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Billy Jenkins

I am a Man from Lewisham

VOTP Records VOCD 105

From the bluesy growl of the opening title-track, through a series of rousing, eccentric instrumentals, to the closing 'Throw Them Blues in the Recycling Bin' featuring the Voice of God Collective Junior League Choir, this is quintessential Billy Jenkins: teasingly satirical, genre-melding, passionate, deeply rooted in South East London.

The blues has always been one of the strongest strands in Jenkins's musical make-up, its unique combination of familiar structure and accommodating informality enabling him to range unaffectedly through all his preoccupations – deep suspicion of portentousness, the value of spontaneous interaction (as he himself comments, 'They don't make records like this any more. Stuff a load of musicians in a recording room, switch the red light on and hear them resonate off one another, as they scrape sounds out of the air'), the celebration of unpretentious everyday pleasures – and 'I am a Man from Lewisham', with its industrial-strength riff, Lewisham- (and low-sugar jam)-promoting lyrics and climax in a phonetic-alphabet soup of police takeaway orders, is one of the most attention-grabbing album openers you're likely to hear this or any other year.

The subsequent instrumentals range from east European-style knees-ups, through bluesy shuffles to banda-like joyousness, all featuring the many-hued but lightly borne talents of the searing alto player Nathaniel Facey; the 'Paganini of Penge', violinist Dylan Bates; the unassumingly virtuosic trombonist Gail Brand; the extraordinarily versatile tuba player Oren Marshall and the driving drummer Charles Hayward, but at the heart of the whole glorious racket is Jenkins himself, firing off salvoes of blistering guitar or simply infusing the proceedings with his manic musical wit and energy.

As he says: 'When musicians are a-buzzing it's the stuff of life! And we all need more of it!'