James Bay Wasn't Always Fond Of Travelling

Brit singer-songwriter James Bay may be riding high in the Australian charts with the Otis Redding-y, soul-drenched Hold Back The River, but he rocks out Arctic Monkeys-style on his debut album, Chaos And The Calm. Bay won the star-making BRIT “Critics’ Choice” Award and allows, “there’s an undeniable pressure”. But adds, “I thrive off that. I really love that buzz, that energy, that it creates and I’m just excited by it.” 

"To ten years later find myself sitting on a plane for 20 hours or so and arriving on the other side of the world where you guys had already heard my song..."

Bay, striking with his porcelain skin, long hair, trademark fedora and Johnny Cash-black attire, recently made a whirlwind trip Down Under, selling out shows in Sydney and Melbourne. “As a kid, I wasn’t really into travelling – I wasn’t really into leaving my little hometown even for London, which is only an hour or so away. So, to ten years later find myself sitting on a plane for 20 hours or so and arriving on the other side of the world where you guys had already heard my song a little bit on the radio and all of this stuff, it was amazing.” 

Bay comes across as self-effacing, chiding himself for using “rubbish” descriptors, but he’s also quietly ambitious. The troubadour hails from the “safe” town of Hitchin, which, yes, contains a river, his childhood idyllic. “We had a big old couple of fields at the end of the road there where we could just go run about and climb trees and stuff.” Meanwhile, he obsessed over Michael Jackson, learnt to play an uncle’s classical guitar and eventually gigged in bands. Bay departed Hitchin to study at the Brighton Institute of Modern Music. “It was music that sort of dragged me out.” He performed open-mic nights and a fan’s YouTube footage led to his signing to Republic Records. Oddly, Bay, whose first EP materialised mid-2013, journeyed to Nashville to cut Chaos… with Jacquire King (Kings Of Leon). Bay’s manager had suggested he list his preferred producers. “I boldly put [King] at the top there, thinking we can laugh about this one ‘cause that’ll never happen.” Yet the American was keen. 

Bay has been dubbed “rock’n’soul”. Aware the media questions whether rock is still “relevant”, he notes, “At the moment I think guitars have got a little window. That slightly more organic sound is coming back around and that’s great, ‘cause I love all that stuff.” Chaos… houses rawly personal songs, too. The ballad Scars is about being separated from his childhood sweetheart. “It took a while to write that song; it took a couple of years, because I had to live through the whole thing that it’s about: this long-distance relationship that came about. I had to come out the other side of that, where it turned out that she came back.”

Bay is opening for Taylor Swift on select European dates. “God, the scale of those shows... I wanna see what it’s like to play in front of all those tens of thousands of people.”