The Side of the Pond

In the US, Welsh-born singer-songwriter Jem is being called the new Dido.
Now she’s set to break over here.

"WELSH GIRL LIVING THE AMERICAN Dream," Jemma Griffiths laughs. She is mocking her success, but she is also, her animated eyes imply, still rather enchanted by the image.

Griffiths, better known as Jem, is about to start registering on your radar. The trickle of interest created by Jo Whiley’s pre-play of her single, They, a second song advertising the Jude Law and Julia Roberts’ film Closer and the stirrings of a big media push for her forthcoming album, Finally Woken, are all set to generate a rush of interest in the UK comparable to that which the Cardiff-born singer enjoys in the States. Over there, her woozy, eclectically sampled and quirkily infectious trip-pop is being heard on all the right television shows, including "Desperate Housewives", "Six Feet Under" and "The O.C.", in which she had a recent cameo as a wedding singer.

A former club promoter in Brighton, she was thick enough with Fatboy Slim to attend his nuptials with Zoe Ball, but would be welcome at most parties regardless, her own DJing skills recently called into action for the Sundance Film Festival after-show. All this, plus experience of running her own record label and a writing credit for Madonna, has got many people asking: Who’s that girl?

She’s 29, a trained lawyer and certainly no wide-eyed ingénue, but she looks a lot younger. Casually dressed in jeans and hooded top, she can talk for Wales, but now sprinkles her speech with as many phrases from the valleys of her current base, Los Angeles. Her glass of hot chocolate remains barely touched throughout our conversation, as she enthuses to countless questions I never got a chance to ask. Every utterance betrays a determined ambition; she claims her relatively late start was actually beneficial.

"You know, I wonder if I would have been the same if it had happened early," she muses. "I never wanted to be famous, I really didn’t. I love my music, and I know it’s a cliché, but I really want everyone to hear it. It’s Catch 22 though, because that doesn’t happen without people knowing who you are."

US reviewers have been calling her the new Dido, something she’s bemused but scarcely distressed by. "We’ve both got soft voices," she shrugs. "It’s not there in the music, but I’ve stopped saying that now." She leans forward conspiratorially. "She’s sold millions, so I just tell people who bought her album that mine’s really similar." Then she adds: "But why do I have to be compared to anyone? To me, I don’t sound like anyone else. I want to pride myself on feeling original."

Jem has nurtured a desire for musical expression since she was 13 - "I had a really average voice until I took lessons, but I just knew in my heart that I’d be a singer" - and she eventually left the Marine Parade dance label she ran with DJ Adam Freeland in Brighton to return to Cardiff, where she built a studio and settled down to songwriting. Her initial efforts received only lukewarm interest, however. "I think they liked me but they didn’t know what to do with me," she recalls. " I think labels like to work with musicians who do what they’re told. Funnily, the people who stay around for ages are the ones who know what they want."

The epitome of this is, of course, Madonna. When Jem returned to London she was asked by producer Guy Sigsworth, whose previous clients included Britney Spears, Björk and Mrs Ritchie herself, if she would help him write a song for his wife. Sigsworth was so impressed by their collaboration that he sent it to the Queen of Pop, who made Nothing Fails a single on her American Life album.

"I was honoured," she says. "It still hasn’t quite sunk in. I sent her some more tracks just in case and I got a message saying that she thought I was a very talented girl. It was sweet.

"It’s nice to work with someone who really knows what they’re doing and who has made a load of decisions for themselves, because I’m very principled, even with my record deal. I think my age and the careers I’ve had before, like running the record label, have helped stay grounded and focused."

Someone else who understood and wrestled with the importance of staying grounded was the American comedian Bill Hicks, who died 11 years ago today. Jem’s Just a Ride is at once a homage to his claim that life is a metaphysical big dipper, a summary of the comic’s up-and-down career and a warning to herself that it could all end tomorrow.

"The first time I went to America to try to get a deal it was the week of September 11," she recalls. "I was staying with a family who lost their father in the south tower. I turned into a nanny for a while but it was horrible. I returned to the UK not having had any meetings and feeling awful because I had become an integral part of their situation."

With the song Missing You, a tribute to her own dead brother, Jem’s music is scarcely throwaway pop, as evidenced by the otherworldly mandolin and child voices of They, which shares Hicks’ perspective on the shadowy figures of power "who made up all the rules". She says: "I’m a huge Hicks fan. He came at things from different angles and that’s what I like to do."

Her eclectic tastes reflect this. While she dusts off her "truly fantastic" hardcore collection for the DJ booth, her "main passion are probably soul. Like Stevie Wonder, Otis Redding, people who when they sing you’re just blown away.

Then it’s hip-hop and beats, and more recently I’ve been listening to the Stone Roses, Happy Mondays and A Tribe Called Quest. Rock, or what they call rock in America, like Radiohead, Starsailor and Coldplay. But also a lot of classical and unfortunately, a lot of cheesy love ballads. I’m one of those awful people who keep Bryan Adams at number one for 12 weeks."

She’s still anxious and almost insanely keen to collaborate with some of the biggest names in the business; she sends CDs to Dr Dre, a Braille letter to Wonder and presses notes seeking an audience into the hands of musicians entering Beatles’ producer George Martin’s Air Studios.

She’s had no luck so far, but describes her "aggressive" courting as similar to entering a series of lotteries, any one of which could suddenly pay out. It’s this approach that finally secured her an American record deal: the targeted delivery of her demo disk to an LA radio station that helped break Coldplay and Dido in the US.

At the time of our meeting however, she’s courting nobody - Valentine’s Day is about to be spent dozing in a car on the way to another promotional opportunity. It’s a sure bet, though, that if she stays true to herself, Jem won’t remain undiscovered in the UK for long.

Jem is that rare thing - a British performer who became big in America before anyone had heard of her at home. But she’s not the only one...

Source: Scotsman