Is this the final reincarnation of Jamie T?

When Jamie T walked off stage after his landmark Finsbury Park show in 2023, plenty of people thought they might never see him again. Sure, the Wimbledon-born musician (real name Jamie Alexander Treays) might have just performed his biggest show yet — and bagged his first number one album with The Theory of Whatever — but something was clearly awry. Interviews around the album’s release had been boisterous, boozy and downbeat. Treays did not seem to be in a good place. A year beforehand, when headlining Glastonbury’s John Peel stage, he told the audience he didn’t “give a flying f***” if anyone attended. “Thank you for coming to see us, but it really makes no difference to my life,” he said. “I’d play to an empty room, I don’t care.”

The Jamie T sitting in front of me today is very different. At 40, he’s slimmer, bespectacled and smartly dressed in a well-pressed shirt and workman’s jacket. He’s not explicit about the lifestyle changes that have happened over the past few years, but a few things can be gauged: he’s newly married, exercises regularly and is alternating between sips of Coke and coffee (by comparison, many of his print interviews for Whatever took place in pubs). He is still, of course, Jamie T. “F***s” and “shits” come easily and he moves around with a mildly frenetic energy that feels as though his thoughts want to jump out of his skin. He muses on the significance of Finsbury Park before continuing in his signature cor blimey-tinged drawl. “I’m not trying to be dramatic,” he says, “but I definitely felt like something changed in that moment.” The show, he feels, was “the beginning of the end”. After Finsbury Park, Treays took what he considers to be his first proper “break” from making music in nearly 20 years. “It’s been one long conveyor belt,” he says. “It’s all work. I’ve never stopped working.”

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Treays’s life changed the morning when he came downstairs from his childhood bedroom and heard his own song playing on the radio. Someone had sent a demo to the station, which was picked up by one of the hosts. This was 2006, the year that singles Sheila and If You Got The Money introduced the world to Jamie T, a fast-talking, troubadour-cum-gobshite type with a nervous disposition and a penchant for sinking cans of lager. By the time Treays released his debut album Panic Prevention in 2007, the world was hooked.

He’s clocking back in this week with Ghosts (100 Days of Morning), a masterful record that feels like the hopeful life-affirming hangover after a decades-long hedonistic night out. Ghosts begins upbeat, diving into nostalgia headfirst with daydreamy, romantic shout-along 3310, then Cocktail, a plucky, addictive earworm that sounds just a bit like… Gorillaz. Indeed, Damon Albarn is there on the credit list, courtesy of a studio visit he paid Treays last year. “I think he listened to five or six songs,” he remembers, “and he was just sat there in silence, listening to them,” he laughs, sitting in mock stillness to imitate Albarn’s unflappability. “Then after a song, he just goes ‘Right, next one.’”

Cocktail is one of the many songs that have been haunting Treays for years, begging to be completed. He finally tackled a hefty amount of them on a solo writing trip to Siena last year. Treays gave himself 100 days to process the last 20 years of his life, turn it into music, and move on. (He also happens to write in the morning, hence the pun).

“Nobody really has responsibility to look after the artist they’re signing”

While he isn’t clear on exactly what from his past needed processing, he consistently alludes to parts of his career being “traumatic”. I mention the mental health support on offer for (some) younger artists now, such as Olivia Rodrigo, who insisted everyone on her last tour have access to therapists throughout. “I think that that’s absolutely brilliant,” he says genuinely, “because nobody understands — wait, that sounds like ‘nobody understands!’” he mewls, mocking himself, “But nobody understands the pressure.” He continues: “I think any help that people are offering to you know ‘stars’, or whatever we want to call people like myself, is good. There’s no union for us. There’s no way for us to fight for more rights. Nobody really has responsibility to look after the artist they’re signing and putting in a world that is completely overwhelming to them.”

Treays wants “culpability” from music bosses who allow musicians’ mental health to dwindle. “I think some responsibility has to go on record labels and agents and the likes of that to look after their artists, because none of them would be anywhere without someone who sat in a room writing a song and performing it.” Then there’s the rare occasion where the worst happens — an artist takes their own life. In that case, he demands: “I want more questions. Like, ‘OK, so why the f*** did that happen, and who let that happen? And which companies are involved?’ Because there are big companies involved there.”

Jamie T at Finsbury Park in 2023

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Treays has lived with a panic disorder his entire life. As a teenager he would have panic attacks so severe that his hands and feet would curl up and he would be hospitalised. It was “consistently bad” throughout the start of his career, he says. “Anxiety kind of tends to take funny forms. I’ve found that one situation will calm down and [anxiety] will kind of pop up in a different way.” He gives examples: a nervous tic where he’d need to touch his eye, making it hard to play guitar onstage, or a newfound fear of having an epileptic fit, only to find out it was selaphobia, a fear of flashing lights. He recalls one performance in front of a large festival crowd where he was sent into a panic by a glinting light in the distance. “I was panicking, panicking, panicking,” he recalls. “I got through it though, and there was three minutes at the end of that show where I wasn’t panicking, just before the last song, and it was just bliss.”

Things got bad again ahead of Treays’s Finsbury Park gig, and he found it impossible to rehearse. The only thing that got him through it was rehearsing someone else’s music: Paul Weller’s live performance of Days of Speed. Finally, mere days before performing, Treays felt able to enjoy it. “By the time my best friend Joe [Bispham, a teacher who you may know from Channel 4’s Educating the East End] turned up, I was like, ‘Look what we get to do!’ We had a great night.”

He went to ground again after Finsbury, and fans were right to sense that he might not come back. “I felt like ‘It’s done now. You’ve done everything. You don’t have to do anything else if you don’t want to,’” he remembers. Then Treays popped his head above the parapet for a Fred Again gig at Alexandra Palace in February. He was there to perform vocals on Lights Burn Dimmer, a remix of Jamie T’s 2023 track Hippodrome. Jamie T fans were elated.

“I’m quite keen to give people what they want and say thank you to everyone”

Eight months on, Jamie really is back — for now. Of course there’s always a risk of him going back underground between albums, but the exit he’s planning this time is more permanent. After touring Ghosts and celebrating the upcoming 20th anniversary of his debut album, he is serious about calling time on this era of Jamie T. “I feel like I’ve paid my dues to that particular sound that I created,” he says. “So I’m quite keen to give people what they want and say thank you to everyone, and leave everyone on a high with it, but then to move forward in some slightly different way.”

That even means waving goodbye to Sheila, a song woven into the British psyche. “I don’t think I’ll be playing Sheila for the rest of my days, I will probably phase that out at some point after this year,” he admits. “I wrote a lot of those songs for when I was 18 or 17 and I’d like to have a bit of distance from that. This album feels a bit like tying that all up in a bow.”

He has a couple of ideas of what his future might look and sound like, but “can’t quite work out” which he wants to do yet. Our days with the current version of Jamie T may be numbered, but it at least looks like we’ll get one hell of a goodbye. Between Ghosts, Panic Prevention celebrations and next year’s festival circuit (Treays and his publicist both giggle when I ask about Glastonbury), there are plenty of opportunities to shout lyrics back at the likely lad. As for who he becomes next, and how long that takes… not even Treays can tell us that yet.