Jeremy Warmsley 'The Art Of Fiction' album

It’s been a busy year for emerging Anglo-French songsmith Jeremy Warmsley. 2006 not only saw the release of his debut album ‘The Art Of Fiction’, it has also been a year of intense gigging, warming up for the likes of Mystery Jets, Regina Spektor and King Creosote as well as performing at Bestival, End Of The Road festival and Transgresive’s Roadshow.

Jeremy has now m finished biggest UK headline tour to date and to coincide, he’s releasing his home-leaving, string-bolstered anthem ‘Dirty Blue Jeans’. In true Transgressive fashion the 7” comes specially wrapped in a denim sleeve and will be limited to 500 copies, each record will also contain a DVD with all four of his critically acclaimed videos from the LP to date: ‘5 Verses’, ‘I Believe in the Way You Move’, ‘I Promise’, and of course, the title track.

Jeremy Warmsley writes songs in his head and then makes them come out of a computer. Sometimes he plays all the instruments himself, sometimes he gets other people to play them, sometimes the instruments don't exist. He lives in London and is half-French, half-English, which is nice but totally irrelevant.

A songwriter since the age of seventeen, his music encompasses a curious mixture of the new and the old, the traditional and the atypical, all things archaic or experimental.

He self-produces all his songs, playing many instruments himself and working with an eclectic range of musicians and collaborators.

Live appearances vary wildly; from solo, accompanying himself on guitar, ukelele and toy piano and laptop, to full band shows with pianist TOM ROGERSON and drummer MATT INGRAM, bassist/percussionist ADAM BEACH of Optimist Club, and anything in between. (Recent gigs have also seen performances from bassist GBENGA ADELEKAN of Akira).

His debut album, "The Art Of Fiction" was released on Transgressive Records October 9th 2006. (Previous releases include one limited single, two ultra-limited EPs and one really, really limited single).

Biography

Jeremy Warmsley is a 22-year-old musician currently residing in London. He’s literate, bespectacled, wears braces, and, certainly most relevantly of all, has written, performed and produced one of 2006’s most intoxicating listens in debut album ‘The Art Of Fiction’.

Recorded across desolate, wintry evenings from the ending days of 2005 through to the warmer midst of our present annum, ‘TAOF’ is a heady, venturing blitz of electronica-strewn, folk-belting soul. It marks the culmination of a young lifetime of assorted musical fiddling.

‘Aged four, I started playing the recorder,’ he opens. ‘My first performance was in front of 400 kids and parents at a prizegiving ceremony at school in Venezuela aged 7, duetting with my brother on quattro and some guy on the violin.’

Right.

‘I eventually switched to flute, then piano,’ he continues. ‘Truth be told, I didn't really enjoy playing music by that stage though, it was very mindless, playing through random classical pieces set out for me by someone else. When I picked up the guitar it was very nice to be able to play whatever I felt like.’

Ask him what music soundtracked his formative years, and the barrage of responses is predictably unpredictable (of the highlights, Paul Simon, Sam Cooke, Mozart and Beethoven). Ample travelling around at a young age with his Brit/French family, meddling with four-tracks, and a few years at Cambridge University (studying philosophy, since you ask) beckoned, as did the slow evolvement of music-making. But those early days were somewhat tainted in retrospect.

‘I realised that the music I was making was totally ambitionless and
directionless when compared to the stuff I was actually listening to (Microphones, Steve Reich, Brian Eno, Aphex Twin, Radiohead). I wanted to do stuff that was as rule-breaking and inspired as the artists I loved; instead, I was just churning out XTC knockoffs and depressing acoustic songs about girls.’

No real harm there in our view, but if you’re growing up, it’s not just the immediate wants; there’s the whole issue/pressure of isolation, loneliness, expectation and... well, adjusting to growing up: knowing something different to what you knew before. It’s an uncertain time, possibly the most uncertain time in your life. Yet what aural backdrop was desolate and cold enough to convey this sense of uncertainty?

‘I had always dabbled with making electronic music, but had never tried to do it seriously; I tried, and my friends hated it. Not everyone else did though, which was nice.’

Hence where we are now – a blissful, transient state between deft, Bowie-sized epics such as ‘I Knew Her Face Was A Lie’, home-leaving, strings-bolstered anthems such as ‘Dirty Blue Jeans’, the ‘it-should-have-happened(-but-didn’t... or-did-it?)’ tragedy of ‘5 Verses’, and intricate, laptop-bleeping remorse of ‘If I Had Only’. But it’s also about celebration and unification – the righteous thrill of learning what your bits are for in ‘Modern Children’ and the sensuality of the opposite sex (‘I Believe In The Way You Move’) – in other words, universality we can all nod heads to, whether embarrassedly or otherwise.

But the album as a whole?

‘There's no common thread, on the surface; all the songs are about different things.’ Jeremy pauses. ‘There’s a lot in there about what it's like to be lonely, and a few that mention war, or the end of the world, which I guess is a personal fear/fascination of mine.

‘I suppose one common theme is that of trying to step back and assess the world objectively, either by talking about it in the third person or by assuming a character that is not my own. I’m fascinated by the question of authenticity in pop music, the way that people believe that a song is better if it's true, or the way people believe that things pop singers sing about really happened to them. Oasis and Arctic Monkeys Vs Talking Heads and Tom Waits, I suppose. I was always conscious of this writing these songs and as such made an effort to write in such a way that this kind of thinking would be an interesting factor... somehow.’

We should by now be aware of the enigmatic showman at work. Look at the EPs which have pre-cursed this release, and to which the majority of this album has been shaped.

‘The titles of my debut EP bear this out to an extent,’ Jeremy continues from before. “5 Interesting Lies’ (released December 2005 on since sold-out, limited-edition 10”-vinyl)) was supposed to draw your attention to the subject matter of the song and get you thinking about whether or not they were true; there were a few story songs on that EP, and the last track (‘World Of Sound’) in particular was designed to make people question whether I was ‘for real’.

‘The next EP title, ‘Other People's Secrets’ (released May 2006, on – once more – sold-out, limited-edition 10”-vinyl), was supposed to make it sound as though the tracks were all sudden glimpses of something, a window into someone's secret life... the title of the album obviously plays off a similar theme. (It was lifted from a book by David Lodge that attempts to categorise every different sort of fiction it is possible to write. At one point I had visions of trying to write a song that would fit in every category. Didn't quite happen in the end...).’

And the origins, other than Warmsley’s head and then fingers, for this produce? His own bedroom. Where else?

‘What began out of necessity turned out to be a strength; recording at home allows me tremendous freedom and time to get everything just so.

‘When I write a song, I generally have a really strong idea of how it has to sound; recording at home on my own allows me to push that vision through without having to submit to anyone else's take on it.

‘As I’ve made more and more music, however, I’ve learnt to incorporate the other musicians I work with live into those visions. Everyone I play with has a really distinct sound and technique and they've all had a lot of influence on me, so it was really good to be able to bring them in and put them on the record. Especially Tom Rogerson, whose piano playing is simply unlike anyone else's ever (and who also contributed greatly to the string arrangements, especially on ‘Modern Children’), and Adam Beach on the bass and Matt Ingram on the drums, a great rhythm section. What was really fun was to put them on the songs and then to totally f**k around with the stuff that they'd played till it ended up being quite different.’

These aren’t the beginning of the instrumental trail – brass and string sections line the recordings, as do musician friends Mystery Jets, Ladyfuzz and Emmy The Great, all contributing to the masterful, majestic hotchpotch.

So, 11 songs in hand, cataloguing Jeremy’s ascent personally and professionally from keen student artist to Transgressive-signed, budding superstar in waiting... where next? Retelling bitter, adolescent beefs until your hair thins? Hardly.

‘I'm looking forward to trying some much more stripped-down stuff on the next album, although I have some fairly complicated plans for a couple of the songs,’ reveals Jeremy, smiling coyly. ‘I actually already have most of my next two albums planned out. The first is going to be half pure pop, half high-concept; I have a whole story planned out that I’m going to tell in song form. All the songs are written; I can't wait to get back into the studio.’

Suitably, we wait with baited, desperate breath for the next chapter.

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Jeremy Warmsley - The Art Of Fiction