“Where is he?” mutters the greying road manager as he walks towards the tour bus. “Jamie?” he whispers, to no response. “Jamie?”, now a hiss as he rattles the door only to find it locked from the inside. Returning with keys and a scowl, he opens it up and suggests I make myself comfortable. Tonight Jamie Treays, operating under his Jamie T nom de guerre, is to play a sold-out gig at Queen’s University, Belfast. But it’s already late afternoon, and a surfeit of fag ends and empty lager bottles doesn’t bode well for anyone hoping to catch the 21-year-old from Wimbledon at his sprightly best.
A short wait though, and there’s movement from the top deck of the bus. A cough, a curse, and a bandy-legged figure with a ghoulish pallor and medieval dentistry emerges from the gloom. He blinks in the daylight and forces a grin. “Right then,” he yawns. “Shall we find a pub?”
Treays is a pop star. He has a Top Five debut album, January’s Panic Prevention, to prove it, along with Top 10 single Calm Down Dearest and the 2007 NME Award for best solo artist. A Mercury Prize nomination should be confirmed on Tuesday. But that’s only half of it. Not long ago, he would have been an unlikely prospect: unpolished, acutely English, frighteningly young and prone to nightlife narratives delivered in bus-stop vernacular. But with Lily Allen and Arctic Monkeys reinvigorating the charts, Treays was guaranteed a look-in the moment he offered up the opening couplet of his 2006 debut single Sheila (“Sheila goes out with her mate Stella/ It gets poured all over her fella”). Add to this a knack for splicing genres ranging from skiffle to ska, punk rock to hip-hop, and Panic Prevention is rapidly dubbed a “classic British debut”, and Treays “the new sound of the suburbs”. The public face of SW19 is still kitted out in Fred Perry, but now it doesn’t belong to Tim Henman.
“Aw, I feel sorry for that man,” Treays starts, his merry estuary timbre an amorphous flow of glottal stops, absent consonants and “Jafaican” undertones. “Y’know there was that place they called Henman Hill? Well when that geezer [Andrew] Murray came in, they just changed it to Murray Mound. Poor guy played for years, and never won. It’s so English of him.”
He shakes his head and attacks a pint. Hard to believe, but Treays and Henman are both products of the same Surrey public school, Reed’s. And while you suspect this never presented much of a problem for Tiger Tim, no one exuding Treays’s faint sense of streetwise roguishness would normally want to advertise a life of day-pupil privilege. Far from being embarrassed though, his second single, If You Got the Money, featured a portrait of the Treays family in the chintzy haven of their comfortable living room.
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“I hated school. I worked hard, but wasn’t very good at anything,” he reflects, lighting a fag. He left at 16 to study fine art at sixth-form college. “I didn’t want to be there any longer than I had to. I made a lot of beautiful friends though?” It’s easy to see why. Beyond the odd forced belch, Treays is a certain sort of charming, a master of the mazy anecdote and an enthusiastic listener.
Somehow, it’s not a complete surprise when he explains he suffers from dyslexia. (“Everyone’s got it these days, it just means you get an extra 15 minutes in exams.”) There’s something un-ruled and defiantly lopsided about the tottering flow of his dense, busy wordplay. Makeshift metres house sharply observed sketches of late-teen life (“With slurs and urs and a half-done gram/ I jig to the floor in my mamma’s Raybans/ Looking like something out of Only Fools and” Treays sings on Ike and Tina). The protagonists are familiar: the girls and boys who talk too loudly at the back of the bus, and who on a Saturday night will drop their dinner-table inflections and jump the ticket barriers, charged with the confidence of youth and the freedom of A-level study leave.
If he’s not a conventional singer, then he’s an effective one, putting him square in the company of heroes Ian Dury and Billy Bragg, Joe Strummer and Shane MacGowan. And if Panic Prevention sounds a little rough around the edges, it’s hardly surprising, given he recorded it in his bedroom.
After performing at the open-mic nights of folk clubs in Wimbledon and Soho, a self-released EP in 2006 confirmed his rising stock. When Virgin signed him, it was on the condition there was to be no grooming of his look, sound or persona. It’s this autonomy as an unmuzzled star presenting a youth’s-eye view of the suburbs that might tempt you to suppose his words ring true for the countless other kids who grew up in Blair’s Britain. He grimaces at the thought.
“You’ll speak to someone and they’ll say, ‘I read here that you’re a spokesperson for a generation’. Well I didn’t f****** write that, and neither did the kids who come to the shows because they like the tunes.”
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Treays is visibly nervous about being seen to push any particular views. Anything that could be seen as a critique of society is invariably followed by a quick “whatever that means” or “but what do I know?”. It’s the same in his songs. Even a reference to a soldier dying in Iraq isn’t moralising, more a quick glimpse of the world that exists beyond nocturnal japes. Today, he reasons, the relationship between pop music and the push for social or political change has gone. Even if people his age had the inclination, there’s nothing big to kick out against.
“People always ask me if I’m political, and they want me to say something. I’d like to be, but I don’t really know my own views,” Treays sighs, finishing his third pint. “It’s not something anyone talks about down the pub, and I don’t really care what other people think about those things. I’d rather talk about music, or my friends.”
During his frenetic set, a screen shows photos of Treays and mates lost in the bonhomie of assorted nights out. To the Belfast audience, they’re familiar scenes, as they would be to any young crowd in the country. Some punters take snapshots of their friends, no doubt soon to be shared online. The gig closes to a finale of whoops and a surge of sweaty bodies, and it’s only after the day’s most rock’n’roll of moments that the least rock’n’roll of questions is broached: what do his parents think? Treays pauses and frowns.
“I’m not sure they were ever really aware of what was going on,” he explains. “They’ve never seen me play live, and when I was recording, as far as they knew I was just sitting in my bedroom with music on.” It must have been a shock when you explained to them that this is what you’d be doing from now on? He cackles wildly. “Yeah, can you imagine that? Me sitting them down in the living room and just saying, ‘Mum? Dad? I’m a pop star’.”