Stevie Jackson

Stevie Jackson (born 16 January 1969, Glasgow, Scotland) is a Scottish musician and songwriter. He plays lead guitar and sings in the Glasgow based indie band Belle & Sebastian. Jackson's guitar playing is distinctively retrogressive and melodic, with a heavy use of reverb and minimal effects. He has, in the past, been nicknamed 'Reverb' or 'Stevie Reverb' due to his use of the said effect.   Prior to joining the group, Jackson was a member of the now-defunct The Moondials, a band that released a single on Electric Honey, a label that would later issue Belle & Sebastian's first album, Tigermilk. The Moondials experience was a pleasant one for Jackson, and it took a great deal of work for nominal Belle & Sebastian frontman Stuart Murdoch to convince him to join his group. At the time, Murdoch was playing the open mic circuit in Glasgow as a solo act, and it was at one of these performances, at The Halt Bar, that Jackson first saw Murdoch play.   In the beginning, the band existed mostly as an outlet for Murdoch's songwriting. Since the band's third album, The Boy With The Arab Strap, other members have begun to contribute, Jackson chief amongst them. All of the band's subsequent full-lengths have featured compositions by Jackson, and he wrote the band's 2001 single "Jonathan David" as well as "To Be Myself Completely" for 2006's The Life Pursuit. His songs are noticeably different from Murdoch's compositions. They tend to be shorter and less introspective, opting for catchy 1960s-style pop more often than the folky melancholia that defined Belle & Sebastian's early releases.