Songwriter hits the charts...thanks to peanut sauce

A SONGWRITER from Peppard is celebrating having a worldwide hit and says it was all down to… peanut sauce.

James Bell, a musician whose professional name is Yami, wrote The Business by Tiesto, an international DJ and record producer.

It has reached No 4 in the UK singles chart and has hit the top spot in nine other countries, including Hungary, the Czech Republic and Tiesto’s native Netherlands.

Mr Bell, 28, also sings on the house music track, which he
co-wrote with three other people.

He has a publishing deal with BMG, a music company based in Berlin, which sold it to Tiesto.

Mr Bell said: “I’m very grateful and it’s so unreal with the world the way it is right now.

“We always believe we’re good enough to do X, Y or Z or we wouldn’t do it but when it actually happens you’re like, ‘I don’t believe it, this is crazy’.

“I feel vindicated as some musicians never get to this point in their careers.”

Mr Bell, who has been singing since he was a child, said The Business was about mending a broken relationship.

“It is about not falling for the same situation of being in love with someone who doesn’t treat you well,” he said.

“It’s about not spending enough time sorting it out so eventually getting down to business and fixing it.”

It took him and his collaborators Tijs Verwest, Julia Karlsson and Anton Rundberg just two hours to write over lunch.

“We wrote the song quickly as I had to catch a flight that day and I was in a rush,” said Mr Bell. “I have a recording of me coming up with the song while eating a packet of sushi with peanut sauce.

“I’m opening and then pouring this peanut sauce, singing, ‘Let’s get down to business’. A lot of songs get made from eating peanut sauce and I stand by it.”

That was about two years ago and he had forgotten about the song until it started to climb the charts late last year.

Mr Bell said: “I didn’t think about it for a year-and-half after that but the manager kept chasing it up.

“It took a week from Tiesto first hearing the song to recording it. It was quite strange as I hadn’t heard the song the way he heard it — he’d had an idea in his head and went with it.

“When I heard it for the first time I was like, ‘Oh this could be good and something that people might enjoy.

“It has been number one in some countries, which is mad, and went gold in Canada. It’s the first song of mine that has done well in the international charts.”

He said hearing his voice on the song was “mad”, explaining: “It’s very different to just writing the song.

“People want to buy your song and that’s amazing but when they enjoy your voice as well that’s way better, it feels so personal.”

Mr Bell, who can play the guitar, piano, banjo and harmonica, lives with his parents Robert, a solicitor, and Rebecca, a soprano singer, and brother, Henry, 20. He attended St Andrew’s School in Pangbourne and then Marlborough College in Wiltshire.

His mother runs the children’s choir at All Saints’ Church in Peppard and is also the organist.

Mr Bell said: “I started doing opera and classical singing under my mother’s watchful eye and I used to do lots and lots of performances.

“My mother runs many choirs and she has always been keen on me receiving a good musical education so hats off to her.”

He was about 22 when he started writing songs while also doing jobs in sales and consulting, among others. He was about 25 when he landed his first publishing deal with BMG and since then has written for a number of artists, including AJ Mitchell, Ava Max, Lewis Blissett, TY Dolla Sign, Yungblud, Polo G, PrettyMuch and KSI.

He wrote a song called Medicine with James Arthur, who won the ninth series of The X Factor, which reached No 6 on the Capital Chart Show in only two days. Mr Bell, who hopes to record and release his own music soon, likes to write all genres and believes there is no “right” way to come up with a song.

“Sometimes I will watch a television show and someone will say something and I write that phrase down and build a short story around it,” he said.

“Then once that’s done someone will play a beat or a set of chords that work well and we then think of a melody that goes with that.

“We slowly find the building blocks of the song and it’s never the same method.

“The shorter we spend writing a song the better it is. The majority of songs that are enjoyed didn’t take very long to write.

“My favourite thing that I’ve written isn’t even out yet but it’s going to be this year or the next.

“James Arthur and I were looking at it together and were throwing a couple of things around and we came up with something that’s sort of a mix of My Chemical Romance, and Smashing Pumpkins, those type of sounds.

“My second favourite thing I’ve written is The Business as I can’t argue with the numbers.

“I’m very grateful to the UK public for listening to the song as much as they have.

“I haven’t had a top 10 song in the UK before, so thanks for streaming and buying it.”

Mrs Bell said: “It’s a banging tune — I love it and play it all the time.  It’s incredibly catchy and people resonate with the words.

“I’ve got used to Jamie being on the radio now but I still have friends and family calling me to say they’ve heard my boy — he’s all over the world.

“He is classically trained and has got a proper choir voice. He was head chorister at St Andrew’s and at Marlborough College.

“He always loved songwriting and when he left school he always came back to it. He has written a lot of songs but nothing that featured his own voice so this is the first and it’s a big thing.

“The thing for me is this showcases his voice. I’d prefer him to be singing on everything but he’s proud of everything he does.

“As a singer myself, I’m riding on his coat-tails.

“It has kept us going through lockdown to know this has been going on in the background. We just need the clubs to re-open and we’re hoping the song will have another surge in the summer.” 

To listen to The Business, visit Spotify, ITunes, or YouTube.