Bio
Jack Rundell is a self-styled 21st century singing cowboy from wild west Suffolk, proudly preserving a living tradition that can be traced back to the vaudeville shows of the Grand Ole Opry in the early 1900s.
But this was not always the case. He spent his teens and early twenties wearing normal clothes and performing with art-punk firebrands the Waxing Captors. During his tenure with the Captors, he wrote and recorded over a hundred songs deemed too weird for the band, including those exploring a nascent, but initially ironic, interest in country music.
Jack now cites traditional American country music as a major influence and claims listening to Hank Williams changed his life. He also became fascinated by the song craft of 1940s show tunes and, inspired by the DIY ethos of punk rock, produced a staggering array of self-released albums over an 11 year period, which were eventually collected together for his first ‘proper’ album – the absurdly elaborate 3-CD box-set, Home Recordings 2005-2015.
His early demos flitted from genre to genre, featuring lo-fi pastiches filled with vivid, surrealistic imagery, black humour and pathos. The trad country influence is more obvious in his later work, though his songwriting style makes a knowing nod to the postmodern eclecticism of contemporary musicians, such as Beck and Eels.
As of 2019, Jack is backed by the Haunted New Builds – a self-named duo formed of long-time super-fans Benjamin Brown (SuperGlu and Dingus Khan) and Tom Armstrong (Dingus Khan and Bessie Turner) – enabling him to realise the electrifying potential of his solo material with a touring band every bit as eccentric as the man himself.
BBC Introducing: “I think Jack should be a household name and it annoys me actually that he’s not … One of the greatest songwriters in the country.”
