Jack Roscoe - Interview

by John Clarkson

published: 4 / 5 / 2024

Singer-songwriter Jack Roscoe talks to John Clarkson about releasing his first album 'Out of the Woods' at the age of 57 and the heart attack that changed his life for the better.

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“I think it was my kind of stop check,” Jack Roscoe tells Pennyblackmusic. “I think that it was my body saying enough, and alongside that my brain saying, ‘Hold on. Hold on. You’re acting in a way which unhealthy for you.’ “ Roscoe had been through several turbulent years. His marriage of many years had collapsed, and both the relationships that followed it had also failed. Roscoe had gone into teaching in his twenties, had risen through the ranks quickly and by the time he was in his late thirties had become a headmaster. He would be a head teacher in two secondary schools. The constant worry of having to negotiate with government inspectors and officials, parents and the teachers under his charge was also having a traumatic effect. In 2019 he suffered a heart attack. “It was stress that caused the heart attack,” continues Roscoe. “It was the first time in my adult life that I really was forced to stop in about thirty years, and I think it was the first thing that made me think about my life and its purpose and what I was doing. And what really mattered to me. I do wonder if I hadn’t had the heart attack if I would have been doing what I am doing now, and I suspect maybe not.” Roscoe went back to teaching out for a few months, before leaving the profession permanently in the summer of 2020, He has lectured part-time in a local college since then near where he lives just outside Lancaster, and also has been focusing on a long-held ambition to write songs. 2024 finds Jack Roscoe relaxed and happy. He got married for the second time last year to Sarah, another headteacher, who he met shortly before he had his heart attack, and in March of this year released his debut album, ‘Out of the Woods’, digitally through Bandcamp. It is a good record, in which Roscoe’s rough-edged, half-spoken, half-sung vocals, like those of Billy Bragg, prove alluringly charismatic The title track is as shocking as it is powerful. A jangling, on the surface breezy number, Roscoe, acknowledging some of the darkness of previous years weighs up the ways he could have committed suicide, before finishing it on a surging note of triumph at being alive. Another stand-out track is the brooding, balladic ‘The Good Life’ , which tells of a couple who disastrously marry too young. As solid as ‘Out of the Woods’ is, and while Roscoe is clearly proud of it, he has at one level already moved on. A recent, upbeat single ’58 (Not Out)’, released to coincide with his 58th birthday in March, mixes together cricket similes and his joy at still being here. He has just released ‘The Wanderers’ single from a second album, ‘Wanderers on Seas of Fog’. It points at new direction, in contrast to the semi-acoustic ‘ Out of the Woods’, being a soaring, electric, rock number. In two conversations with Pennyblackmusic on Zoom, Jack Roscoe proves talkative, articulate and thought-provoking. WRITING SONGS I would say that the push factor was the heart attack, but the pull factor was lockdpwn. I was in my last few months of working for schools, and I remember one day I had come off a Zoom call, and I didn’t want to watch telly or even read a book because I had been staring at a screen and trying to listen to people for an hour, and I picked up an acoustic guitar and started playing and strumming, I started doing that three or four times a day in between Zoom calls. I would pick up on an idea that I had had before, and would take it a little bit further. That is where the songs started to take root. I wrote my first song in lockdown in its entirety, and that was a big moment for me because up and until then I had procrastinated. I had written bits and pieces. I had half-finished lyrics. I had half-finished ideas of music. that had never really gone anywhere, and suddenly I had this entity which was a recognisable song that actually I was quite proud of, and so it passed the test of whether this song was good enough to inflict on other people. That was a turning point for me and I thought that I can do this, and it went from there. THE ALBUM The album is predominantly guitar-based. I am not a pianist as such but I can certainly navigate my way round a keyboard, and there are bits of that on the album too. The recorder, the tambourine and harmonica are on there too. There is a sax solo on one of the tracks too which I originally tried to play. Now I have never played the sax. I was a clarinet player at school and there are similar fingerings, but I hadn’t played the clarinet for years and years. Fortunately my wife Sarah is also a musician and played the clarinet and saxophone really, really well, and so I got her saxophone out of the case, tried to play this solo and just about made it but it sounded really awful (Laughs), and I said to her, “I have tried to do this solo. Could you do it instead?” and, bless her, she did. For the second album I am going 6o practice the sax a bit more, so hopefully I can play some of the solos. The only thing I can’t play is the drums, so I got a drummer to play on one of the tracks and I think that he did a really good job, and then the rest was recorded in Logik. SINGING I didn’t like my vocals, and so I went to this company Scalehow for help They have been in the music business about twenty odd years, and deal primarily about what is going on mentally rather than physically. There are certainly people who