Former King Crimson guitarist/vocalist Jakko Jakszyk’s first solo album in five years, Son Of Glen, is a companion piece of sorts to his acclaimed 2024 autobiography Who’s The Boy With The Lovely Hair?, recording the adoptee’s attempts to track down his birth parents.
He began working on the record after co-producing his partner and fellow musician Louise Patricia Crane’s 2024 album Netherworld. “After King Crimson ended in 2021, there was a kind of inertia,” he says. “I’d written the book, but I’d lost confidence musically somehow; like, ‘Who the fuck am I now?’ Louise built me back up, saying, ‘No, you can do all sorts of stuff.’”
The album’s eight tracks range from the reflective Somewhere Between Then And Now and the Celtic-infused instrumental The Road To Ballina to the epic, 10-minute title track.
“It’s definitely the proggiest thing I’ve done,” he says of the latter. “But I didn’t want to just write a ‘prog’ album – I let whatever come out of my head come out.”
The title Son Of Glen is a reference to Glen Tripp, his biological father, a former US airman who met his birth mother, Peggy Curran, while stationed in Ireland. Lyrically, the song plays like a conversation between Jakszyk and Tripp.
“It came from Louise – she pointed out the parallel of my dad falling in love with this dark-haired Irish singer, and then me doing the same all these years later, which genuinely hadn’t occurred to me until that point,” he says.
“It’s this idea of, ‘Has he been watching over me from a distance? Has he seen me make all these ridiculous mistakes? Has he been somehow nudging me?’”
As well as Crane, the album also features appearances from ex-King Crimson drummer Gavin Harrison and Marillion counterpart Ian Mosley, with Jakszyk’s son Django on bass. The track How Did I Let You Get So Old includes a posthumous appearance from Jakszyk’s adoptive Polish-born father, Norbert, with whom the musician had a complicated relationship.
His voice was taken from tapes recorded for The Road To Ballina, a documentary he made for Radio 3 in 1996. “We flew my dad back to Poland, and went to these places we hoped would trigger memories.
“We went to his old town, and we went to Auschwitz. I recorded hours of conversation, stuff he would never have said in England. These are snatches of those conversations on the track.”
Even without a tour on the horizon, Jakszyk remains busy enough. He’s finishing the audiobook version of Who’s The Boy With The Lovely Hair? and he’s planning an expanded reissue of A Scarcity Of Miracles, his 2011 album with King Crimson’s Robert Fripp and Mel Collins.
“It’s not just a remixed version,” he says. “There’s different improvised musical bits, and there are tracks where I’ve added overdubs and real drums. There’s plenty of stuff that wasn’t on the original album.”
Additionally, he’s revisiting music King Crimson wrote during his tenure that was played in concert but never recorded. “We’re having a meeting about it in a couple of weeks to discuss it further.
“It features all the members of the most recent line-up of King Crimson, including Robert. I don’t know what it will end up being, but I’ve enjoyed doing it immensely.”
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