Jake Bugg: the most rocking child prodigy of the 2010s

At 14, he read articles online about how to succeed in music. At 15 he was sharing his songs on MySpace in hopes of being discovered. At 17 he was selected to play on the BBC Introducing stage at Glastonbury: it was 2011 and that experience would lead him to sign a recording contract with Mercury Records. His debut album, with the eponymous title, released the following year, would be nominated for the Mercury Prize – among the most coveted awards in the music biz across the Channel – and would sell almost 1 million copies, becoming one of the greatest success of the 2010s. Perhaps we have forgotten too quickly the goals achieved by Jake Bugg in his debut. THE’

the most rocking child prodigy of the 2010s today he is 30 years old. He just released his sixth studio album, “A modern day distraction”. AND he’s not exactly the “coolest guy in Britain” anymoreas he was nicknamed at the time.

“A modern day distraction” marks the return to the scene of the Nottingham singer-songwriter three years after the previous “Saturday night, Sunday morning”. There Jake Bugg had satisfied the public in a more pop guise than in the pastworking – among others – with Steve Mac, one of the men behind Ed Sheeran’s success: the album debuted in third place in the weekly best-selling charts in the United Kingdom, but critics turned up their noses at the turning point by Bugg. This time the musician he returned to a more rock’n’roll attitude and a more raw and edgy sound: listening to it, “A modern day distraction” sounds like an antidote to the plasticky pop of these years. “There were moments when I felt like I was banging my head against a brick wall,” Bugg said in a long interview with the Guardian, speaking about the sometimes incomprehensible musical choices he has made over the years. Like that time – it was 2016 – in “Ain’t no rhyme” he even tried to rap: “Only after the release did I ask myself: ‘But why did I do it?’”.

Jake Bugg remains the youngest male artist to debut at number one in the UK best-selling album chart: he was just 18 when, taken under their wing by Iain Archer and Mike Crossey, the producers who had contributed to the success of bands like Snow Patrol and Arctic Monkeys, reached the milestone with his debut album. In the fourteen tracks that made it up, from “Trouble Town” to “Seen it all”, Bugg it told of his dream of escaping from a world of drugs, violence and even murderoffering particularly dark pictures of working-class British life. “Sometimes that’s what it can be like growing up in those places,” says he, who grew up on the outskirts of Nottingham. “I don’t know how my life could have turned out if I hadn’t been swept away by my dream career. Music has given me a whole new life, better than I could have ever imagined and I feel some kind of responsibility to give it all back. That’s why I never stopped, I never took a break: it seems wrong to me to do so,” he adds.

The New York Times called it a sort of at the time New generation Bob Dylan: “If you like Bob Dylan, try Jake Bugg.” The myth of the Duluth bard also returns in “A modern day distraction”, twelve years after the 2012 album. Just listen to pieces like “I wrote the book” or “All that I needed was you”. The lyrics also look at the songwriting of those years. The single “Zombieland” describes the vicious circle of poverty: the protagonist is a man “who works 24 hours a day to stay afloat”. Some of his outbursts against colleagues like I Mumford & Sons (“Elegant peasants with banjos”) or the

One Direction (“They need to know they are terrible”) remain famous. The fact is that Bugg has always had different references from his peers, from Donovan to Don McLean, passing through Dylan himself: “I hated what was on the radio. I think I was obsessed with being authentic… I was a little critical, but it just made me look more like a fool than anything else”. Today it is less rough than then. He found a sort of internal balance: “I’m quite proud of the record and I would like it to do well. But If it doesn’t go well, I think I could still tell myself that I made a good album and I feel like I’ve found the right path again”.