Django James in The Times: Cross Eurythmics and Bananarama
With his dad in Eurythmics, his mum in Bananarama and his girlfriend a Jagger, it’s no surprise Django James is trying out a few tunes of his own. Yet he’s not just another pop aristocracy wannabe
The atmosphere inside the large Central London piano dealership is library-like, all quietly browsing customers and whispered conversations between staff. Django James sits at a piano and asks if I’d like to hear a song. He has already performed for me in the guitar shop we just visited, and before that gave me his iPod so I could listen to another song (again, his own) while we walked around Camden Town. He leans forward, shuts his eyes and draws a series of jarringly loud chords from the piano. Then he starts to sing.
“I’m sure you’ve heard this tale a thousand times before/ About always using your head and walking through the right doors…”
And he keeps singing. His behaviour is sort of sweet, but it’s sort of odd, too; no other musician I’ve interviewed has done this. It’s a song he wrote three years ago, he says, about not fitting in at his preppy private school in LA. His voice is good – very good for an 18-year-old – bluesy with some of Jeff Buckley’s swooping range, but that’s not why a member of staff is hovering over us. James looks up, smiles absently then waits for him to leave us alone before starting back up.
Two minutes later, another employee approaches, possibly the manager. He stands there glowering while James plays on, either uncaring or oblivious. Eventually, he shoots me the sort of look you reserve for very bad parents and turns on his heels. When the skinny, scarecrow-haired boy in a Victorian jacket and “Official Boob Inspector” badge drifts from the shop, everyone’s eyes follow.
Django James fronts Django James and the Midnight Squires, a glam-pop act from LA who have released one single and boast a growing reputation for fun, boisterous gigs. He is also the younger son of Dave Stewart of Eurythmics and Siobhan Fahey of Bananarama and Shakespears Sister, who between them scored more than ten Top Ten albums and more than twenty Top Ten singles throughout the Eighties and early Nineties. Today, James considers his profile as very much that of artist first and fortunate son second (he doesn’t use his full name, Django James Stewart). To everyone else though, it tends to be the other way around.
“I have to quote the interviewer yesterday. He was just the biggest knob,” he says when we meet at a Greek restaurant in Primrose Hill. “He was like, ‘Do you know that if you were to play Rock Star Lineage Top Trumps, you would have the best deck?’ I was just like, ‘What the f*** are you talking about?’”
If that makes James sound spiky or rude, he isn’t. You guess he didn’t really swear at his interviewer. He is friendly, and wide-eyed and attentive when he’s not talking, which isn’t often. More than three years spent living in California means a lot of upward intonation, and he speaks in a hippy vernacular that’s eagerly positive one moment, po-faced and earnest the next as he talks about believing in “the powers of the universe drawing you to different places”, etc. Over the two afternoons we spend together, he gives the impression of living in a kind of faerie kingdom – a world that exists almost in synch with our own, but where half the inhabitants are famous and the other half very generous with their time and attention. He’s currently dating childhood friend Georgina Jagger, the 17-year-old daughter of Mick Jagger and Jerry Hall, and is staying at her Richmond home while he is back in the UK. He’s the sort of person who would make Alex Turner’s head explode.
When people ask about his parents, however, he will, he says, “wilt” and “go into his shell”. It’s a reaction probably shared by, say, Sting’s 19-year-old daughter, Coco Sumner, or any number of other successful artists’ children starting out in the family trade and eager to be seen as standing on their own two feet. When he was very young, James would run around singing “like a mini Aretha Franklin”, he remembers, “and my parents would always try to record me because they were proud, but I was so reluctant. I’d go and hide under the staircase.”
When Stewart and Fahey divorced in 1996, James and his older brother, Sam, were taken out of school for a year by their dad, and travelled the Amazon on a large boat. Stewart decided to teach his sons himself. “He would say, ‘For the lesson today, we’re going to draw a picture of our worst nightmare, burn it, then throw it in the sky,’” says James. “I was like, ‘All right, Dad!’” Wasn’t it weird? “No. That’s just what we did. I remember being seven years old going down the Amazon at 60mph on my own jet ski… then I was attacked by monkeys.”
Afterwards, James, his brother and Fahey moved into a comfortable house near Chalk Farm (“Dad had a big house in Surrey where I would go at the weekend”). He attended a nearby “crappy international school… I don’t know why… It was pretty weird.” By the time he was a teenager, he would get mugged around Camden a lot, especially walking to and from school: “It was all the time. Twice a week I’d be chased, maybe have bottles thrown at me, tripped up or get screamed at,” he says. “It was a bitch.”
When James was 14, Stewart relocated to LA, and the following year, James decided to join him. “It wasn’t a choice between parents.
I was just sick of being mugged and the bad weather. Plus everyone seemed happy there.” It wasn’t a career move. At 15, he had no plans to start singing. At some point, he thought acting might be a possibility, but for the meantime, the idea was to “fit in, go to college and then something will [hopefully] happen”.
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