My daughter Evelien and I want to nominate Jean Watts from London to be the fan of the YEAR! She did a great job during the European tour this year, by posting all the setlists and reviews.

Jean attended 18 shows in 24 days! She started in the UK with the first of the Jukes shows in Aylesbury and saw her last show in Tilburg, the Netherlands. Two of the eighteen were Bobby shows  (the Isle of Bute and the Bottomline in London).

I met Jean in Glasgow where our tour together started. When the Jukes started their first song at the show on the Ferry, Jean took her pencil and paper and wrote down the title of the song. With every song and with every funny thing Johnny said, Jean immediately wrote some notes in her little book. She only needed half a second to recognize the song, and as we all know, Johnny and Bobby can improvise a lot! But Jean knew....

After the shows she tried to find a way to post a review on the message board. At her home she locked herself up in her computer room and I heard her typing for quite a long time.

The visitors of the message board got used to her updates and started to ask for Jean when the Jukes had done another show in Europe.  When the Jukes started their tour on the mainland, Jean came over to stay in my house for a few days. Needless to say that she used the computer for quite some time a day....  She felt the need to keep the readers and posters of the board informed. In Amsterdam, Evelien got the chance to take a picture of her while she was writing down a song title.

This is Jeans story:

Since highschool, back in the sixties, she explored all kinds of music by going to the live acts in the West London clubs. What she liked the most were the R‘n’B bands with the horns. During the early seventies nothing really happened in musicland, besides the rising of Bruce Springsteen. But even Springsteen wasn’t what Jean was looking for. She kept on searching for that particular sound she heard in the sixties. Jean:

“Then one day I'm browsing the Melody Maker and my eye falls on this album review.  Never heard of the band – hellish awkward mouthful of a name anyway – but they seem to be connected with Bruce and they get a warm review, which mentions the magic word "horns".  Hmm, sounds like the kind of thing I might like. I go and buy it – without getting too excited, I've been fooled by reviews before – and I put it on the deck; and by the end of the first verse of ‘I Don't Want To Go Home’ I'm going:  "Yeah! THAT's what I wanted to hear! That's what I've been waiting to hear all my life!"

The combination of that original “big, fat soaring, soulful sound, done with a real feeling” of the Jukes, with Johnny’s voice and harmonica was what Jean attracted.

It was not until the end of 1977 that Jean saw them alive for the first time in London. They were absolutely, without doubt the best live band she'd seen in her life, and they still are. 

There were some circumstances why Jean didn’t see the Jukes again until 2001, but since then, the number of shows she attends every year is still increasing!

Jean, thank you for all the reports on the board!

Marjan and Evelien,
The Netherlands