David Ackles

borre haugstad in new musical express in 1983: Another thing that struck me at the Oslo show was Costello's voice: at times it was remarkably similar to David Ackles. Confronted with this, he burst out: "Good grief! David Ackles is one of my favourites."
"I've never met anybody who's ever heard of him. His first album on Elektra was one of my favourite albums."
David Ackles, as some of you may remember, made a stunningly beautiful self-titled album in 1968. Julie Driscoll covered one of the album's songs, "Road To Cairo," the very same year. Costello was enthusiastic.
"Some of his stuff is a bit doomy and pretentious, but I really like a lot of it, like 'Road To Cairo' and 'Down River.' There's some fantastic guitar playing on that first Ackles album, like gothic-psychedelic music... He's a very talented writer, it's terrible so few people have heard about him. He should have been a big star in the right sense of the word.
-After his first album, David Ackles, he made two more LPs for Elektra, Subway To The Country and American Gothic (the last one hailed as a masterpiece in the NME Illustrated Encyclopaedia Of Rock). His fourth and last album, D.T. Ackles Five And Dime was released on Columbia, exactly ten years ago.
What about the similarity between the voices?
"Yeah, maybe I've got in my voice some reference point from way back that I've learnt."