can’t sing. I can hold a tune. I can harmonise. I sang in a choir for a bit, but I didn’t like what I heard back. I think that is about your own view of yourself and the sound of your own voice. Then I sat and realised that a lot of people I really admired as singers and songwriters and musicians - probably top of the tree is Lou Reed but Bob Dylan is another example – don’t have conventional voices either. Nobody else can be you but you, and rather than trying to be an Ed Sheeran or a Lewis Capaldi or Peter Gabriel or someone like that, you should just be happy trying o articulate what you are about. I recorded the vocals at first at home, and I think that because I was at home I was over self-conscious, I probably sounded a bit lame because I felt a bit lame. Fortunately there is a really good recording studio about fifteen minutes up the road, and so in August I had a meeting with Mark, who is the sound engineer there, and I said, “Look! I don’t like the way I sound. I think that I would like to come into a recording studio.” So, I booked myself in to do three songs originally. I had never been in a recording studio before, but it made all the difference. As soon as I did the first song, it was like “I love this. I feel great. My voice sounds better than it has ever done. The main change came about because it was like “Don’t try and be Peter Gabriel. Don’t try and be whoever. Be Jack Roscoe and just deliver,” and that is where it ended up. OUT OF THE WOODS There is this ambivalence towards woods on the album I am drawn to woods. At one level there is the whole “IF you go down to the woods today…” thing about forbidden forests, Hansel and Gretel, fairy tales, and dark and nasty things happening in woods at nights. They are common tropes in horror films, the cabin in the woods, but at the same time woods can be places of great sanctuary. Forests also represent freedom, Robin Hood and the lovers in ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream’. You come out of the woods into this place of recovery. The title track is reflecting on a period in my life and some of it is not that long ago after my first marriage ended when I felt pretty suicidal, but it is also how I got beyond that. It is a pretty life-affirming song. The final part there is that I started to write the album during lockdown, and half the tracks don’t have drums which make it more acoustic-based. There is quite a lot of acoustic guitars, but I have also used a lot of hollow body guitars. They are electric but there is a woodiness to them. Woods conjure up for me – that acoustic, woody vibe. GOOD LIFE It is not based on me and my first wife, but clearly there is that element of getting married much too young. I was 23 and she was 21, so we were kids. It kind of references that. You start on this journey with no thought or idea that something will go wrong, but then over the passage of time it does. I was on Facebook two or three years ago, and I realised that a hell of a lot of my friends were in their 40s and their first marriage had ended. None of us get married with the thought or idea that you are going to be one of the 40%, and this idea of a good life goes horribly pear-shaped. It is perhaps the most bitter song on the album. 58 (NOT OUT) I have had to accept that I am more than halfway through my life now, That song is partially about the heart attack and watching my parents die. I was with my mum when she died last year and held her hand as she passed away, and when you see your parent die in front of you it is very sobering, but I didn’t want to make it sad and upsetting. I was saying, “Everybody, it doesn’t matter who you are, we are all going to die. There is nothing that you can do about it. Embrace it and just do the best you can as you can. “ That is where the idea of a cricketer trying to score runs comes in. It is the aim of every batsman to get to a hundred and probably most people. The reality is most batsman who try to make a century don’t make a century, and the reality of most humans is we don’t get to a hundred, and the reality is you just don’t know what age you are going to get to. The lyric goes “I might get to my ton, or I might get to the next ball.” WANDERERS ON THE SEAS OF FOG ‘Out of the Woods’ is about interiors. It is quite an insular, introspective record. It is a very acoustic album. Even when I was using electrics, there weren’t a lot of sound effects, and much of it was recorded at home, whereas the new one is about going out into the world more. ‘Out of the Woods’ was recorded in weeks rather than months. ‘Wanderers’ was recorded last month. I will step release songs from ‘Wanderers on the Seas of Fog’, which will be electric and I will be recording piece meal at Mark’s studio. There are going to be seven oir eight songs released in the build-up to it, but it is not going to be quite a year long project but maybe about eleven months. People talk about second album syndrome and I don’t feel that all, whereas a year ago the thought of putting my voice on tape was terrifying, but now I love it. I am now more confident about recording, and I am recording guitar parts in the studio, and on amps. which means that there is going to be lots of feedback in there and there are some quite crunchy guitar sounds. It is going to be a much louder record. I am aiming to do a release about every six weeks up until Christmas and then there will be a kind of holding back before we put out the album with all the tracks and maybe four or five additional songs in March or April. I think I want to make this a physical album now I have the confidence. It is all about stepping up a gear.