Jamie T

Talking to Jamie, you realise that there’s very little artifice in his music. He really is the guy in his songs, casting an only semi-detached eye over all the snogging, brawling and technicolour yawning of a weekend – in fact, he’s usually participating. What separates him from the crowd is that that he turns his experiences into fantastic tunes, whose, lurching, genre-barrier-defying logic brilliantly mirrors the lifestyle he portrays.

He first joined a punk band in his early teens, playing the bass. Secretly, he was writing his own songs, and soon stumped up the courage to turn up to open-mic nights at local pubs. Since he’d learnt to play on a bass, he got himself an acoustic bass, because he couldn’t get his head around the full six strings.

Parallel to this, and as a rather separate enterprise in his own head, he used some money left to him by a deceased relative to buy an Apple computer and some basic Logic music-making software, and started tinkering around building tracks in his bedroom at his Mom and Dad’s house. Often, he’d get back in the wee hours from a night out, set up a makeshift beat, plug in his acoustic bass and rant about the carnage he’d just left behind in Wimbledon High Street. A fair amount of ‘Panic Prevention’ started life this way.

The sounds that came out of his private little world drew on everything he’d listened to growing up. Some of his earliest musical memories are of drum ‘n’ bass hammering out through his brother’s bedroom wall. He also loved punk rock – The Clash, Billy Bragg (an electric troubadour) and West Coast ska-punkers, Rancid – and by extension got into vintage dub and reggae. Like everyone, he tuned into Britpop, but around that time discovered ‘Check Yo’ Head’, by the Beastie Boys, and then tracked back to ‘License To Ill’ and ‘Paul’s Boutique’.

“I like talking about bands and music I’m into,” Jamie says, with a rare candour in a musician of any age, “and how I’ve taken music I’m into and done my own thing on it. Every song I write is all about some other song. If you listen to other things and use them, it’s much easier, someone else has done half the work for you. I suppose it’s quite juvenile in a way – just, like, throwing things together – but ignorance is bliss, to just mix styles of music, and not caring if it doesn’t sound authentic.

One of Jamie’s favourite words is “mix-mash”. He’s a big fan of making mix tapes, and listeners will notice that the album tracks are interwoven with snippets of dialogue, which aim to bring a little of a mix tape’s no-respite energy to proceedings. For him, “mix-mash” defines the music itself, and also his lyrics, which are very much of a hip hopper’s ‘freestyle’ logic. Few of his songs are about any one person or subject, but a collage of people and events, real and/or imagined.

Jamie’s career started to take off early in 2006 after he started a residency at the 12 Bar, a folkie club in Central London, which, on his irregular Sunday nights, would be so overrun that several hundred people were locked out. Zane Lowe, the Radio One DJ, tagged ‘Back In The Game’ (from his ‘Selfish Sons’ EP) as the “Hottest Record In The World”.

The latter stages of his album were completed in a studio in Elephant & Castle, alongside Ben Bones, who drums in his new live band, the Pacemakers. With his album in the can, things are now moving fast and furious for the lad. He’s started getting props from heroes like Paul Simonon from The Clash (when he supported Simmo’s new band with Damon Albarn, The Good, The Bad & The Queen), and also Billy Bragg, whose key tune, ‘A New England’, Jamie has covered.

In the manner of a true rap star, though, he intends to “keep it real”, and stay in tune with his family and friends. Not for nothing did the sleeve of ‘If You Got The Money’ (his first Top 20 single) feature a photo of him with his Mom, Dad and elder brother, posed in their front room. Although he’s now moved into a flat with big bro, he’s a homebody at heart. The dialogue between tracks is mostly just him arsing about with his pals, who bequeathed him with his artist name, not as some kind of MC tag, but to differentiate him from another of their gang, known as Jamie D.

Inspired by his childhood heroes Rancid, Jamie aims to keep all aspects of what he does close to home. “I’m aware of how important it is to do things your own way,” he says, deadly serious for once. “Then if it backfires, you can only blame yourself. But I always wanted to just make this album for the moment, and nothing more.”

Already, it seems that Jamie has captured the moment for 2007. The pop newcomer and NME Best Solo Award winning artist Jamie T will hit the Osheaga stage on Saturday September 8th!

www.jamie-t.com