Jamie Lenman: "We all have dark moments, don’t we?"

Those romantic, carefree days of 2019, with Jamie Lenman in his bold red suit belting out his reimagined version of Cyndi Lauper's 'She Bop' or 'Hey Jud...

Those romantic, carefree days of 2019, with Jamie Lenman in his bold red suit belting out his reimagined version of Cyndi Lauper's 'She Bop' or 'Hey Jude' by The Beatles seem like a lifetime ago. In 'Shuffle', the enigmatic singer scratched a creative itch which resulted in a unique record that included a scene from Taxi Driver, a reading from Moby Dick and a gargantuan retake of the Popeye theme tune. The album was, ultimately, a gamble that paid off as it seemed in equal measure that, as important as it was for Jamie Lenman to make, it was just as much fun for the listener to go on this weird and wonderful voyage into the fascinating mind of the man.

Now, the mood has changed. In all the pictures it's a black suit and a scowl that reads "no more Mr. Nice Guy". The harsh light makes his cheekbones razor-sharp and, depending on the photo, his eyes are either a murderous stare or, worse, not there at all. For 'King of Clubs', Jamie Lenman is more than just a little irate.

"I mean, we all have dark moments, don't we?" he reasons, when it's pointed out that in person he is one of the most charming people you could ever have the pleasure of meeting.

But, those "dark moments" are what 'King of Clubs' is all about though. It's an eight-track mini-album on the surface but beneath its a furious pummeling of problems which are both wide-ranging global issues and wrestling against his own demons too. Like the album's artwork, it's in those "dark moments" where the shadowy figure of hate, the King of Clubs, is embodied by Jamie Lenman.

That title, in typical Jamie Lenman style, is a double-bladed sword; with one blade pointing forward and the other back at his own chest. On the one hand, where 'Devolver' wryly suggested his own musical disintegration, 'King of Clubs' is another self-deprecating jab by the singer. "I'm never gonna play arenas. I'm gonna stay on the toilet circuit, so if I'm the King of Clubs, then so be it, I fit that," he jokes.

However, on the other side, the brooding instrumental title track which closes out the mini-album was about Jamie himself becoming a bully as a child. The track was originally going to be named 'King of Cruelty' or 'King Cruel' and the lyrics are still printed in the album's inlay, but once those lyrics were pushed out by the scope of the tense death march it made more sense to change the title. And from there, the 'King of Clubs' was born.

"The track 'King of Clubs' is more about the triumph of hate over love, it's quite an upsetting piece of music for me to listen to," he admits. "It's really horrible, it's the song that hatred sings when it wins. It could be Trump's campaign theme.

"And the horrible figure on the cover is most definitely not me, that's supposed to be the embodiment of self-loathing and all the negative thoughts that have swirled up out of this soup. Really, the King of Clubs is an incredibly negative figure that I don't want to associate myself with and yet at times, I ally myself with it. It represents hatred and bad feelings, which is horrible, but that's a part of all of us and every now, and then I feel particularly vindictive or gloomy, and that's what bubbles up in me. So that's what 'King of Clubs' is really, a distillation of feelings."

There is a sense that this album was just as necessary for Jamie as 'Shuffle' was. It's not a "creative itch" needing scratching this time, but bubbling acid racing up his throat and needing to be spewed out.

There is a myriad of different frustrations which come out in the eight tracks and, "It's not always an outward faced anger towards the politics of the day," he reasons.

"'The Road to Right' is about a voyage of personal discovery that ends in revulsion at your own self and 'Kill Me' is about wanting to die because you've met someone that's so attractive and 'Sleep Mission' is about vague, awful things that really get on your tits about the world and then astral projection but that was a bit of a misnomer. It's all about uncomfortable feelings. I suppose the lightest one is 'Like Me Better', which is just about how you come around to liking things that you initially hate… but there's still a negative emotion there somewhere, even if a positive one grows out of it."

It's in the moments where the politics of the day are his gripe though, that Jamie Lenman's most important moments come on this record. Whether it's the exasperated screams of "The future is dead" in the opener or the deadpan "If you're a dick when you're drunk / you're a dick all the time" in 'I Don't Wanna Be Your Friend', Jamie seems to thrive when he confronts large scale movements for change.

There is no secret of his apathy towards politics if you've ever heard 'A Plague on Both Your Houses' from 'Muscle Memory' or his post-Brexit ire in 'Long Gone', and both of these newer singles were perfectly timed for yet more political disillusionment. 'Summer of Discontent (The Future is Dead)' came out at the start of the year "just as the virus broke and our Government were being useless fuckwads but, you know, I wrote it months before that, because they've always been useless fuckwads” while 'I Don't Wanna Be Your Friend' arrived shortly after the murder of George Floyd in America.

