On the Rise
Jamie Rafferty

For the Scottish singer and songwriter, words  always mattered as much as the music itself, but discovering himself as a songwriter has been a lifelong journey. Born and raised in Croy, a former mining village about 20km northeast of Glasgow, Rafferty grew up without the expectation that he'd end up on the path he finds himself on today. While music was around him with a musically inclined family, it never seemed like a real option.

His older brother was the first to learn guitar and the then five-year-old Rafferty – eager to follow in his footsteps – decided he had to play drums to accompany him, but after going to see a Noel Gallagher show at 14, guitars finally entered his life. The real heart of his work – songwriting – actually began much earlier though. The first music he recalls affecting him was a tape of the Beach Boys he found in his mum’s car. In fact, she’d introduce a wide spectrum of sounds to his formative mind. “My mum's a big music fan. She was a singles listener, but she would always buy the album that the single was on…there were a lot of rogue CDs!” he laughs. From Simple Minds to Oasis, and even Ricky Martin, there was always something playing, exposing Rafferty to the mechanics of good songs.  Later, it would be the standard teenage ritual of sharing music back and forth with friends that took hold. “Me and my best friend at school, we would be up at like three and four in the morning sending each other music,” he recalls.  

Following the well-worn British teenage path through Oasis – including a formative first gig seeing Kasabian (“I fucking thought I was going to die that night. It was the maddest gig I've ever been to!”) – it was one night, aged 16, when Rafferty discovered the wondrous world of the Kinks: “There was a documentary on, and I fell into a hole of the Kinks, and I loved that. I still can't really put my finger on the Kinks. I just think there's a really specific sound to it, where I'm like, all right, I know what that is. I've always just been impressed by songwriters in general, so when I hear good songwriting, it's always going to amaze me.” Perhaps, most importantly for Rafferty, “you can tell it's the world through his eyes and his upbringing.”

When he decided to start pursuing music properly, he began playing regularly at the local pub. Hosting acoustic nights, it would be 16-year-old Rafferty and a crew of older men performing covers of The Rolling Stones, The Beatles, et al. It was an unlikely apprenticeship: here he learned not only how to perform – which would eventually see him take to the hallowed Scottish stages such as King Tut’s and TRNSMT festival –  but understand what makes a song tick. 

As he began this journey, the idea of being a performing songwriter was far from his mind. He admits he was “a bit shy" to play, especially when he was in high school: “You didn't want anybody to know that you wanted to sing in front of people because, especially up here, there was a certain kind of person that sang at school and that was not me.”

The crowd that he felt most comfortable with were those old guys. Playing a few songs each, reminiscent of songwriter sessions with stories told in between, “and from then I became comfortable singing in front of people. But it took me a while.”

Songwriting itself was something the young Rafferty always believed to be for “special people”. “I thought there's no way I can write a song. It's people like Ray Davies, Billy Joel, these are guys that can write songs. Brian Wilson. I can't do that.”

It wouldn’t be until 2019 that Rafferty first wrote a song. “I feel like it was quite late in the game, to be honest,“ he chuckles. Remembering those first moments of a song coming together out of thin air, as a late-teen, small village boy, a world away from those icons that formed him, that’s where the magic struck for Rafferty. Piecing together songs, building his confidence, eventually he began gently singing his songs, specifically when his brother was in earshot. “I'd be pissing about on the guitar and I'd sing daft stuff, and I sang one of my songs and I knew that if I played something that he didn't know he would go ‘What is that?’ if he liked it," he recalls. "I remember singing something and I thought if he reacts to this that means it's quite good so I did it and he went ‘What is that?’ And I went, ‘I wrote it.’ And he went, ‘No, fuck off. What was it?’”

A fondness suddenly overcomes Rafferty. “I look back on it now, and I miss how exciting it was. It gets worse when you start to know how to do some of it. You don’t ever know how to write a song, but when you know your own strengths…you definitely try and get that innocence back, where you don't know what you’re doing because everything's new.” 

Rafferty’s understanding of writing as an art form began back in school. When they were studying The Great Gatsby, Rafferty was drawn to how his teacher spoke of F Scott Fitzgerald and his process.  “I became more interested in the writer than the book,” he explains. “If that makes sense. At that time, they were all fucking raging alcoholics, but there was a desperation behind what he was writing.” He also recalls discovering Billy Joel’s more regimented approach. “He'd get up in the morning and he would make coffee and he'd go and buy a special writing book, and there was a process behind it, and I fell in love with that side.”

Rafferty was always fascinated by authorial perspective. “I would read things that other writers had said," he tells me. "Like Albert Camus or Hemingway. It sounds fucking pretentious, I hate even saying stuff like that,” he turns bashful. “But when you listen to the way they talk about life and the way they pick apart things, through that I became interested in what their thought processes were as writers.”

For Rafferty, songwriting is about striking a balance between the old Tin Pan Alley way of churning songs out and going the Keith Richards route – fishing for songs in the ether and waiting for one to bite. “I think the best ones are the ones that you don't try to write, but inspiration has to find you working.”

Realising what he actually had to say with his music didn't come until a viewing of Bruce Springsteen’s Springsteen on Broadway. Watching The Boss play through his career while recalling the stories from his life, particularly where he grew up and the community around him, the lightbulb flicked on for Rafferty. “I was like, ‘Fuck, I've got that. That's exactly what my village is like!’ So I felt comfortable to try and write about that and my own voice.” 

Through this, he eventually released his debut single earlier this summer. “Back at 25” is a rousing number that digs into the Kinks idea of encapsulating ones surroundings into a sepia-tinged vignette. Rafferty combines all of his learning and compiles them into soft, acoustic music that emotionally eviscerates with his keen eye for the rawest parts of life and love. 

To aid his journey, this year he travelled to Nashville to fully immerse himself in the life of a songwriter and came back with his second single, “So I Can Let Her Go”. The song builds itself around the central premise of releasing a lover, the pain palpable in his crooning voice as it rhythmically pushes forward.

Both songs are part of Rafferty's debut EP, Detached Observations, released today. Recorded in those sessions in Nashville as well as London and Bath, it’s a momentous occasion for the lad from Croy who grafted on construction sites while tentatively determined to find something grander, as he saw from his guitar heroes. 

Currently, Rafferty isn’t overly first-person personal with his music – hence the EP’s title – but that's not through lack of trying. It's just easier for him to write by channeling through the characters he spots in everyday life. “People say that writing songs is therapy," he explains. "I never really got that. Music's a positive thing for me, and that just seems too negative.” 

As with all music types, there’s still that inherent need to connect, to provoke a feeling. When he first started writing, that was all he was after: “What I realised is, as simple as it sounds, if it makes you feel something, if you hate it, it's better than somebody saying that's fine. I would rather somebody said they fucking hated it. You want to elicit some kind of emotion in somebody,” he enthuses. 

“If you get no reaction, it's a fucking waste of time. I didn't want to be mediocre at it. I knew I wanted it to be a gut punch. You want to hit them right between the eyes and for them to feel something.” 

As a songwriter, you only hope that whatever it is you're channeling is clear. Perhaps some teenager in a small village will find your words a source of comfort or inspiration. That’s all Rafferty wants: “It's just trying to get that feeling across. And if I can't put it into words, I can put it into the music. That’s all I'm trying to do.”