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GONZO WEEKLY #116: Jon Meets Jeremy
Strange Fruit is a unique two-hour radio show exploring the world of underground, strange and generally neglected music. All shows are themed and all shows set out to give the most hardened of sound-hounds some new delight to sample.
The show is also unique in providing homework for undergraduate students on North West Kent College’s Foundation Degree in Professional Writing (who dig up many of the odd facts featured in the links between tracks).
Strange Fruit founding presenter Neil Nixon has just released a book about rare albums for Gonzo Multimedia. The show is broadcast on Miskin Radio every Sunday from 10-00-midnight.
However, this week we introduce you to a new face, and as the two promotional pictures that he sent consisted as one of him covered in mud and the other of him covered in guinea pigs he is obviously mad as a bagful of cheese, which means he will fit in here just fine!
We asked Jeremy Smith to introduce himself, and he wrote the following:
I’ve been a huge music fan ever since my parents bought me a transistor radio and I would listen to the sixties pirate music stations at nights under the covers. At the age of 13, I discovered progressive music and went to my first gig which was Barclay James Harvest at Guildford Civic Hall. This was shortly followed by what is still one of the best gigs I can remember, Alice Cooper and Roxy Music at Wembley.
In 1976, I found myself going to the Nashville every week to see the Stranglers where my long hair and flares soon started looking out of place, but it was always the music that I loved and especially seeing bands in pubs and clubs.
This love of live music has stayed with me to this day and I still love standing in a small club like the Borderline in London with some mates and watching a band with a pint in my hand.
With the Strange Fruit radio show, I want to continue the trend of doing themed shows and playing the music I love, whether it is bands from the seventies, eighties and nineties who never quite made it, unsigned bands of today from all over the world, or those bands that have kept going for twenty or thirty years through their love of music and performing rather than financial reward.
This guy sounded intriguing so, to welcome him to the Gonzo Family, I rang him up for a chat. Now the hunter has become the hunted, or at least the interviewer has become the interviewee...
