Chatting with A J JENKS who is our BUDDY in the hit musical

Interviewer: Pat Hayward

The musical, Buddy – The Buddy Holly Story tells the enduring tale of the musical icon’s meteoric rise to fame, through to his final legendary performance at the Surf Ballroom in Clear Lake, Iowa, before his tragic and untimely death at the age of 22. In 18 short months the Texas-born singer revolutionised the face of contemporary music, influencing everyone from The Beatles to Bruce Springsteen.

It was on the London stage that Buddy’s legend took on a new life with this, the first of the big ‘jukebox’ musicals, Buddy – The Buddy Holly Story, in 1989. A smash hit in the West End, on tour and around the world for the past 35 years, the show has helped to introduce Buddy’s music to subsequent generations. In the show, audiences are treated to 20 of Buddy Holly’s greatest hits, including timeless classics That’ll Be The Day, Peggy Sue, Oh Boy and Rave On.

Later this month, on the 21^st May A J Jenks returns to Southampton Mayflower Theatre as Buddy Holly, a role he is very familiar with having starred in previous productions of Buddy – The Buddy Holly Story at Mayflower Theatre. I managed to catch a few minutes with him during one of his busy theatre days.

I started off by asking AJ when he first became aware of this singer called Buddy Holly.

I must have been about ten and was fascinated by The Beatles and as part of that fascination I began to understand their heritage and the various roots of their music. It was in this process that I uncovered their links to artists such as Buddy Holly. In fact later I found out that Paul McCartney now owns the title to Buddy Holly’s works. Through my teen years Buddy Holly along with The Beatles were among the artists that shaped my musical tastes and when I was taken to see Buddy The Musical in 2009 I made up my mind that I would love to be able to do that.

It’s a million miles from liking someone’s music and being able to perform it – how were you able to make that transition?

I was a musical kid and was encouraged by my parents to learn to play a musical instrument and so I picked up a guitar and over the years I became more and more competent. I’d always been a singer and would happily accompany whatever was on the radio or cd player. So, I guess there was always a performer in me, waiting to get out. I definitely wanted to pursue a career in performance but I wanted to be more than just a singer/musician struggling for a record deal, when I got an offer of a place at Mountview Academy of Theatre Arts. I wanted to develop actor skills, but I didn’t just want to be an actor. I’d seen a change in the world of theatre where more and more productions were being cast using actor/musicians – now, that really appealed and Mountview were one of the first academies to offer a specific actor/musicianship course. It soon became apparent that just playing the guitar was not enough, actor/musicians need to be able to play various instruments in one performance. I extended my range to cover most stringed instruments and feel comfortable with whatever stringed instrument might be at hand. But acting, that was a different story, being able to do everything that I can do well, but as someone else was a huge challenge. At Mountview we had tremendous coaches and over time it gets to be second nature as you don costume and makeup you make that transition to the person that you need to be.

You graduated in 2017 and when confronted with the need to develop a career what steps did you take?

Well, as everyone does you get your name on every list in town and you go from audition to audition, whether its a role you really want or not. But it’s important to keep performing and so with some fellow musicians we formed a sometime band called “Lost Soul Society Band” and performed the occasional gig and actually recorded and released a couple of tracks. My first big break came with the offer of pantomime for Christmas 2017/18 and I landed the lead role of Aladdin at the Richmond Theatre playing alongside Christopher Biggins and Steve Delaney. I really enjoy panto and I did again last year in St. Albans. It was early in 2018 when I heard that there was to be new production of Buddy. I badgered the producers and directors and sent them videos of me playing the songs and doing the scenes before they’d even asked me to come in. I’d had about 10 auditions by the end of it. And eventually they gave me the rôle, it took me a year to get the part. We opened in August and toured until March 2020, when the first lockdown was announced. As you know theatre virtually closed down for about 2 years, desperate times for everyone in the sector as we all lost our jobs.

Tough times for everyone in the industry, but I guess particularly tough for those, like you, setting out. How did you keep positive and survive?

I’m not a quitter and it was even more important to keep my face and name in front of the community as much as possible and so with Zoom and YouTube I was able to keep in touch with many aspects of the business and my audience. Also, I started offering music services, compositions, arrangements, which much to my surprise started generating a little income. My love of popular music gave me an opportunity, for a small fee, to stream live performances of the music of classic acts – The Beatles, Buddy Holly, Elvis and these became quite popular and attracted quite a lot of interest from within the business. But the important thing was to make sure I was in the frame for appropriate parts in theatre once it was back in business.

How did the reopening of theatres impact you?

I was fairly confident that if certain productions were to go ahead then I would probably get an audition call, but I am a realist and I knew that pulling a production together takes time. The first success was getting the part of Elvis Presley in the musical Million Dollar Quartet which would be the 2022 summer season at The Barn Theatre in Cirencester. That was followed by a part in the new UK tour of Saturday Night Fever where I was cast as Barry Gibb, one of The Bee Gees. Panto in St. Albans followed and then it was straight back into rehearsals for this new tour of Buddy, which kicked off in February this year and continues through to the end of September, by which time my attention will have turned to panto and the new challenges for 2024.

This time on your visit to Southampton you will be performing in a special matinee billed as ‘dementia friendly’ is this something new to you?

Not at all, at many venues we do a relaxed performance which will be appropriate to certain areas of the community, we can use different light settings, lower sound levels, while the house management allow audience involvement and movement in the auditorium. We did a dementia friendly performance just the other week in Shrewsbury, to be honest sometimes we get better reaction from those audiences than we would from a typical one. Dementia is something that I am familiar with as my Nan had it in later years and it is very sad, however the strangest things can trigger something deep inside and oddly music is often one of those things. A person in the audience may not know where they are, or recognise who they are with, but when Buddy plays the opening chords of Oh, Boy! they find the words from deep down inside and sing along, it’s joyous to experience.

How do you find touring and constantly being away from home?

I quite enjoy it. Yes, there are downsides but there are always new places to go, different things to see. A lot depends on where we are, but these days it’s not just the streets around the theatre it’s the whole area. People say you must get fed up living out of a suitcase, but I don’t, I have everything that I need and have ample opportunities to catch up with friends and loved ones. One of the most interesting aspects of touring is gauging the audience reaction, it seems strange to me but audiences in various parts of the country react in different ways – the biggest contrasts are between the Scottish and English audiences, you might think we were performing completely different shows. Some towns and cities are more interesting than others. I quite like Southampton, there’s a lot to see and its a very busy centre with plenty to do, so I’m looking forward to my visit there later in May. The theatre is magnificent too, we don’t often get the chance to play in such a large venue and one where both Buddy Holly and my heroes, The Beatles, both played. To think singing on the same stage and maybe even having the same dressing room, who knows?