It’s no secret that King Crimson is one of my very favourite bands. They are also the archetypal prog rock band; they practically invented the genre as the swinging sixties dissolved into the sickly seventies. But it would be a lie to label this track from King Crimson‘s vocalist and second guitarist, as prog rock. In fact, none of the usual musical style tags really represent this gorgeous rock ballad from Jakko M Jakszyk’s new album, Secrets and Lies. The Trouble With Angels is too gentle to be ‘rock’, too conventional to be ‘prog’ and too thoughtful to be ‘pop’.

So the Crotchety Categorisation Committee sat and pondered and cogitated and pontificated. Jakko’s Angels won’t excite hard core fans of hip-hop; it won’t please teens swooning over girl bands; nor will it satisfy proponents of classical orchestral music. But it should go down well on mass-audience radio stations anywhere across the pop/rock/jazz spectrum. In the end the committee felt they had no choice but to add a new catch-all category of “universal appeal” to their list of approved style tags.

Here’s the official video. See what you think.

We’d all like to be angels. And most of us try to be good. But it’s hard. Sometimes the halo slips. Sometimes our wings fail and we fall. That hurts. It hurts us and it hurts those who looked up to us, too. You see, as JMJ puts it …