BIOGRAPHY
On this page, you can read all about James in the official biographies, as posted on the official James Morrison websites.
“Everybody has it hard growing up,” he says. “I’m not going to say I had it harder than anyone else. But most of the emotion in my singing has come from my upbringing. And the lyrics are heavily involved – I never wanted it to be a case of, oh, nice tune, but the lyrics are crap.”
James was born in Rugby, the middle child of three. Papa was a rolling stone and left when James was young. With mum bedevilled by debts, depression and the strain of three kids, moving house became the norm – a series of fresh starts that never quite were. “The main reason we moved each time was because we were in so much debt. Then suddenly, we were gonna be kicked out of the house, so let’s move.”
They upped sticks to Northampton when James was nine (“It was the same as any other town – people would rip it out of you if you didn’t play football or if you were different”). And James and his family were different. “By [the age of] six or seven, I was ironing my own clothes. My mum was too knackered from work. We were like little adults by the time we were ten. We had to take care of the house, cook dinner, take care of ourselves in the morning, get ourselves to school and back. Mum had issues from her upbringing, which probably led to issues she had with me, my brother and my sister. I’m very close to my brother and sister. We kept each other going.”
One thing their household never lacked was good music. James’ mum, who’d sung in a band herself, had a collection that went from Pink Floyd and Van Morrison to Stevie Wonder and Michael Jackson. Maybe it started there – I just used to love great singers. That feeling of releasing something, that’s what I wanted to get into.”
At 13, his uncle showed him a blues riff on an acoustic guitar. “I was, Whoa! You’ve got to teach me that! Within a week I’d learnt how to play three tunes all the way through.” Every evening from then on, James would play guitar “I’d be so pent up from not going out, cleaning the house, ironing. It was a release.”
Another move, to the beach town of Porth, at 15. “It was only when we moved down there that people were, Hey, go and get your guitar, man. Let’s sit on the beach – I wanna hear you play. I thought, this is weird, nobody ever used to say that in Northampton!”
From there, he started busking locally. “I used to take all my mates with me, and some days there’d be a massive crowd that’d stop and watch. It’s how I got experience of playing in front of people without getting nervous. And I could make good money – 70 quid an hour sometimes. And there would be crowds of teenage girls… I’d get lads heckling because they were jealous!”
By now he’d been playing guitar every night for two years. He’d sit up listening to Otis Redding, Marvin Gaye, Stevie Wonder. “I loved the rawness of that stuff – the emotion. That’s what I wanted to learn, how to get emotion across.” He taped his voice, at first copying, then naturally developing his own sound. “I mean, any white English guy that tries to sing exactly like Otis Redding is going to look stupid. So I needed to find my own way of conveying feeling.”
Things were developing less well at school. “I did music A-level and I didn’t even get a grade, I was that bad. It was all technical crap – you know, listen to the oboe, write down that part…. I could hear everything that was going on. Everything. I could hear a note and then play it on a piano, and get it right every time. But I was crap at the technical side.”
He was in a school band, playing rock and soul covers, got a few gigs in pubs, even made it on to local TV. But it fizzled out, and after school James ended up working as a chambermaid to make ends meet. He started seeing a girl, Gill, who had lived with his family as a lodger for a while, and when she decided to return to her native Derby James went too. But the only job he could find there was the van-washing. “It’s one of those jobs where anyone can do it. Because I was the youngest they’d give me so much shit. I’d mostly bite my tongue – though you had to stick up for yourself. I couldn’t even play my guitar because I was so tired.”
After getting fired, James trawled the town to get gigs, but the pubs all wanted karaoke. He was about to sack it all, head back to Porth, when a guitarist he’d met at an open-mic session, who had some music equipment, offered to help, invited him to record a demo CD. Ex-A&R man, Spencer Wells, who’d worked in the past with Beverley Knight and David Gray, heard it and got in touch.
“He shuffles in, this skinny white kid in a donkey jacket and a beanie hat with a guitar on his back and I thought, this can’t be the same kid on the CD,” Spencer recalls. “He said ‘d’you want me to sing?’, and within two bars he had me. His voice is just unbelievable – but he’s such a modest lad he doesn’t even realise himself what he’s got.”
Spencer and his business partner Paul McDonald brokered a deal with Polydor. Next thing, James found himself ensconced in a plush West London studio with, among others, producer Martin Terefe (Ron Sexsmith, KT Tunstall, and Ed Harcort) and a group of string players from Nashville. He quickly realised that there was no point trying to sing about stuff that didn’t mean anything to him, or stuff written by other people. “I have to think of something close to me for me to sing properly.”
