With an east-coast tour looming on the horizon, former Bluebottle Kiss lead singer Jamie Hutchings has released a digital EP, ‘Other Rooms’, to celebrate the occasion.
Off the back of his latest solo album, 2018's 'Bedsit', 'Other Rooms' features the album track 'It's On Me' along with four previously unreleased songs that came from the same sessions that gave birth to 'Bedsit'.
"'Other Rooms' is very much like 'Bedsit', just [an] extended version of that,” Jamie explains.
“It's very sparse. It's very much about the vocals and the narratives being front and centre. There's not a lot of trickery – everything is very much the performance recording. I put [the] full-length album out in April and that was recorded in early 2016. I recorded 14 songs for it, but I only put 9 on the album because I don't like albums being too long.
“There were four leftover that I thought were pretty good, but for whatever reason I didn't put on the album. I kept them and released them as an EP. I think it holds together well.
“I hadn't heard the songs for a long time. I'd almost forgotten about them. By the time you've recorded and mixed a record and then it gets released, it's like two years. It's like discovering some old, short story you wrote a few years ago but forgotten about. I was pleasantly surprised to hear them.”
Set to perform in Melbourne, Brisbane and Sydney, Jamie's looking forward to delivering his new music as well as his classics to a live audience. He's currently taking song requests for some of his older tracks (including Bluebottle Kiss' back catalogue) that he will play during the three date 'Careering Through The Bedsit' tour.
“You get all types of interesting people at the shows, but they're generally people that are fairly serious about the music. They're a good audience," he says.
“I'm doing two sets in each show. The first set – people have been able to request what songs they want to hear in advance. I'll be playing a lot of material spanning all my albums for the first set. The second set will be more material from 'Bedsit', 'Other Rooms' and more recent releases. It's a bit of a challenge on your memory, but I'm looking forward to it.
“People can expect to hear some material that hasn't been aired for a really long time. I'm going to play electric guitar on a few songs as well.
“People are encouraged to get in touch and let me know – I've written the set list, but if people have a particular old song that they want to hear, then they can very easily contact me on my website or Facebook. I'm sort of trying to gauge what people want to hear as well.”
'Other Rooms' is available now.
Jamie Hutchings Tour 2018
Sat Oct 27 - LongPlay (Melbourne)Thur Nov 1 - Camelot Lounge (Sydney)
Fri Nov 2 - The Junk Bar (Brisbane)
