Photo:
This hack always convinced himself that there was a fine art to the mixtape, elevating my obsession with the perfect pacing, title and tracklisting to the level of a Rothko mural or, for a more contemporary example, ‘Borat’. Never before has ninety-minutes of plastic been responsible for so many hushed indie romances, failed bands and the wilful flaunting of obscurity. Truth is, there’s a genius to the perfect C90 compilation: just ask Jamie T.
“Keep it diverse, keep it happy,” he begins. “Well, not happy necessarily, but keep it on whatever vibe you’re on when you’re making it. Don’t feel afraid to indulge in your vibe (at this point Jamie T gives the impression of someone going mad. He reminds us of Paul Kaye). Don’t think about it too much!” Remember, a mixtape is just NOT the same on CD. “If it’s on tape as well kids who are listening to it are gonna be like ‘fuck it, I wanna buy that!’ y’know? You can’t rip it off the tape. Well, a lot of kids don’t know how to do that, so they won’t”
Waiting for Jamie T to finish a video interview, Gigwise is sitting bored in the canteen of Virgin Records. Box-fresh PR types are walking around as we sit and stare at the sign ‘Don’t open this window. It’s faulty and will fall off’. It’s a further one hour later, during which we watch the headfuck of a video for his new single ‘Calm Down Dearest’ (which locates the midpoint between ‘Trainspotting’s drug scenes and that creepy dwarf in ‘Don’t Look Now’), and sit in the office of an absent MD wondering whether bags will be searched on the way out, before Jamie T bounds in. A vision in vintage Nike, inevitably holding a can of Kronenberg (his first of the day), he has not only come to rule the British music scene in 2007, but to rescue this writer from a miserable Thursday afternoon (that night’s Babyshambles gig excepted).
BANQUET RECORDS: Have you got any more copies of your E.P?
JAMIE T: No.
BANQUET RECORDS: Well, we’ve sold out.
JAMIE T: (incredulously) What?!
BANQUET RECORDS: It’s sold out.
JAMIE T: (pause) Oh.
That’s the moment Jamie T first realised that things were about to run out of his control. Having been making warm, ramshackle recordings in his bedroom for as long as he could remember, he decided that he “had a few tracks that I wanted to know what people thought of, and thought I’d put them out…” The resultant release was the ‘Selfish Sons’ EP. Word of its release spread like wildfire, and soon Jamie T was being confronted at gigs with crowds singing back words to songs that were still very much unreleased, and confused hacks wondering just what the T stands for (it’s Treays, which Jamie’s mum reliably informs him is French).
He was once part of a London scene that also included the likes of Mystery Jets and Larrikin Love. It was a scene in that all the bands were friends and played together, but as Jamie T tells me “by the time it all got brought up in the NME and shit like that it had all pretty much died. It’s just that scenes die once bands get a little bit bigger because we all had to then go off and tour”. There’s a faint trace of regret in Jamie T’s voice that whatever happens now it’ll always be hard to go back to how it was, especially as his January debut ‘Panic Prevention’ promises to be a fine little record, with a kaleidoscopic musical vision that belies the creator’s meagre 20 years. There’s ska, punk, electro, and lamenting acoustics in amongst Jamie’s hyperactive cockney drawl; just don’t utter the word ‘genre’.
“I think it’s silly,” laughs Jamie, clicking a ballpoint repeatedly. “Who’s that calculated? I’m into a lot of different types of music and I’m just kind of…I’m not pretending that they’re mine, that I came up with this kind of thing. I just like all these different types of music. Suddenly: ‘Oh! I’m mixing genres, and trying something really daring and new!’” There’s a pause. “No, people have been doing it for fucking years!” Of the album itself he says: “I’m excited about it, just to kind of hear what people think. But at the same time I’ve washed my hands of it really, to be honest. Done and dusted. I’m still sitting in the studio, writing constantly”
Jamie T’s embrace of eclecticism came first from an older brother from whose room Jamie would hear everything from Guns N Roses to UK jungle, before The Offspring (no, seriously) became the first band he remembers discovering independently (“I don’t care what anyone says, ‘Smash’ is a great album!”). The roots of Jamie’s eventual sound are also easy to trace, not least because Jamie reels off a list of key influences when pressed: “I got hold of Desmond Dekker, and from there just spawned a love of 76-77 punk rock. But like the first wave of it, bits and pieces of all of them. And then got quite into a bit of UK hip-hop actually. It was quite interesting when I first heard it. Although it was so different musically the ethos seemed to be well similar to, like the 70s punk rock stuff. I definitely felt it ran true to what I believed in”
We then talk politics, as is expected of any interview in which the subject is a singer whose lyrical remit extends beyond rhyming “stars” and “cars”. It is the first time Jamie T turns indignant, quickly ruffling his adorably un-kempt hair at the apathy-friendly malaise that this generation constantly finds itself in.
“There’s a lot of stuff that’s pretty shit” he begins, before correcting himself. “There’s a hell of a lot. But it’s like, other people have stopped caring so much. I don’t give a shit anymore. I can’t be arsed to talk politics. You can’t change anything. I constantly say it, like in interviews: I vote to keep people out, not to put people in!”
And yet, two minutes either side of that question he’s not only touched upon the most tactically-minded reasons to vote, but tackled everything from New Orleans to Iraq. Whether or not he realises it Jamie T is actively engaged with politics; just not the politics of in-fighting, successors and cringeworthy Etonites, but the human stories of abandonment and hope, the politics that touch a nerve and matter. From someone who professes not to care, that’s quite something.
It’s also not really much of a surprise, as Jamie T’s songs are all about observation and the people that he, and us, meet every day. Street-level narratives of hedonism and naivety, of dull routine and, by contrast, flashes of surprise. Tracks such as ‘Northern Line’ and ‘Shelia’ may be London-centric on their sample-friendly surface but, like the Arctic Monkeys before him, transcend local dialect to reach the kids nationwide full of escapism in their hearts, clutching empty beer bottles in their hands. Is it just a coincidence that at the moment there are all these bands around talking about, for want of a better term, “real stuff”?
“It’s not the first time it’s happened is it?” Jamie T responds. “It happened in the 70s, it happened in the 80s, it happened in the 90s. From The Clash to The Specials, from Blur to Pulp. So it happens in every decade” It’s fair to say that those artists connected with you at a far greater level than other, more superficial acts? ”Everything I’ve ever listened to has been kind of observatory music, lyrically anyway. So I don’t really understand why people keep going on about it. I think there’s a lot of honesty around…Look at, like, (Gigwise faves) Hot Club De Paris and The Maccabees, and these bands that are just fantastic. They’ve got their own thing going. The most original thing you can do is be yourself”
If ever there was a line that summed up Jamie T then that’s it. Half an hour in his company and he has single-handedly reinstalled my faith in the articulate, impassioned and impulsive dreamers that have been missing from our music for too long now. Even when talking about whether Berlin is the best city in Europe, why ‘Paul’s Boutique’ is the best Beastie Boys album, or why mixtapes can only really ever be made for girls, he is an unpretentiously ruffled, bona-fide British star.
.jpg)