So he poured his life into his songs. Undiscovered is inspired by a friend he has known since he was three – “He’s into smack now, in a big way. He’s lost, doesn’t know where he’s going, or what he wants to be. He makes me think, there’s a lot of people out there who could be absolutely amazing at something, but they just haven’t had the opportunity, or been able to tap into what they’re good at.”
Pieces Don’t Fit (the song that so impressed the Hollywood film producers) is about his long-term girlfriend, Gill. It’s a break-up song – which at first didn’t go down too well. “I was feeling pretty down at the time. She’s the only girlfriend I’ve ever had but things are changing and it’s going to be really, really tough. But now she understands it was just how I was feeling at the time when I wrote it – it’s not how I feel all the time.”
One Last Chance is based on a lad who had lodged with James’s family. “His mum had been really bad to him. She was a dealer, used to send him out to get her coke when he was eight or nine. He was a really nice lad, though, used to help out at the youth centre, teaching kids to skate. Then he started going out pilling it, and he changed into a totally different, totally selfish person. I was thinking about him fucking up, and having one last chance to get his life together.”
Then there’s the intensely moving Wonderful World – riffing on the theme of Louie Armstrong’s classic, but with none of its blind optimism. “I’m saying, it may be a wonderful world – but it doesn’t feel like that right now. It’s about being on the outside and nobody wanting to let you in. I got inspired by this deaf guy on a bus, an Asian guy. He was drunk and all over the place, smiling at everyone, giving people the thumbs-up. He wasn’t doing any harm, you could see he was all right. Then he put his arm around a girl – not in a lechy way, just being friendly. But she turned around and said, ‘Sorry, but what the fuck are you doing – get off me you freak!’
“I suppose that, because my parents fucked it up a bit, my dad was a bit of a piss head, I try to see the good side of people.”
There’s a song for his mum, This Boy. “My mum didn’t have a lot of enthusiasm. She wasn’t happy most of the time. You think it’s normal as a kid. It was only as I got older I’d think, that was a bit weird. I got quite angry about it, then I realised that wasn’t going to solve anything. So I wrote this song to tell her how I feel – you messed me up, but I’m not going to hold that against you. I’m still here for you. I’m not going to hold it against you.”
James Morrison’s brand of soulfulness isn’t about trying to pastiche black America’s past. But it is about unvarnished honesty, passion and letting your emotions go. As he says, “If you don’t feel it in here [thumps his heart], then don’t go with it.”
Undiscovered went to No 1 in Britain, Top 20 in America and won him the 2007 Brit Award for Best Male (he was also nominated for Best Single and Best Newcomer). James’s debut sold over two million copies worldwide and he became the biggest selling British male solo artist of 2006. He was just 21 – but had already accumulated enough life experience to give his candid folk-soul songs genuine emotional content. By many people’s standards he’d had a tough, itinerant childhood, a broken family and endless house moves – although he’d be the first to shrug and say it was no big deal. But he’d also admit that most of the emotion in his singing has come from his upbringing.
James’s reputation as a must-see live performer soared. Following his jaw dropping, first ever TV performance on Later With Jools Holland he went on to play amazing shows to adoring crowds: including the V festival twice in one day – in 2006 so many people came to see him in one of the smaller tents that he was invited to give an impromptu performance on the main stage; last year he played a full set on the main stage. Then there was the Royal Variety Performance, the Concert for Diana and the more traditional 3 sold-out UK tours. He did the Peace One Day concert at the Royal Albert Hall – and had one of those moments where he suddenly realised that his life had changed forever. “Just before I went on I was watching Yusuf Islam and I thought, I’m on after Cat Stevens! I remember being at home with my dad listening to his albums during the darkest times, the best of times…” James has subsequently provided vocals on Yusuf’s new album.
He toured Europe, Australia and Japan, did three separate tours of America, gigging coast to coast. He also supported John Mayer on his large outdoor ‘sheds’ tour in the US. He gave an acoustic rendition of You Give Me Something on national TV on NBC today as well as Jimmy Kimmel and performed on Jay Leno’s show twice at the host’s invitation. James loved the musical appreciation in the American South, in particular. “People were awesome in Alabama – really friendly, loud and lairy. Even if you play a quiet song, afterwards they just go YEAH!!!”
