Gary Jules

Usually, the prospect of spending even a few fleeting minutes in the company of a singer-songwriter riding the crest of a one-hit-wonder wave would be something out of the very baddest of bad dreams, the sort where you wake up when you're dead. Yet here I am, and there Gary Jules is.

Any other time I'd awake in a cold sweat, jerk bolt upright and glance, wide-eyed, about my room, looking for an axe-wielding David Gray or a gun-toting Badly Drawn, but, thankfully, they usually prove to be figments of my over-active imagination. But right now I'm wide awake in a frightfully trendy basement in the guts of Notting Hill, in one corner of which sits a guitar (and silly hat)-clad troubadour regaling us with bittersweet tales of heartbreak and stories of wondrous foreign climes. His voice, that of a croaky Michael Stipe-like angel, fills the low-ceilinged surroundings like a flood in a crypt, enveloping all in attendance and soothing them with an almost maternal ease. Song titles wash over me like the proverbial flood (it later transpires that Jules played, among others, 'Umbilical Town', 'Boat Song' and 'No Poetry'), but the songs themselves stick. There’s plenty enough here to suggest that ‘the hit’ may well be a launch pad to bigger and better things, rather than the aforementioned flash in the pan that it appears at present. Sure, Jules is no Elliott Smith, but with a heavily tattooed arm, comparisons to Dashboard Confessional’s Chris Carrabba, whilst somewhat lazy, are also appropriate.

When the hit comes, last of course, the audience’s hush is spooky. Jules’ live rendition is note-for-note perfect to the recording, but ‘Mad World’ still resonates about us all with an eerie charm and no little poignancy. So, those bad dreams then, the ones in which I'm dying? Nowadays it seems like they’re the best I ever have.