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For ten years of playing together, collective experience has shaped and instilled the music Bare Jams record and perform. Whether it’s as teens skipping school to busk in West Country villages, touring for weeks through the mountain roads of the Alps, gigging at Glastonbury, Boomtown, in London and Paris; and from skanking the night away in the German Black Forest; to pale mornings and waning spirits. These experiences are fixed in the music and the players, and the effect is brought to every gig and every record. Their danceable + confessional blend of reggae, soul and roots brings an electric sense of vitality, of life’s natural ups and downs, and a sense that if we’re good to each other things will be OK.

In 2011, after a year trialling busking material on their local streets, then 17-year olds, drummer Sam James and singer Ollie Coombes got hold of a secondhand Fiesta, chucked their kit in the boot and whipped it relentlessly to gigs along the jurassic coastline, then across the country with bassist Dave Tyler. The three studied music together at ACM - living in the Guildford YMCA, writing and performing at local venues. In 2015, after five years of gigging, they holed up at Larkins Farm to record the Cold Treats EP with Dave Tyler and prodigious horns don Seb Skelly, whose brass arrangements laid an even greater electricity through the band’s sound, heightening the danceable as well as the reflective moments in the record. Cold Treats also saw them team up with producer Tom Loffman, and begin to carve out the sound (neck-snapping backbeat, rousing horns) that would come to define later single collections Ebbs and Flows, Wasting Time and Fish Bowl.

Since then they’ve covered 50,000 miles in tour vans and/or convoyed hatchbacks, picking up fans along the way in The Netherlands, Austria, Belgium, Switzerland, Germany, and across the UK. Moved by a compulsion to create good music and good times amongst friends, their live show is famous for bringing an unpretentious, cosmic knees-up.

Collectivism makes it to the heart of everything Bare Jams do, writing both music and lyrics through workshops and joint sessions. For their new record 'This ’n’ That' the band have rejoined forces with Loffman and returned to Larkins Farm. In full circle, to their most characteristic sound.