Music

‘This is like being at school or something,’ yawns Jamie Treays, pen and paper in hand. Oh dear. It would appear that our plan to sit the 20-year-old bass-slinger through John Betjeman’s ode to suburbia, ‘Metro Land’, has backfired. Fresh from an early morning session for Radio 4’s ‘Loose Ends’, he arrives at the Sir John Soane's Museum for a photoshoot, pours a pre-noon beer down the drain and whispers his way around the resplendent Victorian building (‘If I had my bag on me, I’d nab half of this stuff,’ he cackles). Then it’s off to a basement to watch the DVD, part of a recent Betjeman exhibition that the people at Sir John Soane's have kindly unearthed for us. Sadly, a restless Treays grumbles that ‘it’s one of the most boring things I’ve ever seen.’
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It’s a surprise because Treays is a Betjeman fan (‘I’m interested in the way he talks about things. It’s quite different to what I’m used to. He talks about countryside tea parties and shit’). His great-aunt left him the famous Betjeman record ‘Banana Blush’ in her will, from which he sampled ‘The Cockney Amorist’ for his booze anthem ‘Sheila’. Then, after Time Out included that song in our ‘50 London Songs’ issue a fan sent him a Betjeman book. Still, turning off the DVD, it’s off to the cramped Seven Stars boozer – pubs, of course, being Treays’ leisure-time venues of choice – to talk about some of the similarities between him and Betjeman that people have been noticing, even if Treays himself hasn’t.

Far from suggesting that Jamie T is the next poet laureate, his poignant tales of modern suburbia do point to a shared worldview with Betjeman that belies Treays’ guffaws at the late poet’s more sentimental work. One of the poet’s great achievements was to celebrate the old, obscure and overlooked London – something that Treays himself is fond of doing. From the suburbs (Northolt and Wimbledon) and the scrapes he and his bored friends get into, to London’s forgotten buildings, it’s all there in his life-affirming debut, which paints a vibrant, Stella-lubed picture of the capital.

‘I complain about London sometimes, but at the same time I love the place, man. I like old listed buildings and shit. If you stop looking at some of the stuff in the sense of, “Oh, it’s old,” and start thinking: Why the fuck would you ever spend the time to do something up in that manner, it really gets you going. It’s crazy, over-the-top shit, man. It annoys me when they get rid of stuff. I heard they’re knocking down Elephant & Castle and that kind of made me sad. It’s proper old, ’70s London.’

His panic attacks, which have inspired Treays to give both his album and his riotous club night the name ‘Panic Prevention’, have also come in for the same kind of weary optimism with which Betjeman treated his subjects. It was once said that depression was to Betjeman what daffodils were to Wordsworth.

‘I’ve come to the conclusion that I’m happy having it,’ says Treays. ‘It’s part of who I am. When I get anxious, I have problems, like thinking I’m going to bite my tongue off or finding it hard to walk. Simple things become incredibly hard. I get problems with fainting, confusion, not being able to use my hands properly. I’ve had it for the last five years, although I think I’ve had a bit of it all of my life. But, y’know, everyone’s a bit fucked up.’