It was an amazing time. But sometimes, when he wasn’t onstage, or with the band, he’d feel an acute sense of being increasingly cut off from the people who mattered: his friends and family back in Cornwall – where his mother had finally settled with James, his brother Laurie and sister Hayley when James was 11, and where James had refined his self-taught singing and guitar-playing by busking in Newquay. Most importantly of all, he missed his long-term girlfriend Gill, who had inspired You Give Me Something and, during a rocky patch in their relationship, The Pieces Don’t Fit.
The further James Morrison travelled, both physically and career-wise, the more he craved the people he loved. “Everything I’d felt close to just disappeared,” he says. “You do lose your mind a bit; you haven’t got any routines. And sometimes all I’d think about on the road would be Gill – but we’d lose contact. So when I got home it’d feel like we were starting again.”
He finally stopped in August 2007. For two weeks. And then he sat down to write and record the Notoriously Difficult Second Album. And at first it did prove difficult. He tried to write rockier, harder tunes – as glimpsed on Undiscovered’s Call The Police, which touched on the subject of domestic violence. “I went for something with a bit more electric guitar but in the end it just sounded contrived.”
The pressure was on and it was making him try too hard, too self-consciously. “As soon as I’d get something good I’d think about it and screw it up.” And then the penny dropped: “Just go for what you’re feeling at the time. That’s how I worked on the first album, and in a way I think that’s some of the reason why people liked it. It wasn’t trying too hard.”
And so the people who really made him feel, the ones who became the subjects of his songs on Undiscovered – his family and friends – his relationship with each of them, and the new chapters in all their lives, became central to the new album. James went with whatever and whoever was on his mind, and took it from there. The songs began to flow.
“I’ve called the album Songs for You, Truths for Me because that’s what I feel it is. It’s songs for Gill and everyone else. But for me they’re truths. They’re how I feel. I’ve got a song called Love is Hard. In fact, there are three songs with ‘love’ in the title – and I never thought I’d do that, but that’s the way it went. Love is Hard is about when you’re deep in it and it hurts a lot of the time. You’re fighting, or not always agreeing, you might be away from each other and you’ve still got to be strong. So the album’s a collection of truths I’d learnt in the previous year. It just turned out that way: I knew I didn’t want to write about being on the road. I can only write about what I feel.”
In the end, James enlisted many of the same collaborators from Undiscovered to work with him on Songs for You, Truths For Me hooking up once more with co-writers Martin Brammer, Steve Robson and Eg White. He also added a new fan, One Republic’s Ryan Tedder to that list. The Nashville string quartet feature once again. “I know we work well together now – it’ll take a lot for me to work with someone new.”
There is also a notable collaboration on this record, one of the only things his debut album didn’t have, a fantastic duet with Nelly Furtado on the epic Broken Strings.
Songs for You, Truths For Me is a classic James Morrison record that once again showcases his distinctive, raw, soulful style – but takes it to the next level. “It’s less playful, more to the point,” he says. “But I haven’t consciously gone for a different sound. With me, it always comes down to the lyric, the melody, and the rest flows from that. But I’ve definitely tapped into my feelings about life more on this album, rather than writing about characters on the bus (Wonderful World), or whatever. I was just letting stuff flow through me.”
James Morrison’s big, unashamedly romantic heart and generous spirit shines through like a beacon. Songs For You, Truths For Me sees the wide eyed soul-boy become a wiser man. With this he shines once more on a brilliant new collection of songs and cathartic truths.
As the title of James Morrison’s third and by far best album suggests, The Awakening is the sound of an artist coming of age. In his personal life, Morrison has become a father, while losing his own father after the latter’s long battle with alcoholism and depression. At the same time, Morrison, 26, has matured as a singer, songwriter and musician, enabling him to channel all of that emotion into his most accomplished collection of songs yet. “My first two albums felt like practice shots,” he says, “and now I’ve graduated. In many ways this feels like my first proper album.”
Practice shots they may have been, but those first two albums – Undiscovered (2006) and Songs for You, Truths for Me (2008) – have sold a combined total of 4.5m copies and yielded an astonishing ten singles, including You Give Me Something, Wonderful World, The Pieces Don’t Fit Anymore and the global smash Broken Strings, featuring Nelly Furtado. Those practice shots turned Morrison into an international star.
