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Biog: Little-known facts
- Mick used to be a life model for the painter Simon Edmondson. This involved sitting very still and very naked for great lengths of time in a rather chilly studio in an old perfume factory near Hackney. If you look at some of the characters in Edmondson's paintings from the late '80s there's a definite Jacksonian quality to them.
- At college, one of Jackson's finals happened to fall on his birthday and, to mark the occasion, his friend (who goes by the initials, BD) brought a chocolate cake into the examination (which gives you some idea of how laid-back things were at this particular establishment) and the two of them proceeded to eat it as they wrote their essays. Unknown to the staff overseeing proceedings, the cake was full of small wraps of silver paper which contained useful nuggets regarding Brecht's views on alienation and dialectical materialism.
- In his teens and twenties Mick attended several writing courses at the Arvon Foundation. The highlight was undoubtedly staying up till dawn one night with Adrian Henri (and hearing him sing 'There's only Mick Jackson' after Jacko had produced a bottle of Scotch). The lowlight was probably falling off a cliff near Lumb Back and knocking himself senseless and being carted off to Halifax Infirmary. Even now he can still clearly remember Angela Carter, one of the course tutors, watching him like a hawk as he babbled incoherently as they waited for the ambulance to arrive. This, Jackson later realized, was what writers do in such situations - they 'take notes'.
- In about 1989, Jackson went on a short retreat to Buckfast Abbey, not because he's particularly religious, but because he was curious and wanted some time to work on his first short stories. He was given a very nice room to himself and was woken each morning at about half past five, when one of the brothers popped his head round the door and whispered, 'Are you with us, Michael?' - something that rather freaked Jackson out. Since breakfast was over by about six o'clock, there was plenty of time to get all sorts of reading and writing done. He read a couple of books he might not otherwise have got round to and did a fair bit of creative stuff, but the presiding memory of the place will always be not talking for days at a time (Jackson doesn't think it was a 'silent' order as such - just that there was no-one to natter to) and catching a glimpse of some rather trendy trainers under the hem of some of the younger brother's habits.
- Mick is a keen(ish) runner. Like a lot of people who spend their working lives sitting on their backsides, Jackson likes to get out and about on a regular basis (in his case, up on the South Downs with his running partner, Mark) if only to get some fresh air in his lungs. Also, when you reach Jackson's age and you're reluctant to cut back on the pies and beer you have to do something to burn off the calories. Not for the first time, Jackson would like to point out that the author illustration drawn by David Roberts at the top of this page is slightly porkier than the real M. J. - honestly.
- After 'The Underground Man' had been rejected by several agents Jackson specifically remembers telling a friend how he was beginning to accept that he might have to relegate this novel to the bottom drawer and get on with another one. The next day an editor from a UK publisher got in touch to say that she'd like to publish it. (There's a moral here, but that's probably open to interpretation.)
- Jackson's first band was invited to perform live from Covent Garden on a Saturday morning kids' show. At the time, Mike Reed who was hosting the show from the studio, had single-handedly brought about a tv and radio ban on Frankie Goes to Hollywood's 'Relax', so in the middle of their set, Mick's band managed to slip in about twenty seconds of said banned song, much to the producer's chagrin (who insisted that he'd had all sorts of plans to help the band in the wonderful world of tv, but that they were now 'finished... finished, I tell you.')
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