We have been listening to him play keys for decades, his fingers Boogie Woogieing across the ivories while vocalists from Tom Jones to Gladys Knight croon by his side.
This New Year’s Eve he will, as ever, be tinkling into 2023 with a good few more on his Annual Hootenanny. But today, I’m listening to Jools Holland sing.
“Falderi, Falderaaa…” he chirps, enunciating with his finest southeast London twang, remembering a time he heard the German folk song The Happy Wanderer drift out of a boozer in Greenwich, London, into an early summer’s evening when he was just 17.
It just so happens that now former pub in Jools’ former homeland - he still keeps his studio nearby - is down the road from me, and my flat is very likely plonked on what was Jools’ uncle’s lorry business, where a teen Jools learnt how to spray paint cars because he had a motor “that was a bit bashed up”.
The tipsy voices lured him inside, where he quickly found his place on the piano stool alongside an elderly gent playing merrily.
It was this chap, Adam - surname unknown - who taught him a crucial bit of piano styling which he later inserted into the theme tune for Later… With Jools Holland, which celebrated its 30th anniversary on the BBC this year.
It was also Adam who taught him to play Ain’t Misbehavin’, which came in handy when one of his favourite Later guests, Eartha Kitt, appeared on the show and demanded he accompany her sing it.
“She said ‘Oh, you did know that song’,” he recalls, chuckling at her surprise after he’d finished, as he describes how the then octogenarian wasn’t too impressed with the familiar Later set up of having to stick around and listen to the other artists play.
“She was wandering back to her dressing room, and someone explained. So she came back, sat at the table for about five minutes, and then she literally had her hands over her ears.
“I said ‘What’s the matter?’ She said ‘It’s too loud!’ Then when the camera pans round again she’s gone, but she hadn’t gone to her dressing room - she was on top of the piano doing yoga with her feet touching her head, it was unbelievable.”
Thirty years of Later stories with an extra dollop from Channel 4 ’s cult Eighties’ music show The Tube which first made Jools’ name as a presenter alongside Paula Yates, plus yarns dating right back to his stint on keyboards in rock band Squeeze in the mid-Seventies, make for a lot of history.
Jools, 64, OBE, recounts it all in that incredibly quick-talking way he has. He has surely now reached national treasure status, I ask, scribbling fast.
“You can call me worse things,” he concedes. “Although it does rather imply I’m like Stonehenge, a craggy, ancient monument.”
And he laughs it was once unlikely too, gleefully telling the story of when he, along with Squeeze vocalist Glenn Tilbrook, were warned they’d never appear on TV again.
“Squeeze were on Top Of The Pops,” he recalls. “We were young lads and larking about. On one of them we were behind a DJ.
"Me and Glenn thought it would be amusing to put our fingers up each other’s noses and then jump up and down behind him. It was a babyish attention seeking thing you might do as a young fellow of twenty years of age.
“Afterwards this man came storming up in the dressing room. The producer of the show was furious - ‘you’ve ruined the shot, I will see to it you never work in television again.’ And we were banned from the BBC club bar that night! Anyway, he was wrong!” cackles Jools.
Although he insists it’s “the music” that’s made for his longevity.
Later is a mash-up of pop icons with unknowns - although examples including Amy Winehouse and Adele who got their TV breaks in its famous circle soon became legendary.
This non-commercial blend of Jazz, Blues, Folk, Rock and Indie, often accompanied by Jools, the flamboyant ringmaster, has had plenty to do with his success.
“When we started people couldn’t look up the world on their phones, now they are confounded by choice. But the essence of somebody singing their song and connecting a truth to you is the same thing,” he explains.
But the genius Joolsness of Jools Holland can’t be underestimated.
The south London lad grew up on piano - or more precisely, beside his grandmother’s 1935 pianola - which today he still plays.
“She would play it and I would sit on her lap and listen to it,” he recalls.
Squeeze, formed in 1974, had top ten hits Cool For Cats and Up The Junction, and led Jools into showbiz circles, although not always, then, salubrious ones.
Bono is an old friend. “Squeeze did a show in the Hope and Anchor in Islington one night with U2, and there were only three men and a dog,” Jools recalls.
“Then the men left and then the dog left. We go back to the good old days.”
Later, Squeeze backed The Police, which led to “big mouth” Jools being picked to present a BBC documentary about the bigger band in 1981. That in turn led to him being scouted for The Tube.
“I remember Sting said ‘Welcome to your new career’,” he recalls. And Later, launched in 1992, only brought more celebrity musician pals. The show always feels chummy, because it often genuinely is.
Paul McCartney and Elton John are pals, Tom Jones, Bjork - the list goes on. “When Paul McCartney has been on, people are in awe of him, quite rightly because he’s invented it, half of what we’re doing,” says Jools.
“But he, like Elton John, is the most generous person in these situations. I learned from him early on, he made a point of introducing himself straight away to the different bands.”
Jools and Tom Jones bonded over Jerry Lee Lewis. “I hadn’t met him before he came on the show,” remembers Jools. “And it goes back to the piano in the dressing room, and how all musicians will see a piano as a friendly thing.
“So Tom comes on the show and he said ‘Oh I like Jerry Lee’, and I like Jerry Lee, so we start playing a bit of Jerry Lee and we immediately hit it off the three of us (us and the piano).”
He adds: “You get people on like that who are legends and you get awestruck, but when you’re playing you become the servant of the song together.”
It’s that togetherness Jools values most, and nowhere is it more celebrated than on his New Year’s Hootenanny, which launched on December 31, 1993, when all the acts get together to sing Enjoy Yourself with Ruby Turner.
Jools has lived by that title since Falderi, Falderaaa. “It’s not a bad philosophy to embrace,” he says, as he prepares to enjoy himself all over again.
Jools’ Annual Hootenanny is on BBC2 at 11.30pm on New Year’s Eve
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