He has sold out arena tours, gigged coast-to-coast in America as well as in Australia, Japan and across Europe; he has performed on Jimmy Kimmel’s and Jay Leno’s TV shows in the States; sung in front of tens of thousands at London’s Hyde Park supporting both Bruce Springsteen and Stevie Wonder; appeared on Herbie Hancock’s Grammy-winning album The Imagination Project – singing a widely acclaimed cover of Sam Cooke’s A Change Is Gonna Come; he has been voted Best Male at the 2007 Brit Awards; and – at just 21 – was the biggest-selling British male solo artist the year his debut album, Undiscovered, came out.
Everything was new then – co-writing songs, recording professionally, adjusting to being in the public eye. “It was an amazing opportunity, obviously, but at the same time I found it hard living up to being the person that people thought I was. I kept getting: ‘Ahh, James Morrison – he’s so romantic.’ And I didn’t think I was that kind of guy. I wasn’t trying to write songs to get the girls. That’s not me at all! But I loved touring, playing live – that was the side that really made me believe in what I was doing.”
When the time came to record his second album, “I was trying too hard to reconfirm why I was there and why people liked me. And that I could do it again”. And he did do it again: the album’s first single, Broken Strings, has been Morrison’s biggest-selling to date to the tune of 1.5m copies – but he struggled to embrace the experience the way he had two years earlier. Looking back, he feels his second album was too pop, too “lukewarm”, a step in the wrong direction. “I thought, if I can’t get it right next time, then I ain’t doing this any more. I’m losing myself, and I don’t want to do that.”
Fortunately, The Awakening has turned out to be the album that James Morrison always had the potential to make – at last a worthy platform for his extraordinary singing voice. “This time I wasn’t worrying about success at all, and that’s why it was really enjoyable. I didn’t feel I had to go for the big, loud notes all the time – I just sat back and sang how I felt and it all just came flooding out.”
The Awakening is a warm, live-sounding collection of classic but contemporary folk-soul songs. There are musical similarities with Morrison’s debut, but with added panache and self-belief. There are soaring strings, uplifting harmonies, soulful ballads and, in Slave to the Music, a hand-clapping dancefloor groover – a new string to his bow. There are nods to Motown, gospel, country and a hint of Latin. Technically, Morrison remains one of the finest white soul singers, equal parts Stevie Wonder and Paul Young. But he is more than just a Big Voice – he sings from the heart. “To me, pop music is just great music that lasts for years,” he says. “Though there is the other side of pop, which is where you have a hit, but then, after it comes out, it never gets heard again. I never wanted to make that sort of music.”
Three years in the making, the new album is Morrison’s first for Island Records, after moving from Polydor. He has retained the services of regular co-writers including Steve Robson, the man behind Take That’s Shine, Eg White (Duffy), Dan Wilson (Adele); as well as Toby Gad, best known for Beyonce’s If I Were a Boy. Ten of the 12 songs are produced by Bernard Butler – the acclaimed former guitarist in Suede. Butler, who also played guitar on The Awakening and is hailed by Morrison as “the director of the album”, has forged an impressive studio-based career, producing the likes of The Libertines, Tricky and Duffy .
“I was a bit nervous to meet him – his musical background is so different to mine,” Morrison says. “And that created a bit of tension in me to want to please him. So every time I sang I was really going for it, and he kept saying, ‘Chill out – you’re singing too much. Sing it softer.’ But it clicked on the second day, and from then on I knew it was going to be epic ; I was so excited.
“Bernard was really good at keeping the space in the songs and not letting them get too cluttered with production. You can hear everything clearly. Yet he made it sound like a proper record without it being too polished. It was exactly what it needed.
“It was quite a full production, but at its core there were only four of us in the room – drums, bass, Bernard on guitar and me singing. We did seven or eight live takes of each song, picked the best and worked around that. We just made sure the vibe was good, and then whatever you put on top is going to sound great.”
The song Up is another duet with “hit” written all over it. It is one of two songs produced by Mark Taylor, who helmed Broken Strings. Morrison’s vocal partner this time seems an incongruous choice – the potty-mouthed new queen of urban music, Jessie J. Jessie was suggested by his longstanding A&R, Colin Barlow. “Not that I was doubting Jessie’s ability in any way,” Morrison says, “But I was worried whether she was the right character for the song. She got in the booth and did all this stuff that was amazing – she is a ridiculously good singer, so in tune she’s like Autotune . I wanted to tap into the side of her character that is just a normal girl. I was like, you’re a Ferrari, Jessie, you’re in fifth gear – take it down to third. In the end it worked amazingly: she sang the chorus the way I should’ve sung it!”
