Poetry Magazines - The best collection of poetry magazines online - Simon Armitage

Each issue, a regular Monkey Kettle contributor tells us about something they significantly love or hate. This ish, matthew waxes lyrical about his love for the Jimi Volcano Quintet.

The same thumping chord progressions for eight minutes. Matching black wigs that still somehow manage to sit differently on each member of the band. Puns as poetry. Deft solos on electric ukeleles. Gold lame shirts. Gnarled rock goddery and self-deprecating situationism.

There is no band in MK like the Jimi Volcano Quintet. There is no band in the world like the Jimi Volcano Quintet. And watching them for the millionth heart-rending time, at both the Waterside Festival and Togfest, this summer, I feel moved to compile this paean to their magnificence. Bear with me.

Who knows from whence Jimi, the fractured brain behind the music, originated – he seems older than the history of rock n’ roll itself, older than the primaeval rock of Stonehenge, older than the Burgess Shale, maybe.

There is some corner of a festival field that is forever Jimi. You may have caught him on one of the many chilly outside stages of the city over the last thousand years. You may even have seen him in the inky pages of the GO! section (he is as wise as a druid when it comes to self-promotion). But one thing is for sure – if you see him, you will never forget him!

Standing what seems like eight feet tall in his tattered snakeskin boots, his shock of black hair and perma-present black shades obscuring most of his features, he seems to exude the charisma and bravado of... say, Jim Morrison’s dodgy uncle, or Joey Ramone’s cleaner.

 And then there are the songs!  I had never heard of woodcutter Thomas Bewick until I got down to the funky I’m An Eighteenth Century Woodcut Man – truly this is the true spirit of Edu-Tainment™!  The thrashy rama-lama melodic punk of A Picnic On The Lay-By Where The Motorways Merge sits beautifully alongside the timeless freeway rock of Kicking Out The Jam, surely destined to be the first ever No.1 single about fruit preserves...  Their fervent hymn to our great tennis hope, Come On Tim!, though, doesn’t seem to be helping him much, although it is a swamp-rock multi-storey car park of a track!

But the cream on top of the rock doughnut surely has to be the J-VO Quintet’s live work. A master of audience control, Jimi always has the fans eating out of his hand, occasionally quite literally. Many is the bewildered passer-by I have seen cajoled into participating in one of his legendary ukelele solos...  His frequent straying from the stage at festivals has led to a running bet among his most ardent fans (The Volcanettes) as to whether he’ll still have the energy to clamber back on unaided, or whether he’ll need to run round the back and up the steps. It often depends on the tightness of his red PVC kecks, mind you!

I have suddenly woken up in a field, in the dark, dew staining my cheeks, not knowing where I am, and then realised that we’re only four hours into the instrumental section of Let It Ring. How many bands can you say that about? Not many.

In a city where so many bands are tediously earnest teenage boys with guitars and greasy hair playing drab guitar-rock, a band like the Jimi Volcano Quintet offer something more. The time has come to take them from their underground cult status and make them global megastars. Surely. If for no other reason than to see them on Top of the Pops. You know it makes sense. Rock on.