Without a doubt Sam Jones is an extraordinarily talented musician and songwriter, capable of eliciting support from both legendary punk and mainstream artists alike. Though, having trod the streets and stages of both the UK and mainland Europe for nearly three decades now, this can come as no real surprise. Indeed it is testament to his musical skills and abilities that, through a combination of diligence, luck, tenacity, hard work and total self-belief, he has managed to sustain and maintain his career when many others (like my beloved The Clash) couldn’t. Sam’s obvious love and passion for his trade of choice – nay, his life’s vocation even – and the respect he has garnered to date amongst seriously dedicated professional musicians like Malcolm Joseph (Grace Jones Band), Richard Marcangelo (Manfred Mann’s Earth Band) and Jenifer Batten (Michael Jackson/Jeff Beck), puts him in a bit of a class of his own amongst the majority of his punk peers; and this is a man and musician who, I would happily suggest, would have been just as equally at home strutting around a stage with e.g. The Kinks, The Rolling Stones, The New York Dolls, the Dead Boys, The Cramps, or The Jim Jones Revue, as he is in Angry Town or busking solo around the city centres of the UK and mainland Europe in 2018.

Certainly, Sam’s own material shows a willingness and desire to transcend ridiculous, and ultimately extremely limiting, musical tribal bigotries and ‘loyalties’. Just check out the presently available free download via Sam’s Facebook page – Live at Restauracja Stara Gorzelnia, Mogilno, Poland. It’s an awesome and heady mixture and cocktail of adrenalin driven, gasoline fuelled, highly infectious, out of control, car crash, rock ‘n’ roll: made all the more chaotic and raucous by both Sam’s obvious inability to verbally communicate with the majority of his Polish audience, and the introduction of a new bass player for the evening (though it seems that new members are very much the status quo for Angry Town, as Sam continues to remain the only consistent member of the band to date). Yet, though undeniably a little rough around the edges in both quality and sound (as par the course for the majority of live recordings/bootlegs let’s be honest), nevertheless it still serves as a perfect introduction to some of Sam’s own compositions – Somebody’s Somebody, Under Glass, Boredom Drug, Fire in the Rain, The Walker and The Way She Is – for anyone coming across him for the first time; as well as of course being the perfect accompaniment to Sam’s recently released studio album collection, containing material written between 2002-2014, ‘Retrospective’.

The live recording also hints at the range of Sam’s personal taste in music, with the inclusion of the tracks New Rose (The Damned) and Personal Jesus (Depeche Mode). The latter of course (as noted elsewhere within this article) having been released recently also, as Angry Town’s first single. That all said however, it really would be quite impossible to pay Sam Jones and his music full justice within these few simple pages that Punked can offer. Like the legendary (and quite cantankerous) Mark E. Smith’s long and illustrious career, Sam’s too would need the kind of space and freedom that only an auto/biography or two could give it; and who knows, perhaps that’s a project mulling away at the back of Sam’s mind already. For the moment though it’s enough to simply enjoy this multi-talented man’s music.

Johnny Heartbreaker

Founder and Editor of Punked e-zine