James’s strained relationship with his father, who died last year from heart failure after a protracted and painful battle with alcoholism, inspired the lyrics for Up – and several other songs on The Awakening. “It’s such a personal song: ‘How can I find you when you’re always hiding from yourself/Playing hide and seek with me until it gets too dark inside your shell/Why do I even try when you take yourself for granted – I should know better by now/And when you call, I can already hear that crashing sound as it all falls down.’
“It was basically me saying to him: ‘I’m not going to put up with your shit, but I want you to know you have got the strength to turn it around for yourself.’ I didn’t explain any of that to Jessie, though – I’d only just met her. We just focused on her delivering a shit-hot vocal.”
Another song, The Person I Should Have Been, evolved out of a poem Morrison wrote after a conversation with his dying father. “He wasn’t very well before he died, and we were talking about things he should have done, or things I should have done. It span me out, and I was like, I need to write about this because I’m going crazy.”
Most raw of all is In My Dreams. “I can hardly hear it because it affects me that much – I don’t know how I’m going to perform it. I was writing with Dan Wilson, and he asked me what I was feeling at the time. I told him that my dad had recently died and I was hoping he would come into my dreams, but he still hadn’t.’ And Dan said, ‘I think you should tap into that,’ and as soon as we had the title In My Dreams I just got a guitar and it all came out. Musically I wanted it to sound like “up”, like Curtis Mayfield or Stevie Wonder. I wanted it to feel like you’re in a dream when you’re hearing it.”
Elsewhere, on the album’s title track, Morrison drew on his own experience of fatherhood. His daughter, Elsie, is now three. “It’s like I’ve just woken up to myself and to what I have to do. I used to say ‘oh, I don’t want kids’ – and then when it happened it was the best thing ever. So I wanted to catch that”. And on the stunning I Won’t Let You Go, on which Morrison’s voice really lets fly, his muse is his long-term girlfriend Gill – about whom he had previously penned songs such as You Give Me Something and, during a rocky patch, The Pieces Don’t Fit Anymore.
The Awakening is full of raw emotion, but these are not “downer songs”, says Morrison. “Yes, some of it’s about dealing with shit – but it’s also about looking at yourself and what you’ve got around you, and weighing stuff up to keep yourself thinking positively. I think a lot of people will be able to relate to that, because that’s what life’s like, what relationships are like.”
That is an outlook that Morrison did his best to adhere to during a childhood that was tougher than many. He was born in Rugby, the middle child of three. After his father left when the children were young, the family moved around the country, bedeviled by debts and the frequent threat of eviction, finally settling the Cornish beach town of Porth when Morrison was 15. He taught himself guitar and learnt to perform live by busking locally – although he failed music A-level at school. “I could hear a note and play it on the piano and get it right every time – but I was crap at the technical side.”
A few years of dead-end jobs followed, reaching a nadir during a spell living in Derby when he was employed as a van washer (“I was 19 and living the life of a 40-year-old.”). But he kept his chin up, and it was while living there and performing at open-mic nights that he took the first steps towards landing the record deal with Polydor that turned his life around.
Those formative years perhaps explain Morrison’s unusual reaction to his own celebrity. “I make a point of going to that extra level in my life to remind myself that I’m normal. Like, I went camping to a Haven holiday park – and I didn’t really want to go, but I thought that if I don’t, it’d be like I was saying I’m too good for that. Like I don’t go to Haven holiday parks, I only go to Hawaii or whatever.”
Inevitably, he got mobbed – while eating sausage and mash with his daughter. “I tried to explain that this was private, family time, but in the end I had to get escorted out by a mate. I ended up sitting on my own in the tent for hours, just so I could finish my dinner! I know I shouldn’t do things like that because I’ll get shit I don’t want – but then if I don’t do it I’m creating a barrier, and I don’t want that either. So I have to keep taking the opportunity to knock it down.”
The bad news for James Morrison is that any future camping trips are likely to result in more undignified scrambles – The Awakening has the potential to send him supernova.
“Yeah, it feels like it’s exactly the right thing at the right time,” he concedes. “I’ve only had a couple of moments like that in my life, but I’ve learnt to recognise them when they come along. And it feels like that’s what’s happening now.”
