With a chiselled face that resembles an emaciated Jack White, the obligatory leather jacket and a black Stetson that’s more ’80s Edge than Pharrell, this year’s Critics’ Choice Award winner James Bay says he wants to lead ‘a new revolution in British guitar music.’ BUT, James Bay doesn’t represent ‘a revolution’ he represents a regression and a retreat, and did he miss George Ezra‘s breakthrough last year?! And Royal Blood who were at the vanguard of a so-called ‘revolution’ once too. Surely this isn’t a revolution, it’s a fulfilment of a target market? He told the Standard: “A progression with guitar-based music is greatly needed. It’s been there in the past in healthy portions but it’s been away for a little while – let’s have a new version of it.” “I think we should just do it and not be apologetic about it. I think we’ve had a real strong couple of years with EDM, dance music and a pretty electronic sound of pop music. People are about ready for a bit of stripped-back honesty again.”
At 24, James Bay is every bit the corporate man’s idea of a singer-songwriter, he’s a Topshop Jeff Buckley – the good looks, the ‘soulful’ vocals that sound contrived to within an inch of every flaccid desperate vowel, production that suffocates any remnants of a song from our ears. He has EVERYTHING going for him, guys… including a Brits critics’ award. You know that nice fellow Sam Smith won one of those? No, I didn’t! Oh yeah, and Adele before him?! And they’re HUGE in the US now you know?! It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy you see. Instead of letting the public or dastardly tastemakers like us decide, they are hedging their bets, stacking the odds and have the production line ready to churn out ready made ‘stars’ off the conveyor belt, pre-packaged. So is he this year’s Ed Sheeran or is he this year’s James Morrison? Or maybe he’s this year’s Tom Odell? Who knows… or maybe the question should be who fucking cares?
His debut album, Chaos And The Calm, isn’t even out yet, but the promo machine and all its might has been laying the groundwork for months now. Bay counts the Rolling Stones and Kings of Leon amongst his influences, and it does seem he’s been taking lessons in stadium-bothering rock if his first single ‘Hold Back the River’ is anything to go by. Minimal guitar lines caressed by Bay’s anguished vocals (he sounds more someone suffering from constipation than someone who knows the pain of loss) before a ‘pleasant’ chorus-line is unfurled that ticks the boxes for a choir-dappled singalong that perfectly encapsulates both the commerciality of Coldplay and Mumford and Sons anthems of yore: into a string of bombastic nothingness, it will no doubt be ringing out across muddy fields this summer then. But far from worshipping at the hand of dirty blues gods of the deep south, he actually he’s more like Paul Young with a guitar; boring white boy soul music with a hint of rock that ignores the genuine innovations in neo-soul currently emerging.
The majors have produced a middle-aged executives vision of how Damien Rice could shift even more records, a good-looking young man with multi-purpose songs that tick boxes like the furniture in an IKEA catalogue. So, he sings love and loss, whilst backed by over produced suite of chugging guitars and syrupy choirs. But HE really feels it MAN. And the girls love a sensitive man, don’t you know? He sings about his scars on the tediously snoozesome heart-on-the-sleeve strummer called, um, ‘Scars’ and couples swoon and sing along to the lame piano pop of ‘If You Ever Want To Be In Love’ while they check their tweets, and point their camera phones in the air. Meanwhile, the balladry of new single ‘Let It Go’ is the sappiest of the lot, Bay’s crumpled falsetto initially shows promise before collapsing under the weight of the silliness of nonsense lines like “Why don’t you be you? And I’ll be me?”
Worst of all, each of these songs is safe. SAFE SAFE SAFE – and boring; lacking cleverness, orginality or believability of the best artists; freeze-dried down to inoffensive trite drivel of weary lyrical platitudes. But like his predecessor Ed Sheeran – the overexposed, smug, interchangeable everyperson of mainstream back slappery (‘didn’t he do well/isn’t he a nice boy’) – James Bay’s career will take off in the mainstream… unlike the ill-fated Coldplay-wannabe-sap Tom Odell.
And yet, Bay is utterly inessential, not to mention indistinguishable from thousands of other strummers at open mic nights across the country, so why has he been plucked from obscurity? He’s not a Bjork, Morrissey, Mark E. Smith, Jarvis, Gruff Rhys, Aidan Moffat. To me he represents more of the same, an identikit version of what a singer-songwriter should be, and ‘The Chaos and the Calm’ already sits at number one in the iTunes charts. Little wonder when the awards and marketing heft are firing up his bandwagon. If you want to know and feel pain of loss, or the discovery of self, buy Grace, Blue or Blood on the Tracks... But these are different times: Bay, Smith, Sheeran and his army of fans are now the acceptable choice for people who are served up very little other than what’s in the mainstream. Have we regressed to the 1950s? And have the BRITS panel even heard of genuinely independent artists anymore?! Or are they just willing to churn out majors A&R tips for the year, like sausages? Anyone would think awards shows and majors were in league or something? Because however spirit-crushingly bland he sounds, one thing’s for sure: James Bay will be big in 2015, despite what we think.
