Jake Bugg: feeling Buggsy

- this backdated post has been shifted here from the now-defunct "left" page as an idea of what's to be expected on the "music" page! -

It's a Bugg-sy day because this lad just released his latest album.

"Broken" is one of his folksy tunes - not everyone's cup of tea, admittedly, folk, but when you listen to this a couple times more the tones and the words somewhat rub off on you. The first time I watched the video above was in 2013, though it was "Two Fingers" and "Seen It All" that I first came across (as with most people who listen to him). As much as I was won over by those two songs I think it was only after listening to this one and watching the clip for it that I paused and thought, "This guy's different."

At 18, he received a Mercury Prize nomination. At 20, he had a gig at The Royal Albert Hall. It's been a while since then but he hasn't quite reached the world-storming heights that those who hailed him as a "prodigious" Bob Dylan of my generation said he probably would.  Regardless - he has built himself an audience, and that audience listens.

There's actually quite some stuff written on Jake Bugg - such was (and to a slight extent, still is) the interest in him - but there is this one review on his debut album that I was brought to by a post rightly titled "Jake Bugg explains his poetry":

"There's a great story about Jake Bugg that illustrates just how different he is from your average British teenager. Shortly after playing his first gig, Bugg's friends, suitably impressed, implored him to audition for Britain's Got Talent. In their defence, it's no stretch to imagine Amanda Holden violently weeping all the fluid out of her body to the strains of 'Country Song' or 'Someone Told Me', but Bugg was having none of it. "I never would have done that," he told one interviewer, "because it doesn't seem genuine, it doesn't feel natural."

"...his scowling anger is just a front, a carefully erected facade that shields a vulnerable and contemplative soul...'Broken' is a song of such towering beauty and elegance, it boggles the mind that a scruffy teenager barely old enough to shave could have written it. On 'Two Fingers', Bugg talks wistfully of scheming on the streets of Clifton, where he and his mates would "skin up a fat one, hide from the feds", as though life held no nobler pursuit. You can tell that, up until now, his world has been small, and he might well have spiralled down the sinkhole that swallows so many marginalised estate kids. Eventually, however, Bugg comes to the same conclusion that we do: "Something is changing, changing, changing." If this debut album - rife with uncommon wit, insight and melody - is a testament to anything, it's that his small, unremarkable world is about to get a whole lot bigger."