By Lola Bailey
The Tale Of Jenny and Screech is a story about a mother and her twins who lose their lives. It is a trilogy of songs, starting with Jenny’s Tale, followed by Screech’s Tale and ends with Violet’s Tale. The first two were released in 2019 and the third in 2022, just before the whole video, The Tale Of Jenny And Screech, was released.
Ren Gill is a 35-year-old man from Wales. He was misdiagnosed with depression, bipolar disorder and chronic fatigue for years before being properly diagnosed with Lyme disease in 2015.
He got his first guitar at age 10 and never let it go.
The first song, Jenny’s Tale, was released in February 2019. The song is about a 14-year-old girl dreaming of leaving London but one night, in a dark street, her fate is sealed. A boy named James takes her life after she refuses to give him her purse. In the beginning of the song Ren sings ‘She wanted to escape/Can you blame?’ and the final lyrics of this tale are ‘I guess that she escaped/It’s such a shame’. Ren knows how to choose the correct words to portray a story.
James was out with his mates smoking ganja, his friends called him Screech – Jenny’s twin brother.
The tale was written well, with only a guitar as an instrument, Ren made the story tell its tale without missing anything.
Screech’s Tale, released in September 2019, tells what happens after he killed Jenny. He is one street along from where his sister lays. The tale starts with Screech coming to the realisation he killed someone. Knocking on his pal Patrick’s door with no answer, ‘But Screech kept on knocking till his knuckles became sore’. Then he calls his girlfriend, ‘Have something far more sinister in mind, that does await’.
Ren used the fact that he was recording the song in real time to make the knocking sounds with his guitar and used his phone as a prop when James calls his girlfriend. And then again when he did the four shots that Screech got in his chest, he used his guitar as a gun as the camera gets lower to the ground. The lyricism was done beautifully and portrays what happens very well.
The last song of this trilogy was harder to understand. Violet’s Tale, released in July 2022, follows a woman who is pregnant with twins who unfortunately never gets to meet them. Ren outdid himself with the production of this video.
The beginning of this tale is an amazing guitar solo showing Ren’s brilliant guitar skills. When he starts to sing, we hear Violet’s back story, ‘Violet was a silent girl, she moved out at sixteen/A semi-detached council flat paid for by a welfare scheme/Packing shelves at Tesco, stacking jars like pickled bricks’. It was filmed inside a building and the echoes from the stairway were perfect to show who she is.
Then, when it gets violent, Ren leaves the echoing building, portraying the angry boyfriend beating up his pregnant girlfriend. The lyrics go, ‘She stays silent, things turn violent/That’s the sound of his fists when they fall like a crashing pilot’.
At the end of Violet’s tale he sings ‘In London city, far from pretty, 2-0-0-5/A lady down in Paddington just lost the fight to stay alive/A tragedy or a miracle/it happened on these very streets/Two twins are lying side by side/A girl named Jenny and a boy named Screech’ which tells the listener that the twins, Jenny and Screech, were born in 2005. Both of their tales were released 14 years later which adds to the beauty of the songs.
There are no harmonies, no other instruments other than the guitar. The rawness of it all makes these three tales magical, although the story and lyrics are far from magical.
