kevinperry witnesses the wimbledon wordsmith waxing lyrical

“This place is a bit big for us” says Jamie T, blinking in the lights of the Astoria. It wasn’t too long ago that he was playing London’s grimier dives armed only with a bass guitar and a pad of scrawled lyrics, but the success of his singles, “If You Got The Money” charted at 13 and “Calm Down Dearest” entered the Top Ten, mean that tonight one of central London’s bigger venues has sold out, largely to a younger crowd than the hipsters who first championed him.

Jamie Treays has been lumped in with various different emerging music scenes, from English rappers such as Just Jack as Plan B to the middle-class-from-‘Souf London’ scene that birthed Lily Allen, but in truth he has something which seperates him from all of these acts, a solid-gold-nugget at the heart of his music that promises much. His album, “Panic Prevention”, was released yesterday, and while not every track is a success, when Jamie T is good, he’s very good indeed.

Tonight’s show is opened by Them Nudes,  a London band doing a passable impression of The Jam reinvented as snarlingpunks. The NME-lauded Maccabees, follow and are spectacularly dull, although the mob of kids down the front don’t seem to mind, and pogo enthusiatically regardless.

Their excitement is nothing compared to the main event, however. As he enters with his 4-piece-band, it is abundantly clear that the ramshackle act of his early career has been exorcised in place of a fuller sound, a rockier edge to the record’s hip-hop meets reggae sound.

Opening with ‘Brand New Bass Guitar’, Jamie rattles through a mixture of album material and older tracks and fan favourites such as ‘Ike & Tina’. Each track is interspersed with banter in the  same wide-boy accent that Jamie sings, and his confidence and attitude paper the cracks over a band that seem slightly nervous playing one of the largest London shows of their career.

His live performance rises and falls with the calibre of his tracks, when he’s good on his records, he’s even better live, but when he’s average on his records, his live performance really suffers. The highlights are undoubtably ‘Sheila’ and his tour-de-force ‘Calm Down Dearest’, which is played twice, making a welcome return at the end of the set in a rockier form.

Despite the benefits of the fuller sound that his band provides, perhaps the best moment of the entire show is the beginning of the encore, when Jamie returns without band to play acoustically, including a fantastic cover of Billy Bragg’s ‘A New England’. Edging out into the cold night after the show, and the touts that surrounded the show hours earlier have been replaced by men hawking fake tshirts. They shout over the noise of the buses in voices not far from that with which Jamie T had just been leading the crowd in singalong choruses. Perhaps it is this, over-and-above the mix-mashed production and the witty lyricism, that makes Jamie T what he is. It is the fact that that he speaks a language that is familiar to thousands of kids just like him: white kids in love with black music, middle class kids in love with council estates. All delivered in the patois of the market vendor.
Time will tell whether he can translate his London rooted sound abroad, or reproduce the magic of his best moments, but right now, in his home city, he is a beguiling proposition.