Reviews
Artist:John Jenkins
Album: Tuebrook
Label: Fretsore
Tracks: 11
Website: https://www.johnjenkinsmusic.com/
Named for an area of Liverpool where he spent a lengthy part of his childhood, attending church and both his infant and junior schools, although not all of the songs specifically relate to it. With Jenkins on piano and accompanied by Pippa Murdie on backing vocals and guitar, Chris Howard on keyboards and co-producer Jon Lawton providing programming, bass, guitars, lap steel, percussion and keyboards, it opens with the gently acoustic 'Shadows', a reflection on how, like many areas, a combination of lack of infrastructure or financial support, bad decisions made by local governments, shifting population and economic issues, Truebrook fell into decline, becoming a shadow of its former self and, while the line "they built a highway through this town/Some call it 'The Road to Nowhere'" may not be literally true, "the places I cared about the most/Are no longer there" most certainly is.
That's followed by 'Christopher Roberts' which opening with piano, accompanied on guitar and featuring audio recordings of John Jenkins Snr and John Jenkins Jnr, is a wistful memory of a friend in junior school "A little wet behind the ears…Exchanging comics/Marvel, and DC/Bursting tar bubbles/Scrubbing our hands with margarine") whom he never saw again after they all went to different secondary schools.
Drifting dreamily, 'Maybe I Just Came Along For The Ride' is more the result of a lyrical idea than anything specifically autobiographical, a reflection on a lost relationship ("Desire can run its course/Was it nothing but a twist of fate?... I had to let it go/Like ripples on a pond that move away/Read something in her face/Oh, I wish I could have stayed").
Again of a storytelling rather than a personal persuasion, taking inspiration from its mention in 'Easy's Gettin' Harder Every Day' and the fact it sounds more romantic than Cleethorpe, set to the traditional melody of 'Wayfaring Stranger', 'Idaho' with its steady plucked guitar rhythm and Murdie's harmonies, is a tale of two lovers, "Far too young, far too green", running away in search of a dream only to find tragedy instead ("Poor Jenny well she got pregnant/Lost the baby, I lost my wife/Where once we spoke of the future/I only speak of the past"). Played out with fingerpicked notes and a gently tumbling melody, 'Passing Time' sounds a similar note ("We got married in September/A case of the cart before the horse/Well, she left me in November/I guess I was no fun after all/I hooked up with some girl in Texas/Best years of my life so I thought/Until she left me for a girl from Memphis"), a reflection on what was and what might have been that comes with growing older ("I took each day as it came/Maybe I should have listened more/Where we only passing time/Trying to make some sense of it all?").
Another narrative song, based on someone he once worked with, '43 And Counting' is bitterly sad mid-tempo waltzer played out on dark guitar notes sung from the perspective of a woman who wanted children but whose partner did not and has now left her for a younger woman, her biological clock now ticking away ("I was a fool to myself/And I wanted a baby, a family/And I had to listen when he told it was not going to be/And I feel so betrayed/Every year that I've lost makes me feel like they're coffin nails/And he has a new life and a wife of his own/He left me this solitary house but I live alone")
Returning to matters autobiographical, opening with birdsong and the sound of a milkman delivering, and featuring an audio recording of his grandmother, Bella, who he called Ma, 'A Child's Sense of Wonder' has a Dave Brubeck swing with its brushed drums, jazz guitar and keys, as he sings of how she'd allay his fears ("that face you see on the wardrobe door/Is only a grain in the wood") and soothe him to sleep, adding a poignant observation on how "when you grow older/The "Man in the Moon" disappears".
Murdie again on harmonies, the resigned circling melody 'She Feels Nothing' is another that sprang from a story idea, here a relationship that has turned loveless ("Long ago it seemed so easy/The queen and king of the ball/But now two ghosts drifting/Trying to find their way home/She feels nothing for this love/A love shallow to which she is bound").
He returns to Tuebrook and childhood for the sad memories of the intimately sung 'William', a song about William Geary, a childhood friend who lived next door to him for 20 years, who married, moved away and had two daughters before falling into alcoholism, unable to control the addition despite the support he received, eventually dying of pneumonia. Poignantly, it opens and closes with a 1978 audio recordings of the two of them mucking about singing together.
The penultimate number, the sparsely strummed 'Lost in the Storm (A Sadness Far Too Heavy)' again has a downcast mood, reminiscing on things past and lost, of a weariness of battling the daily odds that embraces both the local priest ("Father Tom grows weary of hearing people's truths/'Do they ever learn from the that mistakes they do?'/Kneels down at the altar floor/And he prays to Cecilia 'Can I take much more?'") and Rita, a woman for whom the lustre of romance has long lost its shine ("Another Friday night in Tuebrook/He promised her the earth and the Moon/But all she has is a heart that feels bruised/All this time lost in the storm").
Sung by the infants choir at "Our Lady, Star of the Sea" School, Seaforth, it ends, though, on a more upbeat note with the brief 'Mr. Ford's Hardware Store', a nostalgic memory of and tribute to a small old local shop that was "packed with every conceivable household good from floor to ceiling and had a smell of soap or detergent powder that was extraordinarily strong", the sort of establishment long vanished from our high streets. In its theme, I was put in mind of Keith West's 'Excerpt From A Teenage Opera', a song Jenkins would have been familiar with as a lad.
At times warmly nostalgic but without rose-tinted glasses, at others movingly sad, it's an album for those of a certain age who have come to look back on their own younger days and those with whom they shared them, and, as such, it's a little gem.
Mike Davies
https://www.fatea-records.co.uk/magazine/reviews/JohnJenkins4/