Stevie Jackson

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.