Jamie Cullum

What do you get out of live performance?

It's where you feel that the time you've spent behind the piano and the time you spent working on your voice and your songs and your interpretations, where all that kind of goes away, you can throw it in the bin and it it's happening… with no thought. That for me is when it feels kind of very beautiful.

Is it indeed the case that you don't really read music in the strict sense of the word?

No, I mean I don't really read a note of music and when I started doing piano lessons… what became very quickly apparent was that I just couldn't get to grips with the notes on a page… the reason why I didn't really get further than grade four was because at that stage, you know, the sight reading part was so important. Like it was almost like I was dyslexic. So I I really gave up after that point trying to read.

What are your earliest memories of life at home with a family?

It was definitely a house where the radio was kind of always on, something was playing… A piano being in the house, a guitar being in the house, it being played by my brother, my uncle coming over playing guitar, my dad playing guitar, my my mum singing… and lots of food. Always always food, all the time.

You turned down a place at Oxford. Why did you do that?

It didn't feel right and it felt like other people's ideas of what I should be doing. Um I just remember feeling like it was someone else's path and not mine. I knew I needed to go and work out this music thing.

When was the point at which you thought, you know, just maybe, maybe I can make a living at this?

It was the last year at university and um I joined loads of function bands really… I actually made a s I made a C D when I was at university with some of my student loan… there just came this moment where we literally couldn't open the C D's fast enough. People were buying them and I think I decided in my last year of uni that I was gonna move to London and just give it a few years.

Did you feel that you were almost hit by a tidal wave of attention that year [when Twenty Something came out]?

I did. It was immense and quite frightening and I was completely unprepared for it… I definitely went through a stage where I wasn't myself. You find yourself at three o'clock in the morning surrounded by people you don't know, in a house you don't know, in a city you don't know, and you're not sure how you're going to get home… But the thing I always, always had to save me… was the fact that my most enjoyable thing was getting in a room with my band and playing.