Guitarist Billy Jenkins’s new release, True Love Collection, a set of seven 1970s pop standards, has more in common with Vic Reeves’snovelty cash-in record I Will Cure You than with any of the innovative music he’s made in the past two decades. “Well, I’m getting older and trying to cross over a bit more to a slightly wider audience,” he offers, almost apologetically. “Trying to broaden the parameters. Maybe I’m dumbing down?” After 20 years of defining the fringes of British jazz, Jenkins has left it a little late to “dumb down”.

To talk to Jenkins, or see him live – raggedy hair falling around his Playdoh face as he shoots false starts at his gleefully supportive ensemble – there’s no doubting his sincerity. But jazz fans might find his apparent irreverence a stumbling block. “Jazz is the one medium where kineticism is supposedly the name of the game,” he says, “but it is held back by the attention paid to past recordings, to old documented dead music that stops musicians being able to
breathe.” Like a great juggler pretending he’s about to drop a plate, Jenkins thinks that entertaining is part of his job, and making what he does look throwaway sometimes is part of the fun. “Most music takes place in licensed venues because it’s about having a good time,” he elaborates. “Making records is a different thing. When you get my record home, I want you to sit and worship at the serious altar of your CD system.”

Jenkins has had plenty of opportunity to work out his philosophy. Born in 1957, by the mid-1970s he had already made two albums for Arista records with his jazz-rock band Burlesque, and returned home from shows in Holland to find his Bromley schoolfriends raving about
the Sex Pistols. Already a little jaded, Jenkins waved off his friends, future Banshees Siouxsie Sioux and the young Billy Idol, into the nascent punk scene. “I thought they were all being sheep. I remember, though, we’d just decided we were playing too fast in Burlesque, so just as punk came along, we halved the speed of everything.”

Riding the crest of the next cultural wave, Jenkins formed Trimmer and Jenkins, a musical-comedy double act whose prank of trying to get a pro-CND song adopted as the new national anthem led to questions being asked in the House of Lords. Trimmer and Jenkins headlined over Alexei Sayle in the early days of The Comic Strip comedy club, and provided general musical accompaniment to the young Nigel Planer and French and Saunders. “We got fed up with all the brown-nosing and Grouchoing, and we met Robin Williams and decided he had a big ego and he smelt, so we quit, and then Roland Rivron’s Raw Sex took our job.”

In 1983 Jenkins started working in a recording studio in Greenwich, and it was watching the 21-piece big band Loose Tubes rehearse that rekindled his musical ambition. “I was attracted particularly to saxophonist Iain Ballamy’s arrogance, and I thought, ‘Here are some musicians I could work with.’ Jazz has been killed by overeducation, by conceptualising things. But I was a rock guitarist throwing lines at Ballamy, lines he’d never have got with jazzers, and he was
responding to them.” It was from these meetings that Jenkins’s loose Voice of God Collective took shape, though to describe himself as a “rock guitarist” is something of an oversimplification, and his impulsive, noisy, discordant soloing, a style he called Spazz, is the
distinctive feature of most of his 1980s work.

The CD compilation First Aural Art Exhibition samples definitive Jenkins moments from 1984 to 1991, for the most part a series of perfectly observed pastiches set up by sensitive collaborators, ready for him to scribble all over. Scratches of Spain, from 1987, arguably his finest album from the period, is packaged exactly as the Gil Evans and Miles Davis masterpiece, Sketches of Spain, except that the silhouette of a noble bull is replaced by a depressed-looking donkey. This isn’t the Spanish spirit of Rodrigo’s Concierto de Aranjuez,
either, but the paper party hat, package-tour tragedy of tracks such as Benidorm Motorway Services and Monkey Men, trumpets swarming amid the castanets like irritating Mediterranean insects. Cooking Oil, a mournful and dignified cello lament from which Jenkins’s skittering guitar is notably absent, is hugely emotionally affecting, uncomplicated by any humour or irony.

Much of Jenkins’s recent work has seen him step back further from the foreground. His collaborations with the German quartet the Fun Horns were among his most exciting recordings, and made for some thrilling live shows, his guests responding indulgently to his deliberate false starts and tendency to tear up their music in front of them. Mayfest 94, 1994’s rough-and-ready live album, is an astonishing display, and sounds like it was conducted by Carl Stalling, the inspirational journeyman who scored the Bugs Bunny cartoons.

It’s a comparison that pleases Jenkins. “I see what I’m doing as aural cartoons of scenes I’ve observed. I’m a suburban boy, and I write music inspired by the things I see around me.” Jenkins’s cartoon compositional style and suburban reference points meet most satisfyingly in 1997’s Still Sounds Like Bromley, where a bustling eight- piece band evokes the changing fortunes of a satellite town. The record ends with Jenkins singing a litany of names of former
Bromley residents, the departed 1970s proto-punks among them, and relieves any listener of the need to visit Bromley.

Jenkins excuses the 1970s pop covers that make up the new album, True Love Collection, by virtue of their place in his youth, but in trying to make a more commercial record he has delivered one of the oddest ones of his career. Apart from the occasional moment of musical
virtuosity and Jenkins’s Telly Savalas-style vocals, these versions of Yesterday Once More and How Deep Is Your Love can sound like Barbara Dickson backing tracks, only Sunny and Dancing in the Street recalling the Voice of God Collective. However, each track is preceded by a two-minute instrumental “invocation”, in which the band, including Ballamy and Django Bates, the former Loose Tubes keyboard player, grope mysteriously towards the main theme, delivering a brief moment of pure joy as they stumble into it. But even Jenkins admits the idea has limitations. “We’d go into a trance-like state, and then, when everyone was bedded in, I’d count them in. It’s a one-shot gag, but it works, once. Between you and me, I had to put the invocations on just to get some Performing Rights Society money.”

The day before we spoke, Jenkins had just finished scoring a piece for a string quartet called Suburbia, which he claims to have been working on for 25 years, and says he’s now looking forward to staying at home for a bit and playing nothing but blues guitar. In the immediate future he says he hopes to sell more than 5,000 copies of the next album and make a bit more money, before signing off with the usual grumbles about how arts funding goes to all the wrong
musicians. “The thing about me,” says the great unrecognised genius of south London, with a mixture of pride and regret, “is that I can’t bullshit.”