As Jack left his teenage years and entered adulthood, things fell apart. After leaving home at 16, he eventually dropped out of university and the early 00s found him doing stints as a chef in various pubs and hotels, which is how he also came to dabble in playing music. "I taught myself how to play the piano in the pub where I was working," he remembers.

From here, his musical career began in secret. Toying around on a little toy piano he purchased, he started writing songs that he professes now to have been "absolutely dreadful, like truly, truly awful"; it was always on the back burner until one fateful New Year's Eve.

In a lock-in at one of the pubs he was working at, his friend took up at the piano, and before he knew it, an inebriated Jack was singing The Doors' "Light My Fire". This would be his first ever public performance. "The only reason I did it, Steven, if I'm completely honest, was because I was just really, really pissed," he chortles.

Getting a good reception, particularly from his pal Joe, who took up the keys, nudged Jack a bit further toward his future calling. "That was the first time anyone heard me. They were like, Oh, who knew the chef could sing, you know? And that made me feel better about writing my silly little songs secretly at home."

"I think music did then become sort of an emotional outpost, something I could do to get myself through the things that we all go through as humans," he mentions when I ask if there was a change after this moment. "It certainly became a very cathartic thing for me in my early 20s." From this realisation, it began to snowball. "I started to do more of it and more of it," he says.

Eventually wanting to record what he was creating, he saved his money from his job and decided to head to a local studio. More than a calling, he saw it as a way out of the life he'd found himself in. "There was no North Star. I was just working in these pubs and a bit aimless, if I'm honest, cooking food and not really enjoying it."

It was at this studio that another important moment happened for Jack. He met his longtime producer Owen Thomas. "He's like my family now, but he was the first person within the industry already that sort of went, That's good, that's really well made, that song; you're not bad.' For Jack, it was confirmation that he was on to something.

"That was the end of the beginning for me. It was like, Okay, cool, you've started now, and off you go. My story's a long one, and I don't want to bore you, but a lot happened between then and now," he says.