What’s In Your Fridge is where the Straight asks interesting Vancouverites about their life-changing concerts, favourite albums, and, most importantly, what’s sitting beside the Heinz ketchup in their custom-made Big Chill Retropolitan 20.6-cubic-foot refrigerators.

Who are you

William Jans, photographer and multimedia travel show host. Professionally I shoot corporate work, industrial, portrait, and specialize in drone and helicopter images and videos. For my art outside of my work, I’ve also hosted live shows about wacky travels overseas for 20 years now, with over 80,000 Canadians seeing them in theatres. I am thrilled to say my 11th travel show is premiering in Vancouver on Tuesday (April 30) at Langara (6:30pm doors, 7pm show), and it is a doozy! ROOM TO ROAM (Awe and Wonder of Norway) includes some edges with the longest drops in the world, mountain runs, hitchhiking to an unpronounceable town, midnight sun, and almost going to hell. The shows are fun and funny and have garnered rave reviews from media and guests alike. If you’re on the fence or puzzled as what this is, see any of the reviews to any previous 10 shows to see what all the fuss is about. 

First concert

Billy Joel at the Pacific Coliseum up in the nosebleeds, so he was postage-stamp size in the distance, but still electric. Then Pat Benatar some months later where took crappy photos with an Instamatic! Absurd to think only a few years later, I’d become a concert photographer. I was way too young, but that maybe made it more fun to be in the pit at the best concerts, then get to meet many of my heroes.

Life-changing concert

As far as a totally wow concert: Einsturzende Neubauten for the Perpetuum Mobile tour at the Commodore about a decade ago. It was so completely impressive, although they all were more advanced in years. I won tickets to it from CiTR on show day and on such short notice, I only called two people who could not make it...so I opted to go solo, since there was no chance I was going to go to invite someone who didn't know the band or their music and risk my plus-one saying, “I don’t like this, it’s weird, it’s noisy,” or whatever. It was totally fantastic to be absorbed into that show. I was so impressed I bought an overpriced t-shirt (which I never would normally do) as a way to give back in some silly way since I won my tickets. They were so creative and I am quite sure they made some of their own percussion instruments—drain pipes, compressors, and a thing that looked like a bed spring that created one of the lowest tones that I ever recall hearing live onstage: a deep dirge-like sound. I should have bought the $50 CD of the very show they flogged after instead of the shirt, but maybe someone reading this who was wiser than me and got that memorable recording may reach out?

But...I cannot leave it there! I was so fortunate to have real, massive, life-changing moments since I got lucky to have personal interactions at gigs I was shooting with some truly amazing musicians. For brevity here, are some punchy bullet points…

• Joe Strummer was one of the most consistently kind and friendly performers over the years. On our first meeting at the Kerrisdale Arena, he not only was willing to sign all my eight or nine albums, he drew doodles on most them, too, including a pretty darn good outline of a map of Canada. On Give them Enough Rope he wrote, “Vulture truth... Bill’s bones.” Speaking of signatures, he also wrote on the wall, “Hey, Paul Weller, keep the faith, love Joe Strummer” (behind the hockey changeroom door that was serving as their dressing room). Great to realize there was not a rivalry there like I had heard. I had the further good fortune only a few days later to point that out to Paul Weller when they also played this hockey arena in tranquil Kerrisdale. I wish I got a photo of each of them with the graffiti, but I do have a photo of the scribble itself, at least, that I showed Paul Weller again only a few years back.
• Backstage with the Cramps at the Thunderbird Arena, and telling Lux Interior and Poison Ivy about the Flintstone village on the way out by Bridal Falls and hoping I could be allowed to go along and take photos. 
• Having a real lively conversation with Annie Lennox (just her and I in her dressing room) and she interrupts mid-sentence to ask me if I like “tart things” in her Aberdeen brogue. She then produces a wee snack from her purse wrapped in a napkin that she tells me she scooped at the hotel buffet earlier in the day. Yummy. She was really genuine, and when I said, “See you later,” she said, “Well, probably not, so have a great life.” I still hope to see her again.
• Bono saying I could ride the bus to the Seattle gig (right after this Orpheum concert) if I had my passport…I have no idea if he was just teasing me, in retrospect, since who goes to a concert with their passport?
• I asked David Byrne about the big suit, and he told me his mom helped him make it! 
• Carlos Alomar, (who as I recall was the person to introduce David Bowie to John Lennon), introduced me to his little girl, then asked if I could play piano. I said a little bit, and he proceeded to teach me a brief tune on the piano that he had me repeat a couple times. Then he told me he and John Lennon wrote that and it had never been recorded! If I was smarter, I would have promptly written it down to remember forever, but alas—the excitement got the best of me and I have completely forgotten it.

