Junior Jack- Lynx, The Cure & Surviving A Fatal car Crash

"Three years ago I had a very bad car crash, on the way to Midem in France. I'd been driving all night then about 8am I stopped, because I was tired and a friend who was with me in the car said 'OK, now I'm gonna drive'. I started dozing as the sun was rising then, about half an hour later, he fell asleep at the wheel and drove off the road.

He died immediately and I was seriously injured. I had an operation and I was paralysed almost completely- both my legs and both my arms and they put my neck in a metal frame. I was paralysed for almost six months and when I got back in the studio after that, I felt like I was reborn, so I put Junior in front."

Despite now being known to the world as Junior Jack, Defected Records' latest great house hope grew up in Italy going by the name of Vito Lucente, adopting Mr Jack some six years ago in homage to his love of Chicago house. He also enjoyed last year's most successful dance record in the UK, the Lynx deodorant endorsed smash Make Luv, under producer name Room 5, though it's his Junior Jack new album Trust It that he's now fully focused on.

"I made that track several years ago, releasing it initially on my own label and we sold around 2,000 copies, that's all. I completely forgot about it," he admits.

"When Positiva signed it again and got it on the Lynx (deodorant) advert it worked, but to me it was already an old track."

Number 1 pop hits aside, he also enjoyed a massive Ibiza hit last year with E Samba and is shortly releasing hotly tipped new single Da Hype, featuring vocal contributions from one Robert Smith (known to his army of adoring fans as The Robert Smith of The Cure). It's been a remarkable turnaround from facing life as a paraplegic. Jonty Skrufff chatted to him down the line to his studio in Belgium this week, the place he now considers home.


Skrufff (Jonty Skrufff): It's over three years since you woke up almost totally paralysed, can you walk properly now-

Junior Jack: "Yes of course, you'd never believe that I had this accident. Before I had the operation the doctor told me 'Maybe you're going to leave this hospital in a wheel chair, maybe you're never going to walk again'. But the accident didn't really change my attitude to life because it wasn't me who was driving so I wasn't scared when it happened, it really wasn't a scary experience and it wasn't full of blood for example. My friend who died was just lying there with his eyes closed, I didn't know he'd died at the time, then he ambulance came but they didn't tell me he'd died immediately, they waited until three days after. Though of course, when they told me three days after, I then felt very scared and it was difficult to sleep. It sounds hard but I prefer for my friend to be like that instead of seriously injured and stuck in a wheel chair all his life. Maybe my attitude didn't change because I recovered to how I was before, of course, it would be different if I was still in a wheel chair. One thing that has changed is that I'm never going to drive for many hours in one stretch again, now I take the train and plane for long trips. It can happen to anybody, it's a question of seconds."

Skrufff: It's 14 years since you started making music, why have you waited until now to put out a proper artist album-

Junior Jack: "I started making music when I was very young and covered many different genres, perhaps because I wasn't so sure about my music, but for the last two or three years I've felt really proud of what I'm doing so that's why I decided to start showing my face, doing interviews like this, for example. So it then became logical to do an album when the record company asked me. When you're making dance music you follow two options, either you release only 12"s and singles until one day you disappear, which has happened to lots of producers, or you go further and persuade people to consider you as an artist. But to achieve that you need to make albums."

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