Before the release of “Jim,” Lidell went to Los Angeles to shoot a three-part Web mini-series entitled “Jamie Lidell is Jim.” The resulting footage is irrepressibly cute—Lidell enjoys tunes, toys and Tinseltown with youthful abandon—and even more entertaining than his official music videos.
A few days before he began his tour of the U.S., we caught Lidell in Europe and asked him about his California adventure, the benefits of being a morning person and his unusual quest to make the world a cleaner place.
Your phone number is French, but don’t you live in Berlin?
I am in Paris now. I left relatively recently and am still making the move. I love Berlin, but I think something about it was becoming a bit of a mold. I was getting a bit moldy.
Why Paris in particular?
Many, many reasons; too many to go into.
How about one?
Love and croissants and baguettes and no mold. That’s more than one. Not that you need a real reason to do Paris. Paris alone is a reason.
Aren’t you too positive of a guy for France, though, with all your songs about feeling good?
True, there’s a lot of misery here. But, you know what? I find them a lot more upbeat than the Germans.
You profess to be a morning person in your Web mini-series. It’s 7:30 a.m. here, so do you have any advice for those of us that are the opposite?
You’ve either got to love the morning, or you can’t fake it. If you’re going to fake it, you might as well use drugs. Not big drugs, but just, you know, drugs. Music first thing in the morning is a bloody useful thing.
Do you make music in the mornings?
Very infrequently, although many of the songs on this album were recorded [in the morning] on my mobile phone. There is a moment of clarity you can have in the morning, just after you wake up. I don’t know why, but the brain is somehow getting into motion and that interesting space of consciousness creates a window you can use. It’s like that little window you have when you’re trying to remember your dreams.
So do you have some really fancy phone to record your music?
Nah, it was a piece of shit, to be honest, and it’s dead now. It was just some old phone that I used like a Dictaphone in order to record a quick idea. I think I learned my lesson from other recordings when I’d gone into the studio too quickly, thinking, “Ah cool, I can just record this song right now!” And actually, I was wrong. I should have held back a bit and made sure I had a good song on my hands first. So this time, I put my phone next to my bed and would try and fall asleep to these little melodies and stuff, and if one of them would wake me up, I would think, maybe this is a good one. If it sounds good at that low, awful fidelity, then maybe it’s quite good.
Why did you decide to shoot the Web mini-series in Hollywood?
The thing is, for an Englishman, it’s like the end of the road. It’s like flying to the end of the rainbow, where the pot of gold is. I knew that L.A. would provide this cool, warm, welcoming kind of breakfast buffet.
See, you say “breakfast buffet” and I think of Las Vegas, because the stereotype of people in Los Angeles is that they are on a perpetual diet.
Yeah, that’s true, you’re right. It was more like a granola parfait, to be honest.
There’s a bit on the first part of the series that says your song “Out of My System” was originally thought of as a theme song for a colon cleanser.
There’s an unfortunate reality that adverts have to play a part in the survival of a musician these days. I’ve started to chase that; it’s an ugly thing. But at the same time, there’s nothing wrong with a good bit of cleansing. If I can contribute to the well being of the lower colon—the colonic tract in general—then I think I’ve done my bit for society.
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