Jamie T – ‘Ghosts (100 Days Of Morning)’ review: making peace with the past

To live is to be haunted. Spend any considerable time in one physical location, industry or headspace, and you’ll create spectres that creep up on you and pull you back to past lives without a moment’s notice. The only way to exorcise them is to live with them, process them, and make peace.

For Jamie T, some of the ghosts he’s collected over the years emerged in old voice memos – ideas he’d recorded across his career but forgotten about until he dug through the app when he got a new phone. The foundation of his sixth album, ‘Ghosts (100 Days Of Morning)’, turning them into proper, fleshed-out songs helped him reconcile with himself on the other side of a difficult period – at once the end of one chapter and the beginning of something new.

“Ghosts, they follow you”, he hollers on the punk chug of ‘Waist 36 Leg 32’, a recognition of how the past can linger even as time moves on. This isn’t an album that wallows in despair, though. Instead, it accepts reality – even if it “bites”, as he observes at one point – and finds a way to move on from the negatives. “‘Cause life’s a losing game, and not everything he works out”, he acknowledges on ‘The Won’, but the woozy instrumental beneath him is imbued with just enough buoyancy that you can’t help but feel hopeful.

Across his first five albums, Jamie T has nailed both rousing anthems and more introspective, poignant cuts, and both are represented here. Album opener and lead single ‘3310’ handles the former, the climax of sweet snakebite analogy “If you’re blackcurrant, what does that make me? / Ciiiide–errr” destined to be yelled back at him by lairy crowds, while ‘Cocktail’ – written with Damon Albarn – bounces addictively while he describes “breaking promises I made / Losing friends I had”. ‘Caught Cheating’, meanwhile, tackles the latter prong, interweaving fingerpicked guitar melodies cushioning regret-filled writing about love, loss and the souring of something you thought could survive.

Like much of his catalogue, ‘Ghosts (100 Days Of Morning)’ feels deeply rooted in Britishness, even if it came together on a solo trip to the Tuscan city of Siena. That’s felt in both the sonic influences and the lyrical nods. ‘Chelsea Girls’ is driven by a thumping ’90s dance beat, the spoken-word verses echoing acts like Underworld and Leftfield, while final track ‘Tallahassee’ lines the 40-year-old up alongside icons of British culture – Lily Allen, Tracey Emin, Paul Heaton, The Prodigy’s Liam Howlett.

Written on the morning of his 2023 gig at London’s Finsbury Park – his biggest headline show to date – it both hypes Treays up and brings him back down to Earth. “I’m the soundtrack to your university years”, he asserts between snatches of a Leif Vollebekk sample, but moments later, imposter syndrome catches up with him: “I’m just a plagiarist / I’m always outnumbered, but never outgunned”.

Nestled in the middle of the album, a cover of The Jam’s 1982 track ‘Ghosts’ offers motivation to keep moving through life’s more tormented moments. Although penned by Paul Weller, it feels like it fits surreptitiously into the record’s narrative – capturing both the anguish of feeling haunted and the hope in finding a way to move on. “At the moment there’s nothing, so there’s nothing to lose / Lift up your lonely heart and walk right on through”, he sings towards the song’s end. Out the other side of his own trials, ‘Ghosts (100 Days Of Morning)’ presents Jamie T in peak form – as powerful a songwriter as ever, now backed with a sense of positivity and peace.

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