James Blake

James Blake was born in 1988 and raised in leafy Enfield, north London, the only child of a musician father and a graphic designer mother. Both self-employed and successful in their respective fields, they instilled in their son a determination to do things his own way and to never work for anyone but himself. At six, James began to learn the piano and was later taught classically, completing the grades, which he didn’t enjoy but saw the importance of it. “I had a sense at an early age that if I… Show more was improving then it must be a good thing,” he says. “So I stuck with it. I could see I was getting better at the piano.”

In his teens, James would improvise and practise singing, and liked to play along to old Motown and soul records, Otis Redding and so on. By doing this, he learnt about harmony. “I’d be learning classical harmony and also how to play gospel organ — I was really into gospel quite early on, like real gospel, the Reverend James Cleveland and amazing stuff that was interesting to me pianistically. Then I got into [jazz pianists] Art Tatum and Erroll Garner, though I was never into jazz. I always felt that jazz had had its day and I was looking for something else, something new.”

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