Jack Peñate, the 24-year-old singer-songwriter and best friend of Adele and
Lily Allen, is in his kitchen apologising for the bad smell emanating from
his flatmate's dog. Come on Jack, blaming it on a defenceless hound, that's
a bit cheap. “No, honestly! It's 'cos my girlfriend bought me this whole
Parma ham for Christmas. Look at it: it's still massive and we've been
eating it for three months,” he explains, pointing at it, “so I keep giving
bits to the dog who then does these really stinky farts”.
The words are rushing from his mouth as fast as the pong is vacating the dog.
Peñate, with his ruffled brown hair, South London accent and garrulous hand
gestures, is a fireball of energy - as was evidenced on his first album,
Matinee, on which he bounced from big buoyant song to big buoyant song, his
slightly over-egged estuary accent jumping joyously through a ska and
rockabilly tinged repertoire. In a way it tried too hard, a victim of
Peñate's own youthful urgency. He wrote it aged 19-20, performed it until he
was 23, and gave his live shows 200 per cent, with his jiving,
ants-in-his-pants stage performance leaving internet messageboards full of
fans asking each other “how to do the Jack Peñate dance”. However, there
were also detractors who complained that it was style over substance.
That people-pleasing instinct may still remain - “See, I took that ham to a
local butcher's to ask if he'd cut it - and when he saw I'd brought pig into
his halal shop he went completely mental - I just didn't think! I had to go
back to buy loads of expensive beef as an apology, I felt so bad.”
Musically, though, he has taken a deep breath, realised that life is not just
joyful, “and that I don't have to show this mythical notion of Who I Am all
the time”, and written a second album that is extraordinarily different from
the first. “The first record was a collection of songs rather than an album,
and I knew that. I was young and I called it Matinee because that's the
kids' show, it's not the main event,” he says. But this one (as yet
untitled) is one long groove of space-age African jangles, woodblock
percussion, twanging thumb piano and barely any guitar. A Roland Space Echo
is used to locate his once-upfront voice somewhere eerily far into the
middle distance.
The lead single, Tonight's Today, has won him many surprise new fans. As the
NME recently put it, “In 2007 Jack Peñate became the bum-faced whipping boy
for everyone tired of South London's cliquey and clichéd indie scene. Now
he's back, surprisingly, with the first great single of 2009. He used to
sound like the past, now he sounds like the future. ”
He wrote it after being “a naughty boy” and staying up partying for so long
that “the clock said 4 o'clock and I had no idea which four it was - no clue
whatsoever!” Its success has yanked Peñate from his indie confines and it
has been played by all sorts of unlikely fans, from the urban station Radio
1Xtra to the techno DJ Judge Jules. Mike Skinner of The Streets thinks it's
brilliant.
It's not that Matinee did badly - the album went Top Ten and the single, Torn
on the Platform, went to No7. Not bad for work written by a teenager in his
bedroom and, as Peñate points out, “better than I'd ever dared dream for”.
But still he feels a sense of a missed opportunity - possibly because he had
the extraordinary bad luck to be a boy amid the first generation of
musicians where all the attention went to the girls. And they were all his
gang of mates.
There's his best friend, Adele, “who I met in a club when she was 16 and we
were just talking about how we both did music, and it was lovely, and now
I'm watching her win two Grammys, it's unbelievable”. Kate Nash, with whom
he shared the pub-gig circuit and a joint cover of the NME, had a No1 album
and won a critics' choice Brit award. This year, that same award went to
Florence and the Machine, who, with Peñate, attended the same school in
Dulwich. And, of course, Lily Allen, whom Peñate supported on an early tour,
is now a superstar. He admits that it's very odd seeing his old friends in
paparazzi shots. He seems caught between envy and gratitude for having
missed that gravy train.
“But it was a special period, no matter what anyone says. It was really
exciting.You'd go to one friend's gig and then all head on to another
friend's club night together. It really was home-made and yet struck a chord
with kids all around the country. But it finished quickly and I don't mind
it's over - I think everyone's gonna re-evaluate themselves as musicians
now. Our group-identity thing, and the London thing, was too big a part of
it.”
He has recently left his mum's home and moved north of the river to Dalston.
His mum is the daughter of Mervyn Peake, the writer of Gormenghast and
illustrator of Alice in Wonderland and Treasure Island. Peake died long
before Peñate was born, but his fantastical creations lined the wall of the
house, and imagination was always encouraged. Aged 9, Peñate took a year off
school to act as one of Fagin's gang in Oliver! at the London Palladium ,
directed by Sam Mendes. He encouraged even the youngest actor with the
smallest part to imagine their character's whole life story. Peñate was
entranced.
“It's probably why I'm doing music. I was in the first cast and when it came
out it was so huge - or in my head it felt huge. All the Oxford Street
Christmas lights were Oliver! and Liberty had done every window Oliver! and
they had this huge party at St Pancras and hired out a Tube line - mad! I
would go into school once a month. I was 9 so it wasn't a huge worry. I got
to keep the money and got all my first guitars, an amp, pedals - it was only
a few thousand pounds, but at that age ... Learning about artistry and
watching dancers ... oh, it was wicked.” He sounds so wistful. He says he is
struggling to be a less sentimental person, but he grew up in a close,
loving family. There was also lots of creativity.
“My aunts and uncles and cousins are all artists, or dancers, so we were
always going round the opening of somebody's modern art piece where somebody
would come out in a wedding dress and dance around, then throw paint on
themselves - that was my norm, growing up.” It wasn't all about being a
luvvy though - quite the opposite, in fact. “My auntie is one of the heads
of the Slade [school of fine art] and she's one of the most pragmatic people
I know, she's just so non-airy-fairy, not ‘arty'. She completely considers
art as a trade.”
He says that he and she both meet a lot of young artists who are a bit
precious - he wafts his arms in the air in a comically inspired fashion.
“No, you are an artist because you work really hard and you paint every day
for seven hours and then you get up and start painting again at 9 the next
morning. You're a musician because you learn to play an instrument. We'd all
love to think you just wake up and out of nowhere this magic appears. Well,
when you write a good song it does sometimes just happen that way, and
that's what we're all looking for, but when you really get into it you
realise it's because you spent nine months in the studio to make ten songs.
It's because you're f***ing working.”
According to Peñate's mum this is going to be his year. “My mum rings me up
all the time going, ‘I've read it on the internet: it's going to be a
wonderful year for Virgo - its going to be your best year ever!' She says it
every year but I've really got that in my head now.” It looks as though she
may finally be right.
The single Tonight's Today is out on Monday on XL Recordings.
Jack Peñate starts a UK tour tomorrow, www.jackpenate.com