"I've been very concerned with the inherent racism and sexism and homophobia in society for a long time and wanted to say something about it and actually, you know, that song is about more than that. It's also about how I feel about anti-social behaviour in general, about drink culture and about internet culture and about the amazing bigotry that pollutes our society," he explains.

The singer is keen to explain that the line "If you're a dick when you're drunk / you're a dick all the time" stems from drunk people occasionally trying to sabotage his live show during his last few tours, but the problem doesn't lie with alcohol directly. He adds, "I've got no problem with alcohol and the drinking culture, but I do have a problem with dicks, so if no one was a dick, getting drunk wouldn't be a problem. So, it's dicks that I've got a problem with, not with alcohol."

With anger as the thread woven throughout, the target in his sights changes from track to track and so too does the approach. The more introspective 'The Road to Right' comes with a bad attitude and the sort of hearty chorus that is vintage Lenman. 'Like Me Better' is a story of growth and learning to love something but still contains the menacing whispers about how he "comes across like an arrogant prick" while 'Kill Me' is a blast of violent imagery like "I want your fingertips to separate me cell by cell / take me apart and show me every kind of special hell".

In the studio, working again with producer Space who has been onboard since 'Devolver', "nicety" was the sound they were looking for; a blend of nasty and nice. "We worked a lot on the textures to make sure the sounds are just right, everything covered in a sort of grease. We wanted it to sound dirty, but also every track should make you uncomfortable for a different reason."

Having been seven years since the (half) thrash metal (half folk) album 'Muscle Memory', this is by some way the heaviest work Jamie Lenman has made in a long while and he is first to admit that was relieved to find he still had it him in.

"There were various bits, most of them are in the song 'I Don't Wanna Be Your Friend', where I thought 'oh that's a bit like Reuben', because the verse is quite Reuben, and then the big metal breakdown is like something I'd put on 'Muscle Memory'. It was a joy to revisit those elements because I never stopped loving the three-minute punk song that we used to do in Reuben, and I never stopped loving the intense metal breakdown that was all over 'Muscle Memory'. So, to find a way in which I could do those again was really surprising and really enjoyable."

The pinnacle of that discomfort is in 'Sleep Mission', which is the fuzzy, industrial-sounding, dirge that is unlike anything Jamie Lenman has ever released before. More akin to the most disconcerting Nine Inch Nails number, Jamie describes that track as "a real exercise in going the road less travelled and finding the awkward sound instead of the obvious things", but that quest to break new ground is what keeps his music so hard to define.

A lot of that confidence to continually push the boundaries of what he can get away with in his music, especially in the trilogy of albums that is the straight-up pop rock record 'Devolver' into the experimental and multi-faceted covers album 'Shuffle', to now with the clenched fist of 'King of Clubs', is down to the relationship between Jamie and Space, his producer.

Between the two of them, they gave themselves the challenge of recording a track per day for this mini-album (and in the instance of 'The Road to Right' they had half a day for which Jamie credits the added tension you can hear on the final product). The process was, in his words, both "exhilarating" and "liberated" and 'King of Clubs' could easily have snowballed into a full album now they both have working together down to a fine art. But, it was Jamie's commitment to not making a full album so soon after 'Shuffle' and to not just churn out another weighty album for listeners to digest. It's that same artistic vision with which he approaches music that makes 'King of Clubs' his final collaboration with Space for a while.

"I didn't go into 'Devolver' thinking, right, we'll make three records and then fuck off. I didn't even know we were gonna make one record when we started making 'Devolver'," he admits.

"I had a very definite plan for 'Shuffle' as an answer to 'Devolver'. I wanted it to be a sister record, sounding sonically very similar. And then when I knew we were gonna make 'King of Clubs' - which was another unplanned child because it was supposed to be a single and then it ballooned into an EP, and then it ballooned even further into a mini-album - I thought, well you know what, looking at the themes and looking at the artwork…

"Which seems like a flippant thing to say, but for a designer, half my life is two-dimensional art and design. For me, an album is just as much, or it has become just as much, about the visual aesthetic as it is about the music on the wax. So, in terms of presentation, I knew I wanted it to be black and dark, whereas the other ones have been so bright.

