Jamie Lawson is a singer-songwriter in the truest troubadour fashion. He spent decades travelling around with his guitar always strapped to his back, playing every open mic, gig and tour he could get his name on. And, as he tells Headliner, there were tough moments, but eventually signing with Ed Sheeran’s record label, touring stadiums with the global superstar, and winning an Ivor Novello award validated his dedication to his craft. Headliner chats to Lawson about his long journey and the fascinatingly unique An Acoustic Round tour he has coming up with Gemma Hayes, Richard Walters and Laura Zocca.
In our culture that is currently quite strongly shaped by social media, people’s patience with achieving a goal is often not at the required level, when we see people quickly going viral on TikTok.
Lawson is perhaps the strongest evidence of just how steadfast you must be — he’s been releasing music since 1995, sharing his first demos to the mp3.com platform, to give you an idea of just how long this was before Spotify was even in embryonic form. He spent the mid-2000s independently releasing his first and second albums.
It was the 2011 single Wasn’t Expecting That, which took on an enormous life of its own. It reached No.3 of the Irish Singles Chart and garnered lots of Irish radioplay. Such success helped convince one Ed Sheeran of signing Lawson to be the first artist on his record label, Gingerbread Man Records, and to re-release the song to even greater success.
This was helped by the fact that in years previous, Lawson and Sheeran met each other playing at an open mic night, with Lawson telling Sheeran to “keep doing what he was doing” (which he quite clearly and famously did).
Lawson agrees that it’s a virtue he and Sheeran share, their willingness to play lots and lots of gigs over a long time period, when many would have quickly given up.
“Coming from Plymouth, it wasn’t really the sort of thing you would do for a living,” he says. “But I followed some friends who were in a band and moving to London, and started playing places like the 12 Bar Club. I didn’t have any success for a long time, but there was always something that kept me going, that carrot on a stick.”
On whether he feels the life of a gigging solo musician, playing every possible gig with guitar always in hand is overly romanticised, he says “there a few times where I had nowhere to stay and I was just crashing on people's floors all the time.
"But you do get to meet a lot of like-minded people. I knew Damien Rice and Turin Brakes quite early on before they took off, Lucy Rose was another. I’d see these people doing the same thing as me suddenly break through, and think ‘it's only a matter of time’.”
