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ABOUT
JAMIE LIDELL
Places of Unknowing(TODO)
Add date: 7.22.2025
Release date: 7.18.2025
Jamie Lidell is unmasking. As an artist and performer he’s had a hell of a life, ping-ponging from the avant-garde to clubland hedonism to the mega-mainstream and all points in between, adopting personae from faceless, nameless techno producer to flamboyant showman. He’s made monstrous noise and sweet soul music, he’s performed in art spaces, rave dungeons and the biggest stages in the world in a whirlwind of creativity. But since relocating to Nashville and starting a family, he’s experienced isolation, introspection, being brought face-to-face with his own neurodivergence, and has had to completely reassess his relationship to himself, his history, his music and creative processes. And now all of that is expressed in Places of Unknowing, his first album in nearly a decade and a stark and beautiful departure from anything he’s ever done before.
Jamie grew up in the hamlet of Perry in Cambridgeshire – comfortably enough, but he was the archetypal misunderstood kid. He was inquisitive and constantly followed obsessive lines of enquiry – enough so to easily do well at school – but he was also always in movement, seeking stimulation, and “I can’t remember a time when I wasn’t singing”: all elements, it would much later turn out, of autism and ADHD. He was generally happiest when he was in a fantasy world, whether it was making dens by a lake or lost in computer games. “As soon as I got a computer I was a computer nerd,” he says, “deep in it, real autistic shit, that was from about 1982.”
Pop culture-wise, he got into whatever was going along with his school friends, going through the usual 80s mix of pop, indie, dance, hip hop, and in his mid teens started playing guitar and jamming with friends – though, ever the tinkerer, he quickly found that the effects pedals were the part most interesting to him. It was around this time, too, he discovered his musical first love, Prince, and as he dove deep into his catalogues and methods indoctrinated himself with just how versatile a single artist could be. With the acid house explosion at the end of the decade came all sorts of other opportunities for exploration, and like any musically voracious teen of the time he hoovered up The Orb, Screamadelica and the like. A heavy dose of John Peel on the radio pushed his tastes out further, as did his schoolfriend and early bandmate Simon Scott, who introduced him to Can: Jamie would sit and “try to enjoy Tago Mago for hours on end!”
He was a natural learner and good student with an eye on the sciences in accordance with his family’s expectations, but his emotionally distant upbringing made him feel increasingly disenchanted – and even though he aced all his GCSE exams, his attention quickly veered elsewhere... to partying and music. When he went off to college in Bristol, it was peak rave years of the early 90s, as well as the explosion of that city’s funk, soul and trip hop scene. He threw himself into it all, “the jazzers in one ear and the ravers in the other”: his crate-digger flatmates immersing him in rare grooves and Mo Wax and “expensive Brazilian shit”, and clubs like Lakota providing a non-stop party zone where he gravitated to the populist “rushes and snare rolls” of Sasha and Carl Cox type four-to-the-floor doof-doof. He also travelled further abroad to rave, regularly hitting notorious hardcore rave outpost Sterns in Worthing, and soaking up the intense dancefloor vibes of London gay mecca Soundshaft.
He sang in various Bristol bands including the awkwardly named “Caned And Able” (“Oh, the naivety, the beauty of being a fucking idiot,” he laughs ruefully), and – starting to get into Aphex Twin, LFO and the like – tinkered with music software, but with very little sense of direction. Even when he moved to London with an aim of pursuing music, he didn’t really have any creative identity… Eventually, though, he sent a demo to a school friend who was working at Strongroom Studios in Shoreditch and that found its way to Mick Shiner, who saw something in it, invited him in and paid to cut it as a record. Though Jamie insists the record was “a piece of shit really” and that he didn’t know what he was doing, Mick – who was later to be a key part of the careers of the likes of The Streets, Metronomy, and Frank Turner – took him under his wing, and in turn introduced him to Jason Leich and Phil Wells.
