On the Rise
Jackson Roy

Jack Chandler’s scruffy haven was located on the boundary of Warwickshire and Worcestershire, and the teaching – like the equipment – was pretty dire. But he isn’t complaining: without these spaces, where would artists such as Jackson Roy, his musical alias, be allowed to incubate? “It forces you to take a little bit of ownership and be like, I can go and do my own thing. I’m not relying on the teachers to tell me how to do it,” Chandler tells me. 

We’re in Peckham, around the corner from his studio. He headed down here after school, maybe a decade ago. It wasn’t so much for the bright-lights biopic vibes but because there was only one university that accepted him. “I wasn’t into the idea of moving to London; I was into the idea of moving out of Birmingham,” goes one quip among many from the affable songwriter. I’m not surprised that the admissions officer at London College of Music took a shine to him, which he tells me happened in spite of iffy grades. “It seemed to be good for two things at the time I attended: music technology, because they had a bunch of studios, and midwifery,” he says. “I went with music tech.”

He began playing in bands, including Honey Moon, a jangle pop five-piece whose EP served as his final uni project. That band reached a natural, no-hard-feelings cadence soon after. There were other projects, but as Chandler tells me, “whilst I have an input, it’s not necessarily my voice, literally or generally speaking.” He began writing with both, guided simply by what intrigued him and felt good. If there was one aim, it was to be original, but for his own amusement more than anything. “I’m going to be ripping people off, whether I’m intending to or not, so I should probably try and be as original as I can,” he says. 

When searching for a name to organise these new songs around, Chandler’s school years again came in handy: specifically a group of bullies who’d once upon a time christened him with the arbitrary nickname ‘Jackson’. “I really hated it at the time. People didn’t treat me very nicely, but that was the end of me being bullied,” he says. “So I think maybe there’s some sort of ownership of that, as an adult, taking on that nickname and enjoying the name. I also think it’s just a better name than Jack. Jack is very everyday – not that I want to change my actual name.”

He stresses that this isn’t a corny Lindsay-Lohan-movie triumph over playground adversaries. It’s more about how, “ultimately, the music allows me to be slightly one step removed from me, but still me, so it makes sense that it’s like my name, but not my name.” The Roy part came from his grandad after examining the family tree for inspiration. “It was either going to be that or Jacuzzi Suit,” he says – as in the futuristic outfit Milhouse's mum wears in that one Simpsons episode. 

The name also reinforces this layer of mystery that his project operates behind. It’s almost like he’s covering grandiose arrangements of a bygone era but with a rock band setup. His music has the whimsy, authority, and unfamiliarity of something far removed from today but delivered in a recognisable form. That makes it accessible but also deeply fascinating – given many of us are craving stuff that isn’t so relentlessly today. 

“I feel comfortable in, as you call it, ‘rock band’,” Chandler says, having grown up learning saxophone and guitar, and singing in choirs too. “I know what I’m doing to a certain degree in those environments on a smallish stage with my friends, playing loud. I enjoy that. I can’t see that not being for me.”

But the rock band often plays with a romantic swung feel, employing waltzing fucked-up-ballroom rhythms. There are military marching snares and clarinet serenades tangled into the arrangements. The songs are founded upon old-school vocal harmonies and chord progressions with rich in-built cycles of tension and resolution. There’s something wartime or Gatsby about it – theatrical, plush, ornamented, and yet it’s unpretentious, catchy, progressive alt-rock at the same time. What kind of record collection gets you here?

“I just thought ‘She Loves You’ was some of the best shit I ever heard, and would ever hear,” Chandler says of his earliest influence. As he graduated to the high-water-mark era of Revolver and Rubber Soul, he took comfort in the fact that “you’ve always got them, haven’t you? They’re like the Bible – they’re always there.” 

As he ventured deeper into the pop music canon, it was Pet Sounds that really burst the inspo dam, as he finally found in Brian Wilson a songwriter who transmitted falsetto singing via a format that interested him. “I was like, I want to sound like that. I want to sing super high and do all these harmonies, and he taught me how to do that through listening.” Check out how Chandler nestles multiple voices atop the main vocal earworm of “How Do You Like That?”, whose wordless rise and fall evokes a singing teacher outlining a scale. 

“What I love about Brian Wilson is that he is a musical genius from the musician side, but also from a punter side, from a non-musician side,” Chandler continues. “It’s clever and interesting and challenging, but it sounds straightforward. Burt Bacharach is another great example of someone who did stuff that was accessible and catchy and fun, but actually, if you try and play it, it’s pretty mad.”

I’d argue there’s something of that at play with Chandler’s music, though he diverts credit to his collaborators, e.g. drummer Rian O’Grady’s shifting rhythmic patterns, like the bouncy pushes of “How Do You Like That?” or the phasing, uneasy loops of “June (Soon to Grow)”. There’s one part of “Exhibit”, a break right in the middle, where Chandler’s voice and the piano have this sidebar conversation, dancing together up and down a spellbinding, magic-dust sequence of notes. These aren’t garden-variety rock songs. They’re more akin to the work of a Transylvanian orchestral conductor who's gone undercover in an indie rock band. 

To be fair, the video for “Natural Cause” is probably helping to put that idea in my head, Chandler fang-toothed with a face caked in ghostly white makeup. It’s a hell of a swing for an introductory single. Chandler and bassist Oscar Browne drove out to this bizarre house on stilts in a tiny Welsh town and converted it into their haunted house. They managed to source a bunch of manikins because none of their mates were available on the day. As they run around the place and recoil in terror from stationary figures, there's a brilliant visual juxtaposition with quite a serious song about life being brittle and impermanent, where seemingly the only overlap is a lyric about a house on a hill. 

“I’m not trying to play the game. I’m not trying to be Mr Fucking Viral. I can’t stand TikTok and all that stuff, but there’s an opportunity to have some fun and do something that doesn’t need to tell the story of the song – it doesn’t have to be anything. It’s just a good excuse to have some fun with some friends, do something weird, and try something,” Chandler tells me of his approach to music videos. “I take the music quite seriously, I think, so it’s nice for the music videos to just be… whatever.”

The care and creativity that’s gone into both is obvious. Music video-wise, it’s schlepping up to the Scottish Highlands, waking at the crack of dawn, hanging on for dear life on the back of a quad bike, and then trying to convince a bunch of sheep that he’s one of them. (See “How Do You Like That?” in this instance, where he’s a literal black sheep trying to fit in.) 

Music-wise, it’s songwriting that, underneath whatever ornaments, or regardless of format, is rock-solid – and is Jackson Roy. He inadvertently demonstrated this by releasing several different versions of “Natural Cause”: rock band mode, playing solo in the woods, and singing in St Luke’s Church with a pipe organ. 

“Big Thief are a really good example of that – you never really know what version of the song you’re gonna get,” he says, “and they don’t really know. That’s really freeing, and also it makes the relationship with the song different. Like, there’s a song and then there’s a way the song is explored, rather than: this is exactly how the song goes.”

It’s a refreshing, unlikely way to be, and an impressive feat to pull off. Especially given his modest motivations. “As I spend more time doing it, and Jackson Roy is more defined, there becomes: that’d be like a Jackson Roy thing to do there.” In the meantime though: “I’m just trying to make music that feels right to me.”