Mitch James spent two years busking and playing open mic nights around Europe, sleeping in hostels and on park benches, before getting signed to Sony. Henry Oliver asks him how he did it, and what songs make buskers the most money.

Mitch James, a 21-year-old Auckland singer/songwriter has released two singles after being signed by Sony New Zealand on the strength of his YouTube videos. When Sony got in touch, he’d been traveling around Europe playing wherever he could –playing street corners and open mic nights – and sleeping wherever he could – hostels when he had a good day busking and park benches when he hadn’t.

Now, he’s back in New Zealand, signed to a major record label, recording with proper producers in proper studios and is about to embark on his first New Zealand tour – the Humble Roadie Tour, which will take him, in a kombi van with his buds, to ten cities around the country for the rest of March.

The Spinoff: You’ve played a lot, especially around the UK and Europe, but this is your first ‘proper’ tour. How does it feel to be about to take your music around the the country?

Mitch James: It’ll be a lot of fun. It’s been an idea of mine for a couple of years, to go from the top of New Zealand to the bottom in a kombi van with a couple of mates, a couple of beers and just play some real small, intimate shows. Just to get it off the mark and familiarise myself with New Zealand audiences. I was in Dunedin, on Castle Street, crashing on one of my mate’s couches, and we were having a big bunch of beers and decided that we wanted to call it the Humble Roadie, so that was what we designed as the humblest option. I just thought the whole idea of doing something humble, calling it humble, letting everyone know its humble – doing it in a van, in small venues, it’s almost just a laugh y’know, but it’s such a cool way to get people familiar with you and just letting them know you’re not a big shot who thinks too highly of yourself.

You just seemed to appear out of the blue, signed to a major label. How did you get here?

I finished school at 17 and I read about Ed Sheeran’s blueprint – basically going to London and gigging every single night, whether it’s an open mic night or a gig for a meal or just busking. So I flew over on a one-way ticket with £20. I didn’t realise that the tube into London was more than £20 so I had to jump the barrier, got off at Hyde Park, jumped the barrier there, then the hostel I was staying at was £18 a night, so I went and got a bottle of water, slept, woke up and started busking the next day.

I did an open mic or a gig everyday for the next six or seven months. I didn’t really have too many places to stay, I slept a lot on the street when I couldn’t afford a hostel or there wasn’t a couch – I’d always ask at gigs ‘has anyone got a couch for me to stay on?’

I would busk during the day, but in London there’s such a saturation. There’s only certain areas you can busk and if you’re lucky enough to get a spot you typically, in a three-to-four hour session, which is until my voice can’t take any more, only get £15-20, which is enough for a shitty dinner and a hostel.

What were you thinking? Were you just super optimistic …

Yeah, suuuper optimistic.

Or did you not realise how much things cost over there?

A bit of both really. I was extremely naive, looking back. I thought I was going to go to an open mic night, someone’s going to notice me and it’s all going to unfold like a Cinderella story. But that was pretty far from the truth.

How long did you do this for? Two years?

Yeah. I would have busked over 100 times, played over 200 gigs. It’s pretty buzzy looking back. I don’t do too much busking now, but it’s definitely the lifeblood of where I got all my performing skills and how to interact with people when you’re on stage. It’s interesting when you busk because most of the time you’re playing to no-one, just passers-by, but sometime when people stick around, more people will come. As soon as there’s two people, two turns into four, four turns into eight, and then from five minutes ago when you had one person watching, now you have thirty or forty people surrounding you.

That was my apprenticeship. It taught me how to interact with people and what songs are more favourable. And more than everything else, it’s the sheer amount of hours you put in. If you’re doing four hours a day until your voice can’t take it anymore, you’re just getting better. If you’re putting in the work, you’re going to get better.

What’s the best song to busk? What makes you the most money?

It’d definitely be ‘Thinking Out Loud’ by Ed Sheeran. That’s universal. And ‘Have You Ever Seen the Rain’.

Would you play your own songs?

Yeah, I’d mix them in there. If I had a good crowd I’d play two good ones and then be ‘This is one of my own’, and if they stick around you know if that song’s a goodie.

You went to the UK to try and make it, but you ended up getting signed back here …

Yeah, I was in Munich last year with a Kiwi bloke who runs a hostel there. I was playing gigs on the weekend and putting videos up on Facebook and YouTube and I got an email from Sony. Honestly, I thought it was a yarn. I saw the footer and it looked kinda low-res. I was like, ‘I don’t know if Sony would have low-res footers’. I was very cynical actually. I was Googling the A&R’s names to see if it was legit. Because when you’re putting a lot of stuff online, you get people who have your contact details who make out something to be amazing, but you pay. Like, ‘We can put your song on the radio, but you have to pay a monthly fee’. So it was a pretty special feeling because after all I’ve been through, toiling away, doing the shit no-one really wants to do, when you finally get that validation, it’s what you do it for.

How did Sony hear you?

It was MAALA actually. He was in the studio with Jaden [Parkes], who’s does A&R for Sony. One of my oldest mates, who I hadn’t seen in years had seen one of my cover videos and sent it to MAALA, who clicked on it, by chance, while he was with Jaden.

What song was it?

It was a mash-up cover of ‘7 Years’ by Lukas Graham, ‘Don’t Forget Your Roots’ by Six60 and ‘Let It Go’ by James Bay. When I was doing those cover videos back then that everyone was sick of seeing a dude playing a single song on a guitar. There are thousands of dudes that do that. But if you mix people’s favorite songs together, that’s a point of difference. Do it with a nice backdrop, and nice scenery instead of your bedroom, just separating yourself.

Were you watching a lot of those cover videos?