“Those guys were anarchic,” says Jamie. “They were maniacs.” They ran notorious techno parties in sweaty dives – even in one case in a submarine – they had incredible taste in Detroit and Chicago beats, they wanted to make music, but they didn’t know how. Suddenly Jamie’s “years of being a nerd in my room, learning how to use Cubase and samplers and diligently waiting for a way I could be useful” met their deranged drive and no-barriers creative approach, like petrol and a match. They instantly made “an obscene amount of music” – something like 12 EPs in one year, all of it mindbendingly original and hardcore.
It was anarchy indeed, a headlong rush of creativity, for which Jamie earned nothing but the flood-gates were opened and his love of techno ignited. He went seeking out the UK’s most exploratory producer, Cristian Vogel, in Brighton – who it turned out was a fan of his work, and quickly they were collaborating. In short order, Jamie had moved to the seaside town and the hedonistic chaos continued: sharing a studio with Cristian, singing weekly at a rave cabaret with a Frank Zappa obsessed funk band called Balzac, making wild abstract noise with the Spymania and Trash crews, and eventually making waves further afield with Super_Collider, a duo with Cristian.
Perhaps incongruously they got signed to Loaded – a big house imprint and parent label to Fatboy Slim’s Skint. Jamie reckons they heard the gnarly dancefloor boom and catchy, Prince-y hooks of “Darn (Cold Way o Loving)” “and had a new Basement Jaxx on their hands”, but instead the two went deeper and darker with Head On, an album of raw and paranoid – though still ultra futuristic – funk. It actually kind of fitted alongside the late 90s gloom of artists like Tricky and prefigured where Radiohead were going a year later with Kid A – but on a straightforward dance label, despite some gloriously weird videos and remixes from underground A-listers like Derrick Carter, DJ Harvey and Tom Middleton, it never really found its audience.
In retrospect, understanding his own – and quite a proportion of the people in the music scene around him’s – neurodivergence, Jamie is able to shine light on his conflicting feelings about the period. At the time he was frustrated with Cristian’s more keep-it-underground impulses for S_C (though of course he had some pretty intense avant-garde leanings himself as he’d demonstrate on his mind-melt 2000 solo debut album Muddlin Gear), but at the same time the bloody-minded drive of Cristian and his No Future collective and Mosquito / Rise Robots Rise labels was absolutely integral to the energy of the project: they would release another, even deeper and more brooding, S_C album, Raw Digits, on RRR in 2002. Likewise, for all that Loaded might not have been the right fit, he now looks back with immense gratitude at the investment they made into S_C, including allowing them to tour, with Balzac’s rhythm section filling out a “proper” live band.
Nonetheless, the centre couldn’t hold. Brighton got claustrophobic and Jamie’s ambitions were bigger, though he still didn’t have a clear picture of where he was going. He signed to WARP Records and moved to Berlin, but before he knew it his advance was spent and he was broke. He reverted to full computer nerd mode, spending every waking hour building a piece of looping software that would allow him to perform entirely using his vocals and beatboxing skills – which he then used to tour, building a formidable reputation as a live performer. His shows were essentially a duo act, in fact, with wild live visuals by Canadian stencil artist (that’s his work on the Muddlin Gear sleeve) and filmmaker Geoff “Pablo Fiasco” Johnson. “We were deeply entwined for a time,” says Jamie, “he was one of a series of would-be father figures I sought out, kind of a guru to me. We had an amazing time with those shows, and I felt like I really invented something. I felt like, oh, I'm up here doing this shit, you know? Like, this is my thing.”
The next hugely influential creative “father figure” was another Canadian, Dominic Salole aka Mocky. Part of an ex-pat crew including Peaches and Chilly Gonzalez, he quickly began pushing him in a more commercial direction. Getting him to re-record the moody electronic ballad “Multiply” as an upbeat vintage-sounding soul song, he got Jamie learning all kinds of jazz and funk theory and technique, and teased out the core character of what would become the triumphant album of the same name. Sadly WARP didn’t really get it. The plan had been to put it out with an accompanying Pablo Fiasco directed DVD of live performances so the new “buttoned-up soul sound” could be contrasted with Jamie’s wild electronic improvisatory side, but they weren’t having it, and pushed the album out alone without huge fanfare.
