When Billy Jenkins gets the blues, he doesn't import the stories from his BB King records. They are closer to the heart and include the 'flu, marriage ("what a complete waste of an afternoon"), family visits at Christmas, how much he'd like to kill dogs.
The south London guitar guerrilla was at the Vortex to share these laments with an audience that had turned up intrigued to hear what a blues partnership between the bemusedly demonic Jenkins and the elegantly orthodox John Etheridge would sound like.
Having never played with him before and having had only a telephone call for a rehearsal, Etheridge was watching Jenkins like a hawk all night - particularly the stabbing hand gestures that indicated chord changes (critical since Jenkins's view of the number of bars in a blues is relaxed, to say the least). But if the two became quite exuberantly communicative together on a succession of hurtling boogies and rock shuffles, Jenkins's affection for the situation was even leading him to share thoughts bordering on the sentimental with Etheridge by the second half, when they briefly let the rhythm section drop out. "I've never played a guitar duo with anybody before," Jenkins told Etheridge. "Nobody wants to play with me." But the curling, plangent chords and mellow lines of the first of these exchanges, and the light, dancing boppishness of the second made it hard to comprehend why.
Not that there was any danger of Jenkins losing his appetite for splintered- metal runs, lurching detunes, double-takes where he strikes the pose of the climactic chord without playing it, and palm-slapping harmonica solos where he inadvertently whacks the instrument into the audience. Etheridge wisely eschewed following this inimitable display but turned on some deft and only gently ironic tributes (his Pat Metheny licks were uncanny), and reacted swiftly to every unexpected Jenkins whim. That even memorably took in the swashbuckling Spinal Tap hot-riffing pose - heads down on the fingerboards, left feet up on the front table - that the two guitarists and bassist Thad Kelly suddenly took to adopting close to the end. Since both Jenkins and Etheridge gave every appearance of having a ball, this might be a partnership to resurface in 2000.
