Born & Raised:

Born: Sept. 18, 1973 in Cambridgeshire, England.
Raised: In Huntingdon and Bristol, England.

Early Life:

Jamie Lidell comes from a music family and learned to love music at an early age; his mother sang professionally with different orchestras and as a child, took up the xylophone, drums and trombone in school. When he was a little older, Jamie learned to play the electric guitar and also began getting into '80s electronic dance music.


He bought an amplifier, synthesizer and a drum machine, and recorded his own music in his bedroom on a four-track tape machine, often layering his own vocals over the instrumentals.

Learning His Craft:

His late teens found Lidell moving to Bristol to study physics, after being away from school for six months with a severe bout of glandular fever, he decided not to return to the science program and enrolled in philosophical studies instead. In the mid-1990s Lidell moved to London and became friends with Jason Leach and Phil Wells of a band called Subhead. Lidell has attributed his time making music with Subhead, to his learning how to perform live and the process involved with digital audio editing. In the late 1990s, he moved again, this time from London to Brighton.

Going Solo:

In Brighton, he formed the techno-electronic music duo Super_Collider with Chilean producer Cristian Vogel. Super_Collider produced a slew of singles and two albums, 1999's Head On and 2002's Raw Digits. In between, Lidell kept working on solo material.

He dropped his first electronic album, Muddlin' Gear, in 2000. Over the years, Lidell's vocal style evolved to become much more soulful, starting with his breakthrough 2005 album, Multiply. Since that point, his solo work has been very much influenced by classic and modern Soul music, with bits of his original electronic sound added in.

Discography:

2013: Jamie Lidell.
2010: Compass.
2008: Jim
2005: Multiply
2000: Muddlin' Gear
1997: Freekin' the Frame (EP)

The Last Word:

"When I was a kid I didn't really give a sh*t about music. But when it came time to decide if I was cool or not, I chose Prince, which made me really uncool. That put me really on the fringes of popularity, to say the least. It was pretty damn uncool to be into 'the funk,' but I felt it." -- Jamie Lidell to Marquee magazine, June 2008.