King Jamsheed

PHOTO CRED: NICK FORD PHOTOGRAPHY

King Jamsheed Alex Klineberg catches up with the Brighton-based musician to chat about his new album, lockdown, live gigs and... Druidry!

Secret Winter is your debut album. Give us a sense of your musical background.

I’ve lived my whole life immersed in music and theatre as a singer and a piano player. While other people always had favourite bands and singers, I always struggled to find artists that really spoke to me. A love for alternative and sub-pop genres came quite late in life, so like most self-aware queer people, I’ve had to work hard to push away from the mainstream.

The album is very atmospheric and dramatic. I can hear Björk and Kate Bush influences. Would that be a fair interpretation?

That’s a massive compliment and I’ll take it! It’s probably because those particular artists have spent a lifetime creating genres of their own, famously. Kate Bush, Björk, Woodkid, John Grant, Sufjan Stevens (that’s a dinner party). My creative process and reasons for writing are constantly changing, so the style evolves constantly too. Secret Winter is intended as an epic, a journey, through a frozen forest. We meet characters along the path, including ourselves, who guide us and push us and show us new things. I try to make music that has a purpose and a journey. That’s the music I love and it falls somewhere between music-theatre, art-pop and opera, maybe.

The orchestral sound is so rich on Winter Is Coming. How did you create that kind of sound on your own?

I’m principally a pianist but most of the album is synth and digital orchestration. At the time, that’s all I had access to because I wrote the album while I was trapped on a ship off the coast of Chile. When the pandemic struck in March 2020, all the ports in the world suddenly closed down, leaving us stranded out at sea for about five weeks. It was a terrifying experience but I was lucky enough to have my own cabin, so I spent the time in total isolation writing this album and trying to stay sane while passengers were literally dying right down the hall. With no internet, I just used the instrument libraries I had on my little hard drive, plus my travel mic, and made my album without knowing if I’d make it home alive. It was crazy.

How has lockdown affected your creativity?

Like most composers and freelancers, lockdown is kind of how we operate normally. I shut everything out and turn everything off and get into the flow state. I’m pretty disciplined and keep a 9-to-5 week but early mornings is when I get a lot of song ideas down on paper. I’m also a music arranger for various publishers, so mornings are for score work. Then every day around 11am, I work on a new piano piece. I’ve just signed with the contemporary classical label Collaborative Records to release a solo piano album next year. So trauma aside, I’d say lockdown is pretty good for creativity.

You clearly draw from a wide array of influences. Do you consider yourself to be spiritual?

“I spent the time in total isolation writing this album and trying to stay sane while passengers were literally dying right down the hall. With no internet access, I just used the instrument libraries I had on my little hard drive, plus my travel mic, and made my album without knowing if I’d make it home alive.”

PHOTO CRED: NICK FORD PHOTOGRAPHY

I was brought up in a fantastically broadminded household in London. My background is Parsi, same as Freddie Mercury (we share a lot of traits actually, he can come to the dinner party) but religion was never pushed on me at home, just offered as knowledge. I went to a Christian Science school but it just doesn’t have the sticking power of full-fat Catholicism, so organised religion kinda slid off me like Teflon. But seven years ago my boyfriend introduced me to Druidry. It’s a gentle path of learning that helps me to be fully creative, deeply understand nature and access a source of profound wisdom. Since childhood, I’ve believed that the only thing worth worshipping is the sun. It’s a basic Zoroastrian principle that everything comes from it and ultimately goes to it. This fits with Druidry for me, as it’s all about how we care for the world we’ve been given. Vote Green!

It’s unfortunate there will be no live gigs this year. Do you have any plans to perform live in 2021?

A lot of my music is not really gigging material, so I’ll be putting in hours on a second piano album with Collaborative Records next year and developing my monthly singles into larger song collections. But I hope to develop Secret Winter and its through-story into an immersive stage show one day.

Secret Winter by King Jamsheed is out now on all streaming and download platforms. For their monthly single release, follow King Jamsheed on Spotify or any streaming platform. more info

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