vox pop

ANY ROAD ...  Apropos of whatever. Editorial comments are in italic. All Third Party correspondence has now ceased.

Hello Ed

 Any idea if I can get a copy of The Fabulous Trimmer and Jenkins on CD? I remember them fondly from the times they supported Thin Lizzy at the Milton Keynes Bowl and did a gig in Bedford with the band C-Saim as support (my ex was in C-Saim). Unfortunately my ex got custody of the album when we split!

Juliet
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Alan Springate's big brother Paul was at school with Billy. Alan plays steel guitar and has just released his own album. He recalls:-
Even after almost 30 years I'm still impressed by the way Billy got a tune out of my old beat-up plastic guitar in my brothers bedroom.  Wow, not only was Billy Jenkins in my house, but he played my guitar. Anyway I've progressed since then. You can visit me at www.wight-arts.co.uk/alanspringate

  "Alan is a master of the National Steel Guitar" - Brian Hinton, from the Spring 2001 issue of "Folk on Tap"

Music today is about entertainment. Not, I might add, entertainment that blows my frock up - an entertainment that feeds the mind of the mindless misled crap that walk our schools, shops and media centres nationwide. Muisic is led by sex and fashion, the same ingredients that fed the bored kids I used to lark around with in the streets of a Yorkshire seaside town. It really is as sophisticated as the mouthy brat who wants to clean your car window at every fucking traffic light in London.

The truth is that genuinety is dying in pop culture as a whole. With regard punk Bill, you may be right. Coz I'm a negative kinda guy - I'll agree with ya for now.

Thanks for the Pizza express gig and the deep pan blues you rammed up the jacksies of the off-the-street nob heads that peppered the audience that night.

Craig 'B B Cing'
x

Hello Billy.

I have seen the page that you dedicate in the network to Burlesque, one of the bands of Pub Rock of the seventies. I am coleccionista of all that that have to see with this phenomenon musical baptized like Pub Rock and therefore I encourage me to write you. It would please me that you counted me how was your experience and that of the group in the circuit of pubs of London next to bands as Brinsley Schwarz, Bees Make Honey, Ace, Clancy, Ducks Deluxe, Chilli Willi. ..I am journalist and I am recopilando data upon that phase and not I discard to write some day a book upon the Pub Rock.

 A hug.

Javier Abad

I am reminded of two filing-cabinets that you used to have in Wood Wharf. One said Bollocks and its friend underneath More Bollocks. So maybe the man that thought you played pub rock should have been at your recent South London Gallery gig. I am thinking that it should be called 'Pubes' rock, the dictionary witters on about hair and lower abdomens, could this be more to his taste?????
Music is in the ear of the beholder

Lurca
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 The South London Gallery gig in question was Billy's Improvised Meditations for Low-Strung Guitar, the first ever live presentation of Jenkins' solo 'domestic' suite for specially re-tuned acoustic guitar. Full details here.

Is the rumour true that Billy is having a romatic assocation with one of the Spice Girls? Ginger, we heard . Does he wax his chest?

NS
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Lyrical.  And never mind if it's true or not, just spread it.

Well, I was at Dingwalls, and I didn't think it was like substandard Dr Feelgood. I think the problem (if any) was that Billy came on after a brilliant set from David Thomas and Two Pale Boys. I thought the Blues Collective set was good too, but it took a lot of recalibrating of the music radar to get into it. I found much the same effect when David Thomas supported Slapp Happy at the QEH - he takes you so far off into his own world, it's hard to get back. Nevertheless, the Blues Collective worked for me, and I'll be down the Vortex (in the evil wilds of North London) to check it out again. Didn't hear the radio broadcast - anyone else got any comments on that?

Keep the blues in yo' soul

Paul
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 You're right about David Thomas - mesmerics and hysterics. Strange how Billy has a reputation as a funny man and he hasn't. 

At the time, BBC Radio 3 footage clips from that Dingwalls gig were posted on the Mixing It page.

