Joe Jenkins: the teenage YouTuber from Bristol with 3 million subscribers

Joe Jenkins’ videos have been viewed more than a quarter of a billion times since he started his YouTube channel, Joe Jenkins Music, when he was still at school.

What started as videos shot from above of just his hands playing the piano has since morphed into 19-year-old Joe playing in locations including Millennium Square, Turbo Island and Temple Meads.

Joe, who lives close to Gloucester Road with his parents, is clearly a very talented pianist, who started playing when he was just six. But what makes his videos so unique is the reaction of passers-by to what he is playing.

These have included him heading into Broadmead to play Giorno’s Theme (32m views and counting), Dance Monkey (24m) and songs made famous on TikTok (21m) – a social media platform on which he has almost half a million followers.

His most recent video took him to London before the latest tier four restrictions, where he played Queen songs outside Buckingham Palace. It has so far reached more than 2.5m views in just seven days.

Joe’s first YouTube channels were of him playing Minecraft, with his current channel coming out of his love of playing covers on the piano.

“I thought, ‘oh, why not put them on YouTube so other people can have a look at them as well’, so that’s what I did. But no-one wanted to see that so it eventually it kind of morphed into a meme channel instead of a serious channel.”

Joe said that his channel has only recently taken off in a big way since he began playing his own piano in public in Broadmead (his first performances in public were on street pianos installed as part of Luke Jerram’s Play Me, I’m Yours artwork).

It took only four hours for the first video of Joe playing TikTok songs to hit one million views. He admits that he is “not a big fan of performing, it makes me nervous”, but once he saw that viewers on YouTube enjoyed watching him play in public, he continued doing it.

“I think that people just like seeing reactions of other people. I saw that there was potential for more there. So I forced myself into doing more busking even though I didn’t necessarily want to.”

Joe’s videos are now sponsored and he also makes revenue from the adverts hosted on them. He may still live with his mum and dad but he describes his income as a YouTuber as “comfortable”.

He says he is “working on” moving out of the family home, following in the footsteps of his older sister who lives in Canada, but will stay in Bristol, close to people who help him with his videos, including his regular cameraman, Adrian.

“It’s a stupid idea to start a YouTube channel in the hope of it becoming successful because that it so uncommon,” says Joe, nursing a mug of hot chocolate from Society Cafe.

“So I was just doing it for the sake of it, because it was fun and because I enjoyed it. But at the same time, something in the back of my mind was always saying, ‘what if? What if this suddenly gets big?'”

So what does Joe enjoy most about being a professional YouTuber? “I would say coming up with weird and wacky ideas. The unusual stuff. Not just the playing in Broadmead stuff.”

These have included playing River Flows in You in a river and playing Minecraft songs in a real life Minecraft world (that looks suspiciously like Castle Park).

Joe recreated the video to Vanessa Carlton’s A Thousand Miles when he hit 500,000 subscribers on YouTube and promised that when he hit one million subscribers he would play R Kelly’s I Believe I Can Fly while skydiving – something that due to the pandemic he has yet to achieve.

“I’ve got a couple of ideas that I know will be absolute bangers,” Joe says, without revealing anymore information. “But I just can’t do them until the coronavirus pandemic is over.”

Once he gets an idea, the longest aspect of making the video is for him to learn the song. Once that is done, he can head out to a location, film and edit the video within a week

Joe, who admits he spends a lot of his time watching YouTube videos, could now be a first year undergraduate studying design at Nottingham Trent University but decided not to take up the offer.

Instead, he is still working out how to deal with his growing fame. Just watching a few of his latest videos shows how often he is recognised in public by people who have watched him on YouTube or TikTok.

“It took me a long time to work out how to deal with that. When I’m filming videos, I’m standing out like a sore thumb. I expect people to come out now because it’s normal. But what I still do find weird is when I’m walking around town and someone says that they’ve seen me on YouTube. I don’t think I’ll ever not find that weird.”

Main photo: Martin Booth

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