Biography
Born in Glasgow, the singer and multi-instrumentalist Stevie Jackson earned his widest recognition as lead guitarist for the indie pop institution Belle & Sebastian. He first crossed paths with B&S founder Stuart Murdoch in the early 90's while gigging with the Glasgow indie rockers the Moondials. Both Jackson and Murdoch appeared often as solo acts on the city's modest open-mike circuit, yet Murdoch had to expend considerable effort to draw Jackson from his steady Moondials commitment into the still-formless Belle & Sebastian. The Moondials had already released a single on Electric Honey Records, the label that later pressed the initial edition of Belle & Sebastian's debut album Tigermilk. After departing the Moondials for full-time membership in Belle & Sebastian, Jackson acquired the nickname "Stevie Reverb" due to his reverb-saturated, Velvet Underground-inspired lead guitar style. Although he had sung and played guitar from the band's inception, his first songwriting and lead-vocal credit arrived with "Seymour Stein" on the third album The Boy with the Arab Strap. Every later Belle & Sebastian release would contain at least one Jackson composition, including the Zombies-inflected single "Jonathan David" issued in 2001, and he routinely co-wrote material with Murdoch. When the Scottish noise-pop legends the Vaselines re-formed in 2006, Jackson supplied guitar on selected tours. In spare moments he contributed sporadically to Russian Red, Roy Moller, and The Bill Wells Trio, and he continued to drop in for occasional open-mike sets in Glasgow at the same venues where he and Murdoch had first performed. In 2011, after years spent as a side-man, Jackson finished his debut solo album (I Can't Get No) Stevie Jackson, twelve songs on which he sang lead and played most instruments, aided at intervals by his Belle & Sebastian colleagues. The album first appeared online in late 2011 and received widespread physical release in summer of 2012. Later that year he recorded a version of George McCrae's "Rock Your Baby" for the WFMU fund-raising compilation Super Hits of the Seventies.