I was at the Dingwalls recording session for 'Mixing It'. So what was that all about then? Pub  rock. That's all it was. Three chord three minute sub Dr Feelgood with half as much feel. Pretentious shite. Sorry, Billy - you can take the band out of the pub but you can't take the pub out of the band. Or something like that.

 Yours never again,

Tony Orchard

Hi Billy, just to say thanks for the Dingwalls gig last night, up to your usual energetic and musically conspiratorial self. New material good and arrangements seem to be harking back to your old Trimmer & Jenkins stand. Not that I'm complaining. Looking forward to the chance to see you on-stage soon to sustain the Jenkins fix.

Keep the World fantastic, yeah, great things made of plastic, OK that's enuff

Regards Vince & Kaz

Aarghh! Finally get meself together for a bit of a bum wiggle, or whatever, to find it's all sold out... Should've guessed though, when I saw the review in the Guardian. S'pose I'll just have to wait until you either miss your hols again next year or get the wintertime blues.

Kate H

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 Worse. You're going to have to brave North London - the thousand-mile High Street, re-named every 500 yards, more intestine than artery . Billy's back at the Vortex (Stoke Newington, London N16) with the Blues Collective in February. "Stokie" (ha!) rivals Harlesden for being nowhere near anywhere else. 

Great review in the Guardian Billy! Good picture too!
Hope to see you soon, if not in Camberwell on Wednesday.

 Phil Hollins

 (Short hair, round head. I was the bass player in Violet Circuit who used Wood Wharf many years ago. Last saw you when I turned up 'late' for the Radio 3 bash at the Blackheath Concert Halls - I didn't know Radio 3 was down, I just thought it was a gig! Great gig though - best I've seen you.)

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 It was indeed a beauty, but it was actually the Birmingham gig on the 'Suburbia' tour which the BBC recorded and broadcast on 'Jazz on 3.'

And we're still trying to collect Wood Wharf anecdotes if anyone has any. 

Jazz 606 on BBC 2 many years ago now, was magnificently popular with the non jazz listener and magnificently unpopular with the jazz purist - just how the cock can we make a show that will please everyone, and does Jazz transpose well on TV?

 A BBC Producer called Craig

Jazz 606 hosted the last ever performance of the VOGC SA team
(BJ, Ballamy, Ramm, France, Watts).

Billy replies:-

For some reason I side with the misery bastards who felt 666 trivialised the genre. Interludes like the poetry and The Bohemian married '60's expressionism with 'the Word' type 'yoof tv' format. Both positive styles cancelled each other out. To present such a bastard marriage on BBC2 was the final mis-match.

 I see before me (I am Mystic Smeg) - a concert hall. But then only players upon it busting  veins and passion pouring all over the stage. I don't see pompous self righteous competent curators (of which the scene is riddled). I see close ups of sweat, finger's whirring, furrowed brows. The agony, the ecstacy. Well - that's 1' 30" sorted.... Your earlier musings of filming in several regional clubs is sound. But beware the false presentation. The false mug shot of the embarrassed 'pretending to be cool' punter. The height of absurdity -close up of bird stuffing her face during Julian Joseph being 'seriously sensitive.' It was a basement room wiv people eating - that ain't 'art' - that's the food industry. For example - the finale of 666 with Sumara, chairs pushed back. Come on, Andy - you was not thinking. It came across like an outtake from some spazzy '60's hippy movie. How we laughed. It was staged. Artificial. Untruthful. Jazz should be truthful. It was truthfully shite.

   The other problem, apart from image, is sound. Those sound techs trained at the BBC are specialists in broadcast sound. We know why popular music has developed stylistically - it's to placate broadcast frequencies. The double bass (which you could very roughly say is the difference twixt pop and jazz) has an empherial sound. Not at all liked by broadcast engineers. It is rare that the correct tonality twixt ride cymbal (for pop read closed hi-hat) and double bass is captured on tv - let alone radio. Jazz does not take kindly to compression. With digital broadcasting, I'm hoping this problem will disappear.  

 Ta very much for the weekend's entertainment it's the closest to a religous experience I've had since discovering a huge patch of wild fungi growing on our village football pitch.

Seeya soon
Bob 'n' Dill