Issue 113 / April-May 2021

“I grew up on
Donk music, like
the Wigan Pier
remixes”
JEZTLS
Unearthing the full range of
emotions in PC Music.
Jamie Staples talks to me from a French suburb,
where he’s spending some time as part of his French
degree. He’s excited about early spring sun, contrasting
it with the wind and rain he associates with Liverpool.
However, the dreary weather doesn’t dispel his love for
the city where he arrived to study, and where his musical
exploits have begun to flourish in recent years. He
speaks enthusiastically about the culture here, excitedly
describing Liverpool’s musicians as “mad!”, but doesn’t
note whether he himself falls into this category.
Jamie’s reverence for his fellow musicians can
be seen in his work under the solo moniker JEZTLS
(pronounced jez-tulls), where he mixes influences from
around the world into his electronic led productions. His
upcoming EP El Paradiso mixes steel drums, trap beats,
dancefloor atmospherics and a variety of guest vocalists.
Taking an improvisational, trial and error approach,
Jamie’s focus is on “sounds that sound nice”, as he puts
it, sincere in its clunkiness. “It doesn’t even have to be in
the same key. It’s a lot more percussion based, and less
melody based,” he adds.
He contrasts this with the classical and jazz training
he received growing up, which he says has “nothing
in common” with his bedroom producing. “I couldn’t
stand being in that chair playing the trumpet or playing
the keyboard anymore with that pressure,” he says. So,
instead, he rebelled from his training out of a teenage
desire to be the “mastermind” behind Katy Perry-esque
chart hits.
It’s this background and his open approach which
makes him such a versatile producer, open to working
with whoever he thinks is making the best music. But, as
Jeztls, Jamie wants to bring the focus back to himself. “I
have a full body of work because I’ve always worked as
a producer for other artists, that’s my main thing. So to
finally find all these tracks coming up that I want to keep,
I wouldn’t want to give them away because they’re more
personal.”
Despite this focus “collaboration [remains] the most
important part of what Jeztls is”, he asserts, with features
from a varied pool of vocalists. There are guest vocals on
almost every track on the EP, including Papa Shiraz on
the dark Night To End and Apollo Kid on the breezy and
kinetic We Belong To The Summer.
The more personal approach is apparent on the
recent single, Tear Me Down (featuring Sintia), a track
Jamie started work on when he was just 14, which
explores ideas around masculinity, family and opening up
about emotions. There has been a lot of discussion about
men’s mental health in the last few years, and Jamie
shared his experience of hearing stock phrases, ‘man up,’
‘boys don’t cry”, from those close to him.
“I think a lot of the time it’s family that won’t let you
be emotional. I grew up with just my mother and I have
so much love for her, but at the same time I always felt
this pressure to be a certain way. But that’s probably the
most hurtful thing, that you’re not allowed to express
yourself emotionally if you identify in a certain way,” he
shares. “It’s crazy. It was always a struggle. Friends and
family would always tell me, ‘You’re way too emotional,
you think too much, you feel too much’.”
Tear Me Down comes from the sense of liberation
Jamie found when he stopped listening to the people
telling him to hide his emotions. “It just hit me, why on
Earth should I not be able to be emotional? Where’s that
rule? There is no rule! It’s a social construct that’s been
placed on people to not be allowed to be emotional. Once
I realised that, so much in my life changed, I cried and I
didn’t feel bad, it was so liberating. I had tears down my
face, but I was feeling good about myself. When you do
that, you get to realise your own self-worth.”
While happy to talk about his background and
identity, as a gay man he’s keenly aware of the boxes
artists can be shoehorned into. There have been some
comparisons between Jeztls and SOPHIE, and while
there are some similarities, that can read like sticking the
two together based on queerness. “It’s like there’s two
options, there’s sexuality, and slight genre, so if you fit
this box, you go over there,” he admits.
While talking about this comparison, it’s clear Jamie
just wants to talk about the music. “I love PC Music and
the whole subgenre that’s come from that. For me, I
grew up on Donk music, like the Wigan Pier remixes,
it was very bouncy and fast BPM.” He says this while
enthusiastically pointing out how the picture of who
listens to PC Music has changed from “Fiat 500s driving
around blasting it out their speakers” to “these LGBTQ+
teenagers sat in their bedrooms, truly vibing”.
It’s his love for a variety of music that animates
him and drives him. From his classical training, through
making tracks on GarageBand with his cousin’s MIDI
keyboard, all the way to his current producer work,
it’s his excitement about finding new sounds that is
constant. Jeztls is his way to explore that, away from the
constraints of classical performance, or producing other
people’s music. As he succinctly puts it: “With Jeztls, I can
just do what I want to do.” !
Words: Ed Haynes / @teddyhaynes (They/Them)
El Paradiso is available from 30th April via Virile Music.
@jeztls
46