by Jamie Hutchings

Hi, my name’s Jamie Hutchings; I’m a singer, songwriter, guitarist, percussionist, and sometime improviser and producer. I’m based in Sydney, Australia.

Music was a given in my family household as my dad was a woodwind session cat. He’s 83 now, but he still gigs here and there, but as kids, it was his bread and butter. So all of us inherited his musicality in some form, but still (particularly with my brother and I), we found ourselves gravitating more and more towards rawness and originality over professionalism and technique. I was looking through my mum and dad’s record collection the other night, and it’s almost exclusively Frank Sinatra records. Sinatra is amazing, but the overexposure to music in a show-biz format perhaps contributed to us going in a different direction!

Listen to the album while reading the text.

In my teens, I fell in love with the drums; it really felt like the last stop for me. Hypnotic, exhausting, and primitive, the perfect musical foil for a teenage male. However, by my late teens, the music that kept playing in my head had to find a way out, so I started messing around with the guitar and began writing songs as soon as I could form two or three chords. Shortly after, I began attempting to front bands as the singer and guitarist.

By my early twenties, I was writing, recording, and touring as the front person in Bluebottle Kiss. We stayed together for nearly 15 years, releasing six albums, touring a lot, and slowly gaining a cult following. When that ended in 2007, I began concentrating on my solo work. Where Bluebottle Kiss was a four headed beast, often creating a maelstrom, my solo work was more portable, I could experiment with the songs in a more minimalist way. I’ve since gone on to release six solo albums and toured widely.

In 2014, I started playing regularly with my brother Scott and brother-in-law Reuben Wills in a quartet called Infinity Broke. We generally have a second drummer/percussionist (currently, the percussionist is Tyrone Stevens). Infinity Broke, whilst often using conventional song structures, is very reliant on counter rhythmic percussion, with the incorporation of found objects to give it more percussive color. It’s a cathartic and hypnotic thing in contrast to my solo work’s more reflective, narrative-driven flavor.

So that’s 30 years’ worth of music-making. I sometimes produce other bands and collaborate with other people, and I love it all. Despite often remaining unheard, the urge to create is something that doesn’t seem to leave me. Many things fuel humans – love, ambition, spirituality, etc.- but creating things is a big part of what gives me momentum.

I love beauty – a Monet painting, the night sky, Carol King’s Tapestry, and The Beach Boy’s Pet Sounds. However, I also love what some might call ugly – abandoned buildings and cars, the screech of trains, the sound of a fridge turning on in the night, Sonny Sharrock, early Sonic Youth, etc. so the music I tend to make goes either way and often both ways at the same time.

My latest solo album is called A New. It’s probably the warmest and most summery record I’ve released, at least for a while. On A New, I attempted to play most of the instruments myself, so it also has a clunky intimacy to it. It’s also harder and harder to keep bands together or at least perform in a band context with any regularity, so it seemed like good timing.

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Bandcamp Bluebottle Kiss
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Artist’s Note
Sydney, Australia
Alternative, Folk, Indie, Rock, Singer-Songwriter, Experimental
solo, family, rawness, creativity, art