NYLON Magazine - September 2007 - (Page 146) PANIC ROOM When Jamie T (short for Treays) was a teenager he decided “the outside world wasn’t very nice.” He started to suffer from panic attacks, so his mother (“God bless her!”) bought him a self-help CD called The Panic Prevention Programme. “It was fucking shit,” recalls the 21-year-old over a few pints and a pack of smokes. “But it was all a capella so I started sampling it between songs on mix tapes.” He would give out the now legendary Panic Prevention mix tapes to anyone who asked, via his Web site, through MySpace, and for a while he carried around 30 copies with him at all times. Now, his debut album of the same name retains some of those self-help samples. It’s a good story, no doubt, but in a typically Jamie T move, this bass-thumping singer dampens the sensationalism in favor of realism. “Now it’s become this whole,”[puts on dramatic voice] “Gasp! ‘He had panic attacks! And then he did this album which stopped them!’” he says, balking. “It’s true that being productive stops you from being anxious New Brit sensation Jamie T doesn’t have a lot to be anxious about—at least, not any more. By Kim Taylor Bennett. Photographed by Lee Vincent Grubb because you’re too busy to worry about shit like that and music for me was an outlet. It helped me get out of a cycle, but it’s not like I was sitting in a corner sobbing and then picked up a guitar and went ‘YES!’” Raised in Wimbledon, south London, Jamie T is likeable, self-deprecating, forgetful, and bright. He can hold forth on Pol Pot and Cambodian genocide as readily as he raves about Rancid and his desire to visit legendary East Bay punk stomping ground 924 Gilman Street. He’s also the sort of person you’d like to tear up the town with, (he sporadically puts on club nights at London’s 12 Bar), but it’s Jamie T’s music that’s the real treat. At first it seems scatterbrain and slapdash, but in fact it’s a meticulously structured mash-up of musical styles, sampled strings, tongue-twisting patois, with a few guest slots from the late poet laureate John Betjeman and melodies that slip into your ears and bounce around your brain. “It’s all nicked from somewhere!” he grins, eyes crinkling. “I’ve got no worries about people knowing it’s not original shit. In my eyes it’s just an homage. I know where everything comes from, I’m like, yeah, there’s the Clash, there’s Desmond Dekker.” There he goes, downplaying again. Lyrically, Jamie T has been compared to everyone from Mike Skinner to Billy Bragg. Indeed, his stories are street-smart snapshots of suburban life littered with sharply sketched characters like “Smack Jack The Cracker Man.” His tales speak of drunken fatalities (“Sheila”), “watching your mates go down the wrong path” (“Calm Down Dearest”), late nights, and chemical highs. Lately in the U.K., it’s solo artists like Lily Allen, Jack Penate, and Kate Nash—all loosely strung together by their age, locale, and ballsy, tell-it-like-it-is backchat—who seem to be making the biggest impression. And Jamie T has a filthy mouth to match the best of them. “I was never cool enough to play the guitar,” he explains of his instrument of choice. “Anyway, lead guitarists are cocks! Well, not all of them—but it’s like fucking get a grip, do you not understand there are other people in a band? Solo all you like, but you still sound like a twat.” That’s never going to be a problem for Jamie T.
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