Since Jamie Cullum became famous in 2003, he’s had quite the hard time of it. Musos are keen to dismiss his records as supermarket trolley fare, jazz purists love to hate him for covering The Pussycat Dolls, and Radiohead fans love to hate him for blaspheming their precious ‘High And Dry’. I’ve been a fan of Cullum for years and even I wasn’t keen on his fourth effort The Pursuit. At first.
Cullum kicks off with another one of his jazz standards, ‘Just One of Those Things’, plonking his own saucy introduction at the start of Cole Porter’s classic. ‘I’m sorry to say, I didn’t know her name/ In fact the last six hours are a haze’ – we can at least be thankful that the pint-sized pianist hasn’t lost his penchant for a vulgar lyric.
Cullum’s natural funk swagger comes to the fore on the gloriously swinging ‘You And Me Are Gone’ as well as on a cheeky cover of Rihanna’s ‘Please Don’t Stop The Music’. ‘Mixtape’, on the other hand, is an awkward and annoyingly sentimental tribute to, well, mix tapes. The biggest surprises are his really rather marvellous forays into synth-pop on ‘We Run Things’ and dance beats on ‘Music Is Through’.
It’s been 10 years now and, the way I hear it, he’s still the lovable jazz scamp we all love to hate. But fuck it, the boy’s got soul, moxy, chutzpah and one hell of a way with the piano. Personally, I wouldn’t trade him in for all the Michael Bubles in the world.