Biog: The story of Mick

Jackson's parents could tell straight away that their house had been blessed with a child prodigy. At the age of eight he could recite whole chapters of Anna Karenina and by his fourteenth birthday was the cellist with the Clayton-le-Moors Quartet

Just kidding...

Mick was born in Great Harwood, Lancashire in 1960 and had what he insists was a very happy childhood (if we overlook that incident with the nettles and that time the earwig fell in his soup).

He went to Queen Elizabeth's Grammar School in Blackburn, where he worked hard at developing his social life but showed no inclination to invest any time in anything remotely academic. At the time (and for quite a few years later) he blamed this on a lack of inspiration - ie: the teachers - but has since worked out that he should perhaps accept some of the responsibility himself. All the same, he was still a bit taken aback to leave school with virtually no qualifications, so instead of going to university like all his chums and spending another three years chillin' he had to go out and find a... gulp... job!

During all those years spent staring out of the classroom window, one of the few teachers to get Jackson's attention was a man called Eric Whittle. There's something of a tradition of English teachers being able to talk more openly to their pupils and taking a more unconventional approach. Jackson's epiphany came when Eric set a writing exercise and encouraged the class to write in their own voices and to perhaps pick a subject close to their own heart (advice which still seems pretty sensible, thirty years on).

The occasion was unique in that for once Jackson actually applied himself to the task in hand. But equally important was the fact that Mr Whittle went out of his way to praise Mick's (obviously heartfelt) efforts. It would be no exaggeration to say that those words of encouragement were a turning point in Jackson's life.

He left home at 18 and got a job washing dishes at a hotel in the Peak District. Six months later he pitched up at the stage door of (what was then) The New Theatre in Oxford and talked the stage manager into giving him a job as a general lugger of lights and scenery. This moment also figures as something of a milestone in Mick's memory, as it was possibly the first time he'd used what might be called a bit of initiative (when Jackson had written to the same theatre a few weeks earlier they'd written back and told him that there were no openings). So he lived in Oxford for a while, then (at his Auntie Molly's inspired suggestion after spotting an advertisement for the course in The Guardian) applied for the Theatre Studies course at Dartington College of Arts.

Dartington was the kind of touchy-feely, bohemian playground that would have made Margaret Thatcher's blood run cold. And Jackson threw himself into the dungaree-wearing self-reflection with a vengeance. He discovered that he could write, direct and (God help us) dance to his little heart's content - and all on a full grant (this is a long, long time ago). And, though even he now finds it hard not to be cynical about a bunch of over-confident undergraduates endlessly picking apart their, y'know, feelings, Jackson is adamant that without his four years (yep, count 'em) in south Devon he wouldn't have had the confidence to attempt to make a living from the arts.

In 1983 he left Dartington, moved to Hackney and did all those things that art college graduates tend to do, such as squatting and going on demos and signing on the dole. The rest of the time he was a singer in a band. In fact, several bands. 'Dancing with the dog' was an acapella outfit formed with some Dartington chums which started out by busking in Covent Garden and in no time at all had inveigled their way onto the nascent cabaret circuit (typical gig: upstairs at The Crown and Castle, Dalston).

A year or so later, Mick and John Say (another ex-Dog) formed The Screaming Abdabs which, through numerous skiffley, twangy incarnations peddled their musical wares. Mick also formed The Dinner Ladies with Ben Davies (another Dartington outcast) along with a couple of people who actually knew one end of a piano from the other (ie: music graduates). The DLs were the acoustic / folky opposite to the Abdabs and after a year or two were signed to the label of (legendary) producer, Joe Boyd.

Both bands gigged and occasionally recorded for four or five years, playing at Glastonbury (OK, not the main stage, but we were there, man), Edinburgh, WOMAD, etc., recording sessions for Janice Long and Andy Kershaw and doing the odd tour / festival in North America and East Europe (where they'd be paid on the Friday in a currency which would have been taken out of circulation on the Monday). But, all in all, not a bad way to spend your twenties.

By 1990, with no danger of either band threatening to earn their members a living, they had both folded and Jackson left London for Cambridge where he worked part-time as a care assistant to special needs students and worked on his first handful of short stories. Bliss.

On his second attempt he got a place on the Creative Writing course at the University of East Anglia. Another truly wonderful year, Jackson claims, due in no small part to the sheer relief of having the time and space to work on one's own work amongst other rookie-writers.

In particular, Jackson is indebted to Rose Tremain, one of the course tutors, who went out of her way to try to point him in the general direction of agents and publishers. Towards the end of the course he began working on what would become his first novel, The Underground Man. He moved back to Cambridge for a year, then back to Hackney, working part-time at the Everyman Cinema in Hampstead and writing in the Reading Room at the British Museum the rest of the week.

Amazingly, he managed to find an agent, then a publisher. And since moving to Brighton in 1995 has had the pleasure of writing full-time, even doing the odd bit of screenwriting and directing to keep himself on his toes.

The Underground Man was published in 1997, Five Boys came out in 2001 and his latest collection of stories, Ten Sorry Tales, is published in July '05. There must be more - much more - but if it's not in these pages somewhere we can only assume that Jackson must be saving it for his autobiography