• Probably the coolest for me personally was not only meeting, but kind of becoming friends with Ian McCullough from Echo & the Bunnymen over the years. Not a lifelong friendship or anything, but great experiences. My hair is long gone, but he still recognized me last time he was in town, despite a decade passing since our last meeting and two decades since the first. He is still precocious, regardless of his years, and it seems life has not changed too much for him since he lives in the wacky rock star world. He is funny, too—at a club once a guy came up to our table and asked, “Hey, aren’t you Echo? Say something profound.” Ian leaned in close towards him and said slowly, intensely, and methodically: “The...cat...sat...on...the...mat.” This fan was quite impressed with that answer as he sauntered away with newfound insight. 

Top three records

When I am asked what the one single word to describe me would be, I always answer: “unable to follow instructions.” So I wrote more below my three picks.

Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds No More Shall We Part  Wonderful album. “Love letter” is so perfect, in my opinion. I seem to be so impressed with it that I find it uplifting, whereas some people tell me they find it a bit too heavy. The lyrics of, “God is in the house” are just something else, too: “Goose-stepping 12-stepping Teatotalitarianists.” Who else writes lyrics like that! (Okay, now I am wanting to include Tom Waits’ Swordfish Trombones). If it shows up on the web again, try to see when Nick Cave performed “Love Letter” live on David Letterman. Warren Ellis was there too, of course, and they even flew Kate and Anna McGarrigle in just to sing only four words in the song: “Come back to me.” (It was removed by some evil corporation, but maybe got put back up since?) 

Kate Bush Hounds of Love  She really does it all. Along with music, lyrics, and concepts, she figured her own choreography and was one of the few to be able to program a Fairlight computer too way back (Peter Gabriel is another). I feel she is a great producer, too, since the sound on all her recent albums is perfect to me. “And Dream of Sheep” is lovely all around, and even though the last two songs of the album might be considered an afterthought, “Hello Earth” and “The Morning Fog” are worth cranking the volume for to hear all the subtle bits. “Hello Earth” even turned me on to Gregorian chant to such a degree that I may just create a new travel show about going to try to find people who can sing that heavy low-toned portion called zinskaro, made famous in Nosferatu, and found by Kate Bush to blend into this spacy track. 

XTC Skylarking  Even though Andy Partridge and producer Todd Rundgren still seem to go on about the feud that brewed building this, it is a superb album. Great orchestration, lyrics, production, etc. There are a few versions out there, too, so make sure you get the one with “Dear God” to hear that seminal piece that explains Partridge’s Athiesm so well. 

I dont know if the Straight will let me include this, but as a rule breaker, this is worth tossing in, and you should know about this instead of nasty Spotify. So. Lately I have been having huge fun with internet radio (radiogarden) and listening to stuff ranging from gospel music from the Faroe Islands at times, Grampian Hospital Radio in Aberdeen, Scotland, where they play requests from the patients—from Sinatra, to the Cure, to Tom Jones. I love the variety and would much rather hear music I don’t expect rather than the predictable pattern or pop.