"And if 'Devolver' was all about sort of rhythms and 'Shuffle' was all about arrangement, then 'King of Clubs' is all about texture and sounds," he continues.

"I was also aware of not wanting to wear out. It's very tricky, when you find someone like Space, that you're so close to personally and who understands you completely and is able to manufacture the sounds that you hear in your head just by looking at you, it's very tempting to wanna run that into the ground. I learned from working with other people that I really love before, that's a real danger. I knew there was gonna have to be a stop somewhere, I was gonna have to call a halt somewhere.

"In fact, I thought about making 'King of Clubs' with someone else, but the more I delved into it, the more I realised that there really was no one else that could have realised it. I made up my mind that this would be our last collaboration, for a long time at least. I'd be really sad if I thought we'd never be working together again, but I'll definitely go so far as to say my next record will be with someone else. And so, yeah, they made a nice trilogy, and I think they sort of complete each other in a way that wasn't planned from the beginning.

"I did not have a master plan at the start of 'Devolver', but it's funny how things work out. It's always easy to impose a framework retrospectively on things, but I did sort of have this in mind before I started work on 'King of Clubs', and so perhaps there is a finality to it. Certainly, the last track being 'King of Clubs', the instrumental, maybe there's a finality there that's, maybe that's a little swansong to our professional arrangement, for the time being."

The possibilities for what Jamie Lenman does next are almost too much to comprehend, as he has consistently proven he can pull off anything but also wants to continually explore the uncharted expanses of his creativity. It's a long way from his days in Reuben where all anyone wanted was an album like 'Racecar is Racecar Backwards' again and again. Whether people have been beaten down from asking too much, Jamie says, "people have stopped asking for another 'Racecar' which I'm glad about" optimistic that actually, that's because people are invested in his unique sound and his commitment to keeping people on their toes.

It's a privileged position, and not one many artists can boast; Jamie Lenman can release a thrash metal album with folk tracks as a B-Side or cover Seal, then a scene from Taxi Driver within the same 5 minutes of an album. He can be pop, he can be metal, he can be fun, he can be deadly serious, he can throwback like in the synths on 'Like Me Better' or be at the cutting edge of new music with Illaman's feature on the mini-album and people are behind him all the way.

"I do feel privileged, but at the same time I've worked hard to get there, but, no matter how hard you've worked for that feather bed it's still comfy when you flop down at the end of the day," he philosophises.

It's true that a lot of people tried to dissuade him from doing 'Shuffle' and predicted it to be "career suicide" but, having come through the other side of that album unscathed, Jamie Lenman only seems more motivated to test his limits (and those of his fans).

"I kept coming back to it ['Shuffle'], and I was talking to a very good friend from the music biz about it and he said, 'the thing is, as a listener to your records and someone who's invested in you musically, if you made another 'Devolver' sound-alike and it was a bit dull, I might go 'oh well, that's that then'. Whereas if you made 'Shuffle', regardless of how it came out, I would be so interested that even if I didn't like it I would definitely listen to what you did next, because I would know that you were following your heart. So, I suppose, even if you didn't like 'Shuffle' then maybe 'King of Clubs' is your reward for hanging in there'.

"That gave me a lot of strength and basically pushed me over the edge to demanding that I was gonna do 'Shuffle'. I think even if people don't like my records, people will still listen to the next one which is crucial because therem are a lot of bands that I don't listen to their new record anymore because I've been so beaten down," he reveals, before naming Weezer and Marilyn Manson as the two biggest disappointments he's come to accept in the last few years.

At the end of the day, for Jamie Lenman, it's not about being relevant but about being exciting which drives him. "If you told me 20 years ago that one day there would be a Weezer record that I hadn't even bothered to listen to, I would punch you in the face because I wouldn't have believed you, but that's where we've got to. And the same with Marilyn Manson, the same with quite a few artists who have just time and again delivered these dull records that I don't believe in, to the point where I've stopped listening, and I'd be dismayed if anyone felt that way about me."

It's safe to say that 'King of Clubs' is anything but dull and, better yet, there is something important to be said in it too. It's a useful way for Jamie Lenman to compartmentalise everything currently pissing him off and not let the 'King of Clubs' consume him entirely. "You can't eat your dinner if your fists are shaking so much that the sausage won't fit in your mouth," he astutely observes, referring to how he has learned to put aside his day to day discontent towards the government. It's a helpful analogy to prevent negativity taking over our lives and a gentle reminder to spread love, not hate.

Taken from the October issue of Upset. Jamie Lenman's album 'King of Clubs' is out now.