Camille Jones

“Nothing comes from nothing” Camille Jones sang to the radio listeners great satisfaction in 2000, and she has like all others also experienced the truth in the title. Nothing comes by itself. On the other hand, there is often a reward to expect for the one making a solid effort, and Camille Jones has made that ever since she made her debut in his own name eight years ago. She got a measurable reward when she scored one of the year’s major international clubhits with The Creeps, which in a remix of the Dutch DJ Fedde Le Grand came in the A-rotation on the BBC in England and ended up selling more than 150,000 copies over there alone. Commercial success is not an end in itself for Camille Jones, but it is also not to despise. No, it has more to do with musical challenges, to have the courage to let go and seek new ways. It is the fuel this self-determined singer, songwriter, musician and producer is running on. Therefore, it is a far greater satisfaction to her that she can now sit back after having completed her third regular album Barking Up The Wrong Tree. The album’s ten songs have their musical base in an electronic pop universe and work equally well before, during and after the party. And because the pop elements are so immediate and strong, the songs can also easily be heard anywhere else during the rest of the day. It is melodic and accessible, as cutting-edge pop music anno 2008 should be without the shadow of a string. Gimme Your Mouth and I Am (What You Want Me To Be) are heavy pumping and effective songs, while we end up in the featherweight heights on the emotional Out Of Four. The song Shotgun is already in advance ensured a certain degree of international attention, as Fedde Le Grand has fallen for it and has chosen to remix it on his next album, while the original of the potential floorfiller is on the Camille album. Difficult Guys has an irresistible beat and is also a kind of signatur track for the album, if something like that exists. It is about contact, or rather the lack of physical contact, because there is not much of that when you are smitten for the wrong or unattainable. When you are barking up the wrong tree, in the words of the song. On the whole, the pesterings of couple relationships and, to a lesser degree, sex play a big role in many of Camille’s new lyrics. If you are to very briefly describe Barking Up The Wrong Tree, you can use three c-words and say that the CD is cool, credible and commercial. The first two words are no strangers in Camille’s career, because she has always been cool and credible. And basically probably also commercial – the public has just been slow to find out! Perhaps because she often has been misplaced. Camille Jones has often had to see herself referred to as an r’n'b-singer, but nothing is further from the truth. She is well aware of the reason, for she can not run from the fact that she is a little more tanned than the average Dane, and so the verdict has fallen, despite the fact that there are wise statements like “never judge a book by its cover.” After the great success with The Creeps the audience is no longer in doubt about what Camille Jones stands for. With an original pop-y and sophisticated electronica Camille has with Barking Up The Wrong Tree created the album she’s always wanted. The place was a small city in Denmark, where the little girl grew up with mainly black music around her. Her American father was a jazz musician, and the brothers always played music, the music flowed merrily in the musical home, which buckled with albums with names such as Stevie Wonder, Earth Wind & Fire, Kool & The Gang and Johnny “Guitar” Watson. In fact, Camille remembers how she, as a quite small girl learned different things, such as to cross the street or the weekdays, through music. Camille Jones was noticed, and landed a record deal and made her debut in her own name in late 2000 with the CD Camille Jones. The album received many fine words along the way by the critics, it got a large radiohit in the form of the song Nothing Comes From Nothing, and Camille was nominated for a Danish Music Award as the year’s Danish female Singer. This was the entrance to some instructive years for Camille, who wanted to know more about the mechanisms of the music business. She wanted complete control and therefore established her own record company, where she in the spring of 2004 released, Surrender, both on CD and – quite in the spirit of the times today, but not at the time – on LP. The Albums theme-song was called The Creeps, and a successful electronic remix of Gauzz (Per Ebdrup) was the opener for turnover in Camille’s musical career, when A&R Jan Meedom of the record company Lifted House called her after hearing it on the radio. “Give us 3 month and we’ll make it global” the promising words sounded from Jan Meedom and the cooperation between Camille Jones and the Danish based record company Lifted House was established. The result was a new, more electronic-based version of the album Surrender, which was released internationally in late 2005. Lifted House did a deal with Flamingo Recordings, where sound magician Fedde Le Grand threw himself over The Creeps. His remix of the song conquered clubs in the world and was one of the largest international clubhits in 2007. The stay in England – and a previous stay of four months in New York – lead Camille to ask itself whether it was really necessary to live outside of Denmark? The answer was no, “there is as much happening at home”, was her conclusion, and although some of the ideas were conceived abroad, Barking Up The Wrong Tree was created in Denmark with a strong team of some of the country’s most innovative musicians, mixers and producers as DJ Buda (Lulu Rouge), Copyflex / Fast Brothers, Thor Madsen aka Mazza and Abdullah S, who Camille Jones has worked with for years. Barking Up The Wrong Tree is released on 1. september 2008, and as a precursor to the album the single Difficult Guys has already been sent to the radio.