Don't give tips to friends who are about to have babies unless they ask!
— Jamie Cullum
My grandmother on my father's side, a nightclub singer, was a Jewish refugee from Prussia who ended up in Jerusalem, where she met my grandfather - a British army officer. I remember as a child having bowls of chicken soup made by her. There were lots of interesting components, like feet and necks.
One of the beautiful things about having kids is I had no idea how much it will make you look into yourself and who you are and what you believe in and what your past was like and all that kind of stuff. I think it's made me really look at life in a much more intense way.
Some musicians like to decorate their walls with discs saying: '1 million records sold in America.' I prefer to put up discs marking sales in lesser-known countries.
As I grow older and meet more and more people, I realise how lucky I am to have had a stable family environment. Both my parents had loving families but unstable upbringings, so they wanted us to have a more stable situation.
When I was at school, I wanted to play a piano, and they said, 'No, that's for the classical students.' There's always been this air around pianos, which can very often discourage a young person from having a go.
I never use a piano stool. I always use a drum stool. Because I feel that when you're down there, you're playing in that way you're supposed to. I like to be above it.
I was thinking of applying to the 'Guardian' for a job after university. Yeah, I wanted to be one of the people who writes stories in G2.
Most people in the U.K. discovered me playing a standard on Parkinson. In America, it was on VH1 singing an original called 'All At Sea,' which is a contemporary pop song. So the people that know me there tend to think of me in the singer/songwriter category.
Now I have other demands on my time that are not flexible, I just can't wander into the studio at 2 A.M. like I used to. If I have an idea in the middle of the night, I will go and get the bare bones down, but mostly you can learn to tame it to your needs.
I love traditional shoes. I have a nice couple of pairs of traditional Oxford-style shoes, a pair of Edward Green shoes, and I aspire to a pair of hand-made George Cleverley shoes. Mark McNairy, all those are amazing.
I think you realise how terrifying and scary the world is when you're bringing kids into it.
I've got no problem whatsover with collar bars coming back in. I need to look a tiny bit older before I can dress like that the entire time - otherwise I'm going to look like I'm in 'Bugsy Malone.'
I don't think I've ever been true to jazz. There's always a kind of jazz element to what I do. There are a very few genres that I haven't tried out, really, in what I've been doing. As a jazz musician, you can kind of mess about with things with a certain level of musicianship, which helps.
My only ambition is to grow as a musician.
In my bachelor days, I had a small upright piano in my kitchen. It cost £10 from eBay plus £70 delivery. It was because I'd seen an old photo of Tom Waits - with dirty dishes, empty bottles, a hot plate, a coffee machine and a piano strewn with lyric sheets - and fallen in love with it.
My mother was born in Burma, but my grandfather on her side was Indian-Spanish. So I have this quite exotic mix, which is reflected in my earliest memories, in our Wiltshire country kitchen, of gran, and aunts, cooking spicy stewy, casseroley curries, a version of Indian food with a Burmese twist.
What's interesting is often people think life changes when you have a record deal and you do all kinds of stuff. Obviously your life changes, but nothing changes your life like getting married and having kids.
A studio allows you to indulge your untidiness and your penchant for toys and curiosities that really wouldn't work in a grown-up house.
My maternal granddad, Leonard, was full of amazing stories. He was an orphan, with 11 or 12 brothers and sisters, and he used to tell us about growing up near the Irrawaddy river and how one brother was eaten by a crocodile.
I worship pianos like they are prize diamonds, and I never willfully do damage to them. But I grew up playing guitars, and you treat a guitar like a best friend or a little brother or a lover you have a tempestuous relationship with.
I have a piano in my kitchen. I read a great biography about Tom Waits that said that he had a piano in his kitchen; he had a grand piano in his kitchen. And I thought, 'Well, if Tom Waits has one, then I must.'
Oh, I was a real Nirvana kid. I got into jazz because I listened to a lot of metal, Megadeth and that, and those guys play really fast and are virtuosos. I wanted to learn more about it, and I discovered that a lot of jazz guys played really fast, too.
It's a blessing and a curse when your first big public album does so well. 'Twentysomething' sold four million copies - I think we were hoping to sell 80,000. And it's still selling. In some ways, you'll always be defined by that.
I was an absolute idiot, wearing polo-necks, reading Kerouac, watching Woody Allen movies, and jazz fitted right into all of that. My interest in that whole world became very genuine, but perhaps started off a bit affected - a mixture of right and wrong reasons. I was always drawn to non-commercial music, perhaps pathologically so.
A lot of people are surprised by my love of heavy metal. I fell in love with heavy metal almost before any other genre. One of the first concerts I went to was a Donnington Monsters Of Rock concert.
'm really proud of 'Sad, Sad World' because it manages to state a very complex paradox of an emotion that I experienced when I had children, which is this great happiness and this great intensity, but with that intensity comes a deeper understanding of the world.
The first suit I enjoyed was a Dior suit that I got given. I've never worn anything that fitted that closely - it was akin to 'Oh my God, I had no idea that a suit didn't have to be this wide.' But I do intend to get one made some day.
I lived my twenties on the road, in all different countries experiencing this momentum of a career which was taking off in its own way.
You're only famous in the eyes of others. Inside, you're still the same, and not a hundred million records or TV shows can change that. I think the only pitfall of fame is believing that it means something, and behaving like that.
I believe, from reading biographies, that the great musicians have also been great cooks: Miles Davis, Dizzy Gillespie, Thelonious Monk, Max Roach. I think I've worked out why this is - unsociable hours, plus general creativity.
Having kids sets a bomb off in your life. It really makes you examine who you are, what you believe in and what you want to be. And that is magical for creativity.
I'm no longer a shoeaholic, but I used to be. I used to spend all my time on tour either buying records or shoes.
I sit around for ages waiting for inspiration. Then when I get an idea, I want to go with it and get something as quickly as possible. It's like catching a fly in a bottle. I'll play with drums for a bit, then the piano for a bit, play the guitar.
My grandfather, Harry, died when my dad was in his early 20s, so I never met him. Amazingly, he was 6ft tall. That gene definitely never filtered down to me!
I used to drum on the table at school. I think a handful of my school reports say that they thought I might have some kind of ADD because I was making sounds. I was far from being an ADD child. I was actually quite quiet and well-behaved. But I used to drum on things.
I never sought out a record deal. It caught me with my pants down. I was just a musician doing my thing, I didn't even send my records out.
People often say that having a family makes you make safer choices. It's been the total opposite for me. It's really made me want to make bolder choices.
My pure love is playing music.
I've worn some particularly baggy jeans and cowboys boot combinations after coming back from Austin, Texas. This was ill-advised.
The last time I went to a festival without a hat, two things happened. One: I got sunstroke. Secondly, I had to buy what can only be described as a Jamiroquai hat, which was sartorially incorrect - I'm saying that as a Jamiroquai fan. That was a disaster. I looked like a small clown.
I tried to sing 'What's Going On' with Amy Winehouse once at an old cinema in the West End. There was a funk band that had members of both of our bands playing in it, but it was the worst kind of place to sing bad karaoke because everyone there was an amazing singer or musician.
I can't get enough of this guy called Baths. He's a total L.A. dude and really young as well. It's super-electronic, but with almost Hall & Oates-style songwriting. Without the context of the production, it could be super-cheesy, but it has amazing harmonies.
'Cullum' is Scottish, but I'm nowhere near Scottish. My mother is Burmese, and my father is of German, Jewish, English ancestry.
