Lockdown album gets proper live launch
After a muted online launch for their album during lockdown, South Harting band Jamie and the Jets are looking forward to launching it properly.
They are planning to play the album in its entirely at a special launch party at The Old Library, Midhurst on Friday, February 11 (doors open 7pm).
Tickets £12 from www. jamiewestguitar.com/index. html or jwest73@me.com.
Stand-up comic Dan Evans will perform. He will also compere the night; also performing will be Diego Brown and the Good Fairy; Jamie and the Jets expect to be on stage around 9pm.
Jamie West, who set up the band around five or six years ago, has called the album Raisin Deckchair, a play on the French words raison d’être: “We were sitting on the beach one day and looking around and everybody was in their deck chairs. I just thought of the phrase and it amused me so that’s what I’ve called the album.
“It was recorded in 2019 and 2020 and it was done in my garage in South Harting. I have been a singer-songwriter for years and years and we created the band for another album that I did and we just enjoyed it so much that we decided to carry on as a band.
“When you are a musician you work with a lot of people and some of them resonate with you and some of them don’t. Sometimes it’s all very professional and you just turn up and you get paid and that’s it, but when you are doing your own music you are looking to resonate with people, to be friends and to share that time and space together. If you’re looking around and you find that you enjoyed it, you just say yes and want to carry on playing together. There is a lot of time and commitment involved in being in a band so you want to look for that resonance.”
As for the release during lockdown: “I was tempted to wait. It was released with a muted online performance. I didn’t really get into all the online gig thing. I wanted to get it out because when you put it out it’s online and you can still do a lot of things but at some point you want to get it out there and play it live because you want that feedback of having an audience. And we’ve not really had the opportunity to do that until now.
“There is no concept to the album. We just want to do the album as an album because that’s what you do. The tagline to the music is that I call it introvertism delivered extrovertly. You can call it folk rock but the rock bit doesn’t really do it but it’s certainly not folk folk. I guess it’s really just in the singer-songwriter genre.
“Touring the album is probably a bit beyond us right now. We just want to get it out there properly and to be able to deliver it to an audience
“One of the songs is about Ho Chi Minh, the esteemed Vietnamese leader.
“He was an extraordinary man who achieved extraordinary things but maybe falls on the other side of the axis of evil.
“There are also songs of love on there and there is a bit about supermoons.
“We get them occasionally and I had this concept of the moon being like our silent guardian and I was wondering what it would tell us as it witnesses everything we do.
“And there’s also a song about the psychological impact of our parents. It is just that we are born into our parents and there is nothing we can do about it. It’s just a small reflection on, whether we like it or not, who brings us up and what we become.”