The West is the Best

One of the pleasures of preparing for a gig is rediscovering songs.

Preparing for Jamie West‘s gig on Noel Le Bon’s night at Open Ealing (Facebook event here) with a stop at the Speech Painter’s Petworth Fringe PoPuP and a post-gig gig at Harting Roundhouse, I’ve had the pleasure of listening through his back catalogue. Scratchy recordings Live at the Plimsoll, the albums of Lewd his millennial band (interview below), and his superb solo albums.

I urge you to have a listen to (Sic) Amor, Back Up Delete and Fleecing the Christians.

You can hear Sine at the bottom of the page. Then have a listen to more on his website:

http://www.jamiewestguitar.com/music....

INTERVIEW

I interviewed Jamie West in 2005 for Speak Up magazine as he was climbing a hill in Sussex, England, asking first if he had always wanted to be a rock star.

JAMIE WEST:

You know, if you – I don’t know – dig holes in the road, you know, you have an aspiration. If you play cricket, you want to play for England, or whatever you do. It’s a natural head of the line when you play the guitar, the wish to be, you know, famous and recognised, or acknowledged for it. So, yeah. Ever since I played the guitar.

SPEAK UP: I hear that Paul just lost his guitar. Is that a typical Lewd experience?

JAMIE WEST:

Yeah, it is quite typical. We’re … we fight to be organised, but naturally we’re very unorganised, and we’re just very much four men. Um. You know, you can imagine. Four men live together, four women live together. Which one stereotypically will be clean and tidy, and which one will be a complete fag-butt hell? And we are a complete fab-butt hell, but just on a tour van.

SPEAK UP: How do you write your songs?

JAMIE WEST:

My favourite method, still to this day, is to write a lyric first. Not first, but to write a complete lyric of prose, with … not a beginning and end, but following a style, to encapsulate a point that I’m trying to make. And then what I do is, because I play the guitar, I’m always picking it up and fiddling with it, and listening to different sounds, whatever, I try and marry the two together. and I try and think about the pace of the lyric, try and marry it with the, sort of, the pace and the tempo of the song … and then obviusly sometimes you get, you know, you like a bit of music very very much, so you try and force lyrics into it, and vice versa. You know, sometimes you like the lyrics so much, but the music doesn’t fit, so you have to chop and change the music. So that’s my favourite way. But listening to other people, and reading about the way people write songs, you know, everyone does it in a quite unique way. And I always thought that that was THE way to do it, you know. To be complete. But, you know, Bowie and Thom Yorke, they just chop words up, you know. They just write soundbites, and they fit soundbites into songs. So they’ll go to the studio and record, you know, a whole bit of music and then just fit the … have a melody and fit the words into the melody. So I’ve been trying to do that a little bit. But you know my favourite method is still a complete lyrical article and try to marry the music to it.

SPEAK UP: What’s next for Lewd?

JAMIE WEST:

We went into the studio in August and did four songs and we’ve been, you know, touring – and recorded those, but on reflection, on listening to them back, we think we can do it better. So, because there is a little bit of money in the pot, we’re going to try and get someone – a producer person – to come down and lend, you know, a fifth ear to this, and try to get him to produce something. You know, really top-notch, and really really beautiful. So that’s what’s next, so we see that happening. And just more gigs really. We’re going to go out and about and just do some more gigs. Keep playing live.

Finally SPEAK UP asked if Jamie would like to come to Brazil.

JAMIE WEST:

Yeah, I’d love to see Brazil, for … for the size of it, for the culture, for the … Things I remember about India, stuff like that, were the smell. That sounds really daft but it’s really important. Countries have … , you know, smells. Aromas. Every now and then, you catch the smell of a wood burning and it just takes you back to Nepal. It’s such a strong sense. So it’s – I suppose it sounds stupid – but Ireland. You smell a pub or you smell, um, fried … food frying, it makes you think of Ireland. So I’d love to go and smell Brazil. The Pope kisses the tarmac, I just smell it. So yeah, I’d love to go to Brazil. I’d love to go to lots of parts of South America.