Introducing: Kris Jenkins
My very first DJ residency was back in 1999. I’d travel from Birmingham down to Cardiff every weekend to play the back room of the Toucan Club. The club itself moved around 5 or 6 times and the main room residents for the majority of its lifetime were Kris Jenkins and Paul Lyons, two friends from the Docks in Cardiff, whose record collections put me to shame. For me they’re both central to the musical lifeblood of this city, and so I have some exciting news at the end of this post.
But first I want to have the opportunity to give you a little history lesson, because a lot of Welsh music history gets forgotten about, and I’m in a very fortunate position at the moment where I’ve been learning all about it, so I want to tell you more about Kris Jenkins, and hopefully you’ll see why I feel he’s such an important figure.
Kris (right) in Stuttgart. 1996.
I met Kris in Stuttgart, back in 1996. I was there hanging out with the Potato Skinz (a few years before I started rapping with them) and his band Backbone were playing the same festival. At the time the band included Sian Evans who went on to front the seminal noughties dance group Kosheen, and Rob Taylor, who sadly passed in 2008 but was well respected for his saxophone and flute skills. Yesterday I got to sit down with Kris for a few hours as he told me the history of how the band started and what happened next when he began playing with the likes of Catatonia and Super Furry Animals. In fact we went right back to the late 70s and early 80s when he was a teenage skater punk, making the most of his older brother’s job as security at the legendary live music venue Top Rank, going to see bands like XTC, Sham 69, Ian Dury & The Blockheads and The Creatures.
His brother was a big influence on his music tastes, playing a mixture of blues, jazz, jazz funk and Brazilian music in the house. Kris also used to hang out and listen to local sound systems such as Conqueror Sound, however when he and a couple of friends got their own mobile DJ setup together called Champagne Disco, they opted for funk, soul and of course disco.
Still in his teens, he played all over with Champagne Disco and also took up a residency at The Philharmonic’s ‘Under 18’ nights. To feed his already severe record habit, he also had a job in the Welsh Skateboard Centre before later joining Spillers Records (the world’s oldest record shop for those who don’t know), eventually becoming their main reggae buyer, and learning even more about music from everyone else working there.
As well as all this, he started playing in local bands as a percussionist, including Pressure Points, and was learning ballet and contemporary dance at Chalkie White’s Youth Centre, before “breakdancing” and electro arrived with the first wave of hip hop, and he became a body popper with local Docks crew, the Devious DMCs.
Thanks to legendary head teacher and community activist Betty Campbell, he got a job in the BBC’s costume department, ending up as a wardrobe master at HTV before heading off to London in the late 80s, where he helped produce fashion shows for designers such as John Galliano and Vivian Westwood, making the most of the city’s nightlife: Shoom; Soul II Soul at the Africa Centre; Norman Jay at Bass Clef; Sundays at Dingwalls with Gilles Peterson and Eddie Pillar; The Wag; The Limelight; Subterranea; Heaven; Westworld at Brixton Academy; plus Secret Society free parties. Surely the best possible time to be in the city, I can’t help but be a little jealous.
He kept on doing music, DJing at a strip bar in Soho, and attending the Desperately Seeking Fusion jam sessions alongside the likes of Jason Rebello, Cleveland Watkiss and Courtney Pine. This eventually led to many sessions for Acid Jazz and touring as percussionist for both the Jazz Renegades and the James Taylor Quartet.
He also started recording as Backbone, first with a rapper called Mr Wiggles and then he put out a track called ‘To The Top’ for Urban Polydor which featured high class players such as Merlin Rhys-Jones from The Blockheads, Jason Rebello, Mick Talbot from Style Council, Dennis Rollins from the Jazz Warriors and rapper Darien Daniel.
He moved back to Cardiff in 1991 and started working with Sian Evans under the Backbone name. Their tracks ‘The Joint’ (1993) and ‘Universal’ (1995) did well in London, leading to headline shows at Jazz Cafe and WKD, as well as airplay on Jazz FM, Capital FM and various pirate radio stations.
Backbone evolved into Bench but around this time Sian moved onto Kosheen so only appeared on a few tracks when their first album ‘Bliss’ dropped, with Rachel Thomas and Jill Sedgewick doing the rest of the vocals. Rachel would become the full time singer for live shows and their next album ‘A Trip & A Twist’ in 2002, which featured a fantastic guest spot from Gruff Rhys of Super Furry Animals. The album was put out on the Furries’ record label, Placid Casuals and Kris was also their percussionist. He’d already recorded with Guto and Dafydd from the group, as they’d all played on the original Catatonia releases back in 93 / 94.
Members of both bands, and in fact many other bands of the time had been regulars at Juice Joint in Clwb Ifor Bach, where Kris was the resident DJ after he moved back to Wales. Those Thursdays became some of the busiest nights at Clwb in the early 90s, with Juice Joint downstairs playing everything from funk to country, and all manner of rave legends upstairs.
The Toucan Club was also a hang out for many of the city’s alternative musicians. It was an oasis in a city full of dress codes and fighting. It remains one of my all time favourite clubs and I was privileged to be a part of it from 1999 all the way through the noughties. I occasionally got to spin some funk and soul in the main room on Saturdays, but it was very much Kris and Paul’s domain and rightfully so. However the three of us will be playing together for the first time since those days this Saturday (21st October) at Paradise Garden on City Road in Roath. One of the last bars in the city where we can get away with digging deep and playing some serious ‘Bump N Hustle’ tunes with old skool funk, soul, disco and jazz funk all night long.
There’s loads more I could add about Kris and there’s surely much that he’s forgotten in over 40 years of music. There’s all the other acts he’s produced and engineered such as 9bach, Los Blancos, Geraint Jarman, Cate LeBon, H Hawkline, Gorkys Zygotic Mynci and tons of hip hop too from Potato Skinz to Tystion to Dead Residents. Nowadays his time is split between music and food, catering for the likes of Dr Who (the BBC programme not the actual timelord) and working at Sound Progression, an amazing youth music opportunity in the city giving free studio time, rehearsal space. production and guidance. Paul Lyons founded the organisation and one day I’ll hopefully tell you his story too, but for now come and enjoy tunes from both these dons (and me). We’ll be down at Paradise Garden from 8pm til 12:30am, so hopefully see you there.
