Jamie T On Feeling Old At 29 And Dealing With Anxiety

"People are suddenly talking about me in different terms," says Jamie Treays. The Englishman — who records as, simply, Jamie T — released his debut album, Panic Prevention, when he was just 21, and its follow-up, Kings & Queens, at 23. But, his third LP, Carry On The Grudge, arrived after a half-decade interim ("I hadn't released a record in five years, we didn't know if anyone would be interested"); Treays' 'return' marked by a change in how he was perceived.

"Being 29 in a lot of places makes you still young; in the music industry it makes you old," Treays laughs. "Having started really young, I've been treated young for a long time. People would call me 'brash' and all that shit, but I don't think I've really changed since then. It's more that, when you get older, people actually listen to what you're fucking saying. You've been around long enough that they have to listen, if only to wonder how it is that you're still around.

"I try and take it all a bit less seriously now."

"Music is generally for young people, and it should be. When someone's young, they know about the rule book, but they couldn't be fucked learning it or following it, and that's a great thing. But the flip side is that, when you do that, there are certain people who'll just put you down, say, 'You're young, you don't know what you're doing.' You take a lot of flack for the things that you do, but when you're young you're headstrong enough to tell everyone to get fucked."

Treays started out in music young, listening to his older brother's drum'n'bass records before adolescence and forming his first punk band at 14. "Being not particularly handsome-looking, what do you do when you're young, to get girls? You get in a band! That seemed like a good idea at the time, and I've been doing it ever since."

When Treays got a four-track recorder at 15, he funnelled his teenage boredom into recording, growing into the 'one-man-band' he'd be on Panic Prevention. Treays cut his teeth in a DIY way, making flyers and doing poster runs, booking shows and running club nights. "Without meaning to be, I think me and my friends were really driven to do things. Looking back now — and I sound like I'm fucking 60 years old when I say that — I'm happy that I got to do things in a way that's almost disappeared now. Nobody ever thought: 'Let's upload a track and try and get a record deal.' It was: 'Let's put on a party and get 300 quid in our pocket.'"

The first two Jamie T records proved hugely successful in England — Panic Prevention nominated for the Mercury Prize, both clocking up Gold sales — but Treays felt the need to step away, his career tapping into anxieties he'd long been dealing with (hence his debut's title). "I had to learn to be less hard on myself," he says. "I try and take it all a bit less seriously now, think of it like a job. It helps me to keep things separated. This is something I do for a living, and there's a huge public element of that, but my personal private life is my personal private life. That helps me be less stressed."