MamaFM from Geraldton, Australia in the Outback sometimes plays Aboriginal country music...but the big wow at times can be the amazingly weird Shirley and Spinoza Radio from Dali, China (I’ve even travelled to tiny Dali; Yunnan, too). It's mostly radio art and found sounds, blended with noises, and sound bites from commercials or movies. So great. You gotta check that one out.

You will not be disappointed, or you will be exceptionally disappointed—I don’t care—but you’ll hear something new. And that is immently cooler than hearing the same old same old. The Guardian even did a story on this guy toiling away, and I even heard a PSA that Stewart Copeland must have sent him. While writing this at 3:07pm they were playing a narrated list of Russian men’s names with a mix of what sounded like Balinese gamelan as background and fading into some karygyraa (multi tonal Tuvan throat singing). There is rarely any explanation. It just happens. You figure it out. 

Favourite video

That is tough! Some videos are great as films on their own (most everything that OK Go creates, from the gravity video to the Rube Goldberg machine, and high-speed camera one, too). But of course I get sucked into the particular songs that bring up great memories. Shriekback’s “All Lined Up” is one of my favourite songs ever, and a really weird video to go along with it sure works for me. Bauhaus’ “Telegram Sam” is the coolest goth imagery ever! I am surprised how much I revelled in the weird… 

Snakefinger’s “I’m the Man in the Dark Sedan”, Residents’ “Moisture”, and Cabaret Voltaire’s “Sensoria” blew my mind. I still have a bunch of footage on VHS from the Nite Dreems cable show so many years back. Those earliest videos make up part of my youth and mean so much! I even got to make a video for the Evaporators at Pender Harbour’s Hotel Lake where my cabin is located (“Ogopogo Punk”). Fond memories of that since it was my concept, direction, editing, camera work, and drone flying, and that is even with the high costs of my drone ending up in the lake (my fault) as well as a few video cameras (canoe tipping over as Big Hamm was getting in). The drone crash made for great ending, though… If the Straight puts up one video I hope you find the Snakefinger one. What a hoot. He sadly passed at 55 years of a coronary issue some years back.

What’s in your fridge

Hákarl. It’s not my fridge that’s interesting, it’s my freezer! I have the infamous Hákarl (Icelandic fermented shark) that is hard to say, and much much harder to eat. It is considered one of the worst foods in the world to some. When I premiered my last show IRE & ICE (charm of Ireland, chaos of Iceland) in March of 2023, one Icelandic gent I met on the trip (who makes up part of the great ending to the show), actually flew out from Grundarfjörður to Vancouver to be at all three shows. We brought up six willing volunteers/victims to try eating this delicacy at the end of the show. One fellow could not get it down and had to spit out this ammonia-flavoured morsel, and he told me later that at 2am that night, his girlfriend made him leave her place to go to his home since, despite, brushing repeatedly (tongue, too) and lots of mouthwash, he still smelled too bad to be in her bed. My remaining Hákarl is in two Ziploc bags in a container in another Ziploc bag and still stinks. 

Kvikk Lunsj. In my fridge I have a Kvikk Lunsj (means quick lunch) chocolate bar I brought back from Norway that might be one of the silly interactive draw prizes at my show on Tuesday. Sure, it is only a chocolate bar, but considering I bought it in Norway where you can spend $7.50 for a Coca-Cola, this is a pricy treat! I also may draw a couple names to taste some Salt Skum (it's great!). Kvikk Lunsj is like a Kit-Kat, but who wants to buy from nasty Nestle?

Yogurt I made. Only my second time making it, but it is super easy. My friend Daryl has been doing this in Edmonton once a week for maybe 20 years, I bet. He saves a few teaspoons from the last batch to make the one. I am new at this, and it is easy, but I hope I can get a perfect batch, then I have to just eat it more!

For tickets to ROOM TO ROAM on Tuesday (April 30) at Langara Theatre, go to williamjans.com.