Sadly, this drove a wedge between Jamie and Geoff, but of course the label were very wrong: Multiply was huge, worldwide, and Jamie was launched onto a rollercoaster through the mainstream. He supported James Brown, Björk, Beck, Elton John and his beloved Prince, each subsequent album kept generating attention and sales, and no less a figure than Rick Rubin tried to headhunt him for his American label. WARP’s oddly grudging attitude remained, though. Most notably, they put the kybosh on the Rubin deal by insisting on £1,000,000 to buy out the contract. Again, in hindsight, Jamie can see both sides, and is ultimately relieved he never went the major label route: “I maybe could have handled it for a little while, but really it would have been absolutely awful – I know Steve Beckett did me a favour there.” Nonetheless, at the time it was galling.
Again, with the benefit of hindsight, he can see how the same patterns as with Super_Collider got played out on a vastly bigger scale. The urges to run full-tilt towards the light of fame, to embody that flamboyant performance persona on ever bigger stages, was immense – but people from the scene he had roots in were pulling him back from that, and though this riled him at the time, there was a big part of him that wasn’t suited to it, that felt the masks upon masks upon masks needed to thrive in that environment were a big burden to carry. “I had a really big ego on the one hand,” he explains, “and also a terribly self-defeating ‘piece of shit in the centre of the universe’ kind of vibe going on.”
It was only when he met his wife Lindsey that he “had to really unpack a lot of who I'd become through those years, hardening myself to deal with people and to perform on a regular basis.” As they settled into domestic life in New York, and then Nashville, Jamie slowly, slowly began to shake off the need for relentless stimulation and approval. You can hear some of that process of unwinding and fierce self-examination through 2016’s Building a Beginning, his first self-released album. And the process only picked up pace as Jamie and Lindsey became parents, their son was diagnosed autistic, and more about Jamie’s own mental makeup became clear.
In the decade since, his focus has been on family life, and his creative outlet has been the Hanging Out With Audiophiles podcast – which has been a haven for him, a place to enjoy musical process and sound entirely for their own sakes, as well as great conversation with a striking array of talents. He continued accumulating studio tech expertise, and singing every day (“I understand now, it’s basic nervous regulation for me!”), but – as he says with typically unflinching attitude – “I often feel semi-retired. Like in a slightly nihilistic way, there’s a sense of ‘What’s it all for?’”
However, things changed in COVID lockdown. The introspection stepped up yet another notch, and a strange need for new expression took hold. Discovering their neighbours were esteemed classical musicians – they never met outside the lockdown times as they were always on tour – Jamie took it on himself to learn piano for the first time, and began recording some lyrics written by Lindsey. Singing some else’s words – albeit someone he felt a deep responsibility to – and having an entirely new musical palette to draw from was immensely refreshing. The results are gripping: heavily inspired by Davids Sylvian and Bowie, on Places of Unknowing Jamie explores dark places, making revisiting some of the shadows he cavorted through with Super_Collider, but with new confidence and clarity.
Where he goes next from here is unwritten. That sense of semi-retirement lingers, having little to prove and being several steps removed from the music industry itself. But at the same time, the ever-present need to tinker and explore process is drawing him more into the world of post-classical composition and arrangement, starting with a one-off orchestrated performance of the album. And most importantly of all, there’s a powerful motive to continue: “if I'm gonna teach my son anything, it's: follow that passion because especially as an autistic person, you need those special interests to guide you in life. That will be your saving grace when people are mocking you for being different. Having that and knowing the power of that is huge. And not to be all ‘life lesson’ about it, I know I should take a little bit of my own advice!”