Jakko Jakszyk
Jakko Jakszyk is a British guitar player who took over the role as guitarist in Level 42 after Allan's brief stint. Jakko was also involved in doing remixes of the Bruford albums for the Bruford box set reissues.
Jakko reminisces about Allan in this interview: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HaiHGMvMSDE
No Secrets (Facelift 1994)
Finally, I had to ask him about his spell with Level 42, as he's the second guitarist to appear in 4 Facelift issues to have had connections with a band not usually associated with this sphere of music.
"It was basically helping them out because I played on the album. I always like to play on albums, because then you can go in and try and make whatever you do work in that environment. I just mentioned to them that I knew that Alan Murphy had died and I said if you don't find the right guy before you go on tour and you get stuck, you can call me...
"And that's what happened basically. They were looking for another guy and I guess in the end they got Jakko. I was just helping them out. It wasn't right even down to my rig. The whole purpose of the way that my sound or the equipment has grown is to make certain things or certain sounds that like and I'd stayed away from all the regular guitar things like strumming, and there was a lot of that in Level 42. It's not something that I really can get into. I never really liked the strumming aspect of guitar playing at all, so I knew it wasn't right. But it got them through - it helped them out.
"Again they were all wonderful guys and for the kind of music that they play it was really good. But I couldn't have done that for a long time - I would have gone nuts!" A major restriction on his playing, surely? "Oh, completely. And the thought of having to play some solo. The most horrendous thing for me was to have the spotlight on me once a night to play 4 bars of solo, note for note, that was played by this guy, like, 20 years ago. I had to really bite my tongue on that. But that's that game - it's showbiz, it's not necessarily music.
