Jack

At nineteen, Anthony Reynolds launched Jack alongside fellow Cardiff native Matthew Scott on guitar, the pair bonded by a mutual taste for Nick Cave’s bleak wit and Charles Bukowski’s liquor-soaked prose. By March 1995 the lineup was complete when guitarist Richard Adderley, drummer Patrick Pulzer, bassist Colin Williams and keyboardist George Wright came aboard for the band’s first London show, after which Too Pure Records signed them on the spot. Their opening release, the limited-edition single “Kid Stardust,” was named single of the week by Melody Maker, and was soon followed by Pioneer Soundtracks, whose bohemian atmosphere was enriched by ex-Scott Walker producer Peter Walsh and by cello arrangements from seventh member Audrey Morse. Issued during the brief vogue for cabaret noir in the vein of Cave—whose style is almost parodied on “I Didn’t Mean It, Marie”—Walker, Jacques Brel and the Tindersticks, the album found Reynolds extending the black-clad gloom to fresh extremes: “I don’t believe in happiness,” he announced, “do you?” He pursued that darkness further through Jacques, characterized as Jack’s “older, slightly eccentric brother,” a parallel venture with fellow Brel obsessive Momus that produced 1997’s How To Make Love Volume 1. The parent band reached its fullest realization on 1998’s The Jazz Age, a lush romantic masterpiece whose pinnacle arrived with the epic ballad “Nico’s Children.”

Reynolds completed two more albums under the Jack/Jacques banner—To Stars (2000) and The End Of The Way It’s Always Been (2002)—before dissolving both projects to focus on solo material. His first outing under the Anthony name, Neu York, appeared in 2004. He has also issued volumes of his poetry.