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Glaswegian born singer and multi-instrumentalist
Stevie Jackson is best known as the lead guitarist for indie pop institution
Belle & Sebastian.
Jackson was playing with Glasgow indie rockers the Moondials when he first met
B&S founder
Stuart Murdoch in the early 90's. Both
Jackson and
Murdoch were frequent solo performers in their town's relatively small open mike night scene, and
Murdoch had to go to great lengths to woo
Jackson away from his stable gig with the Moondials and convince him to join the barely conceptualized
Belle & Sebastian. The Moondials had issued a single on Electric Honey Records, the label that would release the initial run of
Belle & Sebastian's debut album
Tigermilk. After leaving the Moondials for full-time
B&S membership,
Jackson was dubbed "Stevie Reverb" for his penchant for reverb-heavy,
Velvet Underground-inspired lead guitar work. While singing and playing guitar since the band's beginning, it wasn't until "Seymour Stein" on third album
The Boy with the Arab Strap that
Jackson got a chance to contribute as a songwriter and lead vocalist. All of their records to follow would feature at least one
Jackson-penned tune, and his
Zombies-inflected "Jonathan David" was featured as a single in 2001.
Jackson would also regularly co-write songs with
Murdoch. When Scottish noise-pop legends
the Vaselines re-formed in 2006,
Jackson played guitar with them occasionally on various tours. In his downtime,
Jackson also contributed in a sporadic fashion to , Russian Red, Roy Moller, The Bill Wells Trio and was also known to occasionally do random gigs at the same types of open mics in Glasgow where he and
Murdoch first met. In 2011,
Jackson completed his first solo album after years as in the role of the side-man. (I Can't Get No) Stevie Jackson featured twelve songs with
Jackson on lead vocals and playing most of the instruments, assisted at times by his
Belle & Sebastian cohorts. The album was first released online in late 2011 and saw widescale physical release in summer of 2012. Later that year
Jackson contributed a version of
George McCrae's "Rock Your Baby" to the WFMU fund-raising compilation Super Hits of the Seventies. ~ Fred Thomas