores, designed to promote the album.

“It’s been nice getting to see the fans’ reaction as they hear the record for the first time,” says the friendly 32-year-old, “and getting to speak to them and give them a hug and that kind of stuff.”

Listening to the album (my favourite tracks were Breathe, Peaches Out of Reach and Let Down), some of the songs made me laugh out loud and reminded me a bit of Welsh comedy rap collective, Goldie Lookin Chain.

“Oh yes, I remember those – Newport lads,” says Jack, who was the subject of a BBC Radio 4 documentary, titled Another Swansea Poet, in 2019.

“I love them… I was basically listening to loads of stuff, but mainly The Streets and a lot of electronica, like Chemical Brothers and Daft Punk – that kind of dubby, ‘naughty’ sound.

“We were listening to a lot of that when we were making the record.”

On moving from being a rock guitarist to making a spoken word album, Jack says: “I saw this interview with David Bowie and he said: ‘An artist is probably in the right place when he’s taking his foot out of the puddle that he’s usually in and planning to dip it into some unknown waters’.

“I just put myself in a situation that I wasn’t really sure I could even come up with anything in, but being out of your comfort zone, I suppose, is a little bit of the job of being an artist.

“So I put the guitar down and looked at my diaries and tried to work on them and chip them away into some sort of songs, basically.”

Jack has written poetry and kept a diary for many years.

“I’ve always been a more melodic kind of traditional songwriter before this album, I suppose,” he says, “and this time we were working with beats and synths and all these kind of modern things, which was fascinating for me because I’m a bit of a technophobe, to be honest.

“I do have a phone, which is probably unlucky for everyone else I know, but other than that I don’t have a computer or anything.”

Jack Jones’ album cover
Jack Jones’ album cover

Jack’s poetry has been described as “exceptional” by famed English poet and comedian John Cooper Clarke.

“I wrote a lot [of poetry] when I was in school,” remembers Jack, “and then I showed it to one of my teachers and they desecrated it with red pen, so I never wrote again.

“I started again when I was like probably late teens, 20 or something, so it’s probably 10 years ago, or something like that, I guess. Maybe a bit more…

“But I’ve always written a diary, probably since I was seven, so I don’t know if that counts. It’s not particularly poetry per se, but I’ve always written.

“It’s been the only way I’ve managed to cope with the world around me, I think.”

Jack, a great admirer of fellow Welsh writer and poet Dylan Thomas, started learning the guitar after his time at one particular school came to an abrupt end.

“When I was about 13 years old, I got expelled from school for jumping on my art teacher’s car screaming that I wanted to be a woman, for a fiver,” he recalls, “and I got the fiver but my mother took it off me and gave it to the local church.

“That Christmas, there was a weird-shaped present under the Christmas tree and it was from my dad, who I wasn’t living with at the time, and it said on it ‘I heard school isn’t going so well, it may be time to think of an alternative career’. I opened it and it was a guitar.

“And I just kind of got obsessed with it – I don’t know if it was because my dad bought it for me, or because I saw one of my friends playing guitar and he managed to get a girlfriend. Probably a mixture of both...

“I got obsessed pretty quickly and that was it for me. It was quite young to decide what I wanted to be, I think – and I haven’t changed really since I was 13, in that respect.

“I’ve changed in many other ways, but not in knowing what I wanted to do.”

Jack became acquainted with Pete Doherty, whose band The Libertines recently performed in Cambridge, purely by chance.

“Well I was writing little poetry videos and putting little poetry videos online,” he explains, “and they had about 100 views – no views at all – and then I got invited to a Libertines show out of the blue.

“And I was sitting on the kerb outside the show and someone tapped me on the shoulder and it’s Pete Doherty, and out of the 100 views they had on YouTube, 99 of them were him – and he knew all the poems off by heart. So it was really bizarre…

“I think a photographer, Roger Sargent, had sent the videos to him. He was doing photos for my band and had taken lots of photos of Pete, and then I got invited to be The Libertines’ tour poet.

“And then after that, Pete saw me playing guitar and he poached me for his band. I was very happy to be his guitarist and I’d be there for him in a heartbeat if he ever needed me.”

Despite the rap elements in his music, Jack sees himself as more of a “wordsmith”.

“Someone who just plays with words and works at words, the way a plumber works at piping,” he says. “I just see that as my work.”

Jack Jones. Picture: Simon Sarin
Jack Jones. Picture: Simon Sarin

Jack Jones will be appearing at The Six Six Bar in Cambridge on Friday, 8 November. Tickets, priced £8.96, are available from thesixsixbars.com.



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