Yeah, I’m a big studier of things. I’m also a big believer in the law of attraction so I figure if I put all my concentration, all my everything into something, study the whole thing and mold myself to whatever I figure is successful and only focus on that, eventually it will manifest itself into what you’re visualising. So you have to keep a close eye on pop music as a whole and the people that stick out to you – what are those qualities that stick out to you and how can you apply them to yourself?

But you’re not just watching Ed Sheeran, you’re looking at the people on YouTube covering Ed Sheeran?

Absolutely. It always used to get me down in a sense to see all these amazing people in their bedrooms doing an amazing job and nothing’s happening to them. So if you study that and looking into what is separating them all. Because half of them can sing better than these [famous] people. I notice that being in the actual industry now, a lot of these people can’t really sing. A lot of it is just how you market yourself in making your content attractive to people. A lot of it is driven by who you are as a person and whether people want to get to know you.

So when you finish the tour, what will you be working on now? An album?

Yeah, the first two songs are doing so well and I’ve literally got 49 songs ready to go that we’re going to narrow down for an album. Loose release date of October/November. But I’ve got three albums ready to go. But hopefully we’ll just make it so packed to the rafters that it’ll be hard to ignore.

The Spinoff’s music content is brought to you by our friends at Spark. Mitch James’ Humble Roadie Tour, (also supported by Spark) starts in Auckland on Friday 17 March and ends in Dunedin on Thursday 30 March. Buy tickets here.

Te Radar’s Chequered Past tells the stories of New Zealand’s most colourful characters, both infamous and largely forgotten. He explains what drew him to our hidden histories.

There was a moment, caught between a grey Central Otago sky and even greyer rocks strewn through the tussock, that I wondered if this was it. Was I about to become a part of the history I had spent so many years eagerly reading and retelling? Would I be, like the characters in so many of the tales I recounted, just another buffoon in the hands of fate, killed by his own hubris? Or more romantically, Richard Burgess’s final victim? And if I was, wouldn’t it be depressing if the cameraman missed my impromptu tumble?

It wasn’t supposed to be this way.

The horse-hire firm had promised me a placid hack called Snoopy, but instead delivered Odin, a stallion with an ornery temperament and a clear desire to be anywhere other than under me. This beast was supposed to help me recreate that iconic image: Man and Horse alone in the vast wildernesses of the westerns. I’d devoured them as a child, not knowing then that these stories set in faraway America-land had also occurred right here in New Zealand.

My discovery of the murderer Richard Burgess, and his eponymous Burgess Gang, changed that. The equals of any of the American outlaws I’d read about, they marauded and murdered in a quintessential and oddly incompetent kiwi way across the South Island Goldfields in the 1850s and 60s. It’s the story I was attempting to retell for Te Radar’s Chequered Past when I found myself hurtling towards the hard Glenorchy ground after being summarily ejected from Odin’s saddle.  

There are a couple of things people say when you tell them you’re doing a New Zealand history show. “Must be a short show,” they guffaw. Very derisive sound, the guffaw. Or they say, “Be a bit boring won’t it?” There’s still a lingering sense that history is a rather dry subject, laden with dates and facts and events and controversies we’d rather not address, and that New Zealand history is the shortest, driest and most tiresomely controversial of all. People generally mention the treaty, and then their eyes glaze over or they begin to fume.

But we have enough highwaymen, outlaws, explorers, stunt performers, intrepid women, inventors, and errant politicians to fill any number of Hollywood blockbusters. And the stories I love are all about these people, because to me history is about people. He tangata, he tangata, bloody he tangata as they say.

The idea behind Te Radar’s Chequered Past, and the live show it sprang from, Eating the Dog, is that the personalities are the story. Every story is about a person, people just like us with hopes and dreams, or murderous intent, or some odd thing they knocked up in the workshop that changed the world. People who thought they’d give something a bit too ambitious a go, and for whom things usually went a bit pear-shaped.

They’re the stories you haven’t heard, about people you’ve not heard of, or if you have, you probably don’t know all the delightful facets of their escapades, and the weird, often beautiful synchronicity of our tiny country’s history.

Take the story of Johnny Wray from our first episode. He wanted to run away to sea so in the early 1930s he bodged together a sturdy homemade yacht from scavenged timbers. He christened her the Ngataki, and then taught himself to navigate as he sailed off into the Pacific.

In the 1980’s, a young woman called Debbie Lewis wanted to run away to sea, so she bought herself a dilapidated boat – all she could afford – and taught herself to navigate as she sailed off into the Pacific. That boat just happened to be the Ngataki. She had no idea of its history when she bought it. What are the chances? Maybe in New Zealand, better than you’d think.

Filming Johnny’s story and interviewing Debbie on board the Ngataki, now owned by a trust dedicated to protecting our maritime heritage, shows how close we can get to our history, and in a way become part of the story ourselves.

As much as possible we cast people who had a connection to the characters they played; we have an actual fee paying nudist playing naked gardener Douglas Cook; we have a surf lifesaver we happened to spot while watching Piha Rescue playing Barrie Devenport, surf lifesaver and first conqueror of Cook Straight. Matua Parkinson, former rugby player and bush-loving hunter, portrays Brunner’s guide Hone Mokekehu. The Mad Butcher plays mad butcher Jackson Barry.

We have descendants playing their own historical relatives and soldiers played by men who on weekends, play soldiers. And then we have Snoopy the Placid Horse unexpectedly played by Odin the Terrifyingly Bad Tempered, because that’s how stories are born, and how people make (or become) history.

Watch Te Radar’s Chequered Past on TVNZ1, Saturdays at 8.35pm or here on TVNZ OnDemand

This content, like all television coverage we do at The Spinoff, is brought to you thanks to the excellent folk at Lightbox. Do us and yourself a favour by clicking here to start a FREE 30 day trial of this truly wonderful service.