Biography
With his appealingly lazy hip-hop vocal phrasing and his eclectic bedroom D.I.Y. musical palette, Jamie T comes across at times like the mutant love child of the Streets' Mike Skinner and Badly Drawn Boy's Damon Gough. His clever pop sense is his own, however, and keeps the young South Londoner from sounding like a mash-up of his influences, which range from vintage Jamaican ska to the Beastie Boys, via Tina Turner and the Clash. Born Jamie Treays (roughly, "TREE-yay") in Wimbledon in 1986, Jamie T grew up in multicultural London, absorbing a variety of musical styles while attempting to create his own. Abandoning the guitar as too difficult to play while singing, Jamie T first picked up the electric bass before a friend gifted him with a hand-me-down standup acoustic model. While playing solo bass-and-vocals gigs, Jamie T also started recording his own one-man band home tracks, eventually debuting with the "Salvador" 7" single in 2004, followed by the Betty and the Selfish Sons EP, both on his own Pacemaker Records imprint. Along with gigs with increasingly hot London acts like the Mystery Jets, Jamie T got an instant leg up when Damon Albarn chose him to remix Gorillaz's single "Kids with Guns." Signing to Gorillaz's label, Virgin Records, Jamie T put together a full band lineup for live gigs and released two more singles in 2006, "Sheila" and "If You've Got the Money," as he prepared his debut album, Panic Prevention, released in early 2007.
