{"id":41064,"date":"2014-12-01T11:38:51","date_gmt":"2014-12-01T10:38:51","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.wonderlandmagazine.com\/?p=41064"},"modified":"2016-09-22T14:27:27","modified_gmt":"2016-09-22T14:27:27","slug":"profile-james-bay","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.wonderlandmagazine.com\/2014\/12\/01\/profile-james-bay\/","title":{"rendered":"Profile: James Bay"},"content":{"rendered":"

With his\u00a0whiskeyed\u00a0voice and killer acoustic game, even\u00a0TayTay\u2019s\u00a0on the tail of Burberry boy James Bay. <\/p>\n

\"James<\/a><\/p>\n

Maroon suede cropped jacket by BURBERRY PRORSUM, hat James’ own<\/em><\/p>\n

Guys with guitars aren’t truly loved anymore. A decade ago it was a different story. Things were going really well for the reigning bunch of brogue-wearing, trilbied troubadours. In the golden years of indie, The Strokes sold out arena shows, The Killers made Mormons sexy, and, maybe I’m looking back through full-on fuchsia-tinted glasses, but even Johnny Borrell and Luke Pritchard, armed with indie bangers like “Golden Touch’, weren’t that bad. 23-year-old James Bay remembers The Killers’ “Mr Brightside” being “literally everywhere” when he was a teenager growing up in Hitchin, Hertfordshire. Now it’s him and his contemporaries – Tom Odell, Hozier and Ben Howard occupying that space. But this is a league of sensible songwriters: they’re not about to predict a riot, they don’t swagger about in skinny jeans and, in Bay’s case, he’s playing Burberry not the Barfly.<\/p>\n

“That was crazy,” he says, on playing Christopher Bailey’s SS15 extravaganza. “After the show, this big, tall guy comes over, and he’s all, ‘Hey man, you did a really good show, what’s your name? I wanna shoot you, man.’ Everyone around me was like, ‘Oh, my God’. They told me his name. I recognised it, but I had no idea where from. I felt like a bit of a dick asking if he was a designer. Everyone was like, ‘Err, no, that’s Mario Testino, he’s a massive photographer.'”<\/p>\n

He might sound jammy, but Bay certainly didn’t wing it overnight. His Burberry connections began back in 2013, when Bailey first reached out to use a Bay track for a Burberry presentation. If you’d searched for James Bay back then on Google, you might have struggled to find anything other than the large body of water located in Hudson Bay (it’s still a search Bay shares an unfortunate amount of SEO competition with). His early years were a circuit of pub back-rooms and open mic nights, singing to whoever would listen.<\/p>\n

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\"James<\/a><\/div>\n
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Maroon suede copped jacket by BURBERRY PRORSUM, white cotton button down shirt by CHAPTER, black jeans, hat and watch James’ own<\/em><\/div>\n

At the age of 19, he left his hometown to study at Brighton Institute of Modern Music. He lasted a year of academia before dropping out to traipse along the cobbled streets of Brighton, battered guitar slung over his shoulder, signature hat on head. \u201cI was playing pretty much every night of the week,\u201d he recalls. \u201cIf I didn\u2019t like the \u2013venue\u2013 I was in, I could just go and find another one a few doors down. I\u2019d be playing two or three a night sometimes.\u201d \u201cI was always up for the challenge\u201d, he adds, \u201cI like walking into a place where no one knows or cares about what you\u2019re doing, they\u2019ve all come for a drink and are having a great chat. Whether they\u2019re pissed or about to be, if you can win them over with a song, you think, \u2018Maybe this song\u2019s pretty good?\u2019 That was my mindset.\u201d<\/p>\n

And it\u2019s paying off.\u00a0 Bay is now selling out venues and he\u2019s in the middle of his first US tour. It\u2019s memorable for a number of reasons, particularly for the very special fan he met on the second night. \u201cThis girl was waiting for me after the show, she came over and said, \u2018Are you James Bay?\u2019 I was like, \u2018Excuse me?!\u2019 It was Taylor Swift! She told me she loved my songs, and that she had a few of them on her playlist. She was dissecting the lyrics in front of me, she said she particularly enjoyed the verse lyrics to, \u2018Let It Go\u2019.\u201d<\/p>\n

We\u2019re totally with Taylor. It\u2019s hard not to be won over by Bay\u2019s\u00a0whiskeyed\u00a0voice and killer acoustic game. When the status quo of romance in music is a Wilkinson video depicting an entire relationship through kisses and comedowns, there\u2019s definitely something refreshing about lyrics that you can, well, go off and be a bit emo to. Bay wrote \u201cScars\u201d about his girlfriend, and it took him two years to finish. \u201cIt became about the fact that she had to move away, a little bit out of the blue. We\u2019d been great and all of a sudden the time came round and she had to move countries. That was shit. Eventually she came back, after a year and a half, which was really cool. That was when I was able to finish the song.\u201d \u201cScars\u201d is a gushing and heartfelt plea to make a relationship work, and it did work. Bay is now happily back in the same country with his girlfriend. Requited love, Taylor Swift and Mario\u00a0Testino? Bay\u2019s happy ending is just the beginning.<\/p>\n