Get Close To Me – Thomas Jules
I hope you don’t mind I’m gonna speak my mind
Not good at sensitivity but I’m the sensitive kind
A bit A.D.D. don’t interrupt me and thank you so much
Don’t get me wrong I know you ain’t blind
Ain’t gonna patronise
but it’s my duty as a mate to make you draw the line
Now would you hear me like Oprah Winfrey or Jeremy Kyle ?
Just wanna make you smile…
I’ve been watching over my nephew Thomas Jules since he was 7 years old or thereabouts. I had just started going out with his Aunty Jenny and when I visited the family home in Wembley there was this cheeky bright-eyed sweetheart to greet me alongside Jen’s sisters Dee (his mother), Mollie, Natasha and Lucy and her brother Jon as well as her amazing parents Esther and Thomas. A very close-knit loving family group – in great contrast to my dysfunctional scattered clan, they were welcoming and kind and polite and gentle.
confident Thomas aged 7 with friend Danny
And they still are. Except that now we all love each other. Jenny and I used to look after Thomas particularly on summer holidays when we lived in Archway Road in the late 1980s/90s and he would visit Jackson’s Lane Summer School which was all singing, dancing, acting, performing – right up his street, and literally right up ours, about 400 yards in fact. As the performing side of the family I’d like to think we gave him a little confidence and a few tricks to go with his natural talent and gifts, which are many and legion. Of course Jenny’s sister Lucy Jules (who has sung with Bryan Ferry, George Michael, Kylie, Sam Smith and David Gilmour) represents the musical side of the family and has obviously had a huge influence on the young man both in terms of techniques, voice protection and business advice, along with Uncle Jon who has been a DJ since he was a teenager, was also in a band Undercover and who has advised Tom consistently.
Tom in 3rd Edge around 2002
Thomas was signed when he was 14 years old, had a hit single in 1997 with That Kinda Guy which was on the Bean film soundtrack, formed garage-rap-pop-boy-band 3rd Edge on Parlaphone around the millenium and had several hit singles and TOTP appearances from 2002-3 before breaking out to write and sing with a huge variety of singers and rappers in the noughties such as Wiley, Mystro, Shandra D, 2Play (another hit single with a cover of Careless Whisper) Mark Radford, Crookers and Scorcher; singing back-up with diverse acts like Lulu and Professor Green before settling in as lead vocalist with UK Dance act Rudimental where he was for over two years.
I’m also happy to report that he co-wrote a song on the 2nd Rudimental LP We The Generation called Love Ain’t Just A Word (see My Pop Life #149), and had his another co-write released : Do It Right by Anne-Marie – his co-singer in Rudimental. Thomas has always worked hard at his craft both as a singer and top-line writer, and in a shark-infested industry has remained a decent guy who knows a lot of people, has good representation and has a lot of respect from his peers, who include Ed Sheeran, Disclosure, Jessie J, Wiley, Dizzee Rascal and many many others.
When Jenny and I moved down to Brighton in 1996/7 we knew no one in the town. Shortly thereafter Jenny’s schoolfriend Millie moved down from London, then when Thomas outgrew his family home in Harlow we offered him a bedroom in our house. He lived there for two years or so, met his girlfriend and babymother Scarlett on August 9th 2005 whereupon within a year she had moved in too.
Thomas and Scarlett
We were a happy house but eventually they wanted their own space and lived first in St George’s Road (down the hill), then Waterloo Street on the Hove border and now reside in Portslade with their gorgeous funny beautiful daughter Skye.
Skye Phoenix Jules-Pugh
I wrote about Thomas and I in My Pop Life #57 and explained that I am a 57 mystic or UNX. In Loco Paternis. We are close. Whenever I see Tom the first thing he does is pull out a device and play me the new demo he’s just cut that day with so-and-so. I love this part of the relationship. In 2009 Tom decided to take a pass at a Robert Smith song called Close To Me which was a hit single for The Cure in 1985. The resulting song, called Get Close To Me was a re-imagining – an r&b-flavoured pop/garage tune. I was never a huge fan of the Cure but I like Tom’s playful intimacy in the verses, and hook-line for the chorus. Tom’s then-manager Jake wanted a video to accompany it. I volunteered to shoot it on my handy 3-chip DV Camera which was loaned out to almost every theatre company, band and political group in Brighton over the 18 years that I lived there. We were on the beach, the pier, drove round the Downs, took the fabulous Staffordshire Terrier Cassie into a laundrette on St George’s Road, mucked about in the twittens in The Lanes and with the graff kids at Black Rock and the end result is the video you can see below. Some local friends and fam sneak in towards the end – I’ll mention Kerry, Louie Cresswell, Maddy McNicholas, Tanisha Flynn-Pugh, Scarlett and probably her sister Simone but the others will have to shout out below because a) I can’t see them, b) I can’t remember, and c) the video is a wee bit downgraded. It’s the best one I’ve got I’m afraid. It’s very much Brighton 2009. Good times.
Thomas ripping it up live with Rudimental
Not having children ourselves means that all of our nephews nieces and god-children (quite a few) and of course our cats(!) are all very special to us. I have always felt that the very worst part of parenting a child must be that moment when she leaves home to make a new home. And you are left waiting for phone calls, text messages and emails. After 20 years or so of sharing space, opinions, jokes, food, and small talk suddenly there is silence. I think it must be unbearable. But everyone bears it. It’s natural, apparently. I’m not so sure. I do know that moving to New York has had serious implications for my relationships with my little ones (most of whom are now grown up big people in their twenties). They feel further away from me. This means I am still in touch with reality because they actually are further away from me. Geography, the most real of all. This morning at 6am Jenny’s phone rang downstairs and to my inchoate sleeping anger she got up and went down the spiral stairs to answer it. It was Thomas, on tour with Rudimental in Australia, wanting to talk to someone because Nanny Bet had her funeral yesterday in Great Yarmouth (see My Pop Life #122) and Tom thought he’d had a ‘bad show’ in Melbourne and felt isolated and far away. He is far away !! Aunty Jenny managed to make him laugh and eventually she came back to bed. My anger was mainly protective of her sleep because she has two shows today and two more tomorrow (Henry IV, all-women) and she gets very tired on the weekends. But her selfless good fairy quality made her rise and twinkle, for she knew deep in her genius bones that someone needed her love. She is a good Aunty. Aunx perhaps. I didn’t get up and answer the phone, but I did write a blog later. Miss you Tom, and love you very much.
Skye, Thomas, Jackson, Cassie
In the clip beneath the “official video” Tom and Ed Sheeran (his long time friend and brer) play an acoustic version of Get Close To Me. Some people prefer it, but : it doesn’t have Cassie…
Acoustic version with Ed Sheeran accompanying :