Biography

By Polly Glass

 

Music is full of hidden superstars. For every celebrated artist, writer and backstage figure you’ll find dozens more overlooked characters, many with far more interesting, weird and wonderful stories than those who typically fill pages. Talita Jenman is one such person. 

 

Rock’n’roll adventurer, industry maverick and accidental top-line PR – with a boutique roster and feet in the worlds of high art, public speaking and event management – Talita has the sort of mad technicolour CV you didn’t think existed outside the seventies. Rival Sons are one big success story, but her fingerprints cover scenes as diverse as thrash, hip hop, jazz and the New Wave Of Classic Rock. One of rock’n’roll’s true renaissance women, in other words, with a lifelong capacity for spinning multiple plates.

 

“I hadn't thought about doing PR as my only job, because I'd had so many interesting strings to my bow,” she reflects. “I've always felt like a kind of inferior PR. I didn't go through a traditional formation. I didn't work in a PR firm and to get all my contacts. I started as UK & European PR manager at Earache Records, and I always felt this imposter syndrome. But over twenty years of experience, a lot of bands have come back to me and been like, ‘I wish we could work with you again…’”

 

Raised near Uxbridge, Talita struggled at a highly academic school with undiagnosed dyslexia. Through heavy music, she found a world outside the classroom soundtracked by The Wildhearts, Smashing Pumpkins, Sick Of It All and more. She worked her first job on weekends and school holidays at Trumps Records in Ruislip. She wrote her own fanzine, “Zosma” named after her cat, interviewing bands on Burning Heart Records, or bands she’d met on her travels in other countries. Her band played local youth centre Fountains Mill (“we did covers of Hole and Terrorvision, pretty terrible…”). She hung out at Elstree’s Hare Krishna Temple, in order to chat about [Hare Krishna hardcore punks] Shelter with the devotees there.

 

A turning point came when, aged sixteen, while dropping off photocopies of Zosma fanzine at Fountains Mill Youth Centre, she was asked if she’d like to get involved with their musical festival there. It heralded the start of Uxfest, a decade-long project, in which she helped turn the festival into a huge charitable initiative – hosting numerous bands and training dozens of young people in sound engineering, front-of-house management and other jobs. All while spending her weekends managing a fledgling Lostprophets, who she’d met at a hardcore show in Wales.

 

Struck with Glandular Fever and Hashimoto’s Disease while finishing her A levels, she dug in and set her sights on London. There she got a job at Tower Records in Piccadilly (she was subsequently fired for talking to customers for too long…), hosted a breakfast show on Total Rock Radio, and presented a programme about London street culture for a Japanese TV channel. Nights were spent interviewing punk bands, putting on hip hop shows at the Underworld, and hosting parties at her brother’s flat.

 

“DJ Vadim was there, Mark B, Mud Family, Scratch Perverts,” she says of one of these parties, “we had the decks in the lounge with all this graffiti, breakdancers doing the limbo in the bedroom. There were all my brother's stoner friends playing acoustic guitar and getting stoned, and then in the kitchen was wall- to-wall metalheads in leather. But this was my life at the time, a cultural melting pot.”

 

Around this time Talita – a fluent French-speaker from teenage years – found herself on tour as an interpreter for ninety-eight French breakdancers, having met them while visiting her sister in France. From there she started French hip-hop club ‘Soiree’, in Farringdon, bringing over French MCs, dancers, DJs and graffiti artists for the opening night. It was a resounding success, cut short due to The Jazz Bistro shutting down without warning and threats from competing London DJs. 

 

“I was absolutely driven by the music and the culture,” she says, “as a means of expression for minorities, for those struggling to fit in, a balm for people suffering in different ways. I was and still am a believer in music as a refuge and a representation of what otherwise might be overlooked. I saw this as the same for metal and hip hop.”

 

A little dejected by Soiree’s premature demise, she began a degree in French and European Studies at Queen Mary University. On the side she worked for hip hop label Jazz Fudge. During the holidays she worked at the Globe Theatre box office, which led to three years at Hillingdon council, coordinating activities for young carers. All while co-running Uxfest and presenting her weekend breakfast show on Total Rock. 

 

It was through the latter that she met legendary rock journalist Malcolm Dome, who put her in touch with Earache Records – thus commencing the next chapter in her career, as their UK & European press manager. Over the next seven years she set up Earache’s London office, and helped build a cultural movement around thrash stars like Municipal Waste, Evile, Gama Bomb, SSS and Bonded By Blood. Her efforts drove a wave of extreme music into NME, Reading and Leeds festivals and beyond.

 

Juggling dozens of bands (usually on a shoestring) she hit burnout and prepared to hand in her notice. It was then that Earache signed a Californian rock band called Rival Sons, and everything changed again. Quickly bonding with the group, Talita was instrumental in their rise through early shows at London’s Barfly and then Crobar, a Classic Rock covermount EP and rapid growth across the UK and Europe.

 

In 2012 she left Earache, continuing to work with Rival Sons – alongside launching the debut album of The Temperance Movement. At the same time she started freelancing in event management, working for the London Jazz Festival and Hellfest  among others. During a "quiet period" she became the arts coordinator for London Zoo, where she organised literary events, collaborations with Frieze art fair, life drawing sessions in aviaries and more. Two years later she left to go on tour with Rival Sons and Black Sabbath, squeezing in teaching gigs at the National Gallery, Wellcome Collection and others between her travels.

 

All the while Rival Sons became less like clients, more like brothers. When Talita’s mother died, in 2018, she stayed with founders Jay Buchanan and Scott Holiday at their homes in America. It was them who encouraged her to get back on the road and tour again. Years later, when she married ska trombonist Thomas Billings, Buchanan sang her down the aisle with the Beatles’ Blackbird. 

 

Now mother to twins, and with the shadows of the pandemic lifted, Talita presides over a select roster – Rival Sons, The Sheepdogs, Blues Pills, The Temperance Movement, The Hot Damn! And Electric Eel Shock are among her clients. In 2024 she became manager to rising rock’n’rollers Creeping Jean, calling upon years of experience and adventure that aren’t over yet. 

 

And that’s Talita Jenman all over: still a maverick, still spinning plates, still madly in love with the music. 

 

“This is very much part of my life, at this point,” she concludes. “I don't think there's any way that I will be parted from rock’n’roll. It's an interesting life.”