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James Morrison and acoustic pop
Ever wondered where acoustic pop comes from? Time Out hails the charts‘ new puritans
Even if you don’t know James Morrison’s name, you’ll know his voice – a throaty behemoth you’d expect to come from a Ray Harryhausen-animated frost giant rather than a curly-mopped slip of a gent. Married to a glitzy Vegas Soul Revue-style backing, it’s destined to become the unavoidable smash of the season. Indeed, the 21-year-old’s debut single ‘You Give Me Something’ is all over the radio like whooping cough and his debut long-player is already Number One in the album charts before it’s even come out.
In the post-James Blunt era, there is a glut of men with guitars in the charts. Each of them has their own peculiar marketable quality, whether it’s the T4 presenter looks of Paolo Nutini, at one end of the spectrum, or the matey quirkiness of Jim Noir at the other. But ultimately, distinguishing between them is like picking your favourite Spice Girl. Morrison, The Retro One, is easily lumped in with the rest. And that’s why we’re doing it too – because it’s so easy. Given the simplicity of the exercise, isn’t Morrison worried about being typecast?
‘Well, I already have been, to be honest,’ he chuckles. ‘So I can’t really let it bother me too much. It’s up to me to prove myself and when people listen to the album hopefully they’ll see that I haven’t tried to be James Blunt.’
That’s something we can all be thankful for. It’s true that Morrison’s gruff trad-soul is more reminiscent of Paul Young and Zucchero, inhabiting the same body, than his rival’s dreary balladeering. ‘He is good – he’s got an individual voice,’ is Morrison’s charitable assessment of Blunt’s castrato sea-lion yowl. ‘But I don’t see a similarity between me and him other than the fact I’m a male singer-songwriter.’
Morrison sees himself more in keeping with Lily Allen (‘She’s got a great style; I really like her little stories and the honesty of her lyrics’) and perhaps the two have more than youth and popularity in common. After all, ‘You Give Me Something’ is nothing if not honest, written from the perspective of a young man quantifying his affection for Miss Right Now.
‘Being 21, I’m not going to be head over heels in love straight away,’ says James. ‘So I wanted to write a horribly honest love song. You know, he likes her, but he doesn’t know if he wants to be with her forever.’
There’s no denying that Morrison is a soul aficionado – he speaks with genuine passion about his influences (Van Morrison, Otis Redding, Kurt Cobain) and the Motown-inspired recording techniques used to get a ‘raw, full’ sound for his album. Yet in many ways James and his ilk are being marketed as boy-bands for grown ups, except selling an idealised version of romance rather than the sanitised sex of your average pop idol. Morrison has the carefully ruffled appearance of the professionally styled and a MySpace presence Sandi Thom would die for. It’s not surprising that Morrison regards the digital water-cooler as important to his success:
‘MySpace helped a lot, because you can message people back and they feel like it’s a personal thing. But these days, because I’m so busy, the time I actually get to sit down and message them all is quite minimal, so some people get upset.’This idea that these men with guitars are the boy-bands it’s acceptable to like is given further weight by James’s list of friends. Is he aware they almost all seem to be excitable young women?
‘Yeah, I don’t know what that’s about! I never expected that. I want the guys to like it as well, you know. I never intended to be some sort of romancing singer-songwriter.’
However, at this point the boy-band theory breaks down. Virtual swordsmanship aside, Morrison has also been the beneficiary of another, often overlooked, cabal of tastemakers. Aside from the leftfield cheerleaders, the NMEs and Xfms and 6Musics who pride themselves on breaking new artists, is another network. Led by Jools Holland, Jonathan Ross and Radio 2, this one prizes professionalism above invention, treasures a catchy melody and a strong hook and, quite rightly, couldn’t care less what all the trendspotters are into at the moment. In many ways this is the conservative (with a small ‘c’, of course) grassroots of the music industry. Morrison’s ascent really began with an appearance on Jools Holland’s BBC2 show. Although his support slot on the tour of fellow ‘Later’ alumnus Corinne Bailey Rae got people talking, TV exposed him to an audience who would otherwise not have made the effort to seek him out. He’s not the first artist to take off this way, as proved by the ubiquity of the previously unknown KT Tunstall following her 2004 appearance on the same show.
But Jools is far from the only game in town – let us not forget the venerable Michael Parkinson’s role as kingmaker. The smooth-talking jazz-maniac has had a mottled hand in the success of several MOR superstars since the resurrection of his show, including Katie Melua, Michael Bublé, Jamie Cullum and Il Divo (yeah, thanks for that one, Mike). Parky’s TV producer Bea Ballard has said that ‘Grown-ups will buy grown-up music if it’s given as much exposure as teen pop’ and the evidence confirms this: these days you can’t buy a book from Foyles or a scotch egg from the all-night garage without tripping over a rack of Parky-endorsed CDs. In fact, it might benefit Johnny Borrell to remember that his band only hit the big time after performing ‘Golden Touch’ on Parkinson’s show, following an ITV-imposed moratorium on jazz guests.
Music which succeeds at this level might be mature, but it’s never challenging: it doesn’t need explaining, contextualising, or otherwise dressing up. Instantly familiar and recognisably ‘classic’, it won’t make anyone put their foot through the television, although Il Divo might have come close. At the same time, these are not strictly mainstream pop artists. Melua’s photogenics might help her cause, but shout ‘Hey! Let’s sign a Georgian-Irish MOR guitarist’ in your average major label A&R meeting and you’ll get a written warning for hogging the cocaine. These aren’t factory-farmed and hormone-injected pop puppets, say the conservatives, but professional artists, who honed their craft the old-fashioned way. Morrison’s reasoning for the resurgence of interest in good old-fashioned songwriting is illuminating: ‘That style comes from a time when music was raw and full of passion and honesty,’ he says. ‘I think the music industry’s made that die down a bit due to wanting to make loads of money out of it, rather than having long-term artists writing good stuff.’
As with the numerous indie bands puffed up with weapons-grade hype, there are question marks over the career longevity of the conservative-friendly acts once the fairy dust has settled. Established stars such as David Bowie or George Michael traditionally show little improvement in sales even after appearing on ‘Parkinson’, which suggests novelty is at the root of these meteoric successes. The second album from the once-almighty Jamie Cullum suffered a marked decrease in units shifted compared to its predecessor.
Of course, Morrison. who has already filmed his slots for ‘Popworld’ doesn’t like being lumped in with these other characters. ‘I wanted the tunes to be sneaky pop tunes, but the lyrics to be deep enough to carry the songs across,’ he says ‘I wanted to write an album where the songs could stand up today and maybe in 20 years time, because they were recorded with passion.’
Well, they’re fine for today, and for the next five years, but the brutal truth is that the album will not stand up in 20 years, simply because it’s too authentic. The conservative consumer likes music to be a finished product, a definitive article. There’s nothing wrong with that, of course, but Morrison’s album is unlikely to rank alongside ‘Songs In The Key Of Life’ in any futuristic soul Top Tens because it lacks the questing, inventive spirit of soul’s originators. Morrison and his contemporaries may be fine musicians with (in his case at least) voices of distinction, but let’s face it, even in 2026 his label will never let him record something like Stevie Wonder’s ‘Journey Through The Secret Life Of Plants’. Still, by then we’ll be consuming music in pill form in our hoverhouses, so it probably won’t matter.
Written by Eddy Lawrence
