As the fable goes, when English folk-rocker Jake Bugg’s high school buddies first heard him strumming his punky, acoustic originals, they practically in unison suggested the same career-launching idea: The kid should appear on the syndicated overseas TV show Britain’s Got Talent, no doubt about it. With a flick of the nimble wrist, he’d smoke the feeble competition. But Bugg, however, had other ideas. He would follow no such pedestrian path, he declared; He would unleash his talent on his own terms, thanks. By playing live anywhere—and everywhere—he could. It was the only way he understood of achieving any artistic legitimacy.
An apocryphal yarn? Maybe. But the Nottingham native has certainly made it his own idiosyncratic way, without condescending to be some earnest reality TV contestant. His first Two Fingers EP has just been released Stateside, culled from an eponymous overseas debut album that’s boiling over with eerily precocious songwriting and youthful exuberance, in fuel-injected anthems like “Trouble Town,” “Lightning Bolt,” “Seen it All,” and the irresistible breakout hit “Two Fingers,” a real-life story of his hardscrabble Clifton neighborhood (co-written with his key collaborator, Iain Archer). Its chorus, sung in a charismatic rasp, tells the sordid to-hell-with-the-past tale: “So I kiss goodbye to every little ounce of pain/ Light a cigarette and wish the world away/ I got out, I got out, out alive and I’m here to stay.”
And get this—Bugg has conjured up all these decidedly adult Horatio Alger tales before he’s hit his cynical 20s. In fact, he hasn’t even turned 19 yet—that hallowed event, believe it or not, doesn’t take place until this Feb. 28. And it isn’t so much that the lad is some otherworldly prodigy, exactly. It’s just that you can feel the truth in what he’s singing, in every last street-smart, poetic note. Which might be why former Oasis mainman Noel Gallagher has just invited him out as the opening act for his current world tour. Or why The Stone Roses—when they played a top-secret London club show this year—turned the stage over to Bugg first. Or even why his stomping “Lightning Bolt” was played at the 2012 Olympics, as a buildup to Usain Bolt’s performance in the 100m.
“My childhood wasn’t too bad,” swears Bugg. “The place I’m from is just like any other working-class place—it has good bits and bad bits. But Clifton is the biggest council estate in Europe, so it’s like a small town of 30,000 people. But there just wasn’t a lot to do, you know? And everybody who lives there just wants to get out.” Bugg believes that he’s one of the few who’s managed to escape, actually. “I mean, we’ve had a couple of footballers come out of that place. But that’s about it, really,” he chortles.
Bugg himself was pinning more than a few dreams on a sports career. “But then I came back from football training one day, and my uncle had a guitar,” he recalls. “So he showed me the basic chords, and I just took it from there. And when I picked up the guitar, that’s when I kind of packed it in with football, really.”
The first song the fledgling folkie fell in love with was—oddly enough—Don McLean’s classic ode to the painter Van Gogh, “Vincent,” which he stumbled across on an episode of “The Simpsons.” The first song he learned how to pluck on six-string was Gary Jules’ “Mad World.” Which, he started to notice, had a similar chorus to another one of his favorite tunes, “Wonderwall” by Oasis. He was already learning how to structure a complicated composition.
After that, Bugg’s musical horizons expanded considerably. As his own retro sound coalesced, he says, “I wanted to take a little bit from of my eras and idols and try to put it all into one thing. So I culled from Don McLean, Donovan, John Martyn, Nick Drake, Buddy Holly, The Beatles—the list goes on and on. And I really love The Everly Brothers. I think their harmonies are probably the best harmonies in the history of music. They’re brotherly harmonies, but it’s not just that, it was just the tone of their voices that was so amazing and exact.”
The teen tried his hand at college, but was kicked out after only four tentative weeks. He was studying music, but he felt that the professors had nothing constructive to offer him – they had him working on unrelated projects like designing concert posters instead of mastering chords. But last year, everything changed when he was selected by the BBC to appear on its ‘Introducing’ stage at the monolithic Glastonbury festival, when he was barely 17. Mercury Records soon snapped him up, and an early track—the lissome folk ballad “Country Song”—was snapped up the Greene King IPA brewers for a British TV commercial.
Next thing Bugg knew, he was warming up for The Stone Roses—a legendary Mancunian outfit he never dreamed he’d even get to witness in concert. Looking out into the crowd as he took the stage, he was stunned—the house was filled with nothing but A-list celebrities. Bravely, he soldiered through it, then got his reward backstage, when he hung out with Roses singer Ian Brown and the legendary Jimmy Page. “And I just wasn’t expecting that—he was just there at the show,” says a still-flummoxed Bugg. “And everybody was going up to him, but I went up to because I just wanted to tell him that I really liked his guitar solo on Donovan’s “Hurdy Gurdy Man.” His eyes lit up a bit, so I think I said something he doesn’t usually hear.”
How did the Gallagher connection happen? Bugg isn’t sure, exactly. But through the grapevine, he heard that a couple of mutual acquaintances had instructed the Oasis Svengali to check him out. As he heard it, Gallagher logged onto YouTube and took a serious listen. Then he simply rang up Bugg’s manager and invited him on world tour. “Then we finally met when I was playing the club Dingwalls,” he recalls. “I’d just come offstage, it was a cool gig, and I was kinda running with adrenaline. And Noel just walked backstage and said ‘Sorry I missed your set. But those are some cool trainers, man!’ He was just really normal, and it wasn’t like a big deal or anything.”
Did any of Bugg’s mentors give him career pointers, now that he’s suddenly a red-hot celebrity himself in England? He won’t say. But he will admit this: “The best advice you can really give to anyone—or I guess give to the younger people, like me—is to just practice, you know? That’s the absolute best thing you can ever do.”