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.”
