Dublin one day, New York the next. Sudden fame and constant touring are taking their toll on Jack Peñate. But at least nobody mistakes him for James Blunt any more, he tells Tony Clayton-Lea.
ONE of the most high-profile new pop stars of 2007 doesn't want to be in the tabloids; he wants to be in London, at home, in the bosom of his artistic family. Or perhaps, he ponders, he'd rather be on stage in a small Dublin venue, just him, his guitar and his small guitar amplifier, doing his funny frenetic dance that makes people doubt he's the full ten bob note.
When I meet him (in Dublin last weekend), Jack Fabian Peñate, the son of a Spitalfields market trader (and grandson of acclaimed writer Mervyn Peake - see panel), is suffering from the trademark signs of sudden popularity: haggard appearance, sallow complexion, in need of TLC. He sips from a bottle of water. Today it's Dublin. Tomorrow it's a flight to New York. Yesterday? Well, yesterday was a bit of a blur, to be honest. Too busy working, too little time thinking.
"The only drawback," says a genial but clearly weary Peñate, "is that you don't know how you feel a lot of the times because it's so fast-moving you can't catch up with thinking. The point of reflection is gone, which is not great for a songwriter. I've got lots of notebooks, so I'm always writing. I'm finding at the moment it's very exciting to sit down and allow things to come through. You can't force it. It's all worth it, though, as I'm doing things I'd never have dreamed of."
Peñate wears the legacy of his family background lightly. A south London middle-class kid - whose teachers were somewhat in awe of the fact that Mervyn Peake was his grandfather - he always knew, he says, that his life would revolve around the arts in general (he studied classics at university) and music in particular.
"On the one hand I can't believe I'm doing it, but on the other it's something I expected to be doing all the time. The lucky thing in my life is that I knew from very early on what I wanted to do and to be. When you have that focus, it's great. My parents were fantastic about my ambitions, and not once did they ever say it was a bad idea. I've never been a believer in not achieving your dreams - they never told me I couldn't do it, whereas some of my teenage friends didn't believe that."
Sudden popularity doesn't necessarily equate with overnight success, however, so it's no surprise to learn that Peñate has been beavering away for the past five years. When he started at the age of 17 - fresh from a gap year in America and prior to starting university in London - he had little or no idea of how to gain a foothold in the music industry. His game plan, he recalls, was just to play as many gigs as possible.
"I didn't have an idea of how frightening it was playing in front of people with just a guitar and an amplifier. I felt quite lost and unfocused, but then at around the age of 19 I progressed from playing open mic slots to actual gigs. Playing so many gigs in the early days afforded me the opportunity to get better, and also how to get people's attention. A lot of what you do in music is to try and learn how to make people want to listen more. If they listen they'll shut up.
"Eventually, fear of performing live faded away, and then I started to embrace it - the thrill of playing in a room full of people who didn't know me, who weren't friends, and surprising them with something they weren't expecting."
Unknown to Peñate, there were several other like-minded London-based performers who also adopted from 1976-era punk rock its naïve DIY aesthetic, its singer-songwriter guerrilla tactics and its sense of humour and social observation. Anyone who remembers the likes of punk/poet-with-guitar Patrik Fitzgerald and, somewhat later, the Bard of Barking Billy Bragg (a self-styled "one-man Clash") will recognise in Peñate something of a kindred spirit: a man likes to bash out the tunes with little regard for the epic minor chord sensibilities of a James Blunt or a Coldplay.
"I struggled with the perception of the one-man-and-guitar-equals-sensitive-singer-songwriter. I wanted to play club nights, as a support to rock bands, but the promoters never let me because they expected me to be a James Blunt type. It took quite a bit of time to get people to accept that I wasn't the typical 'acoustic night' act. I'd always be the loudest person there.
"If you're in a band people expect you to be wild, but if it's just you, your guitar, and you're frenziedly running around the stage, yelping, it's quite scary. When I first started, people were freaked out by my onstage antics - they wouldn't quite know what to do because they weren't used to it. It was more a case of breaking down the ego, humiliating yourself. My ethos at that time was to divide opinion; I'd much rather have someone say that I'm a dickhead, and that my music was really annoying than someone who just shrugged their shoulders at what I was doing. The former is reaction, the latter is indifference, which is the biggest fear of my life."
Reaction is what Peñate has been receiving from the off. His rudimentary, bastard- offspring style and songs reference the likes of Bragg and The Housemartins, but they are in themselves reactions to a certain musical malaise.
"It's more of a zeitgeisty thing," he says of his musical output and that of his contemporaries Jamie T, Kate Nash and Lily Allen. "It's also about having a voice, not wanting that voice to be hidden and wanting to react against the Coldplay thing, which just got too big, too epic. So what I do is a reaction to that - it's completely real, under my own name, music that is utterly me and without one ounce of bullshit. The fact that myself, Kate, Lily and Jamie all did this independently of each other is by the by. We've been doing it for years without knowing each other. I heard of Jamie T years ago and was delighted that there was someone else doing the guitar-and-amp thing."
The 'guitar-and-amp thing' might gradually mutate into something more textured. For the moment, however, Peñate is happy enough to warp-speed-factor-nine on stage as he thrashes his guitar strings.
His debut album, Matinee, meanwhile, continues to sell in bucket loads. Does he think the success of the album has been too much too soon? He ponders this for a while, as if he's in two minds. "It might be," he concedes. "It doesn't feel so huge a success to me, though, because I've been in the middle of it. I can't see what other people's perceptions of me are, and I don't want to ask because that'd be a problem for my head.
"What I do know, however, is that I don't intend to be here for just the one album. The next one might fail and the one after that might blow them out of the water. As long as I don't believe I've become too successful too soon, then that's okay.
"My life is actually very insular, just me and a few on-tour people on a bus for months. The gig is different, because they're there to see me, but outside of that I'm never sure what the perception is. I don't read press interviews or anything to do with me. The only thing I notice is the amount of people coming to the gigs."
And what about the Mervyn Peake family connection? Is that a burden?
"I'm incredibly proud of him, and it's totally cool that he is part of my family, but I don't necessarily feel any pressures. He was a writer and I'm a musician. If I wanted to write books, I'm sure I'd feel as if I was being compared to him, but I see him in a non-competitive light. His latter years were sad, so I didn't ever grow with him as Mervyn Peake the writer; it was more he was my poor granddad who died in a mental home with nothing to his name.
"I regard his legacy as terrific, however, and if I can even point one person to his work then I'll be very satisfied. I'll feel that I'm saluting him, and giving him some recognition that he didn't have when he was alive."
