Putting a face to a shadowy subculture, Jamie Woon has been tipped as dubstep's first true pop star. But while music is in his blood, fame might be harder to deal with
Of the 15 contenders in this year's BBC Sound of 2011 poll, Jamie Woon is the only one, as far as we know, whose mum sang with Michael Jackson and whose uncle was in a legendarily hard-living 70s Scottish rock band. He's also the only one to have had one of his records remixed by the dubstep enigma Burial and to have had another praised as "good music to do yoga to" by the actor Gemma Chan, last seen playing a geologist in Dr Who. But, then, Woon's songs do feature his smooth, supple vocals swooping and soaring over fidgety, edgy electronica. And yet he's not remotely offended by the suggestion that they represent, in the nicest possible way, the sound of boxes being ticked.
"I guess I try and tick a lot of boxes myself," he laughs, in the cafe within the east London studio complex where he's been rehearsing for live dates. The only other sound is the low hum of the air-conditioning unit. "I never wanted to be in one scene. I've always wanted to make pop music."
In a way, Woon's fusion of traditional songwriting and singing with dubstep production ? variously called sobstep, dubpop, and lovestep ? is the new pop music. Along with Mercury prizewinners the xx, the highly regarded Mount Kimbie and fellow Sound of 2011 hopeful James Blake (who was at No 2 in the final countdown, two places above Woon), he is bringing an eerie spaciousness, a nocturnal tranquillity, to daytime radio.
"It's had daytime play ? it's mad," he says of recent single Night Air. "I didn't expect it at all, even though I did set out to make a pop record. It's good that Radio 1 are changing their policy and opening up the daytime to new stuff. It's even apparently been playlisted on Asda FM."
If his music offers a new kind of pop music, Woon is a new kind of pop star: like James Blake, he lives partly in the shadowy netherworld of dubstep. His music is created in a bedroom (in Clapton, in a house that he shares with modern jazz Mercury nominees Portico Quartet), using Apple's Logic software and skills acquired watching friends Burial and Ramadanman work their dark magic on his music. On the other hand, he's tall and handsome, with jet-black hair and a goatee, and a soulful croon designed to charm the mainstream. "X Factor magazine described me as 'Michael Bubl�'s angsty goth cousin'," he says without a hint of embarrassment.
He seems calm and self-assured, but then, at 28, he's had time to prepare for this. He's also been schooled in all the right places: specifically, the Brit School in Croydon, former alma mater of Adele, Amy Winehouse, Kate Nash, Katie Melua, Katy B, Leona Lewis and this year's Sound of 2011 pollwinner, Jessie J.
There, he "hung out a bit" with Winehouse, but he wasn't part of the legwarmers-and-pirouettes brigade because he didn't take dance or musical theatre, he just specialised in music. "Me and my friends used to sit around looking moody, playing guitars in the lobby in hoodies, trying to intimidate everyone," he says with a grin.
One day, he got approached in the smoking pit by a band called Superfish, who were into Radiohead and Nirvana and who were looking for a singer with the requisite Cobain/Yorke-style attitude. Woon got the gig, their high point being a performance of Radiohead's Lucky at Croydon's Fairfield Halls, where the audience were, he recalls, "bemused by this intense, edgy-voiced kid".
Softly-spoken and inscrutable, it's hard to tell where his quiet intensity comes from. His upbringing was, he considers, "eventful in all the normal ways": he was born in south-west London in 1983, and his mother was Mae McKenna, a Celtic folk singer who doubled as a session singer for Pete Townshend, Scritti Politti, Kylie, Bj�rk and Michael Jackson among others. (She also provided backing vocals for her son's Night Air.) Woon's uncle Hugh, meanwhile, played keyboards with the notoriously dissolute Sensational Alex Harvey Band, although Woon is quick to point out that he has "been mostly teetotal since I've been around".
He was impressed when he was introduced, aged eight, to Kylie ? he remembers she had on "the sparkliest red dress I've ever seen" ? but what he really wanted was to be a journalist or an astronaut. He discounts professional golfer or tennis coach, even though these were what his Malaysian father, who left when Woon was nine, did for a living.
With just Woon and his mother at home, he became, as he puts it, "pretty self-involved ? I was the centre of my own universe. I was a bit of a geek, really." He took up guitar in his early teens, inspired by Blur and Oasis, and was further encouraged to pursue music after joining his mum in Nashville in 1999 and watching as she recorded an album of Celtic-meets-bluegrass songs titled Shore to Shore.
He returned to America soon after to attend a guitar camp in North Carolina, an acoustic and folk guitar workshop where he learned how to play the instrument percussively and how to employ open tunings, beloved of Joni Mitchell, Nick Drake and John Martyn, all artists he began to admire. Around this time he also fell under the spell of DJ Shadow's sampling classic Endtroducing ... and Radiohead's OK Computer, the latter a prime example of emotional songcraft allied to electronics.
Less widely known is one of Woon's "absolute all-time heroes", the troubled London soul wonderkid Lewis Taylor, whose 90s and noughties albums have earned him cult status, even though he has retired from music, having removed all traces of himself from YouTube. Woon's debut album, Mirrorwriting, released this spring, will feature an homage to his electronic soul forebear in the form of a series of one-word song titles, a speciality of Taylor's.
I interviewed Taylor several times, about his experiences with hard drugs and his unease about being marketed as a soul boy ? a sort of credible Jamiroquai ? when really he wanted to make records influenced by the weirder parts of the Brian Wilson catalogue, as well as by Captain Beefheart. I put it to Woon that he lacks any of Taylor's self-destructive tendencies and seems destined for success.
"Really?" he says, almost disappointed. You don't, I tell him, seem to have the air of a casualty about you; you're not messed up. "I am, in my own way," he argues. "Maybe I haven't taken a shitload of drugs, but I am singing about my own life, my own internal struggles."
The songs from Mirrorwriting, such as Spirits, Shoulda, Street and Spiral, have the requisite space and silence, and enough crepuscular ambience, to convince doubters that Woon is more than just a soulboy in dubstep clothing. They strike the right balance between organic warmth and synthetic cool, between the doleful and the digital.
At least four of the songs on the album are, he explains, about trying to find peace amid the angry noise of the city. Throughout, he uses "tons of reverb and delay" to stretch out the sounds, because he has "a terrible relationship with time" and wants to, as far as he can, create more of it. This is what he has acquired from Ramadanman and Burial ? that ability to take a moment and make it linger.
What he has also learned from these mysterious producers is that you can make commercially impactful music without giving too much of yourself away.
"I don't aim to be a personality," he says. I ask him whether he'll be as in-our-face as Jessie J this year, but I already know the answer. "You're sitting next to me now," he says. "You tell me." How does his music compare and contrast with James Blake's? "I don't really want to answer that."
Woon's next single, Lady Luck, is, he reveals, about whinging, something he does a lot. "I do it all the time, then I beat myself up for it. It's a vicious cycle of self-laceration. Why do I put myself down? So that it's harder for other people to do it."
Appearances can be deceiving. You would think he was, like that earlier exponent of quirky modern soul, Craig David, Born to Do It. Far from it. "I'm not very comfortable with a great deal of attention," he says finally. "I really love pop music and I still love the idea of making tunes that loads of people connect with, but it's not in my personality to want to be a star."
Lady Luck is released by Polydor on 28 March. Jamie Woon plays the Jericho, Oxford, on 19 February, then tours the UK until 6 March.
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