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Some people just seem to understand the current situation in music more than others. Worried about fans stealing your new album? Stream the whole thing for free on your MySpace like our dude Jamie T did. No video budget? Make one your damn self like our dude Jamie T did (also on the MySpace). Be a go-getter. We will find you! After you listen to Jamie's awesome raggedy anthems on his page, you can purchase his new album Panic Prevention, released this week in the UK here. After the jump, you can read Jamie's Gen F from F38, and yes, we fuck with pegged jeans and street drinks.
Child's Play
Jamie T relieves the pressure
By Chioma Nnadi
Pounding the pavement, dressed in black, Jamie T emerges from the darkness like a mod-shaped apparition. “From here to Salavdooorrr!!!” he croons, guitar strings jangling along like Big Ben at midnight. “The laydeess dance!!!” The bass breaks loose and before you know it the whole video explodes into a giant mobile disco, only now the West Londoner is seven years old, lip-synching his little heart out and tearing up the tarmac with some kid-crazy dance moves.
“This is gonna sound really wrong if I don’t say this right. But I love the way little kids dance,” Jamie says while pondering his first video, “Salvador”. “They’re all loose, they just let themselves go. People as they get older tend to dance like they’re trying to impress someone, myself included.” Although Jamie T probably wouldn’t admit it, that little kid’s footwork has something of the same carefree jaunt of his own musical feet. Whether it’s tinkering his way ’round old school reggae samples in his bedroom, reminiscing on by-gone rave days or jamming solo after hours down the pub with his acoustic bass, Jamie makes music with the playful mish-mash instinct of a child. It’s the subject matter—tales of drunken nights in Wimbledon with drunken ex-girlfriends—that neatly ties everything together, and partly why some have called him a suburban troubadour.
The newest tag that everyone’s been dying to pin on him is the Thamesbeat one: a scene that, as the name suggests, is holding ground along the city’s river, with Eel Pie Island as the epicenter of it all. “I think it’s a bunch of bullocks basically,” he says in response to the mere mention of the word Thamesbeat. “I think if you make a scene, scenes die and I don’t think any band in that scene deserves to die and I don’t think they will.” Bands like the Mystery Jets and Larrikin Love all bonded over late summer gigs in the island’s dockyard. And while Jamie’s toured with more than a few of his musical buddies he’s more excited about taking his own movement on the road. He has an extension of his music that he calls Panic Prevention, and what started out as a free mixtape has recently became its own club night. “A bit of Prince, some Desmond Dekker, and there’s some Paul Weller on there I think,” he says of Panic Prevention Volume One, the first mixtape he’s handed out at gigs. Between his songs and his mixtapes, it’s as if Jamie T has imagined some secret musical playground. “I suffer from panic attacks quite a lot,” he says. “And I think people like the idea that if you’re panicking you can put this music on to take your mind off of it.”