On the Rise
James McVey

Behind him, shining discs adorn the wall. “I thought that the learning I wanted to convey in the EP was a learning process about myself and my mental health and figuring out the person I am, but it’s also about how to fucking make artwork. Everything’s been learning with this EP.”

Guitarist with platinum-selling international pop act The Vamps, Manabi marks not only McVey’s first solo outing since the age of 15, but also his first taste of true independence. From the songwriting to the production to finding his login for CDBaby, everything has brought with it new experiences and discoveries.

“I went on there and it’s like, last login 2007,” he laughs about the distribution platform. “I did an EP when I was 15 and it was still on iTunes and I had to remove it because it was just atrocious and fans have tweeted me this week being like, ‘Where’s it gone?’ What do you mean, you’re listening to that?!”

McVey grew up in Dorset, far removed from any kind of real music scene. Inspired by an early crush’s older brother, he began to learn guitar in his early teens. While neither of his parents were particularly musical, his dad would often play records by the likes of Crowded House and Del Amitri in the car. The latter had an early influence on McVey, but it was his discovery of the first two Damien Rice albums that really caught deep.

“I just found the lyrics so interesting and so different from all the stuff my friends were listening to,” he smiles. “Who is the blower’s daughter? What the hell does that mean? I loved being presented with that complexity of music at that age.”

Around the age of 15 he began to play live in the few pubs that would let him. Putting all his energy into his music, he was discovered by The Vamps’ management on Myspace. “It’s funny if I compare it to some of my band mates in The Vamps,” he says. “They had a lot more of a music scene in Birmingham, for example. In Dorset, there was no fast track. It was really like, you play two-hour sets doing covers and then you try and sing a verse and chorus of a song you’d worked on at home. It was really hard, those early days of trying to cut through.”

Forming in 2012, The Vamps quickly found fame and success. Their debut album Meet The Vamps was released two years later and has since been certified platinum in the UK. In 2018 McVey starred in the reality show I'm a Celebrity...Get Me Out of Here! Coming out of the jungle, he began a turbulent period in his life. Alongside coming to terms with his body image struggles, he had surgery on his vocal cords and was left unable to sing for six months. But it wasn’t all bad: he also married his wife, Kirstie Brittain.

In the midst of all that was going on, McVey realised that he’d fallen away from music and found himself lost in a world of talk radio and political commentary. “I didn’t even have a guitar at home. Probably for 18 months I was avoiding songwriting. I don’t really know why, I just fell out of love with it and felt a bit unsure with what I wanted to do musically,” he says. “I was obsessed with this political world and I would go on all these radio stations and TV shows and debate and argue with things. Then I was like, shit. At the core of it I am a musician. I was going down this slightly peculiar way of doing everything I can to not be a musician.”

Leaning back into songwriting and revisiting his love of Damien Rice and early Taylor Swift, McVey began to spend time in Nashville working on his own music and figuring out what that might sound like. One day, towards the end of a trip, he was convinced to try a fancy hotel breakfast by Brittain. Sitting down to eat his porridge, everything changed. “I was sat at this hotel breakfast that I didn’t want to go to, my wife forced me,” he laughs. “Amy Wadge came over to me in the hotel and I’d never met her before but I’d obviously been a fan of hers for years and really admired her songwriting and she was like, ‘I didn’t know you were here. Let’s get a session in when we’re back home.’”

Best known for her work with Ed Sheeran, Wadge is a Grammy winning songwriter. She also became the catalyst for McVey’s solo material. Having struggled to find the right sound while working in Nashville, on returning to the UK he visited Wadge at her home studio in Wales. “As soon as I met Amy and started working with her it was like a night and day shift in how it all made sense,” he says. “I don’t normally believe in the whole fate thing, but for me that was the single most bizarre moment of the whole process because it honestly changed everything.”

During their first session in Wales, McVey and Wadge wrote two songs, “Antarctica” and “30,000 feet”, both of which feature on Manabi. The former is a soaring piano ballad that builds with a yearning passion, while the latter is a warped pop cruise that has the confident playfulness of The 1975. They also reworked the lyrics to the track “Blood and Bones,” a tender ode to McVey’s wife. A simple and delicate track, the intimacy and rawness of the recording pays a striking homage to its influences.

Across the EP, McVey balances big choruses and pop hooks with modest, organic production. Co-producing with engineer Alex Stacey, they would send the tracks back and forth as McVey continued work remotely. With rough edges and natural sounds, the songs have a genuine presence and warm atmosphere.

It was in writing the track “Strength in Numbers”, a collaboration with Starsailor frontman James Walsh, that McVey discovered the confidence to produce himself. Both musicians had arrived at the studio thinking the other would take that role, but it was McVey who stepped up. “I honestly didn’t know what I was doing, to the point where it took me about half an hour to turn the speakers on,” he laughs. “That session was quite an important moment. It taught me that actually I can produce songs on this EP, and James really liked the suggestions I had.”

After years of playing in a band and working with a large record label, it took going back to basics for McVey to truly learn about the music he wanted to make. “I worked with so many different people in Nashville and they were great, but for this EP I was like, how am I gonna find people that really understand the feeling I want to capture,” he explains. “James was one of them, Amy was one of them and Alex was one of them. And that was it.”