Music

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? Feature continues

‘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: