Racking up the Cullum inches

“Eighteen months ago? It was the total opposite to what I’m doing now,” recalls the boy wonder of jazz, Jamie Cullum, with a wry smile. “I was having a great time, that’s the only similarity, that and playing music of course, but I was carrying my keyboard, driving the van to gigs, playing in bars and clubs, a lot of the time for free to try and get more gigs. I was rehearsing with about five different bands, rock bands, pop bands, hip-hop bands, everything, playing guitar in one, drums in another, piano in my own jazz trio; it was a lot more varied, but everything was low level. There was no promotion, no interviews, no TV, no free CDs…” he grins, tapping the pile of Universal ‘product’ to his left. Ah, the perks.

Cullum has been stirring up the jazz world of late thanks to a landmark £1,000,000 stg record deal – not bad for a 24-year-old English Lit graduate from Wiltshire who recorded early albums with his student loan. Having discovered jazz by way of grunge, metal and drum n bass, Cullum immersed himself in the works of legends like Miles Davis and Herbie Hancock and songwriters such as Tom Waits, James Taylor and Stevie Wonder, people with “long, developing careers”.
“I definitely want a long, developing career,” he says. “I’m not going to be a fresh-faced new kid on the block for long. I’m already not, really. To them, to the jazz critics, I’m already someone who ought to be doing better by now. But I feel I can only do my best, and that’s what I’m doing. I’m not trying to be the next Keith Jarrett or the next Oscar Peterson. I set out to make music that feels good to me. I guess, in theory, the pressure’s on, but all I can do is my own thing. If I get caught up in it it’s just gonna destroy me. The whole point is that so far I’ve enjoyed making music so much, and if I lose that, if it starts to become like a job, then the whole point of it will be lost.”
On his major label debut, Twentysomething, Cullum arms witty, intelligent, original material (see title track ‘Twentysomething’ and ‘All At Sea’) with oh-my-god-is-that-what-I-think-it-is covers that show off his eclectic tastes. Sinatra’s ‘Singin’ In The Rain’, ‘I Could Have Danced All Night’ from My Fair Lady, Jimi Hendrix’ ‘The Wind Cries Mary’ and Jeff Buckley’s ‘Lover, You Should Have Come Over’ all feature.
“I’ve got to love the song, and I’ve got to know it inside out so that I can hear it in a different way,” Cullum says, of his choice in covers. “And you’ve got to have a hook, you’ve got to have a way in. You can’t just play it the way it is. With Jeff Buckley, with ‘Lover, You Should Have Come Over’, I heard it like the blues, slowed down, very empty. The original is like a symphony and it’s very mixed up, but I wanted to make it like a Readers Digest version, at the risk of making it sound incredibly uncool, and maybe do it like Donnie Hathaway did ‘Jealous Guy’, I heard it like that, really empty, just three instruments. And then with the Jimi Hendrix cover I did, I kinda heard it like a New Orleans street march. That’s how it occurred to me in my head.”
Despite the industry frenzy that surrounded his signing – he was namechecked as one to watch in a plethora of well respected publications, and even appeared on Parkinson – Cullum is trying to remain oblivious to the pressure.
“The thing that’s prepared me for all this is the amount that I’ve played live,” he explains. “I’ve done so much of that over the last six years so I’m used to the pressure of playing live gigs every night. But I think I’m coping fine. I’m just enjoying it, for what it is, and as long as I get to play and no one makes me mime and do stupid things like that, I’m happy. I don’t feel pressurised because I was a musician before a major label deal, and I will be afterwards. When it all falls apart, I’ll still be playing music.”

Jamie Cullum plays The Olympia Theatre